The
by bob ConRad
Undercover officer James Hoff was murdered on June 25, 1979.
killing of a few events have shocked Northern Nevada as much as the 1979 murder of an undercover officer
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cop These traits helped land him on death row within a year of coming to Reno. Olausen was one of four involved with the killing of undercover Reno Police Officer James Hoff. His family is still trying to reckon with how he took part in a heinous murder. Today, Olausen is holed up in the Nevada prison system. He’s serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole and has been in prison for all of his adult life. He’s been calling me from prison on and off for the past year. Olausen, his family and his advocate, Debbie Sinclair, have been trying to tell Olausen’s part of the story in the Hoff killing for decades. It’s a story, they say, that has been incomplete in mainstream news coverage since the day everything went down: June 25, 1979.
eno, Nevada in the 1970s was much smaller than it is today. The city’s 1970 population of about 72,000 pales to today’s count of more than 245,000 citizens. But Reno then, as now, was also a draw for lowskilled, blue collar labor. Just about anyone could move to Reno and find work that paid enough to get by— as a dishwasher, a dealer or a cab driver. It was this lure for fast, easy money that drew one young man to Reno in 1979. Just out of high school, but without a diploma, John Steven Competing Olausen struggled to The convicted learn. He had a learning naRRatives perpetrators disability, dyslexia, that Few events have shocked hampered his ability to insist they were this community as much understand the basics. as the murder of the set up, acted in A February 1974 33-year-old undercover report by the Chico, officer in 1979 near self-defense, California school district Idlewild Park. Hoff’s noted Olausen’s erratic and that their legacy as a fallen officer learning behavior while still resonates with the sentences were in middle school: “It Reno Police Department. appears that he has some Olausen, Edward overly harsh. feelings of inadequacy Tom Wilson, Fred concerning his inability Stites and David Lani to compete academically were each convicted with his peers, and he is of killing Hoff. How they became murderers reaching out for help,” wrote school psychology remains in dispute. test administrator David Pitt. “In his social reacAndy Boles, a retired lieutenant for the Reno tions, Steve expects immediate gratification of Police Department, wrote a book, Piercing the his desires. He appears withdrawn and is turned Lion Heart, about Hoff’s death. The book illusinward when he encounters stress. However, he trates at least two versions of how Hoff died. In is now reaching out for help.” the official version, Hoff was an undercover cop Olausen, at 18, was caught between his on major drug bust. Law enforcement and the parents during an ugly divorce. He was easily district attorneys to this day want his killers to influenced but not a troublemaker. Friends said remain in prison. he would do anything for anyone at any time.
Boles’ book also tells the story of the four perpetrators who were found guilty of killing Hoff. They insist they were set up, acted in self-defense, and that their sentences were overly harsh. “I think those boys got a raw deal,” said Boles, who, as an officer transplanted from California to Reno, helped search for the young men the day Hoff was killed. Neither version of events is completely clean. Boles says some of the key evidence is missing from the case. RPD’s role, he explains, has never received scrutiny.
the deal Wilson and Olausen, who had just turned 18, got jobs soon after arriving in Reno. After working in maintenance for three weeks at the then Reef Hotel, both were fired. They were doing a lot of partying at the time, drinking and smoking marijuana. Because they were getting a free room as part of the job, they effectively became homeless upon being laid off. “We were taken advantage of,” Olausen told police. “The work that [the Reef’s manager] wanted to have done was done, and that was all he wanted out of us. He didn’t pay Tom, so we went to the Labor Board.” Wilson was regarded as the ringleader of the four, but prosecutors would later say that
Olausen’s constant presence alongside Wilson meant that he was a major co-conspirator. Upon getting canned from the Reef, they both headed farther west on Fourth Street and crashed with Lani, then 16, and Stites, 18, at the El Tavern Motel, a weekly that stands to this day. Their stay with the pair was for only a few days while Wilson began working on a drug scheme to get money. Instrumental in that scheme was a Reno police informant, Lynn Stefansky. She had been arrested by RPD on an extradition warrant from California for possession of stolen property and drug possession. Also a former prostitute, she became close with officers and helped them with drug cases. Stefansky, then 23, viewed Wilson and Olausen as younger siblings. “I have a brother their age, and I sort of took them under my wing,” she said. “I thought of them as kids.” Also living at the Reef, Stefansky put Wilson in touch with Hoff, whom she said was a freelance photographer and a drug dealer. While then-District Attorney Cal Dunlap would later assert, based upon testimony from jailhouse informants, that the crew knew Hoff
“the killing of a Cop” continued on page 12
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