Practice to Deceive Page 10

Beech’s relationship with the unknown caller held firm. The detective commander established certain times on particular days when the tipster could call him back. He hoped they could ask him more questions about how Peggy Sue and her as-yet-unknown boyfriend might be involved in Russel Douglas’s murder.

  The informant kept contact, calling them at the prearranged times. During each conversation, Beech and Plumberg learned a little more about what seemed to be an unbelievable hostile plot to kill Douglas.

  But they still didn’t have a possible motive.

  Whoever the caller was, he was careful that he could not be traced, hanging up before they could isolate the phone from which he was calling.

  But he had finally come to a point where he felt trusting enough to describe how Russel Douglas died.

  “This person put the gun to Russ’s head and shot him.”

  The detectives knew, of course, that Douglas had died of an almost-contact wound, and not from a “distance of one foot away” that local newspapers had reported.

  “This led us to believe that the tipster wasn’t getting his information from media sources that anyone curious about the homicide could seek out,” Plumberg recalls. “He knew that the murder gun was a .380 handgun, but he didn’t know what make it was.”

  Commander Beech subtly attempted to find the source of the caller’s information; he asked him where the murder had occurred.

  “He didn’t talk to me about that, but I want to say it was near an apartment complex.”

  This was wrong. Television and newspapers had written that the site was in the country, and even named Wahl Road, saying that the body was found in a private drive about twenty-five yards off the road itself.

  It was becoming more clear that the anonymous man was not repeating something he’d found out in public media.

  And then the mysterious caller said that the suspect’s girlfriend was named “Peggy.”

  Mark Plumberg recalled talking with Peggy Sue Thomas in the one phone conversation he’d had with her. She certainly hadn’t seemed nervous or concerned, and she’d readily acknowledged that she was a good friend of Brenna Douglas, and also considered Russ a close friend. It was difficult to believe that someone who might truly be a person of interest had been so relaxed, even charming when he talked to her.

  “The victim’s wife was probably involved, too—or knew what was going to happen,” the informant continued. “By that, I don’t mean to say that she was directly implicated at the scene.”

  He still hadn’t given the Island County investigators the name of a suspect—but now they knew they were so close.

  “The shooter told me that he and Peggy lured the victim to the place where he was shot. They told him that they had a Christmas present for the wife—”

  Plumberg held his breath. This was almost the same story that Peggy Sue Thomas had told him—about going to Russ’s apartment with that gift. And Brenna Douglas had mentioned that she didn’t really question Russ about where he was going around 11 A.M. on December 26. She said he was going to pick up a tablecloth for her—as well as going surfing after that.

  Peggy Sue Thomas and whomever her boyfriend might be had been only blips on Plumberg’s intense investigation. It had been far easier to connect Eddie Navarre—a likely headhunter—to Russel, or someone the victim might have met at a swingers’ club (if, indeed, he ever went to one). It also could have been a former coworker.

  What possible motive could Brenna Douglas’s friend and her lover have to plan a cold-blooded murder?

  It didn’t make sense. Not at all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  * * *

  IT SEEMED TO MARK PLUMBERG that several principals in the murder probe were getting restless. Brenna Douglas called him in late July 2004 to ask if he would like to go with her when she emptied the storage unit where she was keeping Russ’s possessions. He told her that he would. At the same time, he reminded her that she had promised to bring him her Nextel cell phone records.

  “I’m having a hard time getting them because it’s not in my name,” she said.

  She explained that she had taken over payments from a friend for a year, but she’d never changed the account name. Plumberg suggested she have the account owner phone Nextel; it would be simple for him to get the records.

  She called him back later and asked if there was anything in the Tracker, which was locked in the evidence garage, that he could release. She wanted her kids’ sleds, a power converter, and some paperwork from the glove box. There might be other items she hadn’t thought of.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just anything . . .”

