Lying in Wait Ann Rule's Crime Files Vol.17 Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING SERIES

  ANN RULE’S CRIME FILES

  Seventeen must-read collections of “fascinating, unsettling” (Booklist) true crime accounts!

  “Chilling cases. . . . A frightening, fascinating rogue’s gallery of mercenary murderers.”

  —Mystery Guild

  “The prolific and talented Rule brings to life a rich case.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Gripping. . . . Fans of true crime know they can rely on Ann Rule to deliver the dead-level best.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “Rule leaves no stone unturned as she unravels the cases from start to finish.”

  —Night Owl Reviews

  “Among the very small group of top-notch true-crime writers, Rule just may be the best of the bunch.”

  —Booklist

  “Rule’s ability to depict both criminals and victims as believable human beings is perfectly embodied in this sad, fascinating account.”

  —Library Journal

  DON’T MISS THESE CELEBRATED NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERS—

  “AFFECTING, TENSE, AND SMART TRUE CRIME” (Washington Post Book World)

  FROM ANN RULE!

  PRACTICE TO DECEIVE

  “Ann Rule spends almost as much time on every case she writes about as the detectives who solve them. Sharp ears in the courtroom coupled with her dogged in-depth research make for a highly intriguing true-life mystery. Rule’s hard work pays off in her newest, gritty account.”

  —Bookreporter

  “You’ll note that evil comes in all packages, even attractive ones.”

  —Journal Gazette & Times-Courier

  “With her trademark aplomb, Ann Rule unravels the fascinating story of a murder, a small town, and a number of potential killers.”

  —Book Depository

  IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT

  “Make yourself comfortable—at the edge of your seat! That’s where you’ll be throughout this chilling true story of infidelity, lies, and murder.”

  —Mystery Guild

  “An interesting case, a real-life whodunnit. . . . addictive.”

  —True Crime Book Reviews

  TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE

  “The quintessential true-crime story. . . . Mesmerizing. . . . Prepare yourself for a few late nights of reading.”

  —Bookreporter

  GREEN RIVER, RUNNING RED

  “[Rule] conveys the emotional truth of the Green River case.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Riveting. . . . Infused with a personally felt sense of urgency.”

  —People

  Ann Rule worked the all-night shift at a suicide hotline with a handsome, whip-smart psychology major who became her close friend. Soon the world would know him: Ted Bundy, one of the most savage serial killers of our time. . . .

  THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

  Now in an updated edition!

  “Shattering . . . written with compassion but also with professional objectivity.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Overwhelming!”

  —Houston Post

  “Ann Rule has an extraordinary angle [on] the most fascinating killer in modern American history. . . . As dramatic and chilling as a bedroom window shattering at midnight.”

  —The New York Times

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  For those who trusted too much—and for those who still do

  Beware

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Baby Seller

  Secrets of the Amorous Pizza Man

  A Road Trip to Murder

  Murderous Epitaph for the Beautiful Runaway

  Tracks of a Serial Rapist

  “Take a Lifer Home to Dinner . . . with Murder for Dessert!”

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About Ann Rule

  Introduction

  Readers often ask me if I get depressed writing about murder. Sometimes I do, of course. Man’s inhumanity to man baffles me, and I wonder why murderers haven’t chosen another path. Why on earth would anyone in an unhappy marriage pick murder instead of divorce? This bothers me particularly when there are children involved.

  There may have been large insurance policies on the deceased. There may have been overwhelming rage. Or illicit lovers spurring on the actual killer. There are probably dozens of motives for murder, yet none of them seem reasonable to the minds of “ordinary” people.

  So many of the victims in this book were kind people who cared about others, lived quiet lives with happy families, trusted in their God, and really did nothing at all to harm anyone.

  There are three long vignettes and several shorter cases. And yes, writing them has made me depressed from time to time. The saving grace of what I do is that I’ve heard from many people who say that reading my books has, quite literally, saved their lives, that the stories of many innocent victims have been cautionary tales that kept them from trusting those who were too charming, too attractive, and told too many bizarre stories about their backgrounds to be believed. Others wrote that they realized someone they were about to marry had a veneer of good over the evil that lay just beneath.

  Sometimes it’s a simple matter of my warnings against hitchhiking, picking up hitchhikers, or meeting people on the Internet. Readers have told me that they recognized a dangerous sociopath for what he (or she) was, after reading my stories about charismatic killers with dark sides.

  If my books can save just one life, it’s all worth it.

  The first case in Lying in Wait is “The Baby Seller.” Initially, when a relative of a woman who allegedly killed new mothers called me, I was skeptical. The story she told me sounded too weird to be true, but it was true, and far more complex than I could have imagined. The deeper I dug into it, the more startling facts I excavated.

  The next long story—“Secrets of the Amorous Pizza Man”—is a case that made me cry. Kathie Hill loved and trusted her husband and believed he felt the same way. Kathie, a brilliant meteorologist, found love “down on the ice” at the South Pole. Her life was ended by someone who planned her death with calculated cruelty.

