No Regrets (28 page)

“I found the rope next to a bush and put it around her neck. I dragged her down the stairwell. She was crying. I
didn’t want to hurt her or anything—I just wanted to talk to her.”

Ayala said that the victim had offered to perform fellatio, but that he’d stopped her because he didn’t want it then. “We were in the basement. It was dark in there. I took the rope off. I hit her. She was on the ground. I hit her with my hand open. I didn’t know if I should let her go or not. I picked up a stick from the floor and I hit her about eight times. I could hear her kind of foaming from the mouth. I put my ear on her chest. I could hear her breathing. I closed the doors and took off.”

Ayala admitted he’d been in the Exotica the next day when Lamphere and Nordlund came looking for him, but he said the girls covered for him, giving him a chance to escape. “After you left, I closed the place and split.”

Ayala had hopped a bus for Galveston and gotten off in Houston. It was quite possible that he thought he’d killed Arden Lee when he left her in the basement of the deserted house. If she had not managed to crawl out to the street and finally summon help, she probably would have died alone with the rats and the spiders. As it was, she barely survived. Even as she seemed to be getting better, she developed pneumonia; somehow she fought that off, too.

She did recover, somewhat scarred, and with a niggling fear of the dark that she will probably always have.

George Allen Ayala pleaded guilty to an amended charge of assault and received a forty-year sentence.

One of the most helpful informants in the Arden Lee case did not fare as well. Roger Pomarleau, the owner-manager of the Exotica, was always on the lookout for fresh young
talent to feature in the center window. He recruited a new employee in mid-September—only two months after George Ayala was arrested. Cheri Schak was a tiny blonde, only nineteen, and she was thrilled when she listened to the usual spiel that she would make one hundred dollars a night and tips for gyrating in the window of the Exotica and giving dance “programs” in the back rooms.

Since Pomarleau invariably ended up collecting a hefty percentage of “his” girls’ earnings, he was pleased with Cheri, who was more attractive than most applicants. He was so pleased with her that he invited her to his spacious, new condominium. He drove her there in his new gold Cadillac. His hospitality was so warm that Cheri was invited to share Pomarleau’s king-size bed.

It was an odd invitation since Pomarleau was still married to his sixteen-year-old wife. He assured Cheri that it wasn’t for any sexual reason. But, even so, he refused to drive her to her own apartment and she had no way to get home. Pomarleau slept in the middle of the bed—with Cheri on one side and his wife on the other.

Roger always had an excuse why Cheri should stay in his condo, and in no time at all Cheri realized that she was trapped. He told her that if she wanted to keep her job, she would have to live with him and his wife. Cheri’s enthusiasm for the scam run at the Exotica began to fade after a week or so. She didn’t want the job any longer, and she didn’t want to live with the Pomarleaus. There was no big money for her—Roger took it all. She had a boyfriend whom she never got to see. Roger kept filling her head with promises, but she didn’t feel it was necessary to be so devoted to her new career that she had to spend twenty-four hours a day either dancing or living in Roger’s condominium.

Cheri Schak was a captive. Roger wouldn’t let her leave. And she couldn’t get away from him at work, or sneak out of his condo. Soon, he began to knock her around, and then he choked her.

“I have ‘committed’ you to other people,” he told her obscurely. “If you leave, it might mean my life.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant, but then he spelled it out: She would have to sleep with strangers whenever Roger ordered her to.

Later, vice detectives differed somewhat in their opinion of Cheri’s situation—when they had encountered her in the Exotica, she seemed cheerful enough as she danced in the window in a nearly transparent blouse. Roger hadn’t been on the premises, or so it appeared. If that was true, she could have left whenever she wanted to. But then Roger Pomarleau often hid so that he could observe what was going on. Cheri never knew where he was, but she often felt as if she was being watched.

Cheri hated the ménage à trois that Roger demanded with her and his wife. Sometime during the night of September 28, she made her move. Cheri rose from the bed she shared with Mr. and Mrs. Pomarleau and went to the kitchen. There, she found a butcher knife, and walked back to the dimly lit bedroom. According to Cheri, an argument followed.