  * * *

  AND THEN, AT LAST, the mysterious caller was ready to give up the name of the person he believed had shot Russel Douglas. He told Mike Beech that it was his friend James E. Huden, fifty-one, who had grown up and gone to school on Whidbey Island. “I think Jim Huden still has family on the island—a brother who was an air force colonel.”

  There weren’t that many current or former residents of Whidbey Island who had brothers who were retired air force colonels.

  Plumberg found that Huden’s brother owned a bed-and-breakfast called Sea Shell Manor.* He had a good reputation and his business was doing well.

  This was the first time that the investigators had heard the name Jim Huden. The informant said Jim was having a rough time financially; he was about to file bankruptcy.

  “He and Peggy do nothing but party when he’s in Las Vegas, and they’re living on credit cards.”

  There was the name Peggy again. Asked to identify her, the caller said she was Jim’s love interest and she lived in Las Vegas.

  That, of course, struck a chord; this had to be the same Peggy the investigators had spoken to on the phone.

  Mark Plumberg had obtained Brenna Douglas’s phone records. He found numerous calls between Brenna and the number he had for “Peggy.” They had apparently talked a great deal in the month of December before the twenty-sixth. After Russel Douglas was murdered, there had been only eleven calls.

  Things seemed to be coming together. At last, the secret informant was ready to tell Mike Beech who he was. He gave his name as William R. Hill, fifty-six, and said he lived in Port Charlotte, Florida.

  “I didn’t know if I was going to spill the beans or not,” Hill said with some regret. “Jim’s my best friend.”

  It had indeed been a difficult decision for Bill Hill to come to, but the thought of the man who had been murdered seven months before haunted him.

  And initially he had been afraid of reprisal. In the end, he had called the Island County Sheriff’s Office and told them what he knew.

  A search of Hill’s background showed him to be a solid citizen with no criminal history. He had lived at the same address in Florida for years. Bill Hill had been part of a musical group Jim Huden started called Buck Naked and the X-hibitionists. Jim was, he said, a very talented guitar player and they had played regular gigs in and around Punta Gorda, Florida.

  Mark Plumberg felt they should move ahead rapidly, and his instincts were correct. On August 2, Bill Hill phoned Mike Beech once more and told him he had just had lunch with Jim Huden.

  “He told me that we were having lunch so he could say good-bye to me. He said he’d heard that there was a new investigator on the case, and the sheriff’s detectives were going to come looking for him, so he was packing up and heading for Vegas in the next few days. He said he needed to get together with Peggy so they could get their stories straight.”

  Mark Plumberg felt this gave credence to Bill Hill. He clearly wasn’t the tipster who knew all about the sheriff’s probe. Mark was the new investigator on the case. Someone on Whidbey Island or Las Vegas had their ears to the ground and had passed that information on to Jim Huden very rapidly.

  How Jim had learned that the sheriff’s detectives were close to contacting him was a mystery. They themselves had only heard his name recently, and Beech and Plumberg had kept that intellige
nce to themselves.

  The two detectives agreed that they should fly at once to Florida so they could interview Jim Huden before he left for Las Vegas. While they were headed east, detectives Shawn Warwick and Ed Wallace flew south to the Las Vegas area to interview Peggy Sue Thomas, the woman with whom Huden had reportedly had an affair.

  Mark Plumberg applied for search warrants through Island County’s superior court. He was granted two—one for Huden’s residence in Punta Gorda, Florida, and the other for Peggy Sue’s home in Henderson, Nevada.

  It seemed possible—if they could get to Punta Gorda before Jim Huden left—that they might open another pathway to solving Russel Douglas’s homicide.

  They didn’t know then just how long their investigation would stretch into the future. Or how frustrating it would become. At this point, they didn’t know all that much about the relationship that existed between Huden and Peggy Sue Thomas. Was it a casual affair or an intense bonding?

  And it was vital that they learn about that.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH BOTH OF THEM lived far away from the serene island in Puget Sound in 2004, Jim Huden and Peggy Thomas had grown up on Whidbey Island. Their paths barely crossed over the years. During their school days, Jim was much too old for Peggy Sue.

