Early on Saturday, May 10, 1986, Power County sheriff's deputies were called to a trailer park where migrant workers lived, on Fort Hall Reservation land in Arbon Valley, south of the Arbon Valley exit on Interstate 86. Two men were dead in one of the mobile homes. Thirty-four years afterward, as he prepared to retire, Sheriff Jim Jeffries recalled an early case for the Idaho State Journal: two men killed at a labor camp in Arbon Valley sometime in the 1980s, and a wanted poster of his own making that helped crack it. He did not name the victims or give the year, but what he described fits the 1986 case closely.
What the wire services reported
The first word came in a United Press International story that the Logan Herald Journal ran on Sunday, May 11. According to that story, the call about a shooting reached the sheriff's office at 7:06 a.m. At the trailer park deputies came upon two people dead; a few miles off was a third man with a bullet wound in the leg, who ended up at Bannock Regional Medical Center in Pocatello. All that day sheriff's deputies, joined by the FBI, the Idaho State Police and Fort Hall police, hunted for suspects they believed had not left the area, and nobody was yet in custody. Many of the farm workers around there spoke no English, investigators said, and that slowed their work.
On Monday the Associated Press, in a report printed in the Provo Daily Herald, gave the names as the sheriff's dispatcher, Sherry Hansen, released them: Tom Bravo, about 55, of American Falls, and Jilario Alaniz Torres, 24, of Guerrero, Mexico. (The first name is printed "Jilario" in the only copy we have.) Hansen said the investigation so far pointed to a quarrel over music, with drinking involved, that left Bravo stabbed several times and Torres shot to death. By Monday officers had arrested no one, though they were trying to locate another man whom they linked to the deaths.
The poster
Jim Jeffries started at the sheriff's office in 1982, paid as a part-time dispatcher, and moved to full-time dispatching in 1984. He spent the slow hours of those shifts, he said, working through the warrant list to find people who had been wanted a long time and run them down. Police academy training followed in 1986, and by July 1987 he was out on patrol as a deputy.
In Jeffries' 2020 telling, the man the office wanted in the labor camp killing could not be found. Jeffries learned that a certain California city was a frequent stop for the man, so he designed a wanted poster for him and got it to police in California. The poster used two languages, and everyone in the office thought that was a joke. "I had it done in Spanish and English," he recalled. In time the man was arrested in that same city, and while he was being booked, the face on Jeffries' poster on the wall above his chair turned out to be his own. The Journal's January 2021 story on Jeffries' retirement ceremony supplied two more details: he had spread copies of the poster far and wide, and the California arrest was on an unrelated charge.
The man turned out not to be the killer. He had seen the crime, Jeffries said, and had fled because he was scared. His eyewitness account gave investigators what they needed to close the case.
What we do not know
The papers we could read do not say who killed Tom Bravo and Jilario Alaniz Torres, whether anyone was tried, or which California city the poster went to. The third man's name is unreadable in the copy we have. Jeffries' account was given from memory more than thirty years later, and he never named the case, so linking it to the May 1986 killings is our judgment, not something a source states. Still, the details match: two men killed at a migrant workers' trailer park in Arbon Valley in the 1980s, and officers looking for another man. We found no other double killing in the valley in those years, though our newspaper coverage of the 1980s is thin. We also cannot say whether the man the officers wanted that Monday was the same man later found in California, though it may have been. Readers who remember the case, or know how it ended, are welcome to tell us.
Jeffries had a family tie to the office. According to the 2020 article, Power County's first sheriff was D. B. Jeffries, Jim's grandfather. The papers show Sheriff D. B. Jeffries going out to Pauline in December 1918 to bring home the body of B. O. Kelley, killed at the Bannock Creek bridge.
On this site: other deaths in the valley's history are gathered in Stories: Tragedies.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, March 11, 2020, page A2. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Power County Sheriff Jim Jeffries announced that he would step down in January 2021, when his fourth term was up. His time in law enforcement, nearly 38 years, went back to 1982, when he started out as a part-time dispatcher, and he had been sheriff since 2005. The paper noted that his grandfather, D.B. Jeffries, had been the county's first sheriff.
Jeffries said there was no desk in the office he had not worked at some point, yet the sheriff before him steered him toward criminal investigations because he was good at them. In 2006 he also served American Falls as interim police chief for eight months. The city's department came out of that stint with new patrol cars, car cameras and ballistic vests, along with a revised overtime budget.
Two of his cases led to changes in Idaho law. After a stalking case in Power County, the state passed its stalking law. Another case, in which a guardian had molested a 17-year-old, brought an amendment to the sexual battery law; Jeffries was asked to testify for it at the Statehouse but could not go because he was scheduled to work. A third investigation, against Troy David Alonzo, was the first in Idaho to make use of the Combined DNA Index System. Alonzo was convicted of assaulting a woman in her Power County home. Evidence from that case linked him to the murder of Cassia County schoolteacher Kacy Kay Ray, and in 2004 he was sentenced for it to life in prison without parole.
Jeffries also looked back on his first years, when he made a habit of finding people with long-standing warrants. One of those searches was the Arbon Valley labor camp case: the man he was after, located through a Spanish and English poster sent to California police, proved to be a frightened witness. A train-hopping case stood out too. The men in it were frequently drunk and many went by nicknames instead of their real names; two were known as Tennessee and Pops. Melvin Atkinson had pushed two men off a train. The one in Power County survived with injuries, and the one in Lincoln County died. Atkinson was found guilty of aggravated battery in Power County and of manslaughter in Lincoln County, and an appeal that went to the Supreme Court left the verdict standing.
Chief Deputy Max Sprague gave Jeffries and the county commissioners credit for keeping the office well supplied with vehicles and radio equipment. Among the honors the article listed were a Victims Service Award from Gov. Phil Batt in 1996 and recognition at the Journal's Business and Achievement Awards in 2017. As for who should follow him as sheriff, Jeffries planned to make his choice public nearer the May primary.