Authorities found the headless bodies of two Indian children when they arrested Jack Lee Harelson, 55, last April. The skulls of the children, a boy and girl who died about 200 years ago, still have not been located.

Harelson's attorney, Mark Hendershott of Sutherlin, argues Harelson is a legitimate collector of Indian artifacts who legally bought most of the truckload of material police hauled from his Grants Pass home.

The central witness in the trial is expected to be Harelson's former wife, Pamela Ralph, 48, who led investigators to a Nevada cave where she said she and Harelson dug and collected Indian treasures from 1981 to 1984. She has shown investigators photographs of the cave when it was 6 feet by 2 feet during an early visit and when it had grown to 70 feet by 12 feet after three years of digging.

Ralph told state police that the bodies of the two children were intact when she and Harelson buried them. Authorities believe the bodies were dug up and reburied in Harelson's garden after the heads were removed. officers speculated that the skulls might have been sold, but Thompson said none of the charges against Harelson includes selling the skulls or other items.

District Attorney Tim Thompson said last week the skulls had not been located. The looted cave is in territory that was home to Paiute Indians for thousands of years.

If convicted on all charges, Harelson could face up to 28 years in prison and $515,000 in fines, but sentencing guidelines would put any penalty at a fraction of those numbers. The court could, however, order Harelson to make restitution to Paiute tribes or to the Bureau of Land Management.

Witnesses will include Wilson Wewa Jr., a Paiute religious leader from the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.

Jack Harelson, 55, a Grants Pass insurance agent is being tried on charges of aggravated theft, abusing a corpse and tampering with evidence related to the excavation of the cave on federal land.

His former wife, Pamela Ralph, testified Thursday that they took the bodies home so they could get help removing them from their funeral baskets "so we could get the goodies." The prosecution contends that Harelson illegally removed, and kept, the artifacts taken from 1980 through 1984 from a site near Elephant Mountain in northwestern Nevada.

Maximum penalties for the charges add up to 28 years in prison and $515,000 in fines, but sentencing guidelines would make any actual penalties much smaller.

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