Without Pity Page 10

  The letter made a horrible kind of sense, despite its rambling tone, and the fact that some sections were missing. It had obviously been intended for Lori to read, even though there was no salutation on the first page. No one will ever know if Lori Rennsler read the letter, but the chance is that she did not. Had she read this careening jumble of thoughts, she might have been forewarned of the depth of her husband’s mental illness. More likely, Kip Rennsler wrote the letter and then tore it into bits, believing that he could explain his thoughts to her verbally.

  The letter was handprinted and many words and phrases were underlined heavily for emphasis.

  It began:

  Now, you will realize why I am doing all this. What I have to do is so simple it’s unbelievable. It is something that will never hurt anyone—even you or Stevie or Me. However, it’s so shocking that even when I tell you, you won’t believe it. PLEASE READ THIS ALOUD! That means that although you and I can live out our entire lives VERY HAPPY—NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT—the rest of the world will never get a chance. Everyone that ever lived in the past and everyone that will ever live in the future.

  You are not going to believe what I have to go through. It’s so simple yet so tough. Please put Stevie to bed—no matter what he says.

  There was a section missing, and then it went on:

  But that kills the whole deal. You made the decision. Now I have to stick to it. I’m about to tell you what it is. But you must first provide me two things out loud and on paper and really mean them. They are very simple but so weird that you will probably wonder if I’m still around this world.

  Remember. I have to do this the rest of my life. You must believe me immediately. No hesitation. Are you ready? I have to remain silent the rest of my life.

  And here the note trailed off into a stream of consciousness as Kip Rennsler struggled to make his mind do his bidding:

  I forgot one of the things. I can’t go ahead without that one, even though I remember the other one. However, I can’t tell you what the thing I have to do is until I find that simple thing.

  You still have the hardest part because I know all this to be absolutely true, but you have only my word for it. I will tell you something. You and I and Stevie were meant to do this out of all the people past, present and future. Why were we picked? Because God thought we were the very best out of all people, past—present—future. I am, and if he didn’t know this, he would never have picked me for this final or final things.

  “IT IS UNBELIEVABLE TO ME TOO!!!”

  An explanation for the tragedy lay on the table in front of them, scattered thoughts on scattered notes. Kip Rennsler had completely lost touch with reality, and he believed that sacrificing himself and his family would save everyone in the world. On the last day of his family’s lives, he had undoubtedly been completely delusional, believing that he was making a noble sacrifice.

  Perhaps the preposterous things he mentioned in the torn note became the verbal questions he asked his wife on the night of January 2. Expected to answer instantly, the horrified woman must have faltered in her shock. She may have asked her husband to face reality. Such hesitation would have spurred the final maniacal attacks.

  Lori and Stevie probably died first, and Kip Rennsler may have been alive for hours afterward. Someone made the eight phone calls to Solveig Hanson, long after midnight. Someone carried Stevie’s body into the master bedroom so he could be with his mother.

  One psychiatrist felt that the torn note was an indirect suicide note. Perhaps. Another diagnosed Rennsler as being a paranoid schizophrenic. Not likely. Thirty years ago, the term schizophrenia was a catchall phrase to diagnose all manner of aberrant behavior. It is more likely that Kip Rennsler was a manic-depressive whose disease had moved into a psychotic phase.

  His “highs,” or the mania that gripped him, had soared with his vision of owning a hunting and fishing lodge, and he believed he would be very rich and fulfilled. But the higher the highs, the lower the lows when his disease hit the depressive cycle. He had become devastated by his inability to bring his purchase of the Quinault property to fruition, but he bounced higher again. Only this time, the mania made no sense.

  It was perfectly clear to Kip Rennsler that he was meant to be the salvation of the world. He could not understand why Solveig Hanson wouldn’t sit still and listen to his amazing theories and visions. And he must have seen the shock and disbelief in his wife’s eyes as he pointed out how easy the solution to all the world’s problems was.

