Lust Killer Page 8

  And yet Linda Salee was about to become part of a dread sisterhood.

  Linda Dawn Salee was twenty-two years old, a tiny woman who stood only five feet, one inch tall. But she was one of those feisty, bouncy little women who excel at athletics. She was really quite strong and wonderfully coordinated; she had a shelf full of bowling trophies to prove it.

  Linda Salee was also exceptionally pretty. She had ash-blond hair, which she wore in the teased pompadour style so popular in the late sixties. Her eyes were blue and fringed with improbably long lashes, and her smile revealed perfect teeth. Indeed, Linda's smile was so outstanding that she had won a "Miss Smile" contest a few years back.

  Like Linda Slawson, Jan Whitney, and Karen Sprinker, Linda Salee was so attractive that she always drew appreciative male stares. She had a boyfriend whom she loved and she wasn't interested in other men at all.

  Linda worked days in the offices of Consolidated Freightways in Portland, and she left work at four-thirty P.M. on April 23. She planned to drive to the huge shopping mall at Lloyd Center and shop for presents for her boyfriend's birthday. Then she was going to go to the Eastside YMCA for a swim in the pool there, where her boyfriend was a lifeguard. They were both interested in sports and in physical fitness, just one of the many things they shared in common. Since she worked days and he worked evenings, the only way they could see each other during the week was for Linda to come to the pool and swim.

  Linda drove her own car, her pride and joy—a bright red Volkswagen Bug—to Lloyd Center and parked it carefully on the sixth floor of the parking garage. She wore a beige coat against the cold that belied the fact that spring had begun officially more than a month earlier.

  Because she was in love and because she was a young woman of generous spirit, Linda spent a lot of money on presents for her boyfriend. Her original plan had been to get him a leather watchband. She went to a jewelry shop first and the clerk there remembered her well. It was a slow period in the day, and she took a long time making up her mind. She finally made a selection, and headed for a men's clothing store.

  Again, the clerk who waited on her remembered her. She was so pretty, and so careful about her shopping. She bought her friend a blue suede cloth jacket and a pair of walking shorts. As she left the men's store, the clerk glanced at the clock on the wall and noted that it was five-fifteen P.M.

  She sat on one of the benches provided for tired shoppers and opened the small sack that held the watchband. Seeing it in the bright lights overhead, she decided it wasn't the right color after all. She walked back to the jewelry shop and apologized to the clerk. "I'm sorry. It's not what he wanted. Could I return it?"

  Her money was refunded, and Linda smiled at the clerk and left the shop, headed for the parking garage.

  At the YMCA pool, Linda Salee's boyfriend watched over the shouting, leaping kids in the water. He had to keep a close eye on them. The adult swimmers were content to do their laps doggedly, get it over with, and head for the showers. The kids were another story altogether; if you didn't watch them, they'd run on the decks, cannonball off the board without looking for swimmers below, or attempt to venture into the deep end of the pool when they couldn't swim well enough to manage it.

  He sat on his perch high above the pool and scanned the water constantly, his nose itching from the chlorine fumes that permeated the air. Sometimes Linda could emerge from the women's locker room and sneak up on him before he noticed her. Her light touch on his toes always made him jump—and made him happy too. She was a dynamite-looking girl, and he was proud to see her swimming in the pool and know that she was his girl.

  It was cold outside, and rainy, and the temperature outside, combined with the fumes in the pool, steamed up the glass face of the wall clock. The young lifeguard looked at it and realized it was after seven o'clock. He looked at the clock again to be sure it was that late, and it was. Almost seven-thirty.

  Linda should have arrived an hour ago. Where was she?

  The kids' swim session was over, and an "Adults Only" session began. With a spate of time when he didn't have to guard so closely, Linda's boyfriend watched the door of the women's locker room. There were more men than women always, and on this Wednesday night, only a few women drifted out, tucking their hair under their caps. A couple of overweight gals over forty who were determined to slim down. The tall woman who came every night, rain or shine, and swam as if she'd once been a champion. A few teenagers who giggled and paddled around the shallow end.

