Trial for the 2011 killing of Birdseye

Leon Ford on trial in the 2011 death of Mike Crites on June 7, 2023. The trial is being held in Judge Mike Menahan's court in the Lewis and Clark County Courthouse.

Day five of the Helena trial in the killing of John Michael "Mike" Crites rang Wednesday with testimony about cell tower connections and how Leon Michael Ford's cellphone linked to a cell tower near MacDonald Pass the last day Crites was heard from.

Ford is charged with deliberate homicide and felony tampering with evidence after he was accused of killing Crites in 2011 over a possible road access dispute near Turk Road. The trial is being held in Lewis and Clark County District Court before Judge Mike Menahan.

Ford owned property in the Turk Road area off of Birdseye Road since 1993 and planned to retire there after he was done serving in the Navy. Crites moved up to the area in 1996. Dispute records between the two over road access date back to 2002, when Crites first blocked access on a road on his property that Ford wanted to use to access his own property. Ford got an easement to use the lower road on Crites’ property, but that didn't stop Crites from blocking it many times after that.

Multiple other neighbors on Turk Road were in feuds with each other stemming from problems with road access that led to lawsuits, easements, threats and assaults.

The state called a specialist in historical cellphone site analysis who detailed the approximate locations of calls from suspected persons in the Crites trial. Michael Fegley is the founder of Cellx Analytics, a company that specializes in gathering geolocation information using cellphone records, social media records, GPS records and more to map the data. Fegley said he's done work for criminal cases on defense and prosecution sides, civil cases, private investigators, insurance companies, missing persons and anything else geolocation data can be useful for.

Michael Fegley testifies in the homicide trial of Leon Ford on June 7, 2023, before Judge Mike Menahan in the Lewis and Clark County Courthouse.

Fegley inputs cell data from a cellphone provider into the program Trax that then produces a Keyhole Markup Language in Google Earth Maps to visually see the area where phones connect and hand-off to cell towers.

"You're getting records from the past, you're taking connections and call activity from the past, so you take that historical data, and you can map it," Fegley said. "... You can work through historical data and see where a phone was active at a given time when it was on the network."

Fegley was brought in by Lewis and Clark County to do historical cell site analysis on the Verizon 2011 cellphone data from Crites’ phone and Leon and Debbie Ford's phones.

Essentially, phones pick a cell tower to connect to with the best signal strength and least interference. Fegley noted that the towers that were active in 2011 are still active today from a cross-list he conducted in the Helena area, even though the technology has been updated since Crites’ disappearance.

The Verizon data he received from 2011 shows what cell towers a phone connected to when it made a call and when the call ended, and it shows which phone made the call and which one received it. Besides showing cell towers, the data showed which of the three sectors that cover 360 degrees on a cell tower a call connected with. Each sector runs out into the coverage bubble like a slice of pie, which helps further pin down a call's location within the cell tower's range. Some towers can also be omnidirectional, meaning they aren't divided into the three sectors.

Based on Fegley's report, on June 26, 2011, Crites called his voicemail around 8:48 a.m. and connected with the cell tower near Wolf Creek. Crites then called his neighbor, Mike Flora, around 8:52 to 9:12 a.m. Flora testified Monday that Crites called him that day to ask him to witness a meeting with a neighbor that Crites was worried about. Flora declined, telling Crites to record the meeting and call him afterwards.

Crites’ last recorded phone call was when he called his friend Jessie Thomas at 10:10 to 10:38 a.m. on June 26, 2011. Thomas testified Monday that Crites asked him to write a name down but he didn't because Crites often called about disputes with his neighbors. All of Crites' calls connected with the Wolf Creek cell tower.

Fegley's report also detailed data from Leon and Debbie Ford's phones on June 26, 2011. Ford called Debbie at 12:48 p.m., and his phone pinged off the Wolf Creek cell tower. Debbie called Ford's phone at 4:02 p.m., and Leon called Debbie at 5:08 p.m. -- both calls pinged off the cell tower near the top of MacDonald Pass.

The defense noted that there are factors like weather, object obstruction and traffic that could make a phone connect with a different cell tower than it usually would in a given spot. They also questioned the credibility of Fegley's data based on updates to the cellular world, such as Montana having 2G or 3G coverage in 2011 and mainly 4G now.

Fegley highlighted that the Trax program he is trained in and used in this case historically has a 95% accuracy rate.

"If you have cell sites, sector information and a tower list, then you can do cell site analysis," Fegley said. "I mean it's simply if you get the data from the provider that says, ‘This cellphone, this device connected to this tower at this date and this time,’ you can do cell site analysis. The more data you have, obviously, the more accuracy you can put to the data."

Fegley conducted a drive test of the areas involved in the investigation of Crites' death with a cell signal scanner to understand which tower a call would be most likely to connect to from a certain area in early June 2022. The scanner was able to scan in similar settings to what the cell world looked like in 2011, Fegley said.

Some of Crites' remains were found at what used to be Porcupine Campground on MacDonald Pass in October 2011. Other remains, including his skull, were found near Lime Quarry Hills Lane on the other side of MacDonald Pass near Elliston in September 2012. Based on the drive test scan, both locations where Crites' remains were found off Highway 12 would ping section three of the cell tower on MacDonald Pass if a cellphone was used near them. This is the same cell tower Ford's phone pinged off of twice in the afternoon on June 26, 2011.

"This is the reading from the cell site scanner when you’re actually at that recovery site No. 1, it's showing that MacDonald Pass, Helena 299 tower, is the No. 1 cell site for that area," said Fegley. "... When the scanner was actually at recovery site No. 2, and it's showing that that Helena 299, that MacDonald Pass tower, is the No. 1 tower at that location."

Crites’ cellphone pinged one last time off a cell tower near Montana City when Flora tried to call him at 8:24 a.m. on June 28, 2011. While Crites’ residence mostly pinged off the Wolf Creek cell tower, other parts of Turk Road and the Birdseye Road area ping off the Montana City tower, based on the drive test scan results.

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