  No one wants to believe that someone they care about is slipping into mental illness. It is easier to find other explanations and blame aberrance on fatigue or stress or anything that isn’t “crazy.” But “crazy” is nothing to be ashamed of, and there are treatments that can help the mind come back to reality—just as the body can be healed.

  Every year, there are bleak headlines about fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, and even grown children who, for their own unfathomable and distorted reasons, destroy their entire families. Many of these tragedies can be prevented in the future if we pay attention to symptoms that are like tiny red flags just beyond the periphery of our vision.

  Campbell’s Revenge

  (from A Rose for Her Grave)

  “Don’t the stories you write frighten you?” It is another predictable question that I have heard two hundred times. Usually my answer is that I am rarely afraid, even though I have written about some of the most heinous criminals of the last three decades. But sometimes I must admit that a case cuts too close to the bone and triggers fears that all women have. We fear first for our children and only second for ourselves.

  Charles Rodman Campbell is a killer straight out of a nightmare. There should have been some way to keep him locked up forever. But he slipped through the loopholes of our justice system, and he was allowed freedom to stalk his unknowing victims. If ever there was a case that pitted innocence against pure evil, it is this one. He was out of his cage, and he was aware of every facet of her life, and yet his potential prey felt only a chill premonition of danger. He was a man consumed with rage and the need for revenge. Because of a neglectful bureaucracy, Campbell was allowed to take not one life—but three.

  Clearview, Washington, is little more than a crossroads, a tiny neighborhood in Snohomish County, twelve miles south of Everett, the county seat. Travelers headed for Stevens Pass, one of the northern routes over the Cascade Mountains, pass through Clearview and scarcely realize it.

  After it was over, Clearview residents cried, “This sort of thing doesn’t happen here—not in Clearview.” Why do people say that? Is everyone who lives outside a major metropolitan area convinced that he or she lives in a safe zone, under a kind of glass bubble where violent crimes never break through? Possibly—if the nightly news is any barometer. The cold fact is that tragedies and terror happen everywhere, no matter how sylvan the landscape, how slow the pace of life is, or how loving and protective the friends and neighbors. Psychopaths move among all of us, their motivation usually hidden behind a winning, clear-eyed smile and sincere promises. Many of them are handsome or beautiful, successful—at least for a time—and persuasive. And sometimes all of us trust too much, too soon.

  He was not like the smoothly handsome predators. He frightened most women just by the way he looked. He was so big—almost six feet five—and his bushy mustache and tangled Afro hair were reddish brown and seemed to bristle with electricity. But it was his eyes that caught them in a steady, mind-altering stare. They were like the entrance to a tunnel, the dark orbs fixed above an expanse of white beneath. Sampaku, the Japanese call them: “eyes of death.” Like Rasputin’s—the mad monk who mesmerized Russian nobility, another huge man who seemed impervious to his enemies—Charles Rodman Campbell’s eyes had a life of their own. They were often glazed and a little crazy. To the cons in the Monroe, Washington, Reformatory, he was a “bad-ass,” and to his guards, he was trouble. To his victims, he was the devil himself.

  Renae Ahle
rs Wicklund was a beautiful woman—dark-haired and big-eyed, with the high cheekbones and symmetrical features of a model. Her career was beauty—the art of bringing beauty to other women. She was kind, responsible, and gutsy. She must have been gutsy to endure what she did.

  After she graduated from high school, where she was a drum majorette for the band, in Jamestown, North Dakota, Renae Ahlers moved to California and then to Washington State. When Renae met her future husband, Jack Wicklund, she was working in a beauty parlor in Seattle. She was nineteen, and Jack was fourteen years older, divorced with two children from a previous marriage.

  In 1972 they fell in love and got married. Renae was expecting her first baby when they moved into their own home, a neat one-story rambler set far back in a stand of fir trees near rural Clearview. Lots were acre-sized, and being neighborly required some effort. Running across the street to have coffee meant almost a quarter-mile jog. But Renae and Barbara and Don Hendrickson grew close right away. Don was forty-three and Barbara forty-one. They had lived there for ten years, and they became almost substitute parents; their children—Peggy, Susan, and Dan—were family, too.