  Linda never showed up.

  Her friend changed into his street clothes when the last swimmer was out of the pool, and drove to her apartment. His knocking went unanswered and he was a little angry with her—but only for a few minutes. He knew her too well to think she would have stood him up. She had been excited about his birthday and had teased him about all the presents he was going to get. Even now, standing in the empty hall outside her apartment, he half-expected to see her jump out and yell, "Surprise!"

  When Linda Salee didn't arrive at her job at Consolidated Freightways the next morning, her friends and family grew frantic for her safety. There was simply no explanation but that she was someplace from which she was unable to come home.

  Oregon state police investigators, aware of the other cases involving missing young women, treated Linda Salee's disappearance very seriously. With the information that she had intended to go shopping in Lloyd Center, they joined detectives from Portland in a search of the grounds and parking garage.

  It was like a replay of Karen Sprinker's case. Linda Salee's car was located in the parking garage. It too was locked and there were no indications that a struggle had taken place in or around the vehicle.

  There was no conclusion to be drawn other than that someone had taken Linda away against her will.

  Comparing the cases of the missing women, detectives in Oregon saw similarities again and again. Four pretty young women had disappeared from the mainstream of life within sixteen months, leaving no clues at all behind. All the girls had vanished within a fifty-mile area. None of them had anything in her background that would have made her a likely candidate to run away. There were no witnesses. There were no bits of physical evidence—not a piece of clothing, a dropped purse, a shoe. Not even a brush of blood or a hair. Not one of them had reported to friends or police that she had reason to be afraid because of an insistent suitor or an obscene phone call.

  That meant that the Oregon investigators were looking for the most elusive kind of suspect, someone who snatched victims by random choice. Someone had apparently watched until he saw women who appealed to whatever obsession drove him. And then he had stalked them until he found them in places where they could not call for help. Whatever ruse or device he had used to get them, he had done it quickly and silently.

  They were gone.

  It almost seemed as if the person who had taken them away had deliberately chosen victims from areas patrolled by different police agencies. Linda Slawson from the jurisdiction of the Portland city police, Jan Whitney from the I-5 freeway, policed by the Oregon State Police and Linn County Sheriff's officers, Karen Sprinker from the city of Salem, and Linda Salee from the city of Portland again.

  Whoever had taken them—and it had to be assumed that it was a male, and not a woman responsible—he was devious and clever.

  But not clever enough. Communication between law enforcement agencies is essential, and when a major case occurs, every agency within a prescribed area becomes aware of it. Something terrible was happening in northern Oregon, something that posed a threat to pretty young women, and bulletins and teletypes flooded every law-enforcement agency in the region. Descriptions of the missing girls and the circumstances of their disappearances were sent to the thirteen western states via teletype.

  Lane County detectives in Eugene, Oregon, forty-four miles south of Salem, watched the developments of the missing girls' cases closely. They had an unsolved homicide case whose victim resembled the other women. Mrs. Ja
net Shanahan, twenty-two, had been found strangled in the trunk of her car, the vehicle abandoned on a Eugene street only a day after Linda Salee vanished.

  Janet Shanahan fit the victim profile quite closely; the M.O. was different, however, in that her body had been found. But in trying to figure a phantom killer's M.O., this was a significant break in the pattern. Further, the other women had disappeared in time periods that were at least a month apart. That, too, stamped the Shanahan case as outside the pattern.

