A Rage to Kill Page 11

  The year 2000 seemed so far away in 1976. But remembering the terrible tale told in his courtroom, Judge Henry sentenced Charles “Buddy” Longnecker, Jr. to life imprisonment for first degree murder and life imprisonment for first degree rape, both with an additional five years for the use of a deadly weapon during the crimes. He specified that the sentences were to run consecutively. The lowest minimum term which could possibly be set in Buddy’s case would therefore be thirty years.

  As this is written, Buddy Longnecker is in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. He is now forty-one years old. His release date has been calculated as September 28, 2031.

  Sharon Mason would have been sixty years old this year, but she did not live to see her thirty-eighth birthday.

  Born to Kill?

  In the sixties and seventies, prisons seemed to have revolving doors. Too many sadistic sociopaths were finding their way back into a society that had naively believed that life in prison really meant life in prison. In most cases, it meant anywhere from ten to seventeen years in prison. While the vast majority of convicts are neither violent nor without conscience, the sadistic sociopath is compelled to hurt other people; cruelty is an integral part of his emotional blueprint. He usually makes an ideal prisoner—because he will do what he has to do to get free. But even in prison, he doesn’t change inside. And all the counseling, job training, and support doesn’t make one iota of difference to him (or, to be fair, her). When the sadistic sociopath is released, he will murder again.

  What makes sociopaths this way? Most forensic psychiatrists and psychologists agree that there is no one answer. Early abuse certainly contributes to a child’s development into a criminal later on. Quite possibly a physiological defect in the brain adds to the problem. Some researchers believe that criminals have a break in the linkage between the frontal lobe (that gives humans the ability to think and feel) and the limbic system thatwe share with animals. The latter says, basically, “Take what you want when you want.” Some experts thought for awhile that murderers had an extra male chromosome, and that the added “Y chromosome” made them more violent than normal men. That theory, however, proved untrue when tested. In fact, Richard Speck, the Chicago mass murderer of nine student nurses, was the only infamous subject found to have an extra Y chromosome.

  It is more likely that some babies are born with a genetic predisposition to violence—just as some are born with an innate talent for music or math or for athletics. If a child has an inherent tendency to be violent and he is born into an abusive situation, the perfect soil is there for growing an antisocial personality. I don’t believe in the “bad seed” theory that holds that some babies are absolutely slated for a disastrous future from the moment of birth. There are too many variables, and a warm and loving home can work wonders.

  The story that follows is more indicative, however, of what can happen when a child comes into the world with two strikes against him and things only get worse from there.

  Michael Andrew Olds never had anything that he could call his own, not even his name. His fourteen-year-old mother was attacked in a dark alleyway in Seattle in the late summer of 1942, and he was conceived during the rape. The rapist was neither identified nor apprehended. Michael’s natural father may well have been a man of inherent violence who passed it on to the son he never even knew existed. But there was also the reality that the child’s first decade was as horrific as anything Charles Dickens wrote about in Oliver Twist. Michael was a boy nobody wanted, and he lived in sixteen foster homes before he was seventeen.

  His young mother, just a child herself, didn’t tell anyone what had happened to her in the alley—not until she realized that she was pregnant. When she finally confessed that she had been raped, her family was horrified. It was 1942 and good girls didn’t get pregnant, or if they did, their families hid them away from the neighbors. Michael’s mother was taken in at the Florence Crittendon home in Seattle. It was a good shelter, and she received excellent care while she waited to give birth, but she was lonesome and scared, one of the youngest girls who lived there behind shuttered windows and closed doors.

  She bore her red-haired baby boy in April 1943, after many hours of labor. She looked at the beautiful baby and longed to keep him with her, but she was still only fourteen years old and she had no one who would support her if she kept him. She gave him away; there was nothing else she could do under the circumstances.