  Jim had been married twice—to his first wife, Patti, and then to his current wife, Jean. In 2004, Peggy Sue, who was a dozen years younger than Jim, had also been married twice. Jim and Peggy had initially seemed unlikely lovers. After all, she was living in Las Vegas and Jim was in Florida.

  Jim’s father died when he was young. He, his brother, and his mother eventually moved to Clinton on Whidbey Island and his mother remarried. His stepfather was reported to be a physically abusive man who often beat Jim’s mother and sometimes got in some swats for him and his younger brother. Jim wasn’t twelve yet and he wouldn’t have had the physical strength—or the courage—to defend his mother. He reportedly felt humiliated and ultimately frustrated.

  Some sources opined that he never got to avenge his mother. In his midteens, when he was finally big enough to fight back and protect her, his stepfather suddenly died in bed of natural causes.

  One school of thought said that Jim carried that hatred for domestic abusers who hit women and children throughout his life. Was this really true? It created a background for Jim that might one day offer a feasible reason for his actions as a middle-aged man. But it also may well have been apocryphal. His own brother insists that no abuse happened in their boyhood home.

  Jim Huden was a nice kid whose grades usually didn’t reflect his high intelligence. He got along fine with his peers in grade school. Many of those boys, who are now in their fifties, remember him as a “typical kid.”

  When Jim was in the fifth grade, the local school levy failed to pass and South Whidbey Elementary School had no choice but to combine fifth and sixth grades.

  “We were both in that combined class,” longtime friend Lloyd Jackson recalls. “I think I was actually supposed to be a year ahead of him. After that, they were able to raise school taxes and we went back to single classes. My next clear memory of him was in high school.”

  Asked if he’d ever gone to Jim’s home, Jackson shook his head. He didn’t recall Jim ever talking about a “mean stepfather,” although he himself had seen the man from time to time in their small town. If Jim had bruises that were apparent in gym class or the football locker room, those could be explained away. Most young athletes sustain bruises.

  Lloyd Jackson recalled that Jim’s stepfather “looked like the actor Dan Hedaya, who played Nick Tortelli—Carla’s husband on Cheers.” He was a dark and swarthy man whose eyebrows grew together over the bridge of his nose.

  Naturally, Jim looked nothing like him. One of Jim’s most outstanding features was his hair. It was dark blond and thick and shiny; he styled it like most of the teenage boys in the Langley High School class of 1971—parting it far off to one side with bangs and then plastered down with hair gel. The male students who had enough of a beard to do so affected sideburns.

  Huden was still a fairly thin kid in high school when he, Dick Deposit, Ken Kramer, Tom Stackhouse, and Lloyd Jackson were among those who turned out for football for the Falcons at Langley High School.

  “As I recall now,” Jackson said, “Jim wasn’t particularly gifted—but he was a ‘gamer.’ ”

  The athletic star of the class of 1971 was Ken Kramer, and Jim didn’t come close to his skills when they played football, basketball, and ran track. Ken was the quarterback who carried the football across the goal line so many times, and Jim was a guard. But they were both first team.

  And they were both popular. In 1970, Ken Kramer was class president for the first semester of their senior year and Jim Huden was president for the second semester in 1971.

  Jim was generous and well liked, but he occasionally got into trouble at Langley High School because he was “a little bit wild.” Although he made the honor roll in his junior year, he was also suspended in the eleventh grade for drinking.

  In the school yearbook for 1971, Jim Huden was voted “the biggest cut-up.”

  Jackson and Jim drifted apart after Lloyd’s high school graduation, although Jim remained close to some of his childhood friends, particularly Dick Deposit and Ron Young.

