Palisade – The cardboard crowns that Mary Lincoln keeps in the back room of her Slice O Life bakery are bent, and patches of glitter have fallen off. But Lincoln can’t bring herself to throw them away.
Her son Sam wore the crowns two decades ago when he twice was named Peach King and rode at the head of Palisade’s Peach Festival parade.
Sam Lincoln, 25, is in prison now for aggravated robbery and faces three more trials for attempted murder during an alleged methamphetamine-fueled rampage last year.
Lincoln’s high-profile case boosted anti-meth efforts across the Western Slope, particularly in Mesa County, which is attempting to become known nationwide as one of the toughest on this drug.
More than 40 dealers and users were arrested in the four months after Lincoln’s capture. Construction began on an in-house meth treatment center in Grand Junction. A new complex, scientific-based investigation method used in the search for Lincoln became a model for other cases, including the manhunt last month for a meth user who shot a state trooper in neighboring Garfield County.
Like Lincoln, Steven Appl of Battlement Mesa had an arsenal of weapons, a growing propensity for violence and a once-promising life lost to meth.
When Appl shot and killed himself at a roadblock Oct. 25, the case piqued a sadness that still hangs over this town where the Lincolns – a family that Palisade Police Chief Carroll Quarles calls “just plain good folks” – hadn’t stopped reeling.
“It’s like watching one of your kids be buried alive,” said Sam Lincoln’s father, Tim.
The Lincolns thought losing their oldest child to a car accident a decade ago was the greatest pain a family could suffer, until last Thanksgiving. That’s when the son and brother remembered for hugs and “I love you” greetings became a poster child for the perils of meth.
Manhunt lasted 18 days
Samuel Kingman Lincoln took that spotlight when he and an accomplice allegedly shot a fellow meth user and left him for dead in the desert north of Grand Junction on Nov. 23.
During the ensuing 18-day manhunt, Lincoln allegedly hung out of the back of a car careening through Grand Junction at up to 100 mph, shooting two pistols at a patrol car behind him. The shots shattered the windshield and barely missed two officers inside.
Lincoln’s mugshot became a fixture on local newspaper front pages, and the county grew jittery as the manhunt intensified. Several law enforcement agencies working together set up a command center with 10 computers and a wall map of Lincoln’s associates and movements through a netherworld of meth users.
Tracked to Glenwood
On Dec. 1, as the Lincoln family was in the middle of its busy mail-order fruitcake season, authorities tracked Lincoln to Glenwood Springs.
When officers captured him, he had loaded pistols strapped on his powerful 190-pound frame. Inside his room, he had an arsenal of more weapons that included dynamite.
That night, in a butter-yellow home east of Palisade that Lincoln and his brothers had helped their father build, there were tears of relief and, after weeks of praying for a nonviolent outcome, prayers of thanks.
“I had spent entire nights praying the whole time. I thought of the Bible verse ‘Pray without ceasing,”‘ said Lincoln’s older brother Curt.
Mary Lincoln, a devout Catholic, said she also spent nights in prayer before she would head to her bakery at 4:30 a.m. She was there every morning as she had been for 26 years, greeting the townspeople who streamed in to offer hugs as they bought cinnamon doughnuts and peach tarts.
Sam, like her other kids, had grown up in this bakery. He had worked there making fruitcakes, cheerfully running the register and keeping the books.
Father James Plough remembers Sam Lincoln showing a hint of being troubled – a contrast to the other children in “such a beautiful family.”
In middle school, Lincoln struggled with authority. He was bigger and stronger than many kids, and he began to get into fights.
At the same time, Lincoln was trying to hew to his family’s example. He loved baseball and fishing. He insisted on going to Masses early when he wasn’t scheduled as the altar boy, in hopes that someone wouldn’t show up and that he would be chosen.
He was the son who scrambled out of the car on a family vacation to calmly help accident victims. He was the one who saw a drowning swimmer from a Mexican beach and ran for help.
He dropped out of high school but then won honors for finishing in record time at an alternative school.
He was the one his mother said could be a stubborn “blockhead.” His sister, Anna, remembers him as a bit more reckless than his siblings.
But everyone in his family calls him “the one with a really big heart” – and none foresaw how the drug would affect him or them.
Family appealed on TV
One day in the middle of the manhunt, Mary Lincoln stood in front of TV cameras in the bakery – a slight woman in a flour-dusted apron – and spoke to her son as she had many times in her life. Only this time, the life-and-death stakes were etched on her face.
