Roderick Sinclair

Roderick Sinclair, also given as Roderic B. Sinclair, was a sergeant in the Mariposa County Sheriff's Department. On March 5, 1983, on a blind curve of Route 132, his patrol car collided with a car in a convoy of off-duty Secret Service agents assigned to Queen Elizabeth II's visit to Yosemite, killing George P. LaBarge, Donald Robinson and Donald A. Bejcek (Queen's Accident). Sinclair and his partner, Deputy Rod McKean, were injured.²³

The California Highway Patrol blamed his speed, which it estimated at 76 to 80 miles an hour and later at 72, and recommended his prosecution; District Attorney J. Bruce Eckerson resisted for six months and engaged a retired CHP lieutenant whose review disputed the skid-mark evidence. Sinclair's lawyer, David Linn, said the CHP had reached "a predetermined conclusion."³ In the county's later suit against the United States for contribution to its 4-million-dollar settlement with the agents' survivors, the district court found that Sinclair had been driving at 64 miles an hour in a 35-mile zone and that the two federal cars ahead were halfway across the center line into his lane, causing him to brake and skid; it assigned him 70 percent of the fault. The Ninth Circuit reversed in 1986 on the ground that the United States could not be sued for contribution.²

Allegations

The writer Cheri Seymour wrote that nurses at Fremont Hospital, where Sinclair was first treated, and former deputies confirmed that he had been receiving large daily doses of Demerol prescribed by Dr. Arthur Dahlem; that Assistant U.S. Attorney James White in Fresno had Dahlem's files seized and was ordered by Judge Robert E. Coyle to drop the criminal investigation on the ground that no blood tests had been taken, although tests had been taken and later disappeared; and that the CHP report went to the office of Attorney General John Van de Kamp, who told an assistant to "discard" it, and that Eckerson held stock in MCA. Deputy Rod Cusic told the Fresno office of the FBI on April 26, 1984, and October 9, 1987, that Sinclair had told him "to lie to a Grand Jury" about his drug use and the accident, and said he had seen a booby-trapped incendiary device explode at Sinclair's home. Sinclair was later promoted to commander. Seymour also wrote that his father was a military attaché to Douglas MacArthur in World War II and trained Japanese in intelligence gathering in occupied Japan, where the son went to school, and that Sinclair himself worked for the Army CID in a civilian capacity after training at Fort Liggett.¹