A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases Read online

  Jerilee was beginning to feel a little less nervous. She said that she would take Hike with her and look around outside the house. “I think it will be okay,” she told her brother-in-law. He promised to wait on the phone while she checked.

  Jerilee’s hand was steady as she put her contact lenses in. There had to be a simple explanation for where Morris was. It wasn’t like him to drink too much, but, if he had, he was probably asleep at a friend’s house.

  “I went out the front door and the dog ran ahead of me and started growling and barking at something on the ground. I couldn’t tell right then what it was,” she recalled quietly. “But when I got there, I saw that it was Morris … ”

  Shock—the kind that congeals the blood and makes the heart race out of sync—also dulls the senses. When something bad happens, so bad that the world will never, ever be the same again, the human mind cannot take it in all at once. Jerilee Blankenbaker had not yet acknowledged that her world had changed forever. At that moment, as she moved toward the man who lay facedown on the snowy ground, she had the tremendous strength that comes with an adrenaline rush. He lay just inside the gate, his feet pointed back toward the alley. He had fallen forward in an almost perfectly straight line.

  “I rolled him over,” Jerilee said, speaking of a man who weighed 210 pounds. “And tried to pull him toward me. I felt his face and I thought I felt something on his face. I thought it was mud at that time. And he was really heavy. I mean—he didn’t help me at all … ”

  A long time later when she spoke about it, Jerilee Blankenbaker’s voice had the thinnest layer of calm over the remembered terror of that moment. “I took a hold of his jacket on his right side and rolled him toward the house, which would be north, and then I pulled him into a sitting position toward me with his jacket … And I think that I tried to hear a heartbeat … and then I laid him back down.”

  Jerilee remembered running inside the house and picking up the phone where her husband’s brother still waited on the line. “Mike,” she cried. “Come quick. Morris has blood all over him.”

  Within a few minutes, Mike Blankenbaker was on his way to help Jerilee, and, he prayed, to help his brother. And so were the Yakima police.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Dennis Meyers had been a patrol officer for the Yakima Police Department for six years, and he was working the early shift—four A.M. to noon—on November 22. He got a call from the police dispatcher at 5:03 that morning to proceed to 210 North Sixth Street “in regards to a subject at that location being covered with lots of blood.”

  That was all Meyers knew at that point. He half-expected to find some drunk with a bloody nose. He was seven blocks away from the location when he got the call, and he was there in a few minutes. Meyers saw a woman standing in front of the house. “She was standing there and crying.”

  The officer walked up to the woman who led him around to the south side of the house and showed him a man lying on his back. It was still almost dark and Meyers used his flashlight to examine the “man down.” The fallen man wore jeans, athletic shoes, and an open down jacket. His right leg was crossed almost casually over his left, and his arms rested on the ground. There was a great deal of blood on his face and seeping into the grass and snow next to his left hand.

  Meyers didn’t recognize the man, but the woman told him that it was her husband: Morris Blankenbaker. Everyone in Yakima knew Morris, but it would have been hard for anyone to recognize him with so much blood on his face.

  More police began to arrive and Meyers tried to calm Jerilee Blankenbaker, who was still sobbing and nearly hysterical, as Officer Terry Rosenberry knelt beside the supine man and checked for signs of life. None were discernible.

  While Meyers and Rosenberry and Patrol Sergeant Pleas Green waited for Sergeant Robert Brimmer, the Yakima police’s chief investigator of homicides and a nineteen-year veteran of the department, they did not approach the body. Time seemed to stretch into hours, but it was actually only fifteen minutes until Brimmer arrived. The patrol officers led him back to the body, and he noted that the blood on the ground was clotted; whatever had happened had occurred some time before the police were called.

  It was an eerie scene in the gray half-dawn. An empty Budweiser beer bottle nudged the dead man’s right foot and a section of Lincoln log lay near the body, left behind, probably, by the victim’s small son.