  Jack Wicklund spent much of his time on the road, and as Renae neared term in her pregnancy, she was more grateful than ever for the Hendricksons. When she went into labor, Jack was out of town, and it was Peggy Hendrickson who drove Renae to the hospital on that day in 1973 when Renae gave birth to a baby girl she named Shannah. Shannah looked just like her mother—she had the same huge brown eyes and chestnut hair. Renae adored her, and everywhere Renae went, her baby went along.

  It is impossible to know if Shannah remembered the first bad time. Probably not. She was only a year and a half old when it happened. It is likely, though, that the toddler sensed her mother’s frantic terror, that the feeling surfaced in bad dreams through the next eight years. The first time, Shannah lived only because her mother did what any mother would have done to save her child: Renae Wicklund gave in to a rapist to keep him from harming Shannah.

  December 11, 1974, was an unseasonably warm and sunny day for western Washington, where December usually means rain, rain, and more rain. Taking advantage of the weather, twenty-three-year-old Renae Wicklund decided to wash her windows. Knowing that darkness comes near four on a winter afternoon in the Northwest, Renae hurried to gather rags, vinegar, and water to accomplish the task. It was about 1:30 P.M. when she carried Shannah out and plopped her down on the grass in the sunshine, talking and singing to the baby while she worked on the windows.

  On that Wednesday afternoon, Renae Wicklund suddenly became aware of someone walking toward them along the long driveway that led through the trees to her house. She saw a tall figure out of the corner of her eye and turned to stare directly at a youngish man with a copper cast to his hair. When she did that, he turned and walked back out to the main road. She thought he had probably been lost and realized when he saw her that he had the wrong house.

  Leaving Shannah on the grass, she stepped into the house to grab some more rags. Moments later she returned and stood at the front door. The man was coming back, and this time he was moving fast.

  As she would testify later in court, “He was running. Toward the house. Up our driveway. I thought that he was after Shannah, so I ran outside to grab her. And before we could get inside the house, he was pushing the door.”

  Renae, dressed lightly because of the balmy December day, tried to hold the front door shut with her body, but the man was much too strong, and she had Shannah in her arms. When he burst through the door, she saw that he had a knife in his right hand. Keeping her voice determinedly calm, she asked if there was something she could do for him—thinking that if she pretended she hadn’t seen the knife, it still might not be too late.

  It was too late. “Yeah,” the intruder said. “Get your clothes off right now or I’ll kill the kid, and I mean it.”

  He was holding the knife terribly close to Shannah. Renae Wicklund didn’t have to decide what she would do. She put Shannah down at the stranger’s order and slowly removed her boots, her purple corduroy shorts, her black sweater and vest, then sat down in a chair, waiting for what she feared would come next.

  But he didn’t want intercourse; he wanted oral sex. While her baby daughter screamed, she complied until her attacker was satisfied.

  She prayed he wouldn’t hurt them and was relieved to hear him mutter “Thanks” and saw that he was leaving. Sickened, she ran to the bathroom and washed out her mouth. Then she flung her clothes back on, grabbed Shannah, and ran across the street to the Hendricksons’. Barbara Hendrickson took one look at Renae’s face and pulled her inside.

  “Renae said there was a man outside and she was afraid he was going to come back,” Barbara told deputies later. “And she looked out the window, and I promptly locked the door and got out my shotgun.”

  Both Renae and Shannah were very, very upset. The women barricaded themselves inside the Hendricksons’ home with a loaded shotgun and called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. A deputy arrived at 2:25 P.M.

  Renae Wicklund was able to give a good description of the man who had sexually assaulted her and threatened to kill her baby. She said he was very tall, with frizzy reddish hair, and that he’d worn blue jeans and a red and black plaid shirt. She thought he was in his early twenties. She had detected a faint odor of alcohol on his breath.

