Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (36 page)

The man explained that he hadn’t called the police or checked further because shouts and screams on the lake were common during the summer months.

Nolan and Actor canvassed the taverns and motels along Aurora Avenue North on Monday, July 5, with negative results. Most of the taverns were closed for the holiday—at least until evening—and the motel managers had no information at all about a woman screaming for help.

Their repeated calls to the owner of the Frontier Tavern continued to be unanswered.

“If Bethany Stokesberry went into the Frontier Tavern after her husband let her off around ten thirty,” Nolan surmised, “and she was screaming for help at midnight, the chances are pretty good that she met her killer inside. And if the bartender is as observant as most of them are, we may get lucky.”

“Right,” Actor agreed. “But until we find him, we haven’t any way of knowing who else was in the Frontier Saturday night—unless we get a call from someone who hears about the murder on radio or television.”

Luck, however, was not with the detectives. If anyone had seen Bethany Stokesberry on Saturday night and recalled who she had left the tavern with, he or she obviously did not want to become involved. A second night passed with no real clues to the victim’s movements on the last night of her life.

At 6 a.m. on Tuesday morning, Dr. Gale Wilson, King County medical examiner, performed the autopsy on the
five-foot-tall, 120-pound blonde. Although she had been beaten savagely, the worst violence had been done to her head. There were nine wounds concentrated on her face and skull—some up to nine centimeters in length. Her nose was broken at the bridge, and she had severely bitten her lower lip when she was struck forcefully in the jaw. The tooth marks in her lip were her own.

The wounds were what Dr. Wilson termed “upper force” injuries with crushed edges, as if the hapless woman had been struck with some manner of blunt instrument. She had suffered severe brain damage called contrecoup injuries, which macerate the brain as it slams against the opposite side of the skull from where the force of the blow struck. That damage was severe enough to have rendered her unconscious almost immediately—causing her death within hours if she didn’t get emergency medical help.

Even with that, Dr. Wilson doubted that the woman could have survived.

Bethany Stokesberry had been the victim of a savage attack. The medical examiner noted more human tooth marks—not her own—encircling one of the victim’s nipples. Both breasts were bruised extensively along their outer walls.

Had a sexual attack sparked the violence that ended in death? The victim’s nudity and her breast injuries strongly suggested it, but she had been in the water for too long before she was discovered for Dr. Wilson to determine if she had been raped or molested.

The postmortem made one thing patently clear: something
the victim had said or done had enraged her killer to the point of maniacal fury. Ironically, despite her grievous wounds, Bethany Stokesberry had not succumbed to the multiple head injuries. Her cause of death was drowning.

Her lungs were completely filled with water and death would have come quickly, as it always does with freshwater drowning, as the human bloodstream, with a higher salt content than lake water, actually sucks water into the blood.

Dr. Wilson determined that the victim had died at about 2 a.m. on the morning of July 4—with an hour’s leeway in either direction. A test of her blood showed no alcohol or drug content at all.

Bethany Stokesberry had fought her attacker, as nail scrapings taken from beneath her broken fingernails revealed.

Detectives observing the autopsy preserved and labeled strands of her hair. If they found her killer, he might have some of her hair on his clothing or person. DNA as a forensic tool was unknown at the time.

The burning question for the detectives was, Why? What had transpired in an hour and a half on July 3–4 that had ended in the death struggle on the shore of Echo Lake?

Shortly after the autopsy on Bethany Stokesberry was completed, Nolan and Detective DuWayne Harrison checked the Frontier Tavern and found the owner had finally returned.

“Sure, Bethany was in here Saturday night,” the owner-bartender replied, after explaining that he had been out of
town since closing his bar that night. “She sat right there,” he added, pointing to a stool at the bar.

“She was alone?”

The bartender nodded. “Bethany used to come in often—usually on a Friday or Saturday night. Used to talk with whoever was here. Sometimes she left with a gentleman—could have been her husband—sometimes with another couple.”

“And Saturday night?”

“Well, we’re usually pretty busy on Saturday nights. I can give you the names of several people who sat at the bar. Bethany talked to all of them—but she left with Long-tall-Paul* and another couple.”

“Long-tall-Paul? Do you know his last name?” Harrison asked.

