A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases Read online

  Someone must have known Morris’s habits, or someone had followed him from the Lion’s Share. Whoever it was, Morris hadn’t been afraid when his killer came up to him. He was probably carrying the open bottle of beer in his hand, a bottle that fell at his feet when he was shot. He hadn’t shouted out a threat or a warning. He hadn’t called out for help.

  Muzzall routinely took a blood sample, which he would send to the Washington State Toxicology Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle for analysis.

  Muzzall removed some battered slugs and a number of bullet fragments from the victim’s skull. Their combined weight suggested strongly that they were .22s. Robert Brimmer marked them into evidence and locked them in a file cabinet in his office until he could mail them to the Washington State Police Crime Lab for testing. The casings (or shells) that had once held them had not been found. If the murder gun was a revolver, the cylinder would have retained the casings until the shooter deliberately tipped them out. If the gun had been an automatic, it would have ejected the shell and slid a new bullet into firing position after every shot.

  They couldn’t be sure which kind of gun they were looking for. If the gun was an automatic, there should be shells at the crime scene. The investigators hadn’t found any yet, but they had had to search in dim light in high grass with patches of snow on the ground. For all they knew, the bullet casings were still lying somewhere on the Blankenbaker’s lawn.

  Sergeant Brimmer had locked the Budweiser bottle and the Lincoln log in the evidence vault on the second floor of the Yakima Police Department. He dusted the brown bottle now with light fingerprint powder, but he could bring up nothing but smudges; there were no distinctive loops, ridges, or whorls that might give him the information that either the victim or the killer had held that bottle.

  One of the most convoluted murder investigations the Yakima detectives had ever known—an intricate murder probe that any big city detective would have found baffling—was just beginning.

  One of the people Brimmer talked to early on was a staff member at Davis High School. For the first time, he learned that there “was an indication of hard feelings between Morris and Mr. Moore.”

  It was like the first little wisp of smoke from a smoldering hidden fire. Brimmer knew Gabby, and he couldn’t imagine the beloved coach would do something like shoot a friend in the face and the back of the head. But he would have to look into it.

  When Jerilee came out of the worst of her shock and hysteria, she thought of the only person she knew who had resented Morris. As impossible as it seemed—even to her—she began to wonder, and she felt she had to mention her doubts to the police. Gabby had always told her that she would come back to him, if it weren’t for Morris. She knew that Gabby didn’t just love her; he was totally obsessed with her. He had let his job slide, he had let his athletes down, and his relentless drinking had made him turn on his own children. He blamed it all on her, and then on Morris.

  She didn’t even want to think what she was thinking. Gabby had threatened so many times to kill himself in front of her, but he had never said anything about hurting Morris. Morris had always been so kind to Gabby. Even after what she and Gabby had done to him, Morris still treated Gabby with respect. He still called him “Coach,” and he had told her he couldn’t bring himself to hit Gabby a week before when he had broken into their house.

  No, she couldn’t imagine Gabby Moore killing Morris. But then, she couldn’t imagine anyone else killing Morris. Of all the things she had been afraid might happen, that was one eventuality that had never crossed her mind.

  Sergeant Brimmer called Gabby Moore and requested that he come down to the police station, asking him to bring any firearms he might own with him. Gabby did come to the station on that first Saturday afternoon, but he did not come prepared to talk to Brimmer. Instead, he said that anyone who was interested in talking to him would have to talk to his attorney. He had nothing to say.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Detective Vernon Henry Henderson had broken through barriers of one kind or another all of his life. Like Morris Blankenbaker, he had grown up in Yakima. But Morris was born there, and Vern arrived at the age of five, coming from the South to a world entirely different from the one he had known.

  “My mother, my sister, and I came from Shreveport, Louisiana,” Henderson said. “My grandfather was living up here already, and he called and told us to come on up here—that it was a better life. He owned some houses in Yakima and told my mother she could probably get a home up here. We moved up, and we were able to get a home.”