  At some point, the baby was given the name Michael Andrew Olds. On some level, he seemed to sense that his birth had been a mistake, and that he wasn’t wanted. A succession of foster parents tried—and failed—to bond with him. He didn’t like to be cuddled and he cried constantly—either from temper or colic. He resisted all efforts at toilet-training; perhaps that was the only function where he had any control over his environment. He would have “accidents” until he was eight. He smashed his toys in anger and frustration and fought with other children in the homes where he was placed. Prospective adoptive parents and foster families alike threw up their hands in surrender. Michael looked adorable, with his mop of red curls and his freckles, but he was a prickly pear who seemed to dare anyone to love him.

  He wore out the first couple who took him in when he was just a baby. The second couple who brought him home had to give up; Michael had carried the family cat to the toilet, dumped him in, and had tried to flush the frantic creature down.

  Cruelty to animals is a red flag signal that shows up early in the background of many violent criminals. There was so much going on with Michael Olds that social workers barely had time to chart the latest fiasco.

  Attempts at counseling failed to change Michael’s behavior, and with each move, he must have felt more of an outcast. Sometimes there were other children in the homes and occasionally he was the only child. It didn’t matter; he never adjusted. He was a blur of red-headed fury.

  Social workers kept shuttling him around until 1959, when he was finally declared “incorrigible” after a terrifying incident in the tiny hamlet of Dayton, Washington. Given the circumstances, “incorrigible” was a mild determination. Michael, who was seventeen by then, enticed a four-year-old girl into an alley by offering her candy. There he choked and beat the toddler almost to death. She was saved only because a delivery man turned his truck into the alley and saw what was happening.

  He was horrified to see Olds straddling a child on the ground with his hands on her throat, as he bellowed, “Die, damn you, die!”

  When the man pulled Michael off the little girl, he was still enraged. “She called me a name,” he muttered.

  Michael Olds seemed to hate the whole world. During the same time period, police had caught him as he was plugging the exhaust pipes of cars with weeds and dirt and newspapers. He said he didn’t like the owners, and figured they would die after they were overcome with carbon monoxide from the exhaust gas.

  And so, at seventeen, Olds was placed in the Luther Burbank School, where emotionally disturbed teenagers were treated. One psychiatrist reported: “It is clear that Mike needs a placement with strong external controls. This episode, an assault on a four-year-old girl, came too close to homicide and the chances of another such occurrence are too great to consider any other disposition.”

  Somewhat surprisingly, Mike Olds did well at Luther Burbank; although he was there because he’d been committed, he at least knew where he would be for awhile. And he did do better with external controls. He stayed a year at Burbank. On May 20, 1960, despite his history, Olds was paroled and sent to a foster home on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill.

  It didn’t work. He came and went as he pleased. He stayed out late, and he was consumed with gambling. He soon dropped out of school to take a job as a stock boy in a medical supply house, although he was a desultory employee at best.

  Up on Queen Anne Hill, his seventeenth family was at its wit’s end wondering what they would do about Michael. He frightened them because they had no idea what he was thinking. When he was
home, he gulped his food and then stared at them with eyes that were as cold as a wolf’s. They found comfort in knowing that soon he would be eighteen and he would be free to live on his own.

  On the evening of March 28, 1961, Blossom Braham took a little time for herself. She was thirty-eight, the mother of two school-aged boys, and she didn’t get that many chances for solitude. Blossom was quite beautiful; a lot of people remarked how much she resembled the movie star Donna Reed. She had once had a career in show business herself—as a dancer. But now she was a full-time mother. She stopped by the Queen Anne branch of the Seattle Public Library that Tuesday evening, returned some books and picked out some others. She needed a few items for breakfast and she walked the few blocks to Jay Samuel’s Grocery Store. It was a little after eight in the evening when she got there.

  Blossom Braham was a familiar customer and she shopped often at the little neighborhood grocery. Mr.Samuels looked up from the account books he was balancing as she walked in, and called “Hello, Blossom.” She smiled and moved to the bread rack and studied the breakfast rolls. The prices were higher here than at the supermarket, but it was within easy walking distance of her house and she liked Mr. Samuels.

