Standout law officer Lamb dies

The Daily Inter Lake

Former longtime Flathead County law-enforcement officer Maxine Lamb, 61, died Saturday in Loma Linda, Calif., of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a rare degenerative brain disorder.

Considered one of Montana's foremost female law officers, Lamb's career with the Flathead County Sheriff's Office spanned nearly 30 years before she left the department in 2002 to train security workers for the U.S. Office of Homeland Security as an employee of Lockheed Martin Corp.

Lewis McCready, Lamb's brother-in-law in Whitefish, said Lamb trained personnel in airport security.

He said she first had symptoms of the illness just two months ago. Lamb was in the hospital for four or five days before she died.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is an invariably fatal brain disorder that is the human equivalent of mad cow disease or chronic wasting disease in elk. Not yet well understood, the disease has three forms: sporadic, inherited and acquired by infection.

Sporadic cases occur spontaneously, often at around the age of 60. Researchers believe a protein called a prion causes the brain damage in CJD sufferers, leading to extreme behavioral and physical changes and usually resulting in death within a year but often much sooner.

Lamb, a 1963 Whitefish High School graduate, started work as a dispatcher for the Flathead Sheriff's Office in 1973 and two years later became the department's first female sworn officer at age 29.

It was the beginning of a series of professional firsts for Lamb, who rose in the ranks to become commander of detectives at the Sheriff's Office. She was the first expert on investigation of sex crimes in Montana, a field in which she became nationally respected.

Seeing an unfulfilled law-enforcement need, Lamb won a Board of Crime Control grant to spend a month in the sex-crimes divisions of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office and the San Diego Police Department. During that time, she learned how to deal with perpetrators and victims of sex crimes and how to educate the public on the subject.

From 1978 to 1986, Lamb was an instructor in rape investigation and child-molestation problems at the Montana Law Enforcement Academy.

Lamb also was Flathead County's first polygraph examiner and in 1989, in her mid-40s, became the first woman in Montana to qualify for and graduate from the tough and prestigious FBI National Academy. At the FBI's invitation, she returned to the academy several times to lecture.

Lamb was an instructor and counselor in the FBI's Youth Leadership Program, and traveled to Virginia to work with students ages 15 to 17.

When she retired from the Flathead Sheriff's Office in 2002, Lamb had logged more than 4,000 hours of law enforcement-related training.