Elaine Schrader says the incident never happened, and although Fred did have an AK-47, it's unlikely he could have had such an encounter without her knowing about it.
Perhaps the agent taking the complaint misheard Rae Ann Graham and confused the incident three years ago as happening more recently. The U.S. Attorney's Office would not comment on that possibility. But the earlier episode had really been between Graham and Elaine, not Graham and Fred, and no automatic weapons had been flashed. Elaine says Fred had a pistol tucked in his belt; Graham told the police he saw the handle of a pistol sticking out of Fred's pocket. Of the other witnesses, neither Graham's equipment operator nor Clay Rineholt saw any guns at all. Rineholt goes on to say that although Elaine was irate, there were no bodily threats from either side.
Until much later. Elaine had heard rumblings that Graham was not a man to be messed with.
Everyone in Apache Junction had heard Moose Graham's stories of how he had killed three other men, all in self-defense. He told the Pinal County Sheriff's Office that he had shot and killed two men who broke into a bar he owned in Chicago in the 1960s--again because the police wouldn't protect him--and that he had shot "two niggers" who broke into his house in Tampa, killing one and wounding the other.
None of those shootings turns up in police records because Graham was never charged--or because they never happened. One of his lawyers from that time has no recollection of the shootings, but says, "I have always found Moose to be straightforward. He often did a lot of his own legal research--at least Rae Ann did. He's not just a dumb country boy. He's very hardheaded, but very bright."
Both Moose and Rae Ann have long arrest records, though neither apparently ever spent more than 30 days in jail. In 1981 in Tampa, the couple allegedly assaulted a man with a pipe. They were charged with aggravated assault and battery and put on probation.
Graham has been arrested for theft, possession of an altered bank note and for keeping houses of "ill fame." He owned strip joints in Tampa, and he was arrested for selling liquor without a license, because, rather than sell beer at his clubs, he would give it away for free--provided you paid a cover charge and bought lap dances from the strippers.
Rae Ann was a topless dancer with arrests for committing a lewd and lascivious act--for which she was fined and put on probation--and for keeping a house of "ill fame"; the disposition of the latter charge is not clear from police records. Ironically, when Moose was arrested, Rae Ann told the Pinal County sheriff's police that one of the reasons they had come to Arizona was "to get away from crime and problems in Florida."
The night before the murder, Graham ran into a Pinal County constable named Howard Vincent Holbrook in a parking lot in Apache Junction. They recognized each other because Holbrook had once served Graham with a subpoena. Holbrook later told the police that Graham was agitated, very frustrated and complaining about not finding justice out on his mining claim.
"At the end of our conversation," Holbrook reported, "he said, 'Well,' he said, 'if this judge can't do something for me,' he says, 'there's gonna be some shooting out there.'"
Graham had two handguns and a rifle in his pickup truck when he drove out to meet Darrell Hand on the morning of the 16th. He brought witnesses, as the U.S. Attorney had suggested. And when Fred Schrader ran out of his trailer, wearing a bathrobe and slippers and carrying a gun to defend a pile of dirt that didn't even belong to him, Graham shot him dead.
@rule:
@body:Whether or not Fred Schrader's death was premeditated, his friends fault him. None of them thought he'd ever use a gun, so when he ran outside with one in his hand, it was only a prop. They doubt he had any intention to use it. They would have shot Graham right through the door, they swear; or they would have gone out unarmed and told him what-for. But Fred had a pistol in his hand and he didn't shoot it, and according to the Wild West code still in effect in Apache Junction, that was a mistake.
"Fred, he wouldn't have hurt a fly," one friend says. "But you don't come at somebody with a gun in your hand. I would have dropped him, too.
