A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (50 page)

photographs, but she didn't find "Jim." Joyce Johnson was worried. The man who had attacked Nina Temple seemed to harbor tremendous rage against women, far more than most rapists. She was afraid they were going to hear more from him. She was right. Only a month lateron Valentine's Day the man with the mustache surfaced again. This time his victim was a nineteen-year-old girltannie Fletcher.* Tannie and her husband, Jon*, hadn't been married long, but with him, she finally felt safe after a childhood marked by continual upheaval. They had found temporary living quarters with a friend in the University District of Seattle, but they both hoped to get jobs so they could have their own place. Tannie soon found that local papers required payment in advance for "Work Wanted" ads, so she printed up several cards and tacked them on bulletin boards in coffeehouses and supermarkets around the district.

She said she was seeking work as a housekeeper/nanny. Only one person responded. The man who called her explained that his house was difficult to find by the address alone. She agreed, therefore, to meet him on a corner of N.E. Fiftieth and Fifteenth Avenue N.E near where she lived, at eight P.M. on Valentine's night. Tannie waited nervously. She had assumed that he lived in a house on one of the nearby corners, so she knocked on Mirror Images the door of one of the houses and asked if someone there needed a housekeeper. "Right on," a woman said with a laugh. "But we can't afford one.

You've probably got the wrong address."

Tannie nodded and went back to the corner. She began to feel as if she were the target of a practical joke when, suddenly, she saw a man just beyond the streetlight's circle of yellow. He was tall and thin and wore a ski jacket. "Tannie Fletcher?" he asked in a pleasant voice.

"Yes," she said with relief. "I thought we'd missed connections."

As he moved into the light, she thought he looked very young to require a housekeeper, but she needed a job badly, so she agreed to follow him down an alley that he told her led to his home. He said he had a very large house and he needed a full-time housekeeper. She darted a look at him and wondered if he was telling the truth, he wasn't dressed very well. The alley opened onto another and then another. After about eight blocks, Tannie realized that she had been duped. There was no house.

There was only a cold knife held now against her side. Tannie didn't know it, but she was hearing the same story Nina Temple had heard a month before, "My brother's hurt bad in the park. The pigs shot him and you have to help me stop the bleeding." The petite girl was forced deep into Cowan Park at knife point.

Tannie kept protesting that the sight of blood sickened her and that she couldn't possibly help her captor's wounded brother. Finally, he looked at her with an odd smile and said, "If you ball me, l won't make you look at my brother." She wanted to stay alive. Thinking rapidly, she asked, "If I say yes, will you throw the knife away?" The man responded by flinging the knife into the bushes, but he said coldly, "Be nice. I still have a razor." Fighting her revulsion, Tannie Fletcher submitted to rape. When the man had climaxed, he let her put her clothes back on.

Perversely gallant now, he walked her back to within a block of her home. She thought he must be crazy. He talked to her as if they were truly lovers, as if she had made love with him willingly. "I want to be with you again," he said in a soft voice. Tannie kept walking, nodding as if she agreed with him. He told her he had been in the Monroe Reformatory from 1968 until 1971, and that he had been married but was divorced. She lied, telling him she had once been in a girl's training school. Expansive, taking Tannie Fletcher's conversation as approval, he became even more talkative. He bragged about his extraordinary job. He told her he was part of a research project at the University of Washington one where he was given massive doses of vitamins every day and received seventy dollars a week just to let them study him. "It's some research deal, ten dollars a day for doing nothing but swallowing pills." He showed her a card with some medical phrases on it. It was too dark for her to read much of it, but she saw the name "Jim R." Tannie felt a hysterical giggle rise in her throat. Was her abductor so revved up on vitamins that they had turned him into a rapist? Had she just gone through the worst ordeal of her life because the scientists at the university had given him too much Vitamin C or something? She said nothing when the man told her he would call her the next day, but she couldn't control a shudder as he removed a pendant from his neck and placed it around hers as a memento of their meeting. All that mattered now was that she believed he was going to let her go. She wanted to get home alive.