  “A Road Trip to Murder” tells the story of a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, white supremacists who cut a bloody path from Oregon to Washington and then to Northern California. Heroes, too, play a part in these stories. In a strange coincidence, one of these heroes was once my neighbor. Terry Uhrich, the highway patrol officer who caught the killers in “A Road Trip to Murder,” lived across the street from me when he was a boy. My daughter, Leslie, was his babysitter.

  “Murderous Epitaph for the Beautiful Runaway” is the story of a free-spirited and trusting teen who did not recognize evil until it was too late.

  During four bleak months in the winter of 1975, Seattle women were terrorized by an attacker so full of rage that detectives feared his next victim would die. “Tracks of a Serial Rapist” covers those dark days that finally ended when one victim refused to give in.

  In “Take a Lifer Home to Dinner . . . with Murder for Dessert!” a pint-sized escape artist cannot be contained by law enforcement. Yet it is not his own cunning that brings disaster, but an overly optimistic government-sanctioned program.

  THE BABY SELLER

  When Dana
Rose DiLillo* first contacted me in the spring of 2013, I almost put her in my “220” file—my file labeled with the term Washington State law officers use for someone who is mentally unstable. Her story was that far-fetched. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that someone has called or written me about a bizarre murder they have witnessed. Most of the time when I follow up on these cases, I find that they never really happened.

  Those who tell me stories that would chill the blood aren’t lying to me; their delusions are so entrenched that they actually believe they are true. Taken to ground level, some of my “informants” admit that the murder was something they had seen in a dream, or that they had not actually seen it themselves, but were relaying something that a psychic had told them about.

  It usually doesn’t take me long to determine that there had been no unsolved cases in the locales they named. Their time sequences didn’t fit and, sometimes, the “victim” was still alive and well, unaware of their alleged death.

  In the corner of my office is a file stuffed with these “220” reports. I try to treat the people who send them with respect and kindness, and I feel sad for them; it must be a certain kind of hell to be haunted by unsolved homicides that never occurred.

  I like to think that I’ve learned to spot people who are gullible, mistaken, obsessed, or just plain psychotic. I did, after all, write my first true crime article in 1969. Because I have covered thousands of criminal cases, I’ve had a front-row seat to the machinations of human behavior.

  Generally, I have been able to winnow out the deluded and the liars early on.

  But not always.

  I could not make up my mind about Dana Rose. Had she really witnessed a murder—a murder committed by her mother?

  We had spoken on the phone several times before Dana Rose told me that she had been committed to mental hospitals from time to time, and I wondered if my first impression of her had been right.

  Dana Rose’s claims were hard to believe, yet something told me I needed to take a closer look. And when I did, I was astonished to find her story turned out to be truth stranger than fiction.

  * * *

  Athens, Alabama, is one of the state’s oldest incorporated towns. Founded in 1818, it is the county seat of Limestone County. It sits fifteen miles south of Tennessee, and its historic downtown is home to Athens State University—an institution of higher learning with roots that wend back nearly two centuries.

  The crime rate in Athens is lower than the average for Alabama, and visitors would never guess the charming old town with its wide, clean streets and easygoing residents was the site of an afternoon of violence that cut deep and left an ugly scar that some say has never truly healed.

  The story of the nightmare that struck Athens is reduced to a few paragraphs and engraved upon a historic marker that sits smack in the middle of the lawn of Limestone County’s brick courthouse. It begins, “Athens Sacked and Plundered,” and briefly describes that dark May 2 in 1862 when Colonel John Basil Turchin turned loose his brigade of Union soldiers.

  The sign does not mention the fact that the Russian-born Turchin told his men that he would shut his eyes for two hours so that they could plunder and rape to their hearts’ content.

  Terrified citizens cowered in fear as the men ripped through the town, stealing anything of value that they could carry and destroying what they could not. Females were shoved and kicked and fondled, and when their husbands and fathers stepped forward to protect them, they were hauled off and arrested. The soldiers laughed at the hysterical girls and women, unmoved by their tears as they raped them.

  When the shameful pillage was over, and authorities prepared to court-martial Colonel Turchin for encouraging the war crimes, his wife appealed to President Abraham Lincoln for help. Lincoln not only pardoned Turchin, he promoted him to brigadier general.

  A pregnant woman was among the victims that spring day in Athens when evil came to town. The poor woman was so terrorized by the soldiers that she went into early labor. Both mother and baby died.

  Over a century later, in January 1980, another young Athens mother would be subjected to that same, paralyzing terror. But this time, it wasn’t an army of mad-dog soldiers that threatened to take away all that was dear, but a smiling woman who appeared so ordinary that anyone who passed her on the street would likely forget her immediately—if they noticed her at all.