  Many of Jim Huden’s friends left Whidbey Island to go to college or join the service. One formerly close friend he lost touch with was Ken Kramer, who had been offered a number of athletic scholarships. True to his basic generosity, Jim never seemed to be jealous of Ken. The message he scribbled in Ken’s yearbook demonstrated that, and, in other ways may have been prophetic:

  Ken—

  If you had enough pages, I could almost start to write about all the junk we’ve done. Football was best of all, though. If there is one thing it’s taught us, it’s to do anything to win. You got the talent so remember that. Do the best in everything you do, and best of luck to you.

  James E. Huden

  Lloyd Jackson didn’t run into Jim again until about 1976 when Huden returned to Whidbey Island after serving in the air force.

  “I was coming off the stupidest thing I’d ever done,” Jackson said. “And getting a divorce. Anyway, we started hanging out together, sometimes where he was living, at Ron Young’s house. Ron got married and added two kids, and I asked Jim if he wanted to move in with me. I had a house with a spare bedroom. I guess he stayed with me about a year. It was the start of a long, real friendship.

  “It was good having him around. I was kind of depressed from my divorce and Jim helped me get over that.”

  After a while, Jim moved on to a place of his own. In 1980, Jim met his first wife, Patti Lewandowski. Patti worked for the telephone company as a lineman and she could scamper up the poles just as well as any man. Like the rest of Jim’s friends, Lloyd liked Patti and was happy to see Jim settle down with a nice woman. Patti was “attractive—but no beauty.”

  The couple bought a house on the mainland in the north end of King County, and Jim was working for AT&T, too.

  Jim Huden and a couple of his friends were fascinated with computers and their possible future capabilities. In the mideighties, Jim and his coworkers quit the phone company and began to write a software program for Microsoft.

  It was an extremely intense project. Patti Huden confided to Lloyd Jackson that Jim would often work himself to the point of exhaustion.

  “He was so tired at times,” she said, “that he would just start to cry.”

  But it was all worth it. Bill Gates’s burgeoning Microsoft bought Jim’s software program, and suddenly Jim and Patti were wealthy. None of their friends knew exactly how much the software netted them, but there were strong rumors that Jim’s cut was forty thousand dollars a month over a very long time.

  First, Jim and Patti bought a much bigger, more expensive house. They put it on the market a few years later and bought a large motor home with all the bell
s and whistles anyone could ask for. They embarked on a dream that many people have, but few can afford. They quit their jobs and took long, luxurious road trips back and forth across America.

  When Jim and Patti came back to Whidbey Island between trips, they reunited with their friends for great get-togethers. It seemed that Jim Huden had everything a man might want—a good wife, a lot of money, and the freedom to enjoy a life of retirement when he wasn’t yet forty.

  Eventually—when they had seen every corner of the country that they wanted—he and Patti sold the motor home and bought a lavish house on a golf course near Orlando, Florida. The idyllic weather was a far cry from the wind-whipped storms that often scoured Whidbey Island. The couple had seen most of the country and picked the spot that seemed to be the perfect place to live.

  In early 1991, Jim called Lloyd Jackson and invited him to Florida for a visit. Lloyd accepted and he found Jim and Patti gracious hosts. They did everything they could to make his time with them memorable.

  “They took me to Walt Disney’s theme park at Epcot,” Jackson recalled. “We went racing mini Indy race cars, golfing, and we watched Super Bowl XXV when the New York Giants played the Buffalo Bills.”

  Jim and Patti seemed happy together, but they had lived far too lavishly. They were running out of big money. Within a year, they took jobs as managers of the Chevy Chase golf course, just outside of Port Townsend, Washington. As one of the perks of the job, they lived in quarters above the pro shop. It was a definite step down from their plush lifestyle.

  After a few years, the Hudens were able to move back to Florida. Jim’s expertise with computers inspired them to start a new company. It went well at first; Jim was even voted businessman of the year in Punta Gorda. The couple returned to Whidbey Island sporadically to hook up with their longtime friends.

  Lloyd Jackson got a shocking phone call from Jim Huden in 1994. Jim told him that he was having an affair and that he and Patti were breaking up. He asked Jackson to fly to Florida, and drive Patti and their Chevy Blazer back to Washington State.