  A dark green Chevrolet was pulled up beyond the gate area, near the alley. Brimmer directed Meyer to check it out, and he found that Morris’s keys were still in the car, dropped on the floor on the driver’s side. His bank statement lay on the seat. Just as Morris had no locks on his exterior doors, he didn’t bother hiding his keys. He had not expected trouble.

  Don Washburn of the Yakima Ambulance Company was also a deputy coroner. Actually, the ambulance service had gotten the first call for help from the Blankenbaker house, and it was the ambulance company that had called the police. Washburn had driven in around 5:25 A.M. It was he who officially pronounced Morris Blankenbaker dead. He had been dead for hours; rigor mortis—the condition where a human body “freezes” into position after death had begun. The victim’s jaw and shoulders were already hard to move. It was difficult to be certain with so much blood, but he seemed to have been shot in the face. There appeared to be a bullet wound—an entry wound—through his upper lip.

  It was the ambulance attendants who put a sheet over the body—not police procedure because evidence can inadvertently be transferred from the body to the sheet and vice versa. Brimmer wasn’t happy to see this and removed the sheet carefully so that they could take photographs of the body. Two decades later, sheets would be flung over the bodies of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. It is a natural reaction to shelter the dead from prying eyes. Morris Blankenbaker, Yakima’s football hero and a friend to scores of people, was lying dead, staring blindly as snowflakes dotted his body. With his “wife” sobbing hysterically and his small children inside the house, it had seemed the decent thing to do. Then with the help of the investigators, the ambulance attendants lifted Morris’s body to a gurney and put it in the ambulance for the short trip to the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital morgue to await autopsy.

  The police at the scene searched the grounds for more evidence. Brimmer, Rosenberry, and Lt. Bernie Kline combed the area at the south side of the house, along the wire fence between the yard and the apartment house, and moved on to the back where Morris’s car was parked, and then into the alley itself. They had to use their flashlights at first. Sometimes, the refracted beam of a flashlight can help find minute bits of evidence as it hits the shiny side of a shell casing, a bullet fragment, a key, something that might lie hidden on the lawn or beneath a bush. The grass hadn’t been mowed and it was three or four inches high. They searched trash cans in the alley in the faint hope that someone had tossed the murder gun away in his—or her flight.

  They found nothing.

  They desperately needed to find some piece of physical evidence that could lead them to Morris Blankenbaker’s killer. His executioner, really. They already had part of a possible scenario. Morris Blankenbaker had arrived home, stashed his keys on his car floor, and strolled through the gate of his yard. Quite probably, the open beer bottle had been in his hand. A man in fear of his life would not have been carrying a bottle of beer. His ex-wife had found him lying on his face and had somehow managed to turn him over. It would have taken the kind of strength that lets women lift cars off their children; Morris was a big man, a solid man, and she was such a delicate woman.

  The blood on the ground would have come from his facial wounds; he had bled profusely in the moments before he died. In her vain attempt to save his life, Jerilee had managed to flip Morris over; the blood marked where he had lain.

  Maybe an autopsy would give them some information. Maybe there was a bullet in Morris’s head that they could trace to a gun. From the appearance of the wounds, Brimmer’s long experience suggested to him that the gun had been a small-caliber w
eapon—possibly a .22.

  Carefully, as a pale sun cast light on their cheerless work, Brimmer’s team measured every inch of the Blankenbaker yard and the porch, and then measured again from one set point. Later, this would enable them to triangulate their findings and place the body and all the bits and pieces of evidence—so few—in the exact spot where they had been found.

  Their precise work kept them from facing the terrible question that kept echoing. Who on earth would shoot Morris Blankenbaker? Everybody liked Morris …

  The word that Morris Blankenbaker had been murdered spread throughout town to almost everyone who had ever known him, and that was half of Yakima. Long before the headlines hit, everyone who mattered knew.

