A Rage to Kill (2 page)
Authors: Ann Rule
Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.
—S
HAKESPEARE
Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.
—J
OHN
W
EBSTER
Murder will out.
—C
ERVANTES
It is difficult for me to keep a semblance of order in my office since my shelves are jammed with files, photographs, tapes and videos, notes on long legal tablets, yellowing newspaper clippings, and magazines full of the hundreds of articles I have written about criminal cases. Many of these cases are indelibly stamped on my memory, coming back to play across my mind at unexpected moments. And, surprisingly, I had almost forgotten some of them until I started to poke through my archives. I never remember names, anyway; rather, I tend to recall the
circumstances
of a particular crime in minute detail, as if I researched it only yesterday.
The cases in this book, my sixth volume of crime files, come from many different phases of my career. Some are drawn from current headlines, and others go back to the years when I visited one police department or another along the West Coast, asking detectives to tell me about their most memorable cases. In those days, I was raising four children on my own and I often wrote two articles a week to be sure we had grocery money. Along the way, I learned a great deal about criminal behavior,
and
about how good detectives solve cases.
Many of you have asked me to write a book filled with these shorter cases.
A Rage to Kill
is my answer to your request. There were various reasons why I didn’t go on to write a complete book about these stories. A few were short, violent vignettes that made headlines for only a day or two. Others are from police files marked “Closed: Exceptional”—which means that the guilty person is
known
by detectives but, due to lack of physical evidence, has never been arrested. Sometimes, it was simply because the timing was wrong; I was already occupied with writing another book.
I must admit that a couple of these earliest homicide puzzles occurred so early in my writing career that I was convinced no one would buy a book from a young mother who lived in a little town in the State of Washington. (These occurred well before the Ted Bundy saga that I told in
The Stranger Beside Me.
) Even so, I saved them because I knew someday I would want to retell them.
The first case is called “A Bus to Nowhere,” an almost unbelievable tale of terror that reads as if it must have happened in an action movie. The newspapers that carried articles about this fatal bus ride are still quite clean and crisp; the story is current, and the wounds of the injured are still healing.
“The Killer Who Planted His Own Clues” may make you feel that there is no safe place to hide, and “The Lost Lady” is a mystery about a beautiful psychic heiress that has stumped investigators for more than two decades. “Profile of a Spree Killer” is an in-depth look at a particular and unusual species of mass murderer, and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” will probably make you cry.
Other cases in this volume are: “That Was No Lady,” “As Close as a Brother,” “To an Athlete Dying Young,” “Born to Kill?” and “The Killer Who Talked Too Much.” These ten cases demonstrate how wide the range of human emotions that can lead to homicidal rage really is.
Because I have been fortunate enough to meet so many of my readers, I know that you wonder as I do about why seemingly normal people commit horrendous crimes. We also ponder the vagaries of fate that place people with apparently safe lives in the paths of killers. Sometimes their killers were complete strangers, and sometimes they were close friends or relatives. In many instances, I have been able to isolate the probable cause of homicidal violence. And then there are times when I simply cannot.
Going back through my work is a little like reading an old diary. I cannot help but think, “Had
she
lived, she would be forty-five now; she was only a young bride when she died,” or “That case could have been solved so easily with the forensic technology of the nineties.” Today, I wince to see that I described a fifty-two-year-old woman as “elderly” and a forty-year-old victim as “middle-aged.” Our perspective certainly changes as we ourselves mature!
Some of these cases did not have proper endings when I wrote them. Now they do. One is still a mystery. Too many of them were not the final cruel handiwork of a particular killer, and I have, sadly, had to revise them to add new crimes. The men and women convicted in these murder cases ranged from brilliant and manipulative to downright clumsy and stupid. The one trait they had in common was
a rage to kill.
This is a case
that might well have come out of a bad dream. It demonstrates how little control humans have over their own destinies, and how disaster sometimes comes while we are involved in the most mundane pursuits. Along with a million other people, I watched it unfold on my television screen. But don’t jump to conclusions; this is not a review of the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, although the motivation behind the two incidents are, perhaps, almost identical. Rage and resentment hidden beneath a bland façade can explode in ways we might never imagine, and sometimes that kind of hatred can smolder for a very long time, even for decades.
On the day after Thanksgiving, 1998, I was cleaning my kitchen, which, for me, was playing hookey from writing. Like many moms with big families, I had spent all the day before cooking and this seemed a good time to try to create some kind of order in my kitchen drawers and cabinets. This was
my
idea of a holiday, polishing silver, lining cupboards and washing dishes while I watched daytime television.
