A Rage to Kill (10 page)

Toward the end of his life, his mother said she had urged Silas to move back home. His room was still there for him, a small room with barely space for a bed, a dresser, and a postage stamp of a desk. He had resisted that idea, because he needed to move around. “He said he could do more there [in Seattle],” Ena Cool said. “He could get around on buses and go where he wanted to go, whereas here [without a car], you’re pretty stuck.”

At length, Ena Cool said tentatively, “He seemed on the very withdrawn side [in October] if you know what I mean.”

“It was the back pain,” Daniel said quickly. “I think his nerves were in such a state . . .”

Indeed they were. Within six weeks, Silas’s “nerves” were at the point of exploding. Clearly, the problems that had undoubtedly haunted him for years had started to unravel and the tightly controlled world inside his apartment and inside his own head were threatening to burst forth. It was only a matter of when and on which bus.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of the information that was coming into the Homicide unit was in response to the pictures of Silas Cool that were posted at bus stops. A woman recognized Cool, and said she had spoken to him on the bus earlier in the fall. He’d been complaining that the bus drivers were rude, that people were generally rude. He had shown her a small gun that he carried, and commented that things were getting so bad he was going to buy another gun.

And, apparently, he had.

The last person to talk to Silas Garfield Cool before he erupted on Bus Number 359 may have been Dorna Stone, who served free Thanksgiving Day meals at the University Temple United Methodist Church. She remembered a neatly dressed man carrying a backpack. He was tall and handsome and scarcely looked like a “street person.” He came in and sat down at a table where she was talking with several other volunteers. As he enjoyed the holiday meal, he told them that he knew which churches served free meals.

He also told them about which dumpsters held the best food. It was an odd conversation to have with a man who looked like a middle-aged corporate executive who was dressed down on his day off in a plaid sports shirt and jeans. He struck Stone as a nice guy who didn’t seem to be stressed or unhappy. He spent about fifteen minutes in the church basement eating his meal, and then stopped on his way out to ask for more food, which he took with him.

She was quite sure that that pleasant, good-looking man had been Silas Cool.

John Nordlund, Steve O’Leary, and Gene Ramirez continued to question survivors as their condition improved enough to warrant it. They found nothing new; some had seen the man in dark clothing stride up to the bus driver and shoot him twice without exchanging so much as a word. Some had been sleeping, reading, or distracted, and realized they were in trouble only as the bus took flight.

Most of the survivors were doing well, but Charles Moreno, thirty-two, lost a leg and faced the loss of an arm. A private and shy man who was scrupulously honest even when he was having a rough time, he was a recovering alcoholic who was in his sixth year of sobriety when the accident occurred. A relative of Moreno’s recalled one of Moreno’s many good deeds. “One time, he found a blank money order, and we needed it, but he insisted on turning it into Safeway. It was for $160 and we fought over it, but he insisted . . .”

As the Christmas season, 1998, was in full bloom, the groundswells from the bus crash continued to blunt the lives of those who’d been on the bus, those in the apartment house it hit, and even those who had participated in the rescue attempt. Many of the victims would be in the hospital until months into the New Year, and Metro was making arrangements to assist them with funds and counseling. The apartment dwellers had to find new lodging while the damage, estimated at about $200,000, was repaired. Beyond the monetary loss and the physical pain, the psychological cost was immeasurable. There were those who grieved and those who woke in the night full of fear. That would never really go away.

And something else had risen its ugly head; one of the bus passengers had tested HIV positive. Now, the rescuers who had plunged into a literal sea of blood, some of them cutting themselves on the jagged edges of the torn bus, were warned that they should submit to tests that would show if they had contracted the deadly virus. And they couldn’t be sure for six months. It was a concept that most lay people who run to rescue their fellow human beings never think of; where there is blood now there is always danger.

On December 8, fellow bus drivers, passengers, dignitaries and the Seattle public said good-bye to Mark McLaughlin, who had tried desperately to save his passengers by keeping his bus on the bridge. A procession of eighty buses drove slowly down Fourth Avenue toward the Key Arena, where five thousand people waited for a memorial service honoring both Mark McLaughlin and Herman Liebelt. Two Seattle police motorcycle officers led the procession and a tow truck pulled an empty bus emblazoned with McLaughlin’s badge number: 2106. His photo and his uniform jacket hung behind the driver’s seat, and thirty-two purple ribbons marked the seats where the surviving passengers had sat eleven days earlier. There were two black ribbons: one for McLaughlin and one for Liebelt.

But there was no ribbon at all for Silas Cool.

The buses rolled silently for an hour, blocking intersections, and seizing the street for that time in honor of the bus driver and the old man. No one minded. What had happened to them was something all drivers and many riders had feared. “We knew it was only a matter of time,” one driver said. “You never know who’s sitting next to you . . .”

