It was the kind of killing that sets a town against itself. 

Armed with a bench warrant to send 28-year-old Clyde Rector to the state psychiatric hospital in Warm Springs, Montana Highway Patrol Trooper Mike Ren lit out from Eureka’s long gone Evergreen Cafe in pursuit of the troubled hunting guide and stone mason on April 8, 1978. The chase, which wound through the town’s side streets, ended in a gun battle at the end of West Avenue. 

As the shooting died out, an unscathed Rector ducked into the nearby home of several friends, launching a lengthy standoff that would involve state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. 

His 30-year-old pursuer lay dead in the street. His legs still inside his vehicle.  

Longtime Lincoln County resident Gary Montgomery, author of the recently published “The Saga of Clyde Rector and Mike Ren,” remembered the town breaking into two camps after the gunfight.  

“Clyde had a lot of friends, and Ren had a lot of friends,” he said.  

The two men also had a history with each other — and not an amicable one. During one previous run-in, Ren had allegedly beaten a handcuffed Rector. That Rector suffered from some form of mental illness — at least one medical expert concluded he struggled with chronic paranoid schizophrenia — appeared to exacerbate matters. 

But rumors about the shooting soon began spreading through north Lincoln County, among them that Ren was targeted for assassination, Montgomery recalled.  

The divisions in town eventually ensnared a new and prominent member of the community with rumored — falsely, Montgomery maintained — mob ties: successful New Jersey businessman-turned-rancher Alfred Luciano.  

THAT’S WHERE Montgomery entered the story. As Rector prepared to go to trial on a deliberate homicide charge for Ren’s killing, Montgomery began working on Luciano’s ranch.  

Recommended by a friend, Montgomery landed the job after an interview. Though aware of the rumored mob connection — sharing a surname with an infamous mobster can do that — Montgomery said the Luciano he knew was on the level.  

“We'd spend time riding around the ranch and looking at things that needed to be done. Irrigating and cows and fence-fixing, and he was always one to pitch in,” Montgomery said. “He and I worked together quite a bit. I just came to respect the man.” 

Rector seemed to share Montgomery’s esteem of Luciano and saw him “as somewhat of a mentor,” according to the book. Luciano was among the first people Rector called after the shooting. The two remained in touch as Rector’s case headed to a jury trial.  

It wasn’t long before people began wondering whether Luciano had a hand in the trooper’s death. Especially since his son, Alfie Luciano, was no stranger to law enforcement in general and Ren in particular.  

In the years preceding the deadly shooting, the younger Luciano filed a civil suit against Ren and the state of Montana owing to the trooper’s alleged past treatment of him. Alfred Luciano, meanwhile, became involved with a group concerned about the state of law enforcement in the Tobacco Valley.  

Montgomery believes the Lucianos’ relationship with the local authorities, Alfred Luciano’s personal connection with Rector and Alfie Luciano’s penchant for flouting the law — combined with the persistent mob rumors — led to the legal troubles that popped up in the years after a jury acquitted Rector of deliberate homicide.  

Those troubles included an attempted drug sting and federal raids on Alfie Luciano’s Whitefish nightclub, and, later, Alfred Luciano’s real estate business in Eureka, all detailed in Montgomery’s book.  

In the end, Alfie Luciano vanished rather than face criminal conspiracy charges and Alfred Luciano died in an automobile wreck while driving from Spokane, Washington, to Eureka in 1998 after fending off a criminal prosecution brought by the federal government.  

Rector, who continued to bounce in and out of the state hospital in Warm Springs, died by suicide in 1981. He was found with a gunshot wound to the head in a cabin in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, a .22 rifle nearby.  

MONTGOMERY FIRST decided to put the saga to paper in the mid-2000s, having launched a quarterly periodical while running a photo processing and printing business in the Tobacco Valley. Serialized, the tale came out in installments over the span of two years.  

He had two reasons for republishing the story, this time as a book, decades later. Many of the newcomers to the Tobacco Valley likely drove on the short stretch of U.S. 93 south of Eureka known as Trooper Michael M. Ren Memorial Highway without knowing the story behind the name. The second, he said, was the lingering rumor of a mobster who once made Northwest Montana his home.  

“It's just something, I dunno, fun to believe,” he said of the mob story. “It’s one of those things: ‘Don’t confuse me with facts. I want to believe he’s mafia.’” 

Montgomery decided early on that any retelling of the fatal collision of Ren and Rector must include the Lucianos’ travails. The major difference between the previously published story and the book is the inclusion of additional details of the investigations launched into the family following Rector’s acquittal.  

“I very quickly saw the connection between Al Luciano and people believing he was mafia and the fact that Rector had killed Ren, I wanted to weave those two aspects of the story together,” he said.  

The book is based on his own knowledge of the circumstances around Ren’s slaying as well as interviews, correspondence, court documents and trial transcripts. Readers will find Montgomery a frequent companion in the book, following along as he tours the scene of the shooting and speaks with former prosecutors, a juror, law enforcement officers and witnesses. 

“I have a writer’s mind in terms of organizing — starting off with something that’s interesting and then developing the story,” Montgomery said. “Of course, I did a lot of research. I knew so many of the people [involved].” 

Publishing The Trail, which focused on the history of Northwest Montana, helped open a few doors, he said.  

"They respected the fact that I wrote honestly and tried to get the facts straight,” he said. “I wanted to contribute to the historical record.” 

“The Saga of Clyde Rector and Mike Ren” is one of several books Montgomery has penned on the history of Northwest Montana. He is currently working on a sequel to his 2022 manuscript “Doughboys, Rumrunners, and Bootleggers.” 

“There were so many bootlegging stories up around Eureka,” he said, immediately recalling an acquaintance who spent Prohibition delivering whiskey shipments to a lawyer in town.  

As for his most recently published work, which is available in stores including The Bookshelf in Kalispell and Bad Rock Books in Columbia Falls, Montgomery described seeing it out in print simply: “It’s very satisfying.” 

News Editor Derrick Perkins can be reached at 758-4430 or [email protected].