POCATELLO—After 43 years with the Pocatello Police Department, Major Michael Stayner has announced his retirement.

    “I started as a patrolmen here in 1969,” he said. “I joke with people that I was only 10 years old when they hired me on.”

    Stayner's near half-century long career with the department enabled him to serve in a variety of divisions, ranging from burglary and robbery to dispatch and even homicide.

     “I was heavily involved in several area murder investigations,” he said. “One of these was the the Cindy Bringhurst murder back in the early eighties.”  

    Bringhurst vanished from a baby-sitting job on Highland Avenue sometime after 11 p.m. on June 4, 1983. Her employer returned to her Pocatello apartment and found the front door unlocked, Bringhurst gone and the family's two-year-old child asleep in a bedroom.

    A fisherman found Bringhurst's body a month later in the West Fork of Mink Creek. She had been strangled.

    “That case went cold,” Stayner said, adding that he spent countless hours trying to track Bringhurst's killer.

    “I wish at least one of those murder cases was solved,” Stayner said. “You just wish that. When you investigate those kind of cases, they just sort of stick with you. I regret that we never found the killers so the families could've had some form of closure.”

    Stayner named technological advancements in police work as another notable change during his long career.

     “Bannock County was actually the first county in the nation to get an interoperable system in place,” he said.

    Interoperable systems—now widely used—enable various county emergency response organizations to communicate with one another via the same frequency.

    “It basically means that we can talk to each other,” Stayner said. “Later on we found out that National Security knew Bannock County emergency personnel worked together hand and glove. That's whey they allowed us to be the very first to try the system out.”

    Pocatello Police Chief Scott Marchand expressed his gratitude for Stayner's service.

    “The time he's spent here working for this force has got to be a record,” he said. “I think he's had a tremendous career.”

    But Stayner said his retirement won't affect his desire to continue serving the citizens of Pocatello.

    “My wife still has a couple of years before she retires,” he said. “I'm not going anywhere for a while. I hope I can still be here to serve in any way that I can. I've really grown to love this community.”