Lust Killer (13 page)

It was quite possible that there was more than one killer or that the murderer had had an accomplice. It would have taken a man of Herculean strength to lift both the bodies and the heavy auto parts and carry them to the riverbank. No average man could have done it.

Where the man actually lived was another puzzle to be worked out. Linda Slawson and Linda Salee had disappeared from Portland's city limits, and Detective James Cunningham of the Portland police was assigned to those cases, but Linda Salee had been found in Benton County and Linda Slawson had never been found at all. Karen Sprinker had been reported missing from Salem and had been found in Benton County. Jan Whitney's case was being investigated by the Oregon State Police, and only God knew where her body was.

Stovall and Frazier traveled continually, accompanied by Daugherty, checking in with police departments in the Willamette Valley to be sure they weren't missing any clues, information that, taken alone, meant nothing, but when added to the growing file of facts and leads, might mean everything.

Stovall typed the missing and dead girls' names on a small file card and tacked them up over his desk. He was looking for a common denominator. "What kind of spook are we looking for?" he asked himself again and again.

Since he had no face, and no name, and precious little physical evidence to help him find the killer, he tried a technique that had worked for him before. He drew on his background in criminal psychology, on the few facts he knew for certain, and on the "gut feelings" that every superior detective hooks onto when there is nothing else to do.

Stovall placed a clean sheet of paper on his desk and picked up the felt pen he always favors. In his distinctive printing, he wrote a question mark, and then began to fill the page with the thoughts that came tumbling into his head.

? Killer is …

1. Between twenty and thirty—because all victims are young.

2. Of at least average intelligence—knots used to tie parts to bodies skilled.

3. An electrician—copper wire on the bodies wound one turn around and broken, then wound twice as electricians do—twisted in fashion common to electrical wiring.

4. Probably from broken home—with one parent gone … or the child of a strong mother and weak father … strong dislike for mother shown by desecration of female bodies. HATES WOMEN.

5. Probable record of antisocial behavior going far back.

6. Not participant in contact sports—women strangled but not beaten. Strangulation required little force.

7. Not a steady worker. No reason, beyond girls' disappearances at odd hours of day.

8. Driven by a cycle of some sort—possible pseudo-menstrual? All girls vanished toward end of month:

Slawson: January 26

Whitney: November 26

Sprinker: March 27

Salee: April 23

Even with his training and experience taken into account, it is eerie to see just how close Stovall came to visualizing the man he sought. He could not actually
know
these things at the time, for his list, although based on the few facts known, was almost entirely the creation of a subliminal awareness—as if the detective had, indeed, locked into the murderer's mind.

Stovall searched in May 1969 for his "common denominator"—some way to tie a specific suspect to the pattern of deaths.

He assumed that the killer had to be someone familiar with the area from Corvallis to Portland. His origins or recent living arrangements had to have been centered at one time around the Long Tom River. It was too isolated a waterway for someone to have stumbled on it accidentally. Undoubtedly the bodies had been left in the river during nighttime hours by someone who could literally find his way to its banks in the dark. A stranger would have fallen in himself with one misstep.

The man had to be very, very strong. Stovall felt that it was only one man. Incidents of serial murder—lust murder—rarely involve more than one killer; that kind of killing results from a solitary aberration, a secret compulsion that the killer cannot, will not, share with anyone else. No, he was looking for a large man, because a small man could not have carried the bodies and their heavy weights.

The killer undoubtedly looked normal—as most sexual criminals do. The maniacal rapist, frothing at the mouth, is a fiction writer's killer. Most actual rapists are average-looking—even attractive—and usually have some manner of relationship with a woman. They rape and kill because of an inner rage, because they are driven compulsively to do so. If the killer's black side was obvious, Stovall doubted that he would have been able to get close enough to the victims to abduct them.

Jim Stovall studied a map of Oregon. Since the killer had roved from possibly as far south as Eugene and as far north as Portland, his residence was probably somewhere in between the two cities, a "safe house" to run to when the heat was on after each disappearance. The most likely city for the killer's home base would be Corvallis or Salem.

