Missing Native American Artefact.

[w00hoo.livejournal.com]

I wonder if anyone here can help throw some light on a problem I've been working on for the

Chumash casino resort (http://www.chumashcasino.com/) they have been looking in to expanding their Native American museum exhibits and I have been trying to track down information regarding an antique Chumash knife that was once exhibited in the Sunnydale Cultural Museum. I realise it was most likely destroyed when the city suffered it's last earthquake, but I have been able to glean a small part of it's history and having read some of the postulations herein thought there might be a lead.

It would appear the knife went missing on or around Wednesday the 23rd of November, 1999. A post thanksgiving edition of the Sunnydale Press mentions the knife as being among a the weaponry missing from display cases in the Cultural Museum following the murder and mutilation of Dr Gerhardt from the Anthropology Department of the Sunnydale University. The paper suggests that this may have been linked to the discovery earlier on the day of her death of the old Sunnydale Mission that was buried and presumed destroyed in a previous earthquake in 1812. The paper describes the discovery in a separate article headed 'Local Worker's Miracle Escape' which documents how one Alexander L Harris, 18, of Sunnydale was working on the construction site of the new cultural centre when he fell some 20 ft into the ruins of the Old Mission after the ground he was digging collapsed.

It was searching for more information on this part of the puzzle that brought me here.

I have one other clue, a member of the casino security was working as a member of the Sunnydale Police Department in the late 1990's and, being of Chumash descent, recalls the murder at the museum and how the records were suppressed not only regarding the full extent of Dr Gerhardt's mutilation, along with her throat being cut she had been stabbed a number of times and her ear had been removed. But also of the similarities with the alleged suicide of a priest on the same night. He hung himself outside of his church, but allegedly not before he had attempted to hack his own ear off. My source, however, says that the records he saw pointed towards the ear removal being attempted post mortem, and that the item used to make the cuts in both instances was the same crude knife...

It is possible that this is the knife I am researching, if it was indeed stolen by some serial killer, they may have taken it away from Sunnydale before the earthquake. Is anyone here aware of any other cases of similar mutilations in the Sunnydale area around this time? It may help me confirm this conjecture.

Comments

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Can't help on this, but it's weird how often some names crop up in discussions of Sunnydale - Harris is one of them. Given that he was a construction worker in a relatively small town it isn't that unlikely, I suppose, but maybe he was accident-prone; the whole town falling out from under him does seem a bit extreme though.

[johnprester.livejournal.com]

But it does lend credence to the notion that Harris was the "one-eyed man" on the Last Bus Out. If he was that accident-prone, it's surprising that all he lost was an eye.

[(Anonymous)]

This is just another example of affirmative action gone amuck. Fifteen years ago, we had the courage to deman that all these immigrants assimilate and speak English.

Now every minority loon out there wants to take a big ol' bite out of the USA. The black Panthers, the Mexicans, the Indians.

And naturally the press loves these traitors... calls 'em freedom fighters... fighting discrimination. CLaiming dug up artifacts as "cultural relics" when most of them can't account for their ancestry back two generations.

Now if it were a white guy who gutted up a minority, we'd hear it non-stop in the news, right?