No one can really know what went on in Silas Garfield Cool’s head. He is not a villain in the traditional sense of the word because he was undoubtedly insane. He was a quiet boy who never quite fit in—who became a quiet man who didn’t fit in at all. His “bad back” was probably only an excuse for his inability to deal with the world. He had run as far as he could from his boyhood home, seeking a geographic solution to the thoughts that plagued him. But when he got to Seattle in 1979, Silas Cool found that he’d brought all his demons with him. He could not bring himself to admit that it was his mind that was so fragile that he could not work, but he could blame it on his painful spine. He may even have “felt” pain, and picked the term
scoliosis
to describe his ailment. He spent a tremendous amount of money on curealls, magnets, belts, and massagers but none of those could fix his mind, and so he still felt pain.

Silas Cool was about twenty-four years old when he drove his Mustang to the Northwest. Already, according to his supervisors at work, he could not get along with his peers. Already, he was scornful of African-Americans and Asians, perhaps convinced in his own mind that they were a danger to him. The undiagnosed illness that eventually destroyed him had begun to grow like the faintest cuttings of ivy in his thought patterns. As the years passed, the “ivy” wound itself around and around his brain processes. Because he kept himself entirely alone, there was no chance for anyone to help him. He got no psychiatric treatment and no pharmacological treatment.

For Cool, who was entranced, beset, consumed, haunted, obsessed, and possessed by buses, it
was
only a matter of time before someone or some thing triggered his fear and rage. The fact that the catastrophic shooting on the bus was virtually simultaneous with the homecoming reunion for the Class of 1973 cannot be ignored. It is quite possible that Silas
did
resent being teased about his name, being called a “cool guy” a quarter of a century before. He may well have harbored a resentment that burgeoned along with his developing paranoia. He may have wanted to show those classmates who barely remembered him that he was the most famous of them all. Twenty-five years after the fact, his actions were not unlike those of the violent outsiders in the 1990s high school massacres.

It was only a matter of five seconds. If Bus Number 359 had fallen from the top of the Aurora Bridge, Silas Garfield Cool would have taken nearly three dozen people with him in a headline-grabbing suicide plunge. And he would have achieved a ghastly sort of celebrity. He may have planned for it to be that way. But bad timing and fate foiled those plans.

Mystery writers like
to say there is no such thing as a perfect murder, but they’re wrong. There are probably thousands of perfect murders and they’re not all committed by brilliant killers. If a victim isn’t missed when he or she vanishes and no body is ever found, or if one
is
found and not identified, the killer is free and clear.

In this case, the victim was found quickly and identified at once, but her not-too-bright killer attempted to complicate the crime scene by setting up red herrings. He left all manner of false clues for the homicide detectives, but he was completely oblivious to the
real
clues that remained. Most murderers are caught because they leave infinitesimal pieces of themselves behind, unaware that forensic science and detectives’ technical skill have evolved to a point that is almost uncanny.

But the killer in this case caught himself because he was bored and made a stupid decision. It was so stupid that the detectives who tracked him never considered that anyone who was trying to evade capture would make such a blatant mistake; they found that mistake in their routine checks, not in their prime crime scene investigation.

T
he shy
spinster school teacher was an unlikely target for a murderer. “Spinster” is an outdated description for most single women, bringing images of
Little House on the Prairie,
but it fit Sharon Mason. She was still single at the age of thirty-seven and that was by her own choice. Although she was slim and attractive, she rarely dated or even mingled much with people her own age. She looked much younger than her true age. She was five feet four and weighed only 104 pounds, and she seemed fragile, although she was perfectly healthy. She had brown eyes and auburn hair.

Sharon was very cautious and reserved to the point of being timid. Other women took chances that she would never have dreamed of: walking alone at night, making friends by talking to strangers, and accepting blind dates. Not Sharon. She erred, always, on the side of safety. Besides, she preferred being home in her apartment to going out at night. The only way she could have been safer would have been to stay there twenty-four hours a day.

But Sharon did have a full life outside her apartment, a life that revolved around her career and her parents. She had taught the first grade at the Roosevelt Elementary School in Tumwater, Washington, for nine years. Her kids loved her, and her co-workers admired her. She was always at school for special events that involved her students.

Tumwater isn’t exactly a big town, although it is a suburb of Washington’s capital city, Olympia. Tumwater’s claim to fame is that its natural spring water is the main ingredient of a popular beer. But Tumwater and Olympia are far more cosmopolitan than the city where Sharon grew up. She came from Aberdeen on the Grays Harbor inlet along the Washington coast. Aberdeen is a logging and deepwater fishing town and people claim it rains there more than any other spot in the state.

Born late in life to an Aberdeen couple, Sharon was to be their only child and the focal point of their lives. Every weekend, without fail, she drove home to spend the weekend with them. And, every Wednesday evening, she called them. She didn’t chafe at the responsibility to her parents; she loved them and was happy to be with them.