  Whatever the answer was, lawmen moved with speed. They did not want to think that, when the end of May approached, there would be another abduction—that still another young woman would fall prey to the faceless marauder who seemed to rove at will through their territory, picking off one beautiful victim after another.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Long Tom River is a narrow tributary that branches off the powerful Willamette River some twelve miles south of Corvallis. It wends its way south for twenty-four miles and finally empties into the Fern Ridge Reservoir just west of Eugene. Rushing between banks choked with thick underbrush, the Long Tom is an excellent river to fish—for those who know the prime spots. Except for the hamlets of Monroe and Cheshire, there are no towns close to the Long Tom; it is a country river, and hardly known to those who don't live in the area where it flows. In places it is grand and picturesque, but in other spots the Long Tom is as lonely and bleak as a ghost river.

  Until 1961 the Irish Bend Road crossed the Long Tom through an ancient covered bridge, one of the few still standing in the Northwest. The weathered structure is reminiscent of the covered bridges in Pennsylvania and New England. By 1961 modern vehicles found the passage through the old bridge far too tight a squeeze, and a new concrete bridge was built parallel to the old—but preservationists insisted that the old Bundy Bridge be saved. And so it remained in 1969, a relic of the past whose foundations nudged the new bridge crossing—no longer functional for anything but to give shelter to fishermen when the wind wailed along the river and rain dripped down the brims of their hats.

  The Bundy Bridge site is one of the busiest along the river, but in comparison to city rivers, it is still a quiet spot. In winter and early spring the Long Tom creeps high up on the pillars that support the new bridge, full of rain and melted-snow runoff from mountains and foothills.

  By May 10 the river had fallen back, and lapped listlessly at the double quintet of concrete pillars. A man could stand close to shore now and the water would reach only his waist. Old timbers caught on naked saplings and choked the shallows, looking like sea creatures drawn from the bottom. But the bank vegetation had begun to green, and there were a few spring daisies and wild irises brightening the weeds there.

  A lone fisherman parked his truck on the Irish Bend Road that Saturday and gathered his gear for an afternoon of fishing. The sky was leaden and full of clouds that lowered overhead and threatened to burst and spill their substance at any moment. No matter; neither fish nor fishermen mind rain.

  The angler walked onto the Bundy Bridge and peered down into the muddied water. He shivered involuntarily as a sudden gust of wind pulled at his jacket. He watched a flight of water birds lift off the far shore and wing downstream, and thought how deserted the Long Tom seemed. An occasional car had swept by on the road, but when the traffic disappeared, it seemed as if he could hear every crackle in the brush along the bank.

  He hunched his shoulders and turned back to the river, looking for a good spot to drop his line. He didn't want to get it caught on one of the tree snags and spend a half-hour getting disentangled.

  The current caught his lure and tugged it downstream. He cast again, farther out.

  And then he saw something.

  A large bulky object floated just beneath the surface of the Long Tom, twisting lazily in the drift, but caught by something that held it fast. It wasn't a log; it seemed too soft for that, and yet too solid to be only a bundle of cloth. He watched it idly, and felt an odd prickling at the back of his neck.

  The fisherman laid his pole carefully on the bank and sidestepped down, placing his feet tentatively the damp weeds. He caught onto a maple sapling and hung out over the river to get a closer look.

  He saw, but could not compute what he saw for a moment or two—and then he reeled back in horror, almost losing his footing and plunging into the Long Tom himself. The object in the river was a human being. He could see fine light hair fan out and undulate in the river's flow, and caught a glimpse of pale flesh.

  He did not wait to see if it was a man or a woman caught in the river, or even to wonder how the body had come to be there. He was up the bank in three leaps, and headed for his truck.

  The call came in to the Benton County sheriff's office, and Sheriff Charles E. Reams dispatched deputies to the Long Tom River. The deputies radioed back that the presence of a body in the Long Tom had been confirmed. It was that of a young woman.

  "She's been in the river some time," the officer reported. "And she didn't just fall in. The body's weighted down with a car transmission."

  The news that a young woman's body had been found was electrifying to detectives in northern Oregon, and investigators in Salem and Portland waited anxiously to hear who she was and how she had died. Since the body had been found in Benton County, the case was technically and legally under the jurisdiction of Sheriff Reams's department, but Reams and Benton County District Attorney Frank Knight were fully aware of the wider ramifications. If this woman proved to be one of the missing women, it would be the first break—however tragic—in the baffling cases.