  The bell over the door tinkled again as a young man hurried into the small market. He carried a gun in his right hand.

  It was a moment frozen in time. Samuels stared uncomprehendingly at the boy with the gun. He didn’t say a word, but something made Blossom turn around. The gunman told them both to get behind the counter.

  Then he ordered Samuels to empty the cash register and place the contents in a paper sack. There wasn’t that much money—less than $40; a neighborhood grocery wasn’t the kind of target a professional would have chosen.

  Neither Samuels nor Mrs. Braham had resisted in any way. They barely breathed as the young gunman grabbed the sack and backed toward the door.

  “Stay where you are,” the man with the gun ordered—quite unnecessarily. Both Samuels and Blossom Braham remained motionless behind the counter.

  The gunman reached behind him for the doorknob, and then, almost as an afterthought, he raised the gun and fired twice.

  Blossom Braham fell like a stone, a bullet between her eyes. She scarcely had time to see death coming. She looked surprised, as if this could not be happening. Samuels made an involuntary move to help her and the gunman shouted, “I said stay where you are!”

  It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Blossom Braham was dying. Jay Samuels fully expected to hear the gun roar again but the gunman turned and ran out into the street.

  Patrolmen E. E. Stallman and D. C. Moe received the first radio call for help at 8:43 P.M. They found Blossom Braham on the floor behind the counter; she was unconscious and breathing only sporadically. The officers knew it was the agonal breathing of a person in extremis. An ambulance crew arrived to take Blossom Braham to Harborview Hospital. Harborview’s emergency room had wrenched a lot of people back from the edge of death, but there was nothing they could do for Blossom; she died without ever regaining consciousness.

  Jay Samuels was in shock, but he tried to gather his thoughts for the homicide detectives who arrived right after the patrol cops. Dick Schoener and Bob Honz asked him if he could describe the gunman. “He was young—a kid, really,” Samuels began. “Average height and weight but he had such piercing blue eyes. I’ve never seen such cold, deep blue eyes in my life.”

  He thought the weapon had been a .22 handgun. Schoener looked down at the floor and recognized the .22 casings there.

  Detective Al Kretchmar joined the group of investigators at the scene, while a cordon of patrol cars was stationed around the area in the faint hope that the shooter was still in the neighborhood. Other officers moved in to hold back the crowds of curiosity seekers who were trying to peek into the store.

  Samuels was positive that he had never seen the gunman in his store before, and he was baffled about why the man had fired his gun. “We didn’t fight him,” he kept repeating. “We didn’t even move. He just shot.”

  Despite the saturation of patrol cars and foot patrolmen in the Queen Anne area immediately after the shooting, no suspect was caught. The investigators were convinced that he had to be holed up someplace. It was an unseasonably warm spring evening and there were lots of people out. A running man carrying a bag full of money would surely have been noticed by someone—yet no one remembered seeing anything. He could be hiding in a blackberry thicket in a vacant lot or he might even have gone into a nearby house. That would explain his disappearance.

  The night passed without any sightings of the shooter. It had happened so quickly. Except for the blood behind the counter and the scattered bullet casings, it might all have been a very bad dream. When the homicide detectives finished their work near dawn, Jay Samuels pulled down the shade in the front door and locked the store.

  Dr. Gale Wilson, the King County Medical Examiner, performed the postmortem on Blossom Braham. The fatal wound was, of course, the forehead shot; the bullet had transversed her brain, shattering as it hit the back of her skull. Wilson told the detectives observing the post that she would have lived only minutes after such a wound, and all brain function had ceased the moment she was shot. But then he detected another wound, a flesh wound in the right thigh, and the slug was still there. This bullet was retrieved intact, and it would be invaluable for ballistics tests if a suspect gun was ever located.