Karen Sprinker had spent most of her time in Corvallis while she attended Oregon State University; she was seized in Salem. Was there a connection? Was it possible that she had known her killer … or that he might have watched her for some time, and stalked her to Salem?

Daughtery and Stovall agreed that the obvious place to begin intensive questioning was Callahan Hall, where Karen Sprinker had lived. There were hundreds of coeds rooming in Callahan and in other dorms on the Corvallis campus.

Gene Daugherty packed up and moved to Corvallis to organize a massive interviewing program. He would literally live there until a break came—if it did. Daugherty found the Corvallis Police Department and the college authorities magnificently cooperative. The police department provided two detectives, B. J. Miller and "Frenchie" De Lamere, who joined in the search for the killer. The interview teams would work each day and every evening, talking to coeds at fifteen-minute intervals.

"First, we talked with all the girls who had known Karen even slightly. We asked them about her dates, and then we asked them about their own dates. How many dates did they have, and who were they with? Had any of them received peculiar phone calls? Had they been taken to strange places? Had they been in contact with any strange or unusual people? Anything that might have been out of the ordinary—no matter how unimportant it might have seemed. Then we talked to the girls who had not known Karen, and asked them the same questions."

The girls interviewed were subdued, sometimes frightened when they talked of Karen. It could have happened to any of them, and they knew it. Yes, most of them had dated frequently, and it seemed okay to date men they had met on campus. A campus atmosphere seemed safer somehow; it wasn't as thought you were dating strangers you'd met in a city.

Now all of the women interviewed tried to remember anything that had happened to them that had seemed a little off-center. Some of them were embarrassed, but most of them were quite frank in their eagerness to help. Not surprisingly, many of them had had dates with college boys who were sexually aggressive-—but not peculiar about it, and none of them had used force.

After interviewing dozens of girls and filling countless yellow legal pads with notes, Daugherty and the interview teams began to get a little discouraged. It was such a long shot, really, to hope that one of the coeds was going to give the killer to them. Perhaps there
was
no good information to be gleaned at Oregon State.

But asking questions is a major part of a detective's work. A million answers may be utterly useless, and a thousand possible witnesses have to be dismissed with a "thank you for your time." But the right answer cannot be jarred free unless a concerted effort is made. When that one answer shines through, it is worth all the tedium.

And so the detectives worked each day in the stuffy little room off the main lounge of Callahan Hall. Outside, students threw Frisbees on the green, and the lilacs grew in thick clusters, their blooms filling the air with fragrance. Occasionally, laughter carried through the open window, making the grim investigation seem incongruous. And also reminding the detectives that Karen Sprinker could never again return to this campus.

With each new girl, the same questions. "Who have you dated in the last three months?"

And mostly, the same answers. Boys from the dorm next door, boys they'd known in their hometowns. There were a few oddballs in the bunch. One girl had dated a man who wanted to do nothing but have her sit quietly while he played his flute—"very badly"—for her. "I turned him down the next time he called."

There were a couple of girls who'd dated a fellow who wanted to go to Portland and seek out porno movies. "He was kind of weird—but not that weird," one said. "He didn't try anything."

Despite the girls' evaluations of the men they mentioned as harmless, detectives checked out all the ones who had been in any way peculiar, and they all cleared.

And then three or four young women mentioned receiving phone calls from a stranger. He had asked for them by their first name, but none of them had ever met the man before. One girl tried to remember what he had talked about. "Let's see … it was a couple of weeks ago. This guy said that he'd been a prisoner in Vietnam for three years. Then he started in on this garbage about how he possessed extraordinary powers in ESP—that kind of thing. Like he was supposed to be clairvoyant or something. He wanted me to meet him for a Coke, but I said no. "

"Did he give you a name?" Daugherty asked.