  Olive Blankenbaker will never forget the way she heard the worst news of her life. From the moment he was born, she had worried about her only child, but she had fought her natural inclination to warn him to be careful. All through his football days, and then when he was in the service, and working in the mental hospital, and climbing telephone poles in all kinds of weather, she had worried, but she had determinedly kept her mouth shut. In the end she had raised a man’s man, but a gentle sensitive man too.

  Olive was asleep in the early morning hours of November 22. She didn’t know that the police and Mike Blankenbaker were trying to locate the best person to inform her that her son was dead. “They finally went and got my sister. Hazel came and got me out of bed,” Olive remembered. “She just said it right out, ‘Olive, Morris has been shot.’ And I said, ‘Is he dead?’ and she said, ‘Yes.’ I just wanted to know, to get it over with in a hurry. I knew he was dead from the moment she took a hold of my hand. I really thought that I was going to die right on the spot. I thought, ‘This is too bad. Nothing this bad has ever happened to me before, and I can’t take it. I’m not going to survive this. I’m going to die tonight.’”

  Wild with grief, Olive Blankenbaker asked silently why it had to be Morris, her only son. Why couldn’t it have been someone else‘s son—someone who had ten kids—it might be easier for them. She knew that wasn’t true, and that wasn’t the way she usually thought, but she could not bear the idea of living her life out without Morris. She had no husband, her sisters had their own lives, and the boss she’d loved to work for was dead in a plane crash. Now the future yawned ahead of her empty of everything she had ever cared about.

  Olive had no idea who had shot Morris; she couldn’t conceive how anyone could have wanted to hurt him, much less kill him.

  Robert Brimmer returned to the police station, and he and his investigators started their incident report procedure. “At that time,” he said, “We started contacting witnesses or people to talk to. They started coming in after eight-thirty that morning.”

  Brimmer, a tall, lanky, laconic man in his forties, whose smiles were infrequent, was in charge of almost every major crime that came into the Yakima detective unit: homicide, arson, assault, armed robbery. If he was occasionally short tempered, he was always fair and he treated every man who worked for him equally.

  Some of the information Brimmer had elicited thus far in the Blankenbaker case was no help at all, some might prove to be, and some was startling. It would take a while to check it all out, but first there was the postmortem examination to attend.

  The word autopsy by definition roughly means to “see for one’s self.” Everyone who attended Morris Blankenbaker’s autopsy would be there to see what had happened to him medically, clinically, and ballistically. They could not allow themselves to consider the emotional aspect of this crime. Not now.

  Dr. Richard Muzzall was the Yakima County Coroner. In Washington State, counties can choose whether they want to have a medical examiner or a coroner. Yakima and many of the smaller counties have coroners who are medical doctors but have not had extensive training in the science of death examination. In the old days, some counties didn’t even require that coroners be doctors. Muzzall, however, had more experience than most coroners. He had worked as a deputy coroner in the Minneapolis area before moving to Yakima. By the time he stood over Morris Blankenbaker’s body, he had performed approximately 150 autopsies.

  It was ten o’clock in the morning on November 22; Morris had been dead about eight hours, his body had been discovered only five hours before. Just the evening before, he had been laughing with Jerilee and their children as they ate pizza at Shakey’s. They were looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner together. And within the month, he and Jerilee would have remarried and the scars of the past two years would have begun to heal over.

  Now that was not to be.

  Three men stood in the autopsy room with Dr. Muzzall: Sergeant Brimmer, Eric Gustafson, a Yakima County Deputy District Attorney, and a young detective named Vern Henderson. Henderson swallowed hard and fought to maintain a professional distance from the dead man before him. It wasn’t easy; Vern Henderson and Morris Blankenbaker had played football together at Davis High School. More than that—so much more than that—they had been best friends since they were thirteen years old. If any detective on the force had a special reason to want to find Morris’s killer, it was Vern Henderson. Brimmer glanced covertly at Vern to see if he could handle this and, satisfied that he could, looked again at the perfect athlete’s body on the table.