Terrified that he would come after her, Tannie Fletcher made herself walk normally as she headed away from him. If she ran, he would know she was frightened. Tannie's husband found her crying hysterically, covered with mud from head to foot. At the University Hospital, physicians verified that she had been raped. While Tannie and her husband were at the hospital, two phone calls came in from a man who said he wanted to "apologize" to Tannie. He told the people who owned the home Tannie and her husband were sharing temporarily to tell her that "Jim Otto" had called. Mirror Images Detective Joyce Johnson studied the almost identical MOS used in the two attacks, reading first one victim statement and then the other. This "Jim" had to be the same man who had attacked Nina Temple. Everything fit. Johnson suspected that the "vitamin guinea pig" story was as false as his ruse about his brother being shot by "the pigs," but it was all she had to go on. The pendant the rapist had given Tannie Fletcher was a disappointing piece of evidence, it proved to be a mass-produced bit of jewelry that could never be traced. Joyce Johnson telephoned the University Hospital and, to her surprise, she found that there was indeed such a vitamin research program. In fact, the next massive vitamin administration was to be given that very afternoon at one P.M. Johnson alerted University of Washington police and asked them to stand by when the test subjects reported. Sure enough, the officers spotted a tall, slim man with bushy reddish brown hair, thick glasses, and a drooping mustache. His name was Jim. However, it wasn't Jim Otto, it was James Edward Ruzicka. And he had had his last massive dose of vitamins.

Ruzicka was charged with one count of attempted rape while armed with a deadly weapon, one count of second degree assault, and a second count of rape. He gave a five page statement to Joyce Johnson. Yes, he agreed, he had met Tannie Fletcher when he asked her for a cigarette. Then she had asked him to have sex with her, and, according to Ruzicka, he had obliged and accompanied her to a nearby alley. But Tannie had said "Jim"

had forced her into a muddy park. And detectives found footprints in the ground there that exactly matched the bottom of Tannie's "waffle stomper" shoes. Although both rape victims identified Ruzicka as their attacker, he finally admitted only to the rape of Tannie Fletcher. He was subsequently convicted and certified as a sexual psychopath. His ten-year sentence was suspended on the condition that he take part in the sexual psychopath program at Western State Hospital. This sexual offenders program may well have been one of the reasons that Washington voters restored the death penalty. It was a program that allowed its participants incredible freedom. The premise was that locked doors suggested that the hospital staff did not trust the sexual psychopaths.

Counselors argued that unless the inmates felt affirmation and trust from their captors, they would never get well. The program featured frequent passes on the grounds and then into Steilacoom where the hospital was located, and finally into other Washington cities. Of course, the patients had to "prove themselves" before they were given more freedom. Viewed in retrospect, this philosophy of the midseventies was an almost Utopian "feel-good" therapy approach, in tune with the times where everyone did their "own thing." James Ruzicka stayed nine months at Western State. After some months inside where he attended group therapy faithfully and participated in a appropriate manner, he was granted a number of leaves. On January 31, 1974, he failed to return to the hospital after an unsupervised twelve-hour pass. On Friday, February 15, sixteen-year-old Nancy Kinghammer stormed out of her West Seattle home shortly after six in the evening. She and one of her sisters had disagreed over which television show to watch. It was a relatively minor sibling disagreement, but Nancy was angry. Her family assumed she had walked down the block to visit friends and would be back in a few hours. But Nancy did not come home. By three-twenty the next afternoon, her worried father had called all her friends and even contacted West Seattle High School administrators where she was a junior. No one had seen her. Her father was convinced she had not run away, she had taken neither extra clothes nor money with her when she left. The tall, brunette teenager was simply gone.

It was even less likely that fourteen-year-old Penny Marie Haddenham should vanish from her home several blocks from the Kinghammer residence six days later. The red Mirror Images haired, freckled youngster hadn't even had a tiff with anyone. In fact, she had been laughing the last time her father had seen her. That had been at 6:30 in the evening of February 21 in a West Seattle restaurant. Penny had needed twenty dollars to buy material for a pantsuit she was making in home economics at Madison Junior High School. Penny was a strong "B" student at Madison and her father had been glad to give her the money. The last time he saw her she was headed toward the fabric store a few blocks away. A friend's mother saw her about 8:30 that evening. Nancy had stopped in to see the friend, who lived only four blocks from her own home and had been told she'd already gone to bed. Penny had been in good spirits then. She had said she was going home. But, like Nancy, Penny had not gone home. And there was no way in the world her parents would believe she'd run away.