"No. … " The girl shook her head slowly. "Or if he did, I can't remember. I just wasn't interested. I mean, I didn't know him, and his conversation was a little odd."

After hearing about the same "Vietnam vet" from three more girls, Daugherty began to grow a little more enthusiastic about the lead. He was fascinated by the story told by a girl the next day. She too had received an unsolicited phone call from a man who said he was a Vietnam veteran. But, most interesting of all,
she
had agreed to meet the caller in the lounge of her dorm!

"He wasn't offensive when he called; he didn't say anything suggestive or raunchy," she explained. "He said he was really lonesome because he'd been away in the war for years, and he just wanted to meet a girl who would have a cup of coffee with him and talk. When I mentioned I was taking some psychology courses, he said that he'd been a patient at Walter Reed Hospital. He said he had learned a whole new method of study there and that I might be interested in hearing about it. I guess it was kind of foolish to make a date, but I felt a little sorry for him."

"So he did come over to your dorm?"

"Yes. He came over." She laughed nervously. "He turned out about like most blind dates do. He was a lot older than I expected—about thirty. He wasn't very good-looking. Kind of tubby, and he was losing his hair. I mean, he wasn't exactly a knight on a white horse or anything."

"What did you talk about?"

"At first we stayed in the lounge and just talked about general things—the weather, and studying, although he never did tell me about whatever that special method of study was. Just dumb stuff, the way you do when you don't really know a person. Oh, there was something … "

Daugherty looked up sharply. "What?"

"Well, he put his hand on my shoulder and began to massage it … and then he said—I don't know how to explain it—he said, 'Be sad.' "

" 'Be
sad'
?"

"Yes. Wasn't that peculiar? He wanted me to be sad or look sad or something, and I laughed and said I didn't feel sad about anything. Then he said, 'Think of those two girls they found in the river. Those girls who got killed. That was an awful thing that happened to them.' "

"That must have frightened you a little."

"No, not really. Everybody on campus had been talking about it, because it was in all the papers and because one of the girls was a student here. But I guess I just wasn't thinking too much about it. He asked me if I would go out with him and get a Coke, and I did."

"He didn't say or do anything else that seemed odd?"

"Well, kind of," the girl told Daugherty and Jerry Frazier and B. J. Miller, who had moved closer to listen to this most interesting incident. "He was telling me all about self-defense. He said most girls think that they should kick a man in the groin, but that's wrong. He said you might miss and make the guy mad and you'd be off balance. He said you should kick him in the shins first, and then in the groin."

"Anything else?"

"Well, I told him that I had heard it would take at least two men to carry an auto part and a body down to the river bank, and he said he agreed with me—but when he was leaving, it was kind of creepy, what he said. … "

"What was that?" Miller asked.

"He said, 'Why did you change your mind and come with me?' And I said I guessed I was curious. And he said, 'How did you know I would bring you back home and not take you to the river and strangle you?' Wasn't that kind of weird?"

That gave the detectives pause. Frazier cleared his throat and asked the girl about her blind date's car.

"Oh, he had an old junker of a car, and it was dirty and there were kids' clothes in it. I thought he might have been married, but he didn't mention that he was. He did say something about having had to replace the motor in his car recently."

"Can you describe the car?"

"Not really. I'm really bad on cars. It was so dirty, and it was night, so I can't even tell you the color. It was a station wagon, and I think it had Oregon plates."

"Tell me again what he looked like. Describe him as if I had to pick him out from a crowd of people on the street. "

"Okay. He was tall, close to six feet. And heavy. Not fat … but soft around the middle. His hair was blondish-red, and like I said, it was thinning on top—he kind of combed it forward. Let me see … His eyes slanted down at the corners. Bad dresser. Oh, and his complexion was pale and he had freckles."

"That's very good," Daugherty complimented her. "That helps. Have you seen him again?"

She shook her head. "He said he would be back in two days, but he never called. I didn't really care. A lot of guys will say they're going to call you. It's just something to say, and I wasn't interested in him anyway."