A Rage to Kill: And Other True Cases Read online

  CRITICS PRAISE ANN RULE’S

  NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERS

  THE END OF THE DREAM

  AND OTHER TRUE CASES

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 5

  “In the hands of a master true crime writer like Ann Rule, their stories take on a poignancy that goes far beyond mere cops-’n’-robbers stuff. Without resorting to psychobabble, Rule tells us—through exhaustively detailed interviews with lovers, friends, and families—what led three such talented men to such tragic ends.”

  —Seattle Times-Post Intelligencer

  “Ann Rule’s true-life crime stories read better than most fiction murder plots.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  BITTER HARVEST

  “True crime queen Rule continues her reign at the top of the genre with another tension-filled, page-turning chronology and analysis of a psychopath in action. . . . It is Rule’s expert attention to detail that makes this Medea-incarnate story so compelling. . . . Through exhaustive research, Rule slowly reveals the widening chinks in Green’s psychic armor as she fails in her first marriage, then in various attempts to become a practicing physician, and then in her emotionless marriage with her second husband. By the time readers reach the end of Rule’s gripping saga of sin and murder most foul, they will understand at least partly the roots of Green’s madness.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  The sensational #1 bestseller!

  DEAD BY SUNSET

  “A cast of characters like this would provide fascinating material for any capable reporter. . . . Ann Rule is more than capable. The author . . . admirably recounts this labyrinthine tale . . . [and] brings to her work the passion, the prodigious research and the narrative skill necessary to create suspense.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  IN THE NAME OF LOVE

  AND OTHER TRUE CASES

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 4

  “Arresting, that’s what it is. . . . Ann Rule keeps finding true crime stories that somehow fell through the national press cracks, and retelling them in red-hot-off-the-police-blotter style.”

  —New York Daily News

  A FEVER IN THE HEART

  AND OTHER TRUE CASES

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 3

  “Like a fine police reporter, she digs and digs and recounts the stories behind the stories of obsession, betrayal and murder. In this field, Rule rules.”

  —New York Daily News

  YOU BELONG TO ME

  AND OTHER TRUE CASES

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 2

  “Ann Rule . . . dissects the dark heart of a killer with surgical precision. Nobody does it better.”

  —Edna Buchanan, Miami Herald

  A ROSE FOR HER GRAVE

  AND OTHER TRUE CASES

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 1

  “Ann Rule . . . has a great knack for horrific detail.”

  —New York Daily News

  Ann Rule’s #1 New York Times

  bestselling novel

  POSSESSION

  “A gripping, powerful and terrifying novel. . . . The author spares the beholder nothing at all.”

  —James Dickey

  “Possession kept me writhing in its grip from beginning to end.”

  —John Saul

  EVERYTHING SHE EVER WANTED

  “Yet another true crime triumph for Ann Rule....A magnificently constructed book.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Ms. Rule . . . now turns her devastatingly accurate insight to the twisted mind of a modern-day Southern belle. A measure of how well she succeeds is the feeling that came over me after reading just a few paragraphs about Pat Allanson. I wanted to reach into the book and strangle her.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  IF YOU REALLY LOVED ME

  “Meticulous reporting ...the characters are fascinating.”

  —People

  Books by Ann Rule

  Bitter Harvest

  Dead by Sunset

  Everything She Ever Wanted

  If You Really Loved Me

  The Stranger Beside Me

  Possession

  Small Sacrifices

  A Rage to Kill and Other True Cases

  Ann Rule���s Crime Files: Vol. 6

  The End of the Dream and Other True Cases

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 5

  In the Name of Love and Other True Cases

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 4

  A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 3

  You Belong to Me and Other True Cases

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 2

  A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases

  Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Vol. 1

  The names of some individuals in this book have been changed. Such names are indicated by an asterisk (*) the first time each appears in the narrative.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  A Pocket Star Book published by

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com.

  Copyright © 1999 by Ann Rule

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-10: 0-7434-2404-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-2404-2

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Dedication

  To my friends, a thousand homicide detectives from at least a hundred different departments around America. For almost thirty years, I have watched them work under circumstances that most people could never imagine. When the rest of us are enjoying holidays, spending time with our families and sleeping, they are often out in the field, slogging through rain, mud, snow, and sometimes blood. They are coping with the devastation that violence can do to the human body. They come to know and care for the victims they never met in life, and they strive to find who took their lives away even if it means working twenty-four to thirty-six hours without sleep. They are skilled, dedicated, dogged, tough, perceptive, tender, inquisitive, compassionate, hard-nosed, meticulous, and sometimes even clairvoyant. We all hope we will never need their services, but if we should they will do their best to deliver justice. Yes, the homicide guys are sometimes full of black humor—but I have also seen most of them cry.

  And, finally, a salute to Detective Sergeant Don Cameron, thirty years with the Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Unit, on his retirement. A betterhomicide detective never served. And to Chuck Wright, who also retires in 1999 after three decades with the Washington State Department of Corrections. Chuck has helped rehabilitate the thousands of people who have been assigned to his caseload, and he has also worked tirelessly for victims’ rights.

  Acknowledgments

  With ten different cases, you can imagine how many different police departments and prosecutors’ offices I interviewed and how many people have helped me put this anthology of case files together. I want to thank the following detectives: Steve O’Leary, John Nordlund, Gene Ramirez, Ed Striedinger, Steve Kilburg, Rob Blanco, Don Redmond, Paul Barclift, Dwight Caron, K. C. Jones, Dick Nelson, Richard Schoener, Keith May, Ted Forrester, Ted Fonis, Dick Sanford, Don Cameron, Dick Reed, Benny DePalmo, Duane Homan, Billy Baughman, Roy Moran, Ivan Beeson, Wayne Dorman, Jerry Yates, Bill Karban, John Boren, George Helland, Bob Fox, Len Randall, Rolf Grunden, and Ken Schnorr.


  Many of these men have retired; some have died. They all solved seemingly impossible cases.

  I also thank journalists Carol Ostrom, Eric Lacitis, and Eric Sorensen. And my friends, researchers, and first readers: Gerry Brittingham Hay, Barbara Easton, Donna Anders, Mike Rule, and Leslie Rule Wagner.

  To my work crew, who are finally planting flowers and building decks where there was once only mud: Don White, Dave Bailey, and Larry Ellington.

  As always, I am grateful for my agents, Joan and Joe Foley, and my editors at Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster, Emily Heckman, Fred Hills, and Burton Beals (who continue to remind me ever so tactfully that I am not yet the only writer in the world who never makes a mistake).

  And I thank my readers. First, I thank you for buying and reading my books. Second, I bless you for your letters. They make me smile, make me think, and give me new subjects for future books. You can reach me on the Internet at www.annrules.com (my Web page) and at P.O. Box 98846, Seattle, Washington 98198. Sometimes I can’t answer my mail personally—but I know you would rather have a new book to read than a letter. I do answer all truly urgent mail. If you would like a copy of my sporadic—but free—newsletter, send me your address at one of the above locations.

  Contents

  Foreword

  A Bus to Nowhere

  The Killer Who Planted His Own Clues

  Born to Kill?

  As Close as a Brother

  Profile of a Spree Killer

  The Lost Lady

  To an Athlete Dying Young

  Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town

  That Was No Lady

  The Killer Who Talked Too Much

  Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.

  —SHAKESPEARE

  Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.

  —JOHN WEBSTER

  Murder will out.

  —CERVANTES

  Foreword

  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.

  A Bus to Nowhere

  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 voicehad 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 predict
able 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.

  The 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.