  District Attorney Frank Knight is what lawmen call a "policemen's D.A.," an indefatigable worker who stays with a case from the very beginning. Stovall would voice his admiration for Knight many times over the weeks that followed. "He's the kind of D.A. we most admire—he's with us all the way, always available. If we need legal input in a hurry, he's there. From the moment that first body was found in the Long Tom, Knight was part of the team. He never got in the way of our scene investigations, but he put in as many twenty-four-hour days as the rest of us did."

  The road leading to the Bundy Bridge was cordoned off, and only lawmen and officials from the Oregon State Medical Examiner's Office were allowed to cross the barriers. Reams and Knight stood by as the girl's body was lifted from the Long Tom and carried up the bank.

  It was not an easy task; the deputies who had gone into the river were strong, husky men, but the girl, when weighted down by the transmission, weighed almost two-hundred pounds.

  She was a short woman, and quite fair. She had ash-blond hair and blue eyes. They had somehow expected that it would be Karen Sprinker, but it was not. Karen had been taller and was a brunette.

  This girl was young too, and the waters of the Long Tom had been cold, preserving her body with the heedless tenderness of nature. A beige coat still clung to the body, but many of her garments were gone—either torn away by the current or deliberately removed by the killer who had put her into the river.

  William Brady, Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Oregon, was on his way from Portland, and the body would not be moved until he arrived. In the meantime, Reams sent deputies to canvass the countryside to see if anyone might have seen something or someone dumping a heavy burden into the Long Tom.

  It was a fruitless task. The closest farmhouse was a good half-mile from the Bundy Bridge. No nearby resident had seen anything suspicious. It was likely that the disposal of the body had taken place under cover of darkness.

  Throughout the day, into the night, and for days following, the bridge over the Long Tom would be the site of intense police investigation.

  Dr. William Brady arrived to make a preliminary examination of the dead girl. Brady is one of the foremost forensic pathologists in America, a tall, dapper man who dresses more like a visiting ambassador than a working medical examiner. He eschews the coveralls worn by most investigators at a grisly crime scene, and yet he does his work so deftly that he emerges
as immaculate as when he arrives.

  Brady came to Oregon from New York City. He was a forensic pathologist in the Manhattan office of the New York City Medical Examiner's Office before he set up the most sophisticated state medical examiner's system in the country. Oregon abolished the coroner system in 1956, and today its medical examiner's system is a model for other states.

  Because Oregon is essentially a rural state with the bulk of its population in Portland, Salem, and Eugene, Brady feels that law-enforcement agencies in small communities should have the benefit of the expertise of a state medical examiner. No body may be removed in a suspicious death until removal has been authorized by a deputy medical examiner, and thereafter it is not to be undressed, washed, or otherwise prepared before autopsy.

  Too many wrongful deaths go undetected in areas without a medical examiner's system, because once vital physical evidence is lost, it can never be recovered. Too many victims of wrongful death are buried without autopsy, and the killers' secrets are buried with them.

  Oregon has never had more than 150 murders in a given year, and only one-third of those merit intense investigation. When that murder rate is compared with statistics of cities like Houston, Miami, and Detroit, Oregon seems a safe place to live.

  But not for everyone. Not for the young woman who was transported to Dr. Brady's offices to await autopsy.

  The girl was Linda Salee. Detectives had suspected that it was she right from the beginning. Decomposition was moderate; it could not have been Linda Slawson or Jan Whitney. They had been gone too long for visual identification. Someone had taken Linda Salee more than seventy miles away from the Lloyd Center shopping mall, killed her, and then had thrown her away in the Long Tom.

  Her killer had made a tactical error. He had either misjudged the depth of the lonely river or had been unable to carry the weighted body out into the center of the river, where the depth was so much greater.