During the week, Sharon lived near Olympia in a very nice ten-unit apartment building that was adjacent to an evergreen forest. Her balcony looked out on tall fir trees and the woods were full of bird songs. It wasn’t nearly as isolated as it seemed, however, and it was only a short distance to the I-5 freeway. It was also close to the capital building so several state legislators lived in her apartment building. She really didn’t know any of her neighbors well, no more than to politely nod if she met them in the parking lot.

Sharon’s apartment was rather expensive for a school teacher, but she spent little money on anything outside her home. She didn’t need fancy clothes to teach first grade, her car was paid for, and her home was her hobby, her avocation, her pride and joy.

She chose her furniture with care and good taste, and she coaxed house plants into luxuriant growth. Sharon’s only pets were goldfish. After a hectic day with six-year-olds, her apartment was a peaceful haven.

The only jarring note in Sharon Mason’s life was that she was afraid to be alone at night. Maybe it was because her parents had warned her too much about the dangers of life; they doted so on their only child. Perhaps she was just naturally timid. She hated the dark. She always kept her drapes drawn at night, her door locked, and a reassuring night light on in the hallway.

Occasionally, when the winter winds raged, there were massive power outages in the Olympia area, and Sharon was quite frightened. Then, the lowering trees seemed to close in around her apartment’s balcony and she felt cut off from the world. She would either phone her mother to say she was driving the sixty miles to Aberdeen to spend the night, or she would grab the overnight bag that she kept packed, and drive to a motel. On nights like these, her locked doors, the proximity of her neighbors, or the light of candles couldn’t comfort her. In the Northwest, winter days are short and the night falls before five
P.M.
, making the darkness more pervasive.

On Friday, February 20, 1976, Sharon drove to Aberdeen as usual. It was a special weekend because her parents were celebrating their wedding anniversary. They all had a good time with friends. On Sunday afternoon, Sharon’s dad polished her gold Oldsmobile for her and filled the gas tank. He always did that, a gesture to thank her for making the long drive down each weekend. Sharon headed home in mid-afternoon so that she could be in her apartment before dark.

On Monday morning, February 23, Sharon was in her classroom early, as she always was. But she was frightened. She told fellow teachers that someone had prowled the parking lot of her apartment house during the night. “My car was broken into,” she related softly.

“What did you lose?” someone asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Well, nothing—except for the extra apartment key that I kept in my glove box. I told the manager about it right away, and he promised to have the maintenance man change the locks on my doors this afternoon.”

None of the other cars in the lot had been touched. Only Sharon’s. It made her more nervous when she remembered that her missing key had the number of her apartment on it, a clear “9” etched in the metal. And if he—she was sure, somehow, that it was a
he
who had rifled through her car—if he had wanted to know her name, all he would have had to do was check her name on her car registration on the steering column of the Oldsmobile.

It gave her a creepy feeling to think that some stranger had been sitting in her car, pawing through her things in the glove compartment and had taken her key. When she couldn’t get a hold of the apartment manager to confirm that her locks had been changed, she made up her mind not to sleep in her apartment that night; she would go home only to get her overnight bag and then check into the motel where she sometimes stayed.

After classes, Sharon stayed for a brief after-school party. She stopped at an Albertson’s supermarket to pick up a few items, and then cashed a check for $75 at her bank.

If she had thought to put an overnight bag in her car that morning, she probably wouldn’t have even gone to her apartment. But she did, parking the Oldsmobile in the front paved part of the parking lot, facing the road, as if she planned only to stop for a few minutes.

The man who lived in the apartment directly over Sharon Mason’s unit thought he recognized her footsteps on the stairs at 4:55. He heard her door open and close. But he had turned on his television to hear the five o’clock news while he was fixing dinner in his kitchen, and that blocked out any noises outside his walls.

But Sharon Mason’s comings and goings were so predictable. He had
never
heard loud sounds from her apartment. Now, when he did hear something, he listened and remembered. He heard “three quick thumps,” followed almost immediately by three muted cries of a woman uttering “Oooh . . .ooh . . .oh.”

He stood in his kitchen, his hands poised over the sink, listening. Puzzled. The sounds weren’t loud enough to be termed screams, or even alarming enough for him to be sure anything was wrong.

But his curiosity was piqued and he went to his window to peer down at the parking lot. There was a car below, and, feeling a little foolish, he jotted down the license number.

Sharon Mason’s upstairs neighbor felt vaguely disturbed the rest of the evening. At one point, he even went downstairs and rang her doorbell, thinking he would ask her if everything was O.K. But no one answered the bell. He wondered if his imagination was playing tricks on him. He’d been reading
Helter Skelter
about the Manson murders, and he figured that was responsible for his being uncharacteristically suspicious.

