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On Friday Shane Stant, 22, surrendered to authorities in Phoenix, Arizona. Rumored to be the man who actually struck Kerrigan with a retractable black aluminum police baton, Stant checked into a suburban Detroit motel on Jan. 4 and left two days later. The Boston Globe reported that Stant told a source that "Harding was in on it way back." Indeed, she allegedly staged a death threat against herself in November as part of the plan.
Early in the week, when reporters asked Harding if she had been involved, she replied, "You guys know me better than that." After that she ducked out of sight, and was spotted only once late in the week arriving at her tiny cabin on a Christmas-tree farm in Beaver Creek, where she and Gillooly had been living since they were evicted from their apartment last fall for not paying the rent. For all the rumors, police disputed a Boston TV report that Harding's name was contained in a sealed warrant. But both were wanted for questioning, and they hired a pair of high-profile, out-of-town lawyers, both former U.S. Attorneys. After a meeting with the Portland district attorney Friday, no charges were brought against either Harding or Gillooly.
The conspiracy might never have come to light were it not for the wildly assorted cast of characters who teach and study at Pioneer Pacific College, a small vocational school outside Portland. It was here that the players converged: Eckardt, the bodyguard who allegedly helped hatch the plot; Eugene Saunders, the young born-again pastor to whom Eckardt confessed, with a frightening telltale tape; and Gary Crowe, the private detective who ultimately blew the lid off the story.
Crowe, an affable, tweed-clad private detective, taught a weekend course in legal procedure. Among his 20 students, Eckardt certainly stood out, by virtue not only of his 350-lb. frame but also of his blustery tales of having worked at various times for the FBI and the CIA. Eckardt, says Crowe, "lives in a world of shadows and trench coats." Also in the class was Saunders, 24, the pastor of a small evangelical congregation in suburban Gresham. Rotund and clean cut, with the zeal of a Boy Scout, Saunders signed up for the course because of his commitment to defending religious freedom.
At the Jan. 8 class, Saunders approached Crowe with a disturbing story, which Crowe recounted to TIME. The previous night, Saunders said, he had been invited to Eckardt's house and heard more than he wanted to hear. Eckardt talked about a recent meeting before which, he boasted, "I swept the room" for bugs, then planted a tape recorder. With that Eckardt proceeded to produce a cassette and play it for the unsuspecting minister. According to Crowe, Saunders heard three people debating a grisly plot; one was Eckardt, one an unidentified man from Arizona, and the third person Eckardt identified as "Tonya Harding's husband."
At one point, Saunders said, he heard this third man ask, "Why don't we just kill her?"
"We don't need to kill her," Eckardt allegedly responded. "Let's just hit her in the knee."