“Nope. He’s been in maybe eight or ten times. All I know him by is ‘Long-tall-Paul.’ He’s a really tall fellow with a beard. He comes in to play pool. About the only other thing I could tell you is that I hear he works part-time at Melby’s Tavern down the road.”

“Did Mrs. Stokesberry seem to have known this Long-tall-Paul from before?” Nolan questioned.

The bartender shrugged. “Maybe—but I don’t think so. He was trying to get her to go to another tavern with him and I guess she must have agreed because, as I say, they left a little before midnight with this other couple who were sitting there.”

Asked about Bethany Stokesberry’s clothes, the tavern keeper mentioned that she had been wearing some kind of hot-pants outfit. “She got up once and twirled around
beside the bar and asked everyone how they liked her new outfit. She was very outgoing and cheerful.”

The detective duo next went to Melby’s Tavern, where Long-tall-Paul was supposed to have a part-time job. Entering this tavern, which was only a block or so down the street from the Frontier Tavern, Detectives Nolan and Harrison nodded to its lone occupant. The man identified himself as the part-time bar manager and explained that he was principally occupied with his duties as owner of the Echo Lake Motel.

“Do you know a guy called Long-tall-Paul?” Harrison asked.

“Sure do,” the man responded amiably. “He’s not here now. He’s probably over at the motel.”

The investigators exchanged glances.

“Long-tall-Paul lives at my motel—upstairs with Al and Cindy. He works here some of the time, but I’m not expecting him in this morning.”

After days of frustration in attempting to find anything that might lead back to Bethany Stokesberry’s death, the officers were now being handed the name and address of the last person seen with her. They headed back to the motel building whose main entrance is a few scant feet from Aurora Avenue. The unit number given by the owner was on the second level at the far end of a narrow hallway.

Detective Nolan knocked at the door. When it opened slowly, he found himself looking at a giant of a man who stood before him with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

As Dan Nolan told me later, “There was a step up into the apartment as it was, adding to the illusion of height, but the man who came to the door appeared to be about eight feet tall.”

The man identified himself as Paul Anthony “Long-tall-Paul” Vinetti* and said he would be willing to talk with the detectives if they didn’t mind being exposed to the flu, as he was sick.

When they walked into the motel unit, the two detectives saw that Long-tall-Paul Vinetti was almost as tall as he had first appeared in the doorway. He stood well over seven feet!

Questioned about Bethany Stokesberry, Vinetti said that he had talked with her briefly in the Frontier Tavern on July 3, but he hadn’t left with her.

“Did you know her?” Nolan asked.

Vinetti shook his head. “Not before Saturday night—I made some conversation with her while we were sitting at the bar.”

Before pressing him further on his statement, detectives Nolan and Harrison made arrangements to talk privately with the couple he lived with: Al Rigglestatt* and Cindy Mateska.*

That way they might have a clearer idea if Paul was telling them the truth about Saturday night when they questioned him in depth.

Dan Nolan talked with Rigglestatt just outside the motel unit, while DuWayne Harrison talked with Cindy. The revelations gleaned from these interviews cast serious
doubts on Vinetti’s statement that he hadn’t left the tavern with the murder victim.

Rigglestatt told Detective Nolan that he had met Long-tall-Paul, twenty-three, at Smokey Joe’s Tavern in downtown Seattle about six months earlier.

“When I found out that he didn’t have any place to live and no job and hardly any money, I felt sorry for him and invited him to live with me and Cindy. We didn’t have any beds or couches in our unit that he could fit into—he’s about seven foot two or three—but he was happy to sleep on this kind of makeshift pallet on the floor.”

Paul had chipped in on their household expenses whenever he made a few dollars, and Al and Cindy found him a docile, easygoing houseguest who was always willing to help clean or walk the couple’s pet dogs.

“What happened on Saturday night?” Dan Nolan asked.

“Well, Cindy and I were both home when Paul came in between twelve thirty and one. He was breathing heavy and he seemed pretty upset. He had blood all over his shirt and Levi’s and on his arms. I asked him what happened. He said he was in a fight at the Frontier Tavern.

“He told me the name of the other guy in the fight, and I believed him because he’s a fellow we’ve had trouble with. Paul said, ‘I really beat the guy—I took my boots to him.’