Not another sound came from Sharon’s apartment all evening, but that wasn’t unusual. Sharon never had her television on too loud, she never had a party that he could recall or even entertained friends whose voices might carry.

Another man was puzzled when he tried to contact Sharon Mason that evening. He was the maintenance man who took care of the apartment complex. He’d gotten a priority assignment to change the locks on Number 9. But when he knocked on the front door late Monday, she didn’t answer. Assuming that she had a late conference at her school, he had left. But he’d phoned several times during the evening and never got an answer.

After the last call, he shook his head slightly and hung up. He knew from the manager that the tenant in Number 9 was extremely upset and he had promised to have the locks changed by nightfall. But he couldn’t change them unless the tenant was present. He figured she had stayed someplace else for the night, so he decided to call her the next day.

In truth, Sharon Mason’s apartment was not unoccupied, but no one inside could—or would—answer the doorbell, knocks, or telephone rings.

On Tuesday morning, the first graders in Sharon’s schoolroom were restless. Their teacher was late, and she was never late. One of them went to tell the teacher in the room next door.

In nine years, Sharon Mason had never failed to call in if she was ill or could not be at work. Indeed, she usually called the night before to give school authorities the chance to find a substitute teacher. Her principal and her fellow teachers were alarmed. A woman whose punctuality and dependability were legendary would not fail to appear for work unless there was something wrong.

At 9
A.M.
a worried co-worker called the Tumwater Police Department to request that an officer check on Sharon to be sure she was O.K. Sergeant G. E. Miller reached her apartment house twenty-two minutes later. He knocked loudly on the front door of Number 9, and like the others who had tried to rouse someone, was met only with silence. While he waited, he glanced idly down into the parking lot and saw “a tannish-mustard Oldsmobile” parked in the stall allotted to Number 9. He noted nothing unusual about it, except that it was covered with mud.

Sharon’s fellow teachers told Tumwater police officers that it was quite possible that she had driven to Aberdeen the night before. Although she hadn’t mentioned that she might do that, they knew that she was very worried about her stolen key. But a call to her parents in Aberdeen elicited the information that they hadn’t seen Sharon since she drove away Sunday afternoon.

Understandably her parents were frightened. They assured the officers that Sharon would have called them if she stayed anyplace but her apartment. “This isn’t like her,” they told the police and they asked them to go into her apartment.

With the manager leading the way with his pass key, Tumwater Police Chief Ernie Dennis and a silent trio of his officers headed toward Sharon Mason’s apartment. Had it been any other woman, they would not have had the same sense of urgency; Sharon hadn’t even been missing for twenty-four hours. But Sharon Mason was a creature of habit and reliability.

And the mud-covered car in her parking stall was hers, even though it was in a condition she never would have tolerated.

The police knocked again and still no one answered. As the lock tumblers clicked—still with the original lock—and the door swung open, there wasn’t another sound. Sharon’s apartment looked as immaculate as it always did. The investigators moved down the hall, glancing into the bathroom, toward the living room with its drawn blinds, down to the bedroom.

There, they found Sharon. The scene was as chilling as any of those she might have imagined during the dark nights that frightened her. She lay on her back on the carpet of her bedroom, mercifully oblivious to the blood-stained shambles around her.

Someone had done terrible damage to the frail school teacher. The skin on her forehead had split where some manner of blunt instrument had crushed her skull, and her fractured teeth lay scattered around her. Her throat bore the marks of a knife. She had obviously been dead for many hours, possibly since the previous night.

Sharon Mason still wore her car coat, sweater, and bra, but she was nude from the waist down. It would take a postmortem examination to say whether she had been raped, but certainly the scene before the investigators suggested that a sexual attack had been attempted.

The investigators moved slowly through the victim’s apartment, finding it very neat except for the bedroom. It wasn’t difficult to deduce what had happened just prior to the murder. A sack of groceries sat on the counter next to the kitchen sink. The date on the sales slip was
2-23-76
and the time was
4:23 p.m.

Sharon must have purchased the groceries after she left the school party. The tenant upstairs had heard three muffled cries at 4:55
P.M.
Sharon still wore her coat. When the detectives learned that she had a habit of staying away from her apartment whenever she had reason to be afraid, it was apparent to them that she had intended to be there only briefly. Her neighbor gave the police the license number of the yellow car he’d seen parked in a temporary spot. It turned out to be Sharon’s.

But now the car was filthy with mud and parked back in its assigned spot. No, Sharon Mason had not planned to stay in her apartment until she was sure the locks were changed. She had come upstairs, opened the door, and had probably been attacked right inside her front hallway. They believed that her killer had hidden in the front hall closet, waiting for her. The hangers there were askew and clothing was knocked to the floor. As she entered the door, the person waiting had probably grabbed her and dragged her into the bedroom.