Extremist who shot deputy up for parole

On Tuesday or Wednesday, the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole will decide whether or not to release an anti-government extremist serving a life sentence for shooting a Missoula County sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop in 1992 in the Swan Valley.

Gordon Sellner, now 77, holed up for three years at his Condon ranch before being arrested in a shootout with authorities in July 1995.

Sellner was convicted of attempted deliberate homicide and sentenced to life in prison, plus 10 years by Judge C.B. McNeil. He was previously denied parole in 2011.

The Missoula County Sheriff’s Office plans to send representatives to oppose Sellner’s release, according to the office’s public information officer Brenda Bassett. Missoula County Sheriff’s Sgt. Bob Parcell also might be in attendance, Basset said.

“They all plan to be there,” Bassett said.

Parcell was shot in June 1992 by Sellner after Parcell tried to conduct a traffic stop. Parcell believed Sellner might have been a witness to a crime earlier that evening.

“There was no reason to start shooting in the first place,” former Lake County Sheriff Joe Geldrich said. “He [Sellner] was just a witness in a misdemeanor assault case. There was no reason to shoot. It was crazy.”

Sellner’s bullet was deflected by a bulletproof vest that protected Parcell’s chest. Parcell suffered only minor injuries.

Geldrich, who was sheriff at the time, wanted to arrest Sellner, but it seemed that the wanted man had disappeared. “We thought he left,” Geldrich said. “That’s what the rumor was, that he wasn’t there.”

Though allegedly gone, Sellner gave warnings through the media that he would not be taken into custody without a fight. He published “directives” explaining his political and religious beliefs. He claimed that he had not paid taxes in 20 years because he did not want his tax dollars going to abortion. He wrote that he could not be held accountable to the federal government or the state of Montana and that he was only subject to “God’s law.”

A week before his arrest, he told the Los Angeles Times that “there will be bloodshed” if the police came for him and that he wouldn’t surrender. Sellner claimed in the interview that he had many followers from many different states who would bring their weapons to defend him.

Once the Lake County Sheriff’s Office learned that Sellner had returned to his ranch and sawmill in Condon, it began a weeks-long surveillance operation on the property.

Deputies found that Sellner appeared to be heavily armed.

“He carried a rifle with him all the time out at the mill,” Geldrich said.

The Sheriff’s Office devised a plan to get onto the property by working with state narcotics agents who posed as buyers of timber from Sellner’s lumber mill on July 19, 1995.

Once officers began the raid ,Sellner fired an AR-15 assault rifle in the nearby forest. He was shot in the neck by deputies before he was taken into custody.

In the course of the raid, deputies found dynamite gel, 23 firearms, a pipe bomb and ingredients for more pipe bombs, gas masks, blasting caps, a detonating cord, thousands of rounds of ammunition and vests for carrying combat gear.

One camouflaged jacket had a patch that read “American Freedom Fighter for Christ and Country.” Among the firearms seized were a .50 caliber Maadi Griffin sniper rifle, a British sten gun that is commonly referred to as a submachine gun, a sawed-off .410 Save shingle-shot shotgun, and a Sentinel Arms Corp. 12-guage shotgun with a 12-round drum magazine. Signs collected as evidence on the property read “Militia 1st Montana Mountain Division” and “Notice: All entering the property will be subject to God’s law.”

At trial, Sellner admitted shooting the deputy, but claimed that he had been told to do so by voices.

He twice appealed his case to the Montana Supreme Court and lost. The court upheld the findings of Lake County District Court Judge C.B. McNeil, who wrote that Sellner’s trial was fair and properly conducted and that the punishment fit the crime.

“The essential fact of this case is that Petitioner [Sellner] repeatedly and loudly announced that he deliberately shot a deputy sheriff and gave irrational explanations for why he did so,” McNeil wrote in a denial of one of Sellner’s appeals.

The Montana Board of Pardons and Parole hearings take place at Deer Lodge Prison on Aug. 30 at 12:30 p.m. and continue on Aug. 31 at 8:30 a.m.