But I was snapped out of my reverie when I heard the announcer cut into
Oprah
with a news bulletin; his voice
had a nonprofessional edge to it that gave away what was clearly his own shock. I looked up at my little kitchen TV set to see an image there that made no sense at all. I recognized a familiar bridge, but everything else was a jumble of crushed metal, emergency vehicles, victims with bloody clothing, and sobbing bystanders. For the next three hours, I watched, transfixed with horror.
We all tend to think that really bad things are not going to happen in the town where we live—that we are somehow protected by the law of averages, fate, and even angels. The classic quote from bystanders who cluster around a murder or a multiple fatality accident is
always,
“Things like that don’t happen in our town.” Television reporters seem to love that quote, no matter how predictable it has become. But sometimes, terrible things
do
happen right down the street from where we live. The tragedy that occurred in Seattle on the day after Thanksgiving, 1998, was like that, and the reasons behind it made for an unfathomable puzzle at first.
I set out to try to find some answers. What I eventually discovered was shocking. More than any case I’ve written about to date, this one demonstrates that there are people who live and breathe and move among us who live in a completely alien world. In Seattle, on the day after a holiday that traditionally signifies warmth and love, one of those people brought untold pain to perfect strangers. I had to know who he was, what he looked like, and, most important, what drove him to do what he did. You couldn’t really tell who he was from the statements of almost forty eyewitnesses; he might have been a dozen different men.
And
no one
knew who really lived behind his handsome, pleasant facade.
T
he Thanksgiving holiday,
1998, was no different from any other holiday, although Thursday, the day itself, was fairly quiet. Most residents of the western half of Washington State were grateful that the week’s tumultuous weather had tempered just a little, and that there was power to roast their turkeys, since a storm packing 70-mile-an-hour winds had swept in on Monday and knocked power out in 200,000 homes. Ten inches of snow fell in the Cascade Mountains and the first gully-washing rains of what would prove to be a winter of record rainfall had begun. Thanksgiving Day itself was mostly cloudy, a little rainy, but the gale-force winds had diminished to only breezes. Friday was the same. That was fortunate for anyone living along Puget Sound or Elliott Bay; high tides of over twelve feet were expected and 70-mile-an-hour winds would have taken out a lot of docks and bulkheads and carried away boats and buoys. That had happened often enough over the Thanksgiving holidays of the past.
There are no holidays in a homicide unit; there are only detectives who have the day off, detectives who are on call, and detectives who are on duty. When something catastrophic happens, the whole police force is, of course, available. Those in the first category in the Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Unit can breathe easy on a holiday, but the next two are either listening for their pagers to beep or working on open cases. Holidays tend to breed homicides; people who manage to avoid each other—and are wise to do so—the rest of the year are thrown together, with sometimes fatal results. They drink too much, get too little sleep, are worn out by travel, and generally tend to behave badly if they have a propensity for badness in the first place.
Detectives Steve O’Leary, John Nordlund, and Gene Ramirez were only on call on November 27, and thankful for that. They figured they were through the worst of the weekend by Friday. Steve O’Leary and his wife were having a delayed holiday dinner with her grandmother at a restaurant called Claire’s Pantry in the north end of Seattle that afternoon. Between his turkey and his pumpkin pie, O’Leary happened to glance up at the television set placed there in deference to football fanatics. “When I saw what I saw,” he recalled, “I wondered why they hadn’t called me. A moment later, my pager sounded. And that was the beginning of it.”
Traditionally, in every city in America, the day after Thanksgiving is the kick-off of the Christmas shopping season. Die-hard shoppers have barely digested their turkey dinners before they are up and headed to the malls and downtown. That was true in Seattle on November 27, too; most of the shoppers drove private cars, but hundreds of them took advantage of the Metro Transit park-and-ride lots located on the borders of the city. They rode the bus—no parking hassles that way.
Forty-four-year-old Mark McLaughlin was well into his twentieth year as a bus driver for the Metro King County bus system, and he was a familiar and cheerful presence on the Number 359 daytime route from Shoreline in the far north end of Seattle to the downtown area. Mark was a big man with broad shoulders, a deep chest and a comfortable belly. He was six feet, two inches tall, and weighed over 250 pounds, and his partially white beard made him look a little older than he really was. Many of his regular passengers felt that he was a good friend and they looked forward to his kidding, just as his fellow drivers and the mechanics at the bus barn did. He could wrestle the huge articulated buses with an ease a smaller man might envy. McLaughlin loved his job, and he was a complete professional in a career that required a driver to be not only skilled behind the wheel, but adept at dealing with the problems, complaints and eccentricities of the passengers who hopped on board and took a seat behind him.