She was too happy at home, too dependable, too concerned with her friends and schoolwork. For the next three weeks, police, family, and friends looked for Penny and Nancy in vain. Seattle police detectives wondered if there could be any connection between Penny's disappearance and Nancy's. The only link they could find was the proximity of the girls' homes. They had not known each other, they went to different schools, and they traveled in different crowds. Now, they were linked only by terrible speculation. Penny was found first. On March 12, a newsboy cut through a woods edging the Fauntleroy Expressway in West Seattle. The woods was made up of deciduous maple trees with only a few clusters of evergreens, and the ground was covered by a deep carpet of brown leaves. Although the freeway was close by and there were several houses at the edge of the woods, the wooded area itself was as isolated as the center of a forest. The boy stopped in his tracks, transfixed with horror at the sight in front of him. A girl hung from a tree, her neck bent sharply to the side. It was so quiet that the boy's own involuntary cry and the pounding of his heart seemed to echo and reecho through the trees. Police patrol units soon responded to the boy's phone call. The officers looked at the body of the red-haired girl hanging from the bare limb, it was obvious she had been dead for some time days at least. They made no effort to approach closely, but called for homicide detectives. Seattle homicide detectives Roy Moron and Bernie Miller noted that the girl's feet were almost touching the ground, her body leaning back against a slight embankment angling down from the tree. She was not bound, there was just the rope around her neck attached to the limb. The petite girl was dressed in jeans, a yellow nylon jacket (whose right pocket was turned inside out), and platform boots. Her purse was nearby and some items spilled from it were not far away in the leaves. A thorough search of the area turned up a pantsuit pattern envelope and some gray wool and gray silk yardage. Could it be a suicide? If this was Penny Haddenham, and her description matched that of the body in the woods so closely, it seemed impossible that she would have taken her own life. She had been such a happy girl. But it isn't unheard of for teenagers to take life's small problems very, very seriously. Teenagers think they will live forever, and sometimes they make dramatic gestures and find that they cannot turn back. As darkness descended, the body was carefully cut from the tree not at the noose but farther along the rope so that the direction of the fray marks could be studied. ll the girl had committed suicide by hanging, the fraying would point upward, if someone had killed her first and then hoisted her up over the tree limb, the fraying would slant downward. Uniformed officers guarded the scene all night. With the first light of day, there would be a further search. There was no doubt now that the body hanging from the tree was Penny Haddenham, the state of decomposition indicated she had been there for a week or more. The question was how she had gotten there. How could a smiling, joking fourteen-year-old girl end up a suicide? Or, more likely, how had some sadist enticed her away from her own neighborhood and forced her into the woods to die this lonely death?

Mirror Images The postmortem examination on the 5'2", 110-pound girl quickly eliminated any possibility that Penny had killed herself. She had died from hangingasphyxiationbut she had been raped before she died.

Her underclothing and jeans were soaked with semen. Her killer had obviously redressed her after the attack and then hanged her to make it look like suicide. Once again, detectives went over the scene where Penny had been hanged, where she had waited for ten days for someone to come and find her. It was not an easy scene to search with the thick leaf carpeting obscuring the ground, but they found some interesting items. The most damning was a fishing knife, its point honed to a fine edge. It lay half under a cover of leaves, its tan taped handle blending in with the leaves. The killer had probably dropped it and been unable to find it in the dark. It had not been out in the elements long, no longer than Penny's body had hung there. Penny should have had seven or eight dollars left in her purse when she headed home after purchasing the material (and two forbidden packs of cigarettes, according to her best friend), but her purse had had no money at all in it when she was found. The cigarettes had been found, sodden with rain, on the ground beneath her feet. When Penny Haddenham's body was found, the fear that Nancy Kinghammer was dead murdered too was exacerbated. On Saturday, March 16, detectives, patrol officers, and sixty Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts scoured the neighborhood where Nancy had vanished. They searched through empty houses, woods, vacant lots anyplace where a body could have been secreted. Penny had not been far from home, detectives didn't feel that Nancy was either. Police helicopters took aerial photographs on the chance that a body with bright enough clothing might show up from that vantage point. Throughout the day, the search proved fruitless. It was almost five and growing dark when one detective returned to a vacant lot at the corner of Andover and Avalon. The lot had become a very convenient, if unofficial, dump site for the community. Unerringly, almost as if he had some kind of psychic clue, Detective George Cuthill walked through the blackberry brambles and garbage until he came to a pile of boards, cardboard, and junked furniture. "I think she may be under here," he muttered. Bit by bit, as the pile of junk diminished, the remains of a human being were exposed to the fading sunlight. It had been five weeks, and the nearly nude corpse was much deteriorated, the only seemingly alive part of it the long brown hair and the bright rings still glittering on the fingers. A green scarf was tied around the neck of the body, which had been wrapped in white drapery material and towels, fabric that seemed too new to have been part of the debris dumped in the lot. Dental charts, the rings, and a watch gave absolute proof that the body was Nancy Kinghammer's. There was no way now to find what had killed her, the method vanished with her flesh. But a sexual motive was apparent because Nancy was found naked.