  Vern Henderson had long since learned to hide his feelings, and his face was without expression. “I had been to a lot of autopsies by then, even to some where I knew the person. But I’d never been to one where the subject was such a good friend as Morris was. It was hard on me to go, but I wanted to know everything that had happened to him,” Henderson said. “Because, see, I knew in my own mind that if they didn’t find him [the killer] right away, I was going to have to look. I wanted to know what happened and you can only know if you go to the autopsy. I wanted to know the facts, so when I heard things, I’d know if it really happened that way or not.”

  Before the body was undressed and washed, photographs and measurements were taken. The four men took notes and observed minute details that would not have been significant to men in other professions.

  Morris had always had a thick head of hair, and he had recently grown a mustache and a short beard. His face and beard were still stained with dried blood. When he was undressed and examined, it was clear that there were no injuries to his body. All the damage had been done to his head.

  That he had been shot was evident both in the appearance of the wounds and in the gun barrel debris that was still present in his hair and on his skin. Muzzall pointed to the wound he felt had been the first, a shot fired while Morris was standing. It had pierced the upper lip at the center line and knocked out two front teeth before it embedded itself against the base of the spine just below the spot where the occipital portion of the skull joined the spinal column. The mouth wound itself, Muzzall felt, would not have caused death. However, the area where the spinal cord joins the brain is the control center of the human body. It regulates breathing and heart rate, and a bullet striking there might well have caused respiratory arrest. At the very least, this shot would have knocked the victim off his feet.

  Morris had been lying on his face when Jerilee found him. Either the shooter had been in front of him, or the force of the first shot had spun him around as he fell. Muzzall pointed out the “freckles” of unburned gunpowder that had tattooed the victim’s face. Tiny black dots extended up to the forehead, into the hairline and down into the beard for a distance of about three and a half inches from the lip wound. This meant that the killer had stood quite close to Morris when he fired and hit him in the mouth.

  The second and third wounds had been delivered when Morris was down. They entered just behind the left ear and traveled horizontally through the brain, causing fatal damage. The second bullet had lodged against the skull on the right side, traveling at a slight upward angle. The third bullet entered the head just below the second and traveled forward and again slightly upward, ending in the frontal lobe of the brain. This third wound had da
rk gunpowder rimming it; it had almost been a contact wound. Each of these two shots could be considered “execution style” wounds. The killer had leaned over the prone man and held the murder weapon very close behind the victim’s ear. Each was a fatal shot.

  Whoever had shot Morris Blankenbaker had wanted to be very sure that he was dead. Morris had probably seen the first shot coming, if only at the last moment, Muzzall explained. He lifted Morris’s right hand. It was flecked with dried blood. “This is blowback,” he commented. “Here on the back, side, and even the palm of his hand. I would say the first bullet to strike him was the one to the mouth. … He would have had to have been in an upright position, to be raising his hand in front of his face, to get this blowback of blood from the lip wound. If he had been shot behind the ear first, he would have fallen on the ground, and his hand would not have been in a position to catch this blowback.”

  Morris had no other wounds beyond a small scratch on his nose, probably sustained when he fell. There was the characteristic bruising around his eyes almost always present with a head shot—quite consistent with the brain damage and bleeding behind his eyes. His knuckles were smooth. He hadn’t hit anyone. His clothing wasn’t torn. All he had time to do was hold up his hand in a futile attempt to protect his head from the gun he saw in his killer’s fist. Morris had been a tremendously strong man; given a chance, he would have put up an awesome fight for his life.

  Vern Henderson knew that. He had never seen anyone take Morris—not in a fair fight. Morris was—had been, he told himself—as strong as a bull moose.

  But he clearly had not been given any warning. Brimmer and Henderson knew that the victim was due home shortly after two, and that Jerilee thought she had heard his car about then. She hadn’t heard gunshots—although others had—and had probably mistaken the shots for “car doors slamming.” His dog hadn’t barked. Whoever was outside was someone familiar to the victim’s black Lab. Hike was a guard dog, but he was as friendly as a pup to people he recognized.