When the “argument” was over, Roger Pomarleau lay naked on his back on the plush carpet of his bedroom. He was dead, covered with blood from sixteen stab wounds. Two of them had punctured his heart. His young wife ran screaming to the neighbors for help. She also had sixteen stab wounds, but they were not to vital organs, and she eventually recovered.

Cheri Schak suffered cuts to her hands and legs, but
was able to flag down a passing truck driver. She was about to leave the scene when a neighbor pulled her out of the truck cab and held her for police.

Charged with second-degree murder and first-degree assault, Cheri’s story in court was bolstered by the testimony of a rather unlikely witness: the first Mrs. Pomarleau, who said that Roger had beaten her two or three times a week when she lived with him before their marriage. “He slapped me regularly when I lived with him in 1976,” she said. She testified that he had also abused her sexually and burned her with a curling iron.

“I reported him to the police,” she told the jury. “And they charged him with rape and extortion, but Roger turned on the charm and promised he would go straight if I would marry him. I married him in Idaho that July, and as soon as I did, he forced me back to work as a dancer. I signed an affidavit saying that my reports to the police were false and that he never forced me to give him money, that all the sex was voluntary, and that he never burned me with the curling iron.”

The ex-Mrs. Pomarleau testified that her first complaint to police had been true all along; she had suffered painful and humiliating attacks at her husband’s hands. Once he had persuaded her to drop her charges against him, she realized she had been duped into signing the affidavit just so that he could avoid prosecution.

Roger Pomarleau’s sudden demise left a big hole in the operation of the Exotica, but the crew pulled themselves together and the girls in the window remained a regular sight along Pike Street for a while.

Even though homicide detectives wondered whether it was really necessary for Cheri Schak to stab a man sixteen times in self-defense, and to stab his teenage wife the
same number of times during the escape, her jury looked at tiny Cheri Schak and found her innocent of the charges: innocent by reason of self-defense.

With that trial over, the last sidelight on the story of Ayala’s beating of Arden Lee was over. The Exotica “dance school” lasted a few years, and then quietly shut down.

There is no shortage of gullible teenagers who fall under the spell of pimps, but as high-priced condo buildings proliferated in the downtown sections of the Emerald City, Pike Street gradually ceased to be the hot spot for prostitution in Seattle. It didn’t go away, however. It never goes away. In the Seattle area, sex for money moved to Aurora Avenue North and south to the highway that runs by the Seattle-Tacoma Airport—where both became a prime hunting ground for the perversely sadistic murderer known in infamy as the Green River Killer.

And with that, a whole new chapter of horror began.

Not all murders are plotted and designed in a sociopath’s mind. Some killers could never have imagined that they were capable of killing another human being. And yet their victims are just as dead as those bodies left behind in the wake of a serial killer. I like to think that the vast majority of people would kill only only in self-defense. Almost any mother—animal or human—will defend her young unto death. Self-defense and the horror of war can change the conscience and sensibilities of us all.

There are other “triggers” that can evoke blind rage, and sometimes we are unaware of what they are, those secret buttons deep inside that can be pushed without warning. Fear and frustration and jealousy may be deadly triggers. Flashbacks of episodes buried in the psyche can play across the unconscious mind. A lot of murder defendants blame “blackouts,” insisting that they cannot recall the moment they snapped, and are, therefore, not responsible for what they have done. In most cases, I don’t buy that and neither do the vast majority of juries.

In the following case, a number of unfortunate circumstances had to have occurred in a deadly chain to set the scene for murder. Without them, it’s unlikely the killer
would ever have erupted into a homicidal rage. But, with the dark arrangement of circumstance, heedlessness, and the deserted crime scene, the victim’s sudden death seems absolutely predestined. Indeed, the victim herself contributed to the tumbling down of safeguards that would have saved her life.

She was headstrong, and falsely confident in her own ability to make decisions. No matter how many people loved her and wanted to help her, she chose to walk away from their concern and live her own life exactly as she wanted to.

