William “Bill” Conko-Camel, 49, male, was shot to death late on the night of October 5, 2018, on Frank McClure Street in the small community of Agency, just north of Dixon in Sanders County, Montana. A 911 call came in around 11:16 p.m., and deputies from Sanders and Lake counties, along with tribal officers, arrived to find Conko-Camel dead in the roadway as a shaken circle of family and friends began to gather at the scene. In the days that followed, vigils and pleas for answers rippled through the reservation towns while investigators pieced together the final hours of a man known locally as Bill.
For two years the case moved in fits and starts, with law enforcement periodically asking the public for tips and media reports noting new leads but few certainties. The portrait that emerged was of a killing that had fractured a close community, with detectives methodically following threads across jurisdictions on and near the Flathead Reservation.
Then, in the fall of 2020, a break: authorities arrested Cavey Little Rossbach and charged him in Sanders County District Court with deliberate homicide in Conko-Camel's death; an arrest warrant carried $1 million bail as prosecutors prepared the case.
The path from arrest to verdict culminated in April 2022. A Sanders County jury found Rossbach guilty of deliberate homicide, resolving the once-unsolved case that had lingered since 2018. In a contemporaneous statement, the Montana Department of Justice said evidence showed Rossbach shot Conko-Camel five times after an altercation at a friend's residence, a narrative that finally gave shape to the violence that had stolen Bill's life on a dark autumn night. State prosecutors credited Flathead Tribal Police with breaking the case roughly two years after the shooting, and local reporting marked the verdict as the closing chapter of a long-running investigation.