  It wasn’t easy; Vern’s mother, Leona, would work in a Yakima cannery her entire life. She was everything to her son—just as Olive was all things to Morris. Henderson’s sister, Joanne, died when she was only twelve, and he was working by that age thinning apples in the orchards, picking fruit when the trees grew heavy with ripe produce.

  As hard as they all had to work, the move did bring Leona Henderson’s family a better life. “When I was growing up, you could leave your house open,” Vern recalled. “And no one would go in it. And if someone did, we all knew who it was. We knew who the bad people were. Later, when I was on [police] patrol, I knew who the bad kids were, but now, you don’t know who they are, and that makes it real hard to investigate.”

  There was no father in Vern Henderson’s world, and while Morris Blankenbaker did have his father, Ned, in town to go to in a pinch, basically both Morris and Vern were being raised by their mothers. Athletics and the friendship of two of his peers, Les Rucker and Morris Blankenbaker, filled in most of the empty spaces in Vern’s life. They were family to him.

  “I met Morris at Washington Junior High,” Henderson recalled. “He showed up in either seventh or eighth grade.”

  That would have been when Olive left her court job in Vancouver, Washington, and headed back to her hometown. Vern said that Morris lived with his mother and his grandmother out near the river. Morris had always been blind to the color of anyone’s skin. He had played with Indian boys when he was smaller, and if you had asked him what color Vern Henderson and Les Rucker were, he probably would have had to think a moment to come up with “black.”

  There weren’t many blacks living in Yakima four or five decades ago. Vern remembered that he was one of only six at Washington Junior High and that there were eight black students at Davis High School when he attended.

  Over the years, many races would move into Yakima, but in the mid-fifties, there were very few Mexicans and the Indian population mostly lived south of town in Toppenish on the Yakima Indian Reservation. At Davis High, when Morris, Vern, and Les attended, out of the three hundred teenagers registered there was a total of twenty mixed-race students: blacks, Indians, and, perhaps, two or three Chinese. Yakima was a typical small-town orchard and farming community where it was “normal” to be white, and unusual to be any other color, unless you happened to be there to harvest the fruit or work in the fields, and then move on to another migrant worker camp. But the migrant kids rarely got a chance to attend school; they headed south with the first cold snap.

  While Morris treated everyone the same and didn’t notice that his school was mostly white, Vern Henderson did; he had come out of the Deep South to a far better life, just as his grandfather had promised, but he was still aware that he was a member of a minority race, and that he was truly in the minority at Davis High School.

  His mother had found them a house in the northeast area of town, an exclusively Caucasian section of Yakima. “Everything north of Yakima Avenue was white then,” he said. “South was where other races lived. … I even played on a baseball team where I was the only black, because all my friends were white.”

  In Yakima, Catholic teenagers went to Marquette High School, and all the rich kids who went to public school went to Eisenhower High School. Jerilee, several grades behind Vern and Morris, would go to Eisenhower. Later, Vern Henderson remembered that she had lived in a big house up near Thirty-second and
Inglewood. “There were no poor people up there.”

  Morris and Vern met Gabby Moore for the first time at Washington Junior High. He was the assistant wrestling coach then and they viewed him as the hero figure that most boys see in their coaches. They were twelve or thirteen, and Gabby was about twenty-one. The near-decade between them, of course, made a tremendous difference at that stage in their lives. Vern and Morris were awestruck by everything Gabby told them.

  “I remember,” Vern said, “that he taught us to always look our opponent in the eye to let him know what we were thinking, and that we weren’t afraid of him, and that we could beat him.”

  When Morris and Vern moved up to Davis High School, Gabby was their coach there too; he had a better job, coaching on the high school level. “Morris and I both weighed one hundred eighty-five pounds,” Vern said. “Gabby didn’t need two of us competing in that heavyweight category, and he made Morris lose ten pounds so he could wrestle at a lower weight.”