“Sam,” she said, “I’m talking to you. We love you, and we can work out a peaceful solution.”
Tim, Curt and Lincoln’s youngest brother, Matt, were seeking Sam in another way. They knocked on doors. They sifted through phone records. They spent hours hunkered down in cars with binoculars near places they thought they might find him.
Anna Lincoln also was caught in that parallel world as she was stopped one day entering the Bureau of Land Management office where she works. Police had blocked off a nearby commercial strip when they thought they had Lincoln cornered in a motel. They had a command post in the BLM building.
Anna was placed in an office with a BLM officer. She sat there for hours fearing that she might hear her little brother had been killed, while armed tactical teams surrounded the motel but failed to find Lincoln.
“It was like being in a movie – a really horrid movie,” she said.
In and out of trouble
Lincoln had been in trouble with the law before that terrible time in 2005, but his family always saw him try to turn his life around again. He had several juvenile convictions for theft and burglary. At 19, he was sentenced to four years in community corrections for growing pot.
While there, he worked for an iron company and became a valued employee. He played on his employer’s baseball team. He went to a 10-week Bible study course with Curt. When he was released in July 2004, those who know him say he seemed to have been pulled in two very different directions.
Matt Lincoln said Sam – the brother who had preached to him about the dangers of meth – became friendly with some “tweakers” while in community corrections.
Sam Lincoln and his girlfriend rented a house in the town of Mesa.
He also went to work as a roughneck in the oil fields. He submitted to drug tests twice a week. Only one showed meth in his system.
Things began to go very badly after Lincoln’s rented storage shed was burglarized and everything was stolen.
Curt Lincoln said Sam made the bad decision to seek his own justice with those he thought had stolen from him.
Four months after he was released from community corrections, Sam Lincoln went to the home of a convicted meth user with six friends and held the residents at gunpoint while carting off everything of value. Two weeks later, that man reported the robbery to police, and Lincoln was arrested.
Tim and Mary Lincoln put their home up as collateral to bail him out of jail.
The family became alarmed when he didn’t show up for a November court date in Glenwood Springs.
He vanished from his family at that point and left them to learn the rest of his story from daily newscasts.
Family keeps ties strong
Sam still smiles from family photos filling a hallway in the Lincoln home. One picture of Sam has been placed around the corner in the dining room. He smiles out on the big oak table where the family eats dinner. Pictures of Lincoln’s 6-month-old son are stuck to the refrigerator.
Xavier Kingman Lincoln was born in May while Sam was in solitary confinement in the Mesa County Jail.
Xavier’s mother and Lincoln’s family have taken the baby to the jail and held him up to a video camera so Lincoln could see the son he won’t raise.
The family has gone for every 20-minute video visit.
The Lincolns also have been in the courtroom for every appearance and plan to be there in January and again in March when Lincoln is scheduled for attempted-murder trials in Mesa County and in April for another attempted-murder trial in Glenwood Springs.
In the meantime, they are trying to cope with the help of a town that has so much empathy that the local newspaper publisher chose not to run stories about Lincoln.
It’s a town where many say they still pray daily for Lincoln.
“Sam’s ace in the hole is all the prayers that have been said for him,” said Rose Widegren, a mother of nine who lives near the bakery.
Even officers touched
The family also has been in the thoughts of some of the law enforcement officers who dropped everything else last year to search for Lincoln.
The Lincolns sent cards to those officers, thanking them for arresting Sam without violence. The cards were a first, according to investigator Steve King, who had met with the family during the manhunt.
“It was hard to walk away without saying a little prayer for a suffering family – a family deeply concerned about the welfare of a child and a brother,” King said.
Lincoln sent a 12-page letter to his family recently which began, “Dearest Family …”
He wrote about how he has hurt them. He can tell by the pained expressions on their faces and the way he can see them choking back tears – as he is.
He wrote of not being with them “to enjoy the little things in life, like sitting at the table and eating and sharing ideas, feelings and experiences.”
Curt Lincoln said he believes his brother will “find peace and even joy” as he spends what easily could be the rest of his life in prison. He said that he feels “shredded in half” over his brother’s troubles.
Matt Lincoln can’t talk about Sam without crying. Neither can Anna. Tim drifts into silence.
And Mary Lincoln bakes. She finds solace in measuring out the flour and spices, in pinching off pieces of soft dough and slapping them on her antique scale. The familiar scent from the ovens is comforting.
And here she can slip into the back room where the crowns can carry her back to the time of the Peach King. Looking forward is too painful.
“I’m in no hurry,” she said, “to know the future.”