Driving a transit bus has never been an easy job in Seattle. Three decades or more ago, the buses got their power from overhead electric wires. They were half trolley/half bus, and their connecting rods were forever detaching and swinging free. Drivers had to stop, get out, risk getting a shock as they struggled to get their rig back on track. Later, Metro went to regular buses, but when the transit company purchased sixty-feet-long, forty-thousand-pound, articulated buses, everyone eyed them with suspicion. These buses had an accordion-like midsection that connected one ordinary-size bus to another. Articulated buses could carry twice as many passengers, and slide around corners like a Slinky toy. At first the concept didn’t seem natural—or even safe. But some of the drivers, including Mark McLaughlin, were willing to give them a try. Before long, the behemoth buses were taken for granted.
Mark McLaughlin lived away from the city in Lynnwood, halfway between Seattle and Everett. He was divorced and had custody of his two sons, who were sixteen and thirteen. His seventy-eight-year-old mother, Rose, lived nearby, and he had brothers and a sister close by, too. After Mark graduated from Ingraham High School in 1972, he married his first wife, a local girl. He enlisted in the Army and trained to be a medic.
When his Army stint was over in 1979, he went to work for Metro. His first, young marriage ended and so did his second marriage, but he didn’t give up on the possibility of finding someone who would be right for him. He raised his boys, drove the big buses, and hoped for a happier future. He found it in what had become his world—on the bus. Sometime in 1990, Mark was driving through the suburb of Bothell when he met a young woman who was a regular passenger. She was pretty and petite with long blond hair and she always got on with two small children, a baby carrier and a jumble of bags that held diapers, bottles and other baby paraphernalia. Mark always got out of the driver’s seat and helped the young mother get settled. The sight of her struggling with her babies and their gear touched his big heart.
Her name was Elise Crawford. When the bus was nearly empty during off-peak hours, Elise and Mark talked. He learned that she was alone and he told her his second marriage had ended. After months, he asked her out and she said yes. Inevitably, perhaps, they fell in love. They became engaged and joined their families, moving into a modest three-bedroom house in Lynnwood. Mark welcomed Elise’s children; he was such a natural father that he had been awarded custody of his second wife’s son by her earlier marriage. Now, Mark and Elise had four children—his two, her two.
Mark and Elise had wedding plans for the spring of 1999. They were going to marry at his mother Rose’s home, and his sister Debra was helping Elise with the plans. It wouldn’t cost a ton of money, but they would have spring flowers, bridesmaids in pastel dresses, and a great buffet. Mark and Elise had each known lonely days, and this marriage was going to be forever.
When he wasn’t driving a bus, Mark McLaughlin was an avid fan of the Seattle Sonics and Seahawks. He loved the outdoor opportunities in the Northwest, and he was a hiker and an amateur photographer. Elise worked as a nurse at Virginia Mason Hospital, and she took a second job clerking at a J.C. Penney store on the weekends. Mark was driving extra shifts, and it seemed only fair that she help, too. With four kids and a wedding coming up, they needed extra money. Their big dream was to buy their own home together, someplace with bedrooms enough for everyone. There was no reason to think they wouldn’t be able to realize that dream.
Where
they lived didn’t really matter to Elise. After being alone with her small children, often being afraid of sounds in the night, she felt so safe with Mark. He was a big bear of a man who looked after everybody. “He was a wonderful man,” Elise recalled of their happiest days. “We had just started to make it. I was never afraid of anything with him here.”
As a nurse, Elise worried sometimes about Mark’s weight and urged him to cut back on his appetite. But he seemed healthy, and he had boundless endurance.
Mark and Elise had a perfect day on Thanksgiving; they went to his mother’s house for a turkey dinner along with the rest of their relatives. One of Mark’s favorite cousins drove down from Vancouver, B.C., for the weekend. He and Mark planned to take the kids on a hike on Saturday, but first Mark had a shift to drive for Metro. He started at 11:30 on Friday morning, driving Number 359. He would be home in plenty of time to eat leftovers and watch a few of the games during the football marathon that weekend.