  “Me and Morris were just about even,” Vern said. “He was the only one I could go hand-to-hand with and come out even—anyone else, I could just tear apart.”

  Despite his prowess as an athlete, Vern Henderson never forgot what it felt like to be a kid who never had a father in the bleachers cheering him on, one who didn’t have a dad to take him to the Father-Son banquets or to the awards ceremonies. Lots of times, Morris’s dad couldn’t come either, and both Vern and Morris had mothers who were working so hard to support them that they couldn’t take time off. Vern and Morris and Les Rucker were a triumvirate against the world—more than friends—closer even than relatives.

  “Morris and Les were always there for me,” Vern recalled. “We were all there for each other.”

  Morris and Vern hung out together. You rarely saw one without the other. They didn’t go to each other’s homes that much, mostly because they were always playing football or wrestling or driving around town. Vern didn’t have a car, but Morris had a little white Volkswagen that Ned Blankenbaker had bought for him. Olive laughed, remembering it. “Those great big boys weighed that car down so much when they were all in it, they looked like they were sitting on the street!”

  Vern knew both Olive and Ned. “Morris’s dad had the music store and sometimes we’d go over and see him at the store. He was a solid, stocky man.” Morris’s half brother, Mike, was just a little kid then, a kid who idolized Morris.

  Like Morris, Vern belonged to the Lettermen’s Club and was on the “A” Squad of the baseball and football teams, as well as turning out for Gabby Moore’s wrestling squad. Vern and Morris were together so much that they actually could almost read each other’s minds. “I knew what Morris was thinking and he knew what I was thinking.” Vern smiled, remembering. “We could understand each other without talking. He knew if I was going to fight somebody, and he would walk up and stop me. And I’d walk up and stop him. We just knew each other. We knew each other.”

  Morris was not only a tremendously strong athlete; he also had an easygoing nature and reasonable turn of mind. He could always see the other guy’s point of view. When he saw that Vern, who kept so much inside, was about to blow, he could step in and calm him down with a word or two.

  Davis High School played in the AAA Football League and went up against Wenatchee and Richland, and, of course, Eisenhower. Vern played left halfback, Les Rucker played right halfback, and Morris played fullback. Dutch Schultz was their head coach, and Gabby assisted.

  Even though the three musketeers would scatter—Morris and Les to Washington State University, and Vern to Central—Gabby Moore was a hero to all three through their high school years, and after. Lives in a small town are closely interwoven. Almost everyone knew each other and secrets weren’t really secrets. Back then, Gabby seemed like the last man in the world to have secrets. He was a straight shooter, a good teacher, and a good coach whose athletes looked up to him. And he didn’t live by a double standard. If the boys couldn’t drink—and they couldn’t—he didn’t drink. If he ordered his wrestlers to diet, he dieted right along with them.

  Vern Henderson and Morris Blankenbaker took his every word for gospel.

  The friendship between Morris Blankenbaker and Vern Henderson only became stronger as the years went by. Vern laughed as he recalled that he was “serious about every girl I ever met—but not Morris,” he said, suddenly sober. “I never saw him serious about anyone but Jerilee. Oh, he’d talk to girls at the movies or something, but Jerilee was the only one for him.”

  Vern and Morris both went off to college, working evenings and summers to pay for it. Vern married young, the first of their group to do so. He fathered two sons. He was working for the City of Yakima, driving a garbage truck while Morris was working nights in the state mental hospital.

  They both had dreams. Morris had always wanted to become a teacher and a coach. Vern Henderson dreamed of being a policeman and one day a detective. “I always thought I wanted to be a policeman because I thought that would be nice—working and helping people,” Vern recalled. “But I really thought that I never had a chance to be in law enforcement, if you want to know the truth. Back in those days, you didn’t see any black policemen, not in Yakima. I wanted to work in the juvenile section; that’s where I wanted to be, working with kids.”

