In September, 1968, Novak, the Clabaughs, and several others were digging in Spirit Eye when they uncovered a woman’s crouched body. “I remember a yell, everything stopped, and everybody came with their flashlights to look at it,” Clayton Clabaugh told me. “There was this big flat stone on top of her. I remember thinking, Did somebody kill her?” The body had been desiccated by the arid environment, and patches of skin and hair still clung to the skeleton. The flat stone was most likely a metate, or grinding stone, placed there as part of a burial ritual. I asked Novak if he had considered leaving the body there, and he seemed confused by the question. “No,” he said. “I just thought that this should be uncovered, let somebody know, find out how long these people lived in that area.”
Novak stashed the body in his garage, to Betty’s consternation. The next day, he wrote to the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, at the University of Texas at Austin, and asked for guidance. “I thought someone smarter than me should look into it,” he said.
TARL’s response to Novak said that no one on staff was working in his region. In the following weeks, news of the find circulated within the state’s archeological community and came to the attention of Leslie Davis, at the El Paso Archaeological Society. In a letter to a government employee, Davis described Novak as a “confirmed cave looter” who had “made a find that hurt his conscience.” He also pointed out that Novak had attempted to report his finding but had been “a victim of bureaucratic buck-passing and paper shuffling.” Davis recommended immediate action: “Our objective is to salvage a valuable archaeological find and to salvage an amateur archaeologist.” But, for unclear reasons, that didn’t happen. A group from the Archaeological Society made it to Spirit Eye a few months later, but Novak’s involvement was limited. He contacted various archeologists several more times, but, judging from the records that Schroeder has found, no one followed up with Novak about the body.
Meanwhile, Novak had given it to Larry Clabaugh, who kept it in a wheelbarrow for a few weeks before passing it along to another local enthusiast, Adrian Benke. Novak was under the impression that the body had been donated to a museum. Instead, Benke held on to it until 1988, when he placed a classified ad in the back of a publication called The Shotgun, advertising a “museum quality” body: “Approximately 70 percent mummification. Legal.” The body, priced at forty-five hundred dollars, came with a lighted oak display case and artifacts including “portions of sandals . . . polished stones . . . projectile points, animal bones, small corncobs, pieces of string, basketry.”