Before leaving office, President Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Leonard Peltier—a man given two consecutive life terms in prison for killing two FBI agents.
The commutation was celebrated by activists and the corporate media. But a former FBI agent is sharing more of the real story behind Peltier and the execution of two FBI agents on a South Dakota Indian reservation.
Edward Woods is a retired FBI agent who has been involved in the case of Peltier, a convicted killer, for decades. He joined Liz Collin on a recent episode of her podcast.
In 1975, FBI agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams were murdered on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. In 1977, Peltier was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison for their murders. But, after nearly 50 years, former President Biden commuted Peltier’s life sentences. He was freed last week.
“It’s been difficult. I’ve been involved for 24 years,” Woods said. “This all started when I just happened to meet Jack Coler’s youngest son. He had two sons, they were three and five and I met his youngest son just coincidentally. We both had aviation backgrounds. I learned Peltier had a parole hearing and that night I got on the internet and was stunned about everything that was out there talking about Leonard Peltier being a political prisoner. There were about 125 references.”
“I started comparing what they were saying in different places and then I started downloading the trial transcript, I read through that … none of it made any sense,” Woods continued. “They were just contradicting the actual record.”
Woods launched the No Parole Peltier Association (NPPA) in 2000. In telling more of the details of the case, Woods explained how “Jack Coler and Ron Williams were out looking for a fugitive named Jimmy Eagle.”
“They spotted a vehicle. They turned onto what turned out to be the Jumping Bull property and they got caught out in the middle of a field and this is a very touchy subject about the unprovoked attack. There was an eyewitness. The eyewitness was Ron Williams. He was on the radio. Jack Coler and Ron Williams were in separate vehicles. The vehicle that they followed, they were getting out with rifles,” Woods said.
“Ron was on the radio. There were agents and Bureau of Indian Affairs officers who were listening to the transmissions. He said, ‘They’re getting out of the vehicle. It looks like we’re going to be taking fire.’ They can hear the shots over the radio and the last part of the transmission was ‘I’m hit.’ That was Ron and he went down. He was shot three times.”
Coler then went to the trunk of his vehicle to get out his rifle. At that point, a round “came through the trunk lid and nearly tore his arm off.”
“So he went down, probably going into shock. Ron, wounded three times, took his shirt off, crawled over to Jack and used his shirt as a tourniquet. They waited there,” Woods said. “There were 114 shell casings that were matched with Leonard Peltier’s AR-15.”
“There was later testimony in a later trial that Leonard Peltier made the statement that [Williams] ‘was begging for his life but I shot him anyway.’ Ron held his hand up and his fingers were blown through the back of his head. Jack Coler was probably unconscious; they shot him once in the top of the head, once in the jaw and blew his jaw off,” Woods explained.
He then displayed a crime scene photo showing Coler and Williams laying face down after being shot to death. “So the bodies were manhandled after death, and in Indian lore, if you role over a vanquished enemy to face the ground, they won’t meet the creator in the afterlife.”
Woods also spoke about a necessary distinction: “You either buy into the facts or you buy into the myth and the folklore and that’s what they’re (Peltier’s advocates) doing. I certainly appreciate the way Native Americans were treated way back when, but this is a purely criminal act.”
Woods also said that Biden’s commutation—which was celebrated by Sen. Tina Smith and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan—sends a terrible message.
“It’s not just the FBI, it’s law enforcement. Every cop, every investigator, every detective that goes out there, puts his life on the line to help enforce the laws, protect the population, they all feel that and over the past 24 years that I’ve been involved with it, I’ve gotten a lot of really sincere emails from police officers around the country.”
In pointing out the facts, Woods said, “Many agents were killed in the line of duty along with you know like police officers and everything, but this killing was so brutal that it had to be emphasized and that’s why I spent so much time going into the hundreds of pages of trial testimony, hundreds of pages of the court records to know exactly what happened and what the what the real truth is. I understand the emotional part of it, but that’s irrelevant to what happened at Jumping Bull that day.”
Liz Collin
Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