  When Vern graduated from Davis and went to Yakima Valley Community College, and then Central Washington University at Ellensburg, he held on to that ambition. “A lot of my friends were becoming policemen. Jim Beaushaw, who was a quarterback and was a couple of years ahead of us—he became a police officer. And then a few others.” Jim said, ‘Vern, it would be a good job for you. You relate well with people.”’

  Vern Henderson told Jim he would give it a try. He took the test for patrolman. ” They had one opening,” he remembered. “And the first time I took the test, I didn’t pass high enough. And then I said to myself, ‘Wait a minute. I can do better than this. I know these guys are not smarter than me.’ I went back and I studied, and eight guys took the test and they had one opening again. This time, though, I came out number one.”

  That was in 1968. Chief Robert Madden hired Vern Henderson—the first black police officer ever in Yakima. It was the fulfillment of Vern’s impossible dreams.

  In 1968 Gabby Moore was bringing glory to Davis High with his wrestling squads. Morris and Jerilee had moved back to Yakima from Tacoma and she was pregnant with her first child. And Vern Henderson was a young patrolman, cruising the streets of Yakima.

  Eighteen months later, Vern was sent “upstairs” to tryout as a detective working in the juvenile section. “They were having a lot of problems with juvenile black gangs,” he said. “They knew that I knew a lot of the kids. After I stayed there for three or four months, I went back down ‘on the line.’ But I was only there for thirty days. I’d made so many arrests in juvenile that they said, ‘You’re going back upstairs,’ and that’s where I was for the next ten years.”

  Over those years, Vern Henderson would work five years in juvenile, and then in the “regular” detective unit. He worked all manner of cases: burglary, auto theft, and homicides. His being black often gave him a leg up with many of the informants and suspects.

  In the juvenile division, Vern could speak the same language as many of the kids who were brought in. “I understood them and I could talk to them. They knew I was serious when I said they could trust what I said.”

  Whenever there was a problem in the black community, it was Vern Henderson who was sent to represent the Yakima Police Department. He felt very confident then; it was only decades later that he marveled at his temerity in thinking he could handle the emerging gang problem single-handedly. It was decades later too when he would look back with some regret on a decision he had had to make—a decision that would weaken forever the link he had forged with members of his own race.

  By 1974 both Morris Blankenbaker and Vern Henderson were almost thirty-two, and they had realized their goals. Morris was teaching socio
logy at Washington Junior High School and expecting to coach there too. The two men were still close friends, possibly closer than ever.

  One day the Yakima City water line sprung a leak somewhere beneath the surface of the Yakima River. Someone had to dive down and try to locate the break. Both Vern and Morris were skilled SCUBA divers. “They couldn’t pay me,” Vern recalled, “because I was already on the City payroll, so I went and got Morris. We tied a rope around him and I stayed on shore and held on and he swam out and dove until he found the leak.”

  Morris was still strong as a bull, and a natural swimmer. Symbolically, one or the other of them was always holding the “rope” for the other, as if they could somehow keep each other safe.

  Although Vern and his wife didn’t socialize much with Morris and Jerilee, Vern had gotten to know Jerilee when he visited Morris, and he found her a gracious hostess, a pretty woman who kept a neat house. She seemed devoted to Morris. And Morris clearly adored her.

  When Morris told him that Gabby Moore was moving in with him and Jerilee for a while, Vern didn’t think much about it. Everyone knew that Gabby was having a rough time over his divorce from Gay. The word was that Gabby had begun to drink—something that none of his athletes had ever seen before. Vern was soon aware that Gabby became unreasonably jealous and suspicious when he drank, and heard the rumors that Gay Moore couldn’t leave the house on the most innocent of errands without Gabby suspecting she was on her way to some romantic assignation. No marriage could survive long under that kind of pressure, and Gabby’s hadn’t.

  It never occurred to Vern Henderson that Gabby would pose any threat to Morris’s marriage. He was astonished when Morris stopped by the police station one day in the early spring of 1974 to see him. Morris didn’t look very happy, and Vern led him to a quiet corner of the detective unit.