It was to be the death of her.

It is a lovely
patch of woods, where the warmth of bright sunlight just above its treetops grows cooler as the protective branches of Douglas firs in the winter and peach trees in the spring and summer close in. It isn’t that far from a well-populated area, but sound is hushed here, absorbed by a carpet of native vegetation: salal, Oregon grape, kinnikinnik, and feathery sword ferns. Woods like this are one of the inducements for home buyers to accept long commutes into Seattle, crossing over one of the two floating bridges to leave the Emerald City and move to the burgeoning suburb of Bellevue, Washington. The houses that abut these woods are mostly ramblers, huddled close to the ground, landscaped with rhododendrons and dogwoods. They are not plush, but they have grown tremendously in value over the years as suburbs to the east of Lake Washington creep steadily up into the very foothills of Snoqualmie Pass. Families who live there often walk along the meandering paths among the trees. They walk their pets there and ride horses along bridle trails, and young lovers hold hands, enjoying the hushed ambience and the feeling of privacy.

It is a peaceful sanctuary without any sense of foreboding. It is no place for violent death.

It was Friday, December 7, the anniversary of the 1941
attack on Pearl Harbor, but the young people who entered the dark woods didn’t remember the event that sparked the United States to enter World War II; they hadn’t even been born then. They strolled along the path shortly after noon. The girl was seventeen, her friend twenty-two. They broke off some bright red holly berry sprigs, talked about their Christmas plans, and wondered when the snowpack in Snoqualmie Pass would be deep enough for them to plan a ski trip.

As they moved deeper into the woods, the trees were so thick that it was like being in a cave made of branches. Suddenly, the young woman gasped. A skull lay directly in front of them, resting on the surface on sodden, brown leaves. It was far too big to have come from any small woods creature; it was a human skull.

Forgetting their walk, the couple ran to a nearby house and called the Bellevue Police Department. The first officer on the scene was Patrolman Bob Littlejohn. It was an irony in itself that Littlejohn should be the first lawman on the scene. Looking at the skull, he determined that it was, indeed, that of a human being. Yet he could have no way of knowing at the time that he was viewing the remains of someone he knew.

Littlejohn was joined by Patrol Lieutenant Paul Olson. As they secured the scene and notified detectives at their downtown Bellevue offices, the two officers noted that the woods and surrounding trees were part of a long-forgotten peach orchard—all that remained from the days when the development known as “Sherwood Forest” was once farmland.

Now it had become not only a favorite spot for rustic walks but also a popular dirt path for motorcyclists. Little-john walked carefully in an ever-widening circle radiating
out from the skull. Forty feet away, he stopped and stared down at the ground.

He gazed at what first appeared to be only an abandoned Christmas tree. But as he focused his eyes, it resembled one of those drawings that change depending on how the viewer sees them: The woman’s face in the mirror becomes a death’s head, or black letters shift and the viewer sees that the white spaces say something different. Little-john suddenly became aware that this Christmas tree, its branches as bare of needles as the skull itself was denuded of flesh, covered something beneath it: bones that were the widespread legs of a skeleton. The body lay on its back, nude, and decomposition was far advanced. It had to have been here for months.

Within minutes, eight detectives and Bellevue Police Chief Don Van Blaricom arrived. Detective Roy Gleason would take over principal responsibility for the homicide probe. And detectives Gary Trent, Marvin Skeen, Jim Constantine, Mike Lambo, John Cooper, Chuck Webb, and Mike Cate would be assigned to assist in the investigation of what surely was a homicide.

As the investigators looked at the ravaged body— which from the way its hair was cut and the ragged clothes nearby was probably the remains of a female—they knew they would have to call on all their experience and expertise. Going in, this case had all the signs of a loser. The first forty-eight hours after a murder are the prime-time segment when a murder suspect will emerge, and after that the chances of finding him diminish with each passing day. The killer had a very long head start on them. They had no idea who she was, this sad victim thrown away in the woods.

“I don’t think we’re even going to get an identification
—let alone apprehend her killer,” Van Blaricom commented.