“When he took his boots off, I noticed blood up on the instep and long hair caught in the cleats. I told him he’d better just go to bed and he did. Cindy took his clothes and threw them in the closet, and I took and washed his boots
off and pulled the hair out of them. Cindy washed the blood off his arms. Then Cindy and I went downtown for a while, but I got to worrying about the guy Paul beat up, so I drove back to the Frontier Tavern, but I couldn’t find anyone in the alley.

“Paul had told me, ‘Every time the guy moved or moaned, I kicked him,’ and I was afraid he might really have been hurt bad.

“The next day, Cindy went down by the lake and came back and said, ‘They’re taking some young girl’s body out of the lake. She’s been raped and murdered.’ When I told this to Paul, he seemed nervous and sick.”

In the meantime, Cindy Mateska was telling Detective Harrison an identical version of Paul Vinetti’s homecoming on Saturday night. “Paul came in with his sleeves rolled up and blood all over his hands and arms. He knows I disapprove of drinking and I scolded him and told him to go to bed. He gave me a twenty-dollar bill and two or three ones to hold for him and he gave Al a five-dollar bill. He said it was the five that this fellow he beat up owed us for a guitar we’d sold him.

“The next day,” Cindy continued, “when I told Paul about them bringing a girl’s body up out of the lake, he seemed completely surprised.”

Although the couple who had “adopted” Paul Vinetti were only a dozen years older than he was, they seemed to the detectives to have assumed a parental role with him. Rigglestatt recalled that the hair he’d cleaned from the metal cleats of Vinetti’s boots had been blond or light brown and about four and a half inches long.

Informed by detectives Nolan and Harrison that they intended to take Vinetti downtown for further questioning, Rigglestatt said that he had some loaded guns in the unit and that he would be willing to go up first and unload them before any attempt was made to take Vinetti into custody.

He didn’t think Paul would be dangerous when they arrested him, but he wanted to be sure.

Weighing Vinetti’s mild demeanor during previous questioning against the maniacal rage that had exploded on the lakeshore, and knowing that Al and Cindy’s motel unit was at the dead end of a hall—with Paul waiting inside—the detectives agreed that loaded guns might well turn the apartment into an armed fortress. They waited until Rigglestatt returned to tell them that the guns were secured.

Joined by Sergeant Don Actor, Nolan and Harrison knocked once more on the door of the second-floor unit and informed Vinetti that he was under arrest. He was handcuffed and advised of his rights.

“I know my rights,” the hulking suspect responded, but finally he agreed to read the card that outlined his constitutional rights.

The King County investigators obtained a search warrant—although Al and Cindy were completely cooperative—and Sergeant Actor and Detective Howard Reynolds removed several items of clothing that Paul Vinetti had worn on the night of July 3: jockey shorts, a black short-sleeved turtlenecked sweater, a white T-shirt, and a pair of heavy black boots with horseshoe-shaped cleats on the heels.

At the sheriff’s office, Paul Anthony Vinetti gave two statements to Harrison—statements that would lead to second-degree murder charges being filed against the lanky suspect. However, these statements would not become known to the public until Vinetti’s trial in Judge Nancy Ann Holman’s courtroom during the first weeks of November.

In extensive preparation for that trial, Dan Nolan and DuWayne Harrison contacted many witnesses. Among them were people who had sat at the bar of the Frontier Tavern with Vinetti and Bethany Stokesberry. One of these witnesses was Tom Fogarty,* whose name was given to the detectives by the bartender.

“We were there, all right,” Fogarty said. “My girl, my sister, and her husband stopped in at about eleven or eleven thirty, after we’d been out to dinner. We sat at the bar and had one or two schooners of beer. Long-tall-Paul—who I’d seen before maybe once or twice—was there and a woman we met as ‘Bethany’ sat beside him.”

“To your knowledge, was either of them intoxicated?” Nolan asked.

“No, sir. As far as I could tell, they hadn’t had any more to drink than we had. This guy—Paul—asked me if I wanted to play a game of pool for four-fifty, and I said no. At one time, he called me over to the side of the bar and asked me, ‘What’s Bethany’s problem?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about so I just shrugged.”