Mark worked out of Metro’s North Base located at Interstate 5 and 165th; he’d been there since it opened in 1990. It was close to his home, and daytime runs were usually pretty easy when it came to trouble from passengers, even though his route was one of three in the Metro system with the most incidents involving violence. You could never guarantee that there wouldn’t be a drunk or some druggies on the bus, but there were certainly fewer than during late night runs. Drivers all over the city had had their problems with “gang bangers” and other riders who seemed to have more potential for trouble than the average passenger. On some routes, it seemed that the transit drivers had to spend more energy maintaining order on the bus than they did driving. County-wide, Metro was averaging about ten incidents a day. Some were only minor altercations among or between passengers, some were over fare disputes, and, in rare instances, the drivers themselves were assaulted. But, considering that 217,000 people rode the bus every day, the average wasn’t bad.
A lot of the hassles were over fares, so Metro’s policies dictated that drivers were to
request
that a fare be paid, but to back off if a passenger was combative. Keeping the peace was the most important thing.
Mark McLaughlin’s easy manner and ready grin helped him defuse potential trouble most of the time. When he had to stand up and be heard, he was fully capable of doing that. But the day after Thanksgiving was a happy day. It was his last day of work before a week off.
Even the weather seemed to be a good omen. Suddenly, where there had been rain, wind, clouds, snow and sleet, the skies parted in the early afternoon and the sun burst forth. It was November, but it seemed almost like April. For an hour or two, it was shirt-sleeves weather, and neighborhoods along McLaughlin’s route were alive with people taking advantage of a beneficent warm wind, and nowhere more than in Fremont.
The Fremont neighborhood is located in the center of the north end of Seattle. It was once a staid middle-class enclave, but it reinvented itself and became innovative, funky, colorful and much to be desired by those with open minds. Brazenly calling itself the “Center of the Universe,” Fremont has shops with items found nowhere else. The statuary here ranges from someone’s inherited life-size rendition of Lenin to the Fremont Troll. The Troll is a creation of artist Steve Badanes, a hulking monster three times larger than any human, who holds a hapless life-size Volkswagen bug in one mighty claw. Hunkering down under the north end of the towering Aurora Bridge, The Fremont Troll, fearsome as he looks, is also considered lucky and tourists and locals alike often meet at the cement monster.
At three on Friday afternoon, several young people left their small apartments to hang out near the Troll under the bridge, which runs parallel and close to the soaring Aurora Bridge, both spans crossing the Lake Washington Ship Canal which cuts the landscape between Lake Washington, Salmon Bay, and Shilshole Bay. The young people below the overpasses could hear the rumble and
thunkety-thunkety
sound of tires overhead from the small and large bridges, but the noise was so familiar they unconsciously lifted the level of their voices, laughing and talking without really being aware of the traffic above.
Mark McLaughlin headed south toward the center of Seattle on Aurora Avenue North. Along the way, he would pick up some thirty-three passengers, as diverse in age and errand as any busload of people could be. The only thing that they had in common, really, was that they happened to be on the same bus at the same time. Some of them were going downtown to start their Christmas shopping, some were going to work, some to visit friends, and some were headed home. A few recovering addicts were headed for a rehab center. Although all schools and most offices in the Seattle area were closed that Friday after Thanksgiving, the bus would surely be at least half full by the time they reached the Aurora Bridge.
Jerome Barquet, forty-seven, got on the bus at Aurora Village sometime between two and three and chose a seat just in front of the bendable midsection on the right side. He peered out the window as they picked up other passengers and turned back onto the main thoroughfare, Aurora Avenue. Bill Brimeyer, twenty-three, sat about four seats in front of Barquet. Gary Warfield, also forty-seven, sat down close to Barquet in the fourth row of seats, and immediately began reading the textbook he carried. He was studying for a final exam, and needed to cram as much information as he could before his test.
Lacy Olsen was thirteen; she got on at Aurora Village with her friend, Brandy Boling, sixteen. They sat near the articulated divider in the middle of the double bus and began to talk and giggle as teenagers will. Brodie Kelly also boarded Number 359 at Aurora Village. He sat in the first section of the coach, but near the accordion divider. He had his earphones plugged in and was listening to his portable CD player.
Alberto Chavez and his cousin got on the bus at 145th and Aurora and took a seat close to the midsection of the double coach. Alberto looked out the window as they headed south. Barbara Thomas hopped on near the drivers’ license bureau at North 132nd.
Jennifer Lee was sixteen, and a high school junior. She worked in the afternoons at a retirement home in downtown Seattle. She enjoyed her job and she was a breath of fresh air for the seniors who lived in the complex. She bounced down the aisles, oblivious to the driver and the other passengers. Regina King, twenty-eight, caught the bus at North 130th. She worked at a theater and she had already done some heavy-duty shopping that day. Her arms were loaded with packages. She found an empty seat, arranged her shopping bags on her lap and fell asleep, lulled by the sunshine through the windows and the hum of the engine.
