Photo courtesy of Mike Penfold
This tombstone was found Saturday during the annual Yellowstone River Cleanup. Thanks to a local Facebook page, the widow of the man whose headstone it was may be able to retrieve it as early as Tuesday.
This story has been updated, in a postscript.
The power of social media was on display in Billings Monday, when users of a Facebook page quickly solved the mystery surrounding a tombstone found in the Yellowstone River.
The granite headstone was found Saturday during the eighth annual Yellowstone River Cleanup. A group of Rocky Mountain College students found the headstone near Duck Creek Bridge, on dry cobblestone near the water’s edge, and hauled it by boat to Norm’s Island, a few miles downstream.
That’s where Merry Ann Peters, who was walking her dogs on the island Sunday, came across the tombstone.
“I almost started crying,” she said. “It was the saddest thing I ever saw.”
Peters is a member of the Yellowstone River Parks Association, so she called another member to see if he knew anything about it. He steered her to the Facebook page of Mike Penfold, the volunteer field program director for Our Montana, which works on Yellowstone River conservation issues.
Penfold had taken part in the cleanup Saturday and posted a video of the tombstone being unloaded at Norm’s Island, as well as a picture of the tombstone.
About 4 p.m. Monday, Peters posted Penfold’s photo of the tombstone on another Facebook page, the Billings Customer Service Watchdog Group. The page usually deals with comments on restaurants and stores and such, Peters said, but she went to it looking for help because “people post all kinds of weird stuff there.”
She was quickly flooded with comments, and several people found an obituary to match the headstone, showing that it was a memorial to Edward E. Ahlquist, Aug. 5, 1940-April 25, 2003. His obituary said he and his wife, Jane, “built, owned and operated the Red Boxcar Drive-In in Red Lodge from 1972 to 1979.”
On the right side of the headstone it read: “Jane I. Jan. 27,” with the year obscured or weathered away, and no death date, indicating the man’s wife was still alive.
Barely an hour after Peters posted the photo and a plea for help, she heard from Lyndsay Van Steenburgh, who lives across the street from Jane Ahlquist in central Billings. Van Steenburgh said she was at her computer when a notification from the consumer watchdog Facebook page popped up on her news feed.
According to the Find a Grave website, Ahlquist had been buried in the Yellowstone Valley Memorial Park at 3605 Grand Ave.
Van Steenburgh said she subsequently found out that Jane Ahlquist had been in Seattle and was planning to fly back into Billings later Monday night. She also said that a neighbor with a pickup was planning to drive down to Norm’s Island with Jane Ahlquist on Tuesday to retrieve the headstone.
“I couldn’t imagine if it was my husband,” Van Steenburgh said, “so I’m really happy for her.”
Van Steenburgh said family members “have their suspicion on who it was” who stole the tombstone. “I’m not going to say who,” she added. “That’s not my place.”
No one has suggested there’s a connection, but the man accused of killing the son of Jane and Edward Ahlquist in March 2013 was finally arrested just a month ago. The Ahlquists’ son, Frank “Trey” Greene, was gunned down outside a house on the far West End of Billings.
On Aug. 14, Patrick O. Neiss pleaded not guilty to a charge of deliberate homicide in connection with the murder.
Luke Ward, director of Environmental Policy Management at Rocky, was with the students who found the headstone Saturday. He was in drift boat used for transporting debris when the students waved him over to shore just downstream of the Duck Creek Bridge. He said none of them could imagine how the tombstone ended up where it did.
“That thing is super heavy,” Ward said. “It took four of us to get it up in the air.”
Ward said the river cleanup was “kind of a crazy one” this year. They also found a canoe near the city’s water treatment plant, and Ward himself found six shirts still on their hangers. The students who found the headstone also saw a bear not far from Duck Creek, Ward said.
Josie Shirek, the administrator of the year-old watchdog Facebook page where Peters posted her plea, said she had never seen anything quite like it on her site, either.
She jumped onto the comment threat to say how happy she was that the owner of the tombstone had been found.
“My father died a few years ago and his headstone went missing and then the flowers on it continue to get destroyed,” she said.
In a message to Last Best News, she added, “It was quite remarkable to read the comments and see our community of members help find the owner of such a significant item.”
UPDATE: Tuesday afternoon, YRPA members Roger Williams and Don Wirth picked up the headstone at Norm’s Island and took it to Jane Ahlquist’s house. From there, according to Ahlquist, they all went to Billings Monument, where she hoped the tombstone could be refurbished.
Ahlquist said the tombstone was stolen sometime before Memorial Day 2012, after which she had another made at Billings Monument. She said the family was pretty sure who had done it, and when the original headstone was found this week, her kids told her to hang onto the new one.
“They said I should keep it for a spare in case the guy steals it again,” she said.
All joking aside, she said she and her children were very happy to have it back. She said her first thought was to refurbish the old headstone and donate the new one to a needy family after having the engravings on it ground off.
But even if the old one can be restored, she said, the monument company told her it would be more costly to reuse the new one than simply to buy another. So it looks as though she really will have a spare headstone.
“Maybe I’ll put it the garden or something,” she said.