  The Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer both had the story of Blossom Braham’s murder on the front page. Blossom had been a lovely woman with high cheek bones, big brown eyes, and perfect features. Her picture stared back from newsstands. Her beauty drew most readers to the story. But it was the horror of her totally unforeseen death that gripped them. How many of them had run down to the neighborhood grocer for a last-minute purchase? Blossom Braham had gone to buy butterhorns for breakfast, followed the robber’s orders precisely, and had died. That was what frightened people.

  The Seattle Police Homicide Unit on the third floor of the Public Safety Building was deluged with tips from citizens who wanted to help, or who just wanted to get in on the notoriety of the case. None of them panned out. The killer had been swallowed up in the night and might well be thousands of miles away.

  On April 1, however, grocer Jay Samuels received a phone call that made the hairs stand up along his arms. If it was an April Fool’s joke, he didn’t find it funny.

  “I want $200,” a man’s voice breathed into the phone. “I killed Blossom Braham and I wouldn’t be afraid to kill again—”

  Even though the caller warned him not to, Samuels called the police at once. In a very short time, Detective Ed Ivey walked into the store as if he was a customer, and then he found a spot where he could act as a stakeout. If it was an April Fool’s gag, there wouldn’t be any more phone calls. It was a crazy thing for the real killer to have done—and the investigators didn’t really expect another call, but they had to be prepared.

  The phone rang shortly after Ivey was in place. Samuels picked it up nervously and the detective could sense his tension. “Tell me again what you want,” Samuels said, and then he signalled surreptitiously to Ivey to pick up the phone in the back room so he could listen.

  “You heard me,” the voice said impatiently. “Put two hundred dollars in a paper sack and leave it at Five Corners between five and seven P.M. tomorrow.”

  Stalling for time, Ivey asked for more specific directions.

  “Damn you! You know where it is. It’s at West McGraw and Third West!” The stake-out was working. The caller couldn’t tell Ivey’s voice from Samuels’.

  Ivey told the caller to relax; he just wanted to be sure he got everything right, and he didn’t want to chance going to the wrong spot.

  “I’m not nervous,” the caller said. “Not like I was when I shot the lady in the store, and I want the money.”

  A dummy package with cut-up newspapers between real bills was placed at the designated spot. A dozen officers hid n
earby, waiting and watching. They waited until 9:00 P.M., but the killer, if indeed he had made the call, never appeared.

  He did not call again.

  By April 5, tension was still thick on Queen Anne Hill. Extra patrol cars did little to alleviate the citizens’ concern. More than two hundred people had been interviewed, and not one had information that brought detectives any closer to the blue-eyed killer.

  In downtown Seattle, cabby Ben Noyes, fifty-two, picked up a fare, a slender youth with red hair and hard blue eyes that bore right into Noyes’ own. “Just drive south,” he ordered, “I’ll give you the address later.”

  This was the kind of fare that cab drivers hated. Riders without specific addresses were usually trouble. Sighing, Noyes headed out 10th Avenue South toward Beacon Hill, but he never got an address; instead he felt a gun poking him in the back. His passenger assured him he wouldn’t get hurt if he stayed calm and followed orders. They stopped in a thickly wooded area.

  The gunman took all the cash Noyes had, but it was only ten one-dollar bills, hardly enough to warrant a drawn gun. “Now, turn around and head toward Queen Anne Hill,” the passenger ordered.

  As they drove north, he made conversation that did nothing to allay Noyes’ fears. “That’s where I killed a lady in a store a couple of weeks ago,” he said laconically.

  Just like everybody else in Seattle, Noyes had heard about the Blossom Braham killing. He was scared. If the guy was telling him the truth, he had shot an innocent woman for no reason at all. Noyes figured he was in trouble—and he was. A moment later, the gun roared in the back seat and a bullet tore into the upholstery just behind his back. He wondered if he’d been hit; maybe he was so badly injured he was in shock and couldn’t feel it. And then he realized he hadn’t been shot at all—only the padding in the seat behind his back had been.