Missiles, murders and a mystery

BLUESTEM – Entering the missile site owned by Peter Davenport just north of Bluestem Road between the city of Davenport and Harrington requires unlocking two gates and wandering down old roads largely overgrown by sage brush. To the untrained eye, the site, which is one of six in Lincoln County, appears to be a bizarrely oversized storage site for a farmer or person looking to get off the grid, but the history of the sites goes much deeper than that.

Site stores many UFO files

Davenport has a unique reason for owning this site. He has been the director of the National UFO Reporting Center, which he operates on his own dime, since 1994. Davenport uses the missile site to store reports, files and information related to the unidentified in the sky.

Presently, seven rows of cabinets and five crates filled with UFO-related documents lie in the missile site in a massive, chilled concrete room that used to store a missile operated remotely from Fairchild Air Force Base during the Cold War in the 1960's.

Davenport bought the property from the estate of Ralph Howard Benson for $100,000 in 2006.

"I wrote letters to the owners of all the missile sites," Davenport said. "Why in God's name I did this, I don't know...I was looking for a piece of property big enough for my library."

Originally, Davenport planned to live in the missile site, but a moisture problem forced him to find lodging at a Harrington apartment. He also realized he enjoyed being around people more than he originally thought.

"I'm more sociably oriented than I had allowed for," said Davenport, a member of Harrington city council and the Harrington-based precinct committee officer for the Lincoln County Republican Central Committee.

Benson has a dark history

Davenport worked with the sons of Ralph Benson, a truck driver, to purchase the property because Ralph Benson died in 2004.

Benson's death

Benson's death was not a typical passing, and thanks to him, neither was Roger Erdman's.

Roger Erdman was a Department of Licensing fuel tax auditor who was sent to the missile site, where Benson lived, to audit his business records in June 2002.

A square, concrete pit in one of the missile site's rooms was where Erdman's lifeless body fell after Benson shot him in the back of the head that day, Peter Davenport told the Lincoln County Record-Times in a missile site tour last week.

Benson dismembered Erdman's body and dumped most of it on Depot Springs Road outside Cheney. It was found June 2002.

A jury convicted the then-64-year-old Benson of the killing in Nov. 13, and he was sentenced to nearly 32 years in prison by Lincoln County Superior Court Judge Phillip Borst a month later.

Benson died at Monroe State Reformatory in Sept. 2004.

Washington State records and piles of documents providing evidence from the case are still stored in the missile site in a room barely 100 feet from where the killing took place.

Five other missile sites in Lincoln County

Davenport owns one of the six missile sites in Lincoln County, five of which are privately owned.

One missile site is located just northeast of Sprague off Brown Road and is owned by David McIntyre.

A second is in Egypt off Pankey Road on Bill and Kathy Reinbold's land. It recently was sold to Jeffrey Scott Dahl of Fargo, North Dakota from Richard and Debra Nelson.

The sale of $80,060 went through the Lincoln County Assessor's Office July 27, according to Assessor J Scott Liebing.

Mark Kramer's family has owned another missile site just north of Lamona since 1969 and uses it to store farm equipment.

A site northeast of Wilbur is owned by Eric Wyborney.

The government-owned site is located northeast of Reardan near the Spokane County line just east of Crescent Road North and Whispering Pines Drive East. It's owned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Evidence of Cold War remains

Entering Davenport's missile site requires walking through a large, steel door into a short tunnel that leads to a small landing.

To the right of the small landing is a longer tunnel that leads to a second landing where Cold War-era Strategic Air Command art is still painted on the wall. Walk down the stairs of that landing to enter the old barracks where servicemen and women quartered during the active missile site operations.

"You can still see the line from where this area flooded after they left," Davenport said while pointing to a water stain on the concrete walls that were designed with the intention of being able to withstand a nuclear blast.

"About six to 12 people worked here," he said.

To the left small landing near the entrance is a door that leads to three massive rooms separated by openings where a door should be. The middle room is where the Air Force stored its 82-foot-long Atlas E missile, which arrived at the Lincoln County sites in July 1961 amidst nuclear tensions with the U.S.S.R. that peaked with the Cuban Missile Crisis in Oct. 1962. That was the only time local missile crews were on full alert, according to historical records.

Huge yellow braces that propped up the missile are still present on each side of the room.

The multiple-ton ceiling made of concrete would open if the missile ever needed to be fired, Davenport said.

But now, the room is home for something as terrifying as a nuke to some: reports of unidentified flying objects.

How many reports are stored here now?

"It's hard to say," Davenport said while sifting through the hefty file cabinets.