  With her description, Snohomish County detectives narrowed in on Charles Rodman Campbell, twenty, as a possible suspect. He was tremendously tall, and his hair stuck out around his head like a dandelion gone to seed. He had been in trouble since he was old enough to leave his own yard.

  Charles Campbell was born October 21, 1954, in Hawaii. His parents soon moved to Snohomish County. Campbell’s early problems were not his fault. He was always different— and in so many ways. Because of his Hawaiian descent, the kids at his school teased him. Perhaps more damaging, Charles Campbell’s sister was crippled, and some of the thoughtless kids not only tormented her but teased him about it, too, shouting cruel epithets at him. He fought to protect her, and out of sheer rage. Charles Campbell’s parents tired of the responsibility of children early on and had long since defected, leaving the boy’s grandparents to deal with him and his sister. They didn’t know where to begin, and they were not particularly interested in raising another generation of children anyway.

  Charles Campbell was an angry child from the very beginning, large and clumsy for his age with a chip on his shoulder. He was always fighting or running away. Detectives at the Edmonds, Washington, police department had dealt with him since before he hit junior high school. Even then they doubted that he would stay out of prison long. He had always seen the world as out to get him.

  His first arrest came when he was sixteen years old after he stole a car. According to different sources, he stayed in school either through the ninth grade or the tenth—or the eleventh. Whichever, he was not a diligent student. He was too preoccupied, apparently, with drugs and alcohol.

  Chuck Campbell married when he was nineteen, eloping with a twenty-two-year-old woman. His new in-laws were not impressed with him. The couple did not celebrate even a first wedding anniversary, divorcing after ten months. One month before their divorce, his wife gave birth to a child. He was ordered to pay $75 a month in child support, but his visitation rights were revoked after a judge decreed that he “poses a serious threat to the welfare of the child and the petitioner in that he has physically abused the child and petitioner in the past and neglected them.” Since Campbell went to prison shortly thereafter, his ex-wife and child were assured that he would not visit.

  That was why Snohomish County police were familiar with Charles Campbell. Once you saw a man six-and-a-half-feet tall with wild reddish hair and a kind of rage that almost vibrated, you didn’t forget him—especially if you were a cop. They had a mug shot of him in their files. This photograph was included in a “lay-down,” which they showed to Renae Wicklund two weeks after she was att
acked.

  Trembling but resolute, Renae Wicklund picked Campbell’s picture immediately. “That’s him.”

  Finding Charles Campbell would prove far more difficult than identifying him. It would be more than a year before Campbell was arrested and placed in a police lineup. On March 1, 1976, Renae Wicklund looked at the line of men through one-way glass and instantly picked Campbell from the lineup. He was the man who had forced her to perform fellatio sixteen months earlier.

  Campbell argued that he could not possibly have been in Clearview on December 11, 1974. He claimed that he had been living and working as a cook at a pizza restaurant in Renton, Washington, almost 30 miles away during the period in question. He insisted he had punched in to work at 3:30 P.M. on December 11 and stayed in the kitchen throughout his shift.

  A closer look into Campbell’s background, however, brought forth information that stamped him as more than the average hardworking pizza cook. He was wanted for a drug violation in Snohomish County in late December 1974, and he had been working in Renton under the alias Dan Leslie Kile to avoid apprehension. He had quit his job at the pizza parlor very suddenly on December 14, 1974, the day Renton police began their investigation into the apparent theft of $1,200 from the restaurant’s cash register.

  Campbell admitted that he could not say exactly what he had done earlier in the day that the Wicklunds were attacked, but said it was his pattern to drink in the morning—“just enough to get a buzz on”—and that he had probably done so on that Wednesday. He said he didn’t even know where Clearview was for certain and that he had never had any reason to go there—despite the fact he had lived in Snohomish County for fifteen years until he moved into his mother’s home in Renton a month before the sex attack.