  She certainly didn’t appear evil, or in any way threatening. If anything, the visitor at the door was simply an annoying interruption to Geneva Clemons, who had just settled down to watch her favorite TV show, her small daughter and infant son beside her.

  But monsters come in all shapes and sizes, and the evil inside the frumpy, grinning woman was every bit as damaging as the cruelty of all of Turchin’s soldiers combined.

  * * *

  Geneva Clemons was happy that day as she cuddled her infant son. It was January 21, 1980, and five-year-old Tracy gazed proudly at her little brother. James was just sixteen days old. Tracy had waited a long time to become a sister, and she was so excited about finally having a sibling that she had wasted no time in donating her sippy cups to the wiggling infant. She was, after all, the big sister now, and she could drink out of a grown-up cup.

  The baby stared at her so intently, it was as if he knew what she was thinking. She held out her finger and smiled as James grasped it in his tiny fist.

  Though she had longed for a little sister or brother, Tracy had never been without a playmate. Her mother was her best friend and spent her days playing with her firstborn.

  “She was a big kid at heart,” Tracy remembers.

  Sometimes Tracy’s mother pushed her on the swing set in their big backyard, and sometimes they played hide-and-seek.

  Geneva was always up for any game Tracy wanted to play, and Tracy remembers how she got down in the dirt with her to make mud pies. It didn’t matter if they made a mess. Mother and daughter got lost in the moment, faces streaked with dirt as they giggled and “baked” their mud pies and then pretended to eat them.

  Geneva’s laugh was joyful, and all these years later, Tracy can still close her eyes and hear her mother’s laughter.

  Geneva’s kind hazel eyes were flecked with brown, and her silky black hair fell to her waist. She was striking, her Cherokee heritage obvious in her high cheekbones. Geneva’s parents, Martha Louise Barnes, born in July 1925, and Henry Alvin Burgett, born in October 1918, both had Cherokee blood, and Geneva was three-quarters Cherokee.

  Geneva was born on January 6, 1953, somewhere in the middle of a big, noisy brood of ten kids—four boys and six girls. The brothers and sisters all got along well and remained close over the years. They grew up in Tanner, Alabama, the family’s Limestone County roots going back at least three generations.

  Geneva Burgett met Larry Wayne Clemons when she was twenty. Larry, three years older than Geneva, was love struck from the moment he first saw her. She lived across the street from a friend’s house in Tanner. At Larry’s urging, the friend arranged for Geneva and Larry to double date with him and his girlfriend.

  It wasn’t long until Geneva and Larry were talking about a life together. Larry was in the service, and the plan was for him to support them while she stayed home with any children they might have.

  The parents were thrilled when their first child, Tracy, was born in December 1974. A fiercely protective mother, Geneva worried when her infant daughter came down with colic.

  Geneva sat in the rocking chair for hours, cradling her baby close and rocking so hard that the chair thudded against the wall. “My dad said she rocked me so much that she broke a few rocking chairs,” says Tracy.

  The Clemons family was happy. They didn’t have a lot of money and couldn’t afford to buy a house, but they had found a cozy place in the low-rent district of Athens. It was right next door to Larry’s aunt and uncle, so family was always close by.

  One sad thing had happened just a couple of weeks earlier, when Geneva was in the hosp
ital giving birth to James. Her beloved pug, Poochie, was struck by a truck. Poochie was a ferocious guard dog. The Clemonses had had her since she was a puppy, and she was so protective of her family’s turf that she chased a couple of Larry’s aunts from the house when they stopped by to feed her.

  “They were afraid of her,” says Tracy. “She loved us, but she scared everyone else. If Poochie had been alive, no one would have bothered us.”

  Tracy missed Poochie, but she was excited to have a new little brother. The baby was with them as Tracy and her mother got ready for their favorite ritual. Every night they would snuggle on the couch and watch Little House on the Prairie.

  Geneva favored Sun Drop soda, and right before Little House started, she would open a can and get a big bag of Funyuns to snack on. Geneva had just opened her soda, and they were getting ready to watch their show, when they heard someone at the door.

  It was that lady from the contest again. Geneva had met her earlier that day at the supermarket. Geneva was grocery shopping, with baby James in her arms, when the magazine photographer—who said her name was Jackie—first approached her to suggest she enter James in a “beautiful baby contest.” If James won, and his photo was chosen for an ad, then Geneva would get five hundred dollars.

  The Clemons family was struggling financially and could really use the money. Geneva gave Jackie her address, then continued with her shopping.

  Now, this was the third time that day that the lady photographer had approached Geneva. The new mother was a little put off by the woman’s insistence. When she had come by earlier, she gushed about how perfect James was. She was so anxious to take the baby’s photo for the contest.

  Kathy and Wayne McMeans, Geneva’s sister and brother-in-law, happened to be there earlier when the photographer popped in. Apparently not wanting to intrude while Geneva had company, she left. Now she was back. The sun had set, and dusk had melted into night, but the woman was insistent that Geneva and the children go with her so that she could photograph the baby.