A Rage to Kill (11 page)

She had been only two steps from safety; all she had meant to do was pick up her overnight bag and leave.

Although her murder was accomplished with excessive force and by several methods, it was quite possible that the slender school teacher was unconscious almost at once. The detectives hoped so.

Sharon Mason’s murder was the first in Tumwater in a dozen years. Because the Tumwater Police Department had so little experience in homicide investigation, they turned to Thurston County Sheriff Don Redmond’s staff for help. Wes Barclift was the mayor of Tumwater, and his brother, Paul, was one of Redmond’s top detectives. Assisting were Chief of Detectives Dwight Caron and Detective Sergeant Dick Nelson.

Sharon’s death sparked an all-out investigation, even though Redmond’s men sensed that her murder would go unsolved. Some homicide victims had a lifestyle that placed them in the path of homicidal violence. Sharon Mason had been a complete innocent. Any thread that linked her to her killer seemed to be so tenuous that it would be virtually impossible to detect.

“You don’t make a whole lot of enemies teaching first grade, spending weekends with your aging parents, and staying at home watching television,” Redmond commented.

And, of course, he was right. Sharon Mason was the least likely candidate for murder Redmond had ever encountered.

Dr. Donald Nachoneckny, Assistant Medical Examiner of King County, was asked to perform the autopsy on Sharon. An autopsy, translated, means “to see for one’s self.” Although victims can no longer say who hurt them, or how they died, the postmortem examination of the body can speak volumes about the truth of what happened.

Sharon had been struck forcefully on the head, and then she had been strangled manually. Human hands had left finger-shaped bruises on her throat. In a delicate victim, death by strangulation occurs quickly, sometimes within moments.

Sharon Mason had been a virgin, but while she was unconscious, her attacker had removed her slacks and her underwear and had “raped” her with a foreign object. There was no physical evidence of normal intercourse, although acid phosphatase tests on her girdle produced the bright reddish-purple reaction that indicates the presence of semen.

She had been alive, but unconscious, when the carotidartery on the left side of her neck was severed, causing massive bleeding.

There were other, postmortem (after death) wounds on her right thigh. But these long cuts had not bled.

Nachoneckny informed the Thurston County detectives that someone—undoubtedly the killer—had moved Sharon’s body some hours after death. Livor mortis, or lividity, is the purplish staining that appears on the lowest regions of a body when the heart stops pumping blood. When the body is moved before lividity is complete, a secondary pinkish coloration appears along the nether regions of the new position. This, the medical examiner said, had occurred in Sharon’s case.

The investigators already knew that Sharon’s killer had done a great deal of “staging” in her apartment, as if he relished the reaction of the detectives who would try to figure out who he was. They suspected he had stayed in her apartment for a long time after she died. For one thing, the witness who saw Sharon’s car out front at five had watched it sporadically all Monday evening until ten—when it was gone. But then it was back the next morning, in its allocated parking spot.

The killer had carefully created the scene in the bedroom. The lower half of Sharon’s bedspread was stained red, and so was the carpet beside it. The killer had deliberately driven a bloody steak knife into the carpet between his victim’s legs, a phallic symbol that was an especially grim sight next to the birthday cards that spilled from her coat pocket.

More shocking and baffling, however, were the words scrawled across the mirror above the chest of drawers in Sharon’s bedroom. The killer had written his message in two shades of her lipstick: DIDNT [
sic
] KEEP THE DEAL. P.S. ONE MORE . . .”

(It was a communication method used by one of the most infamous serial killers in America. In the nineteen-forties, William Heirens, 17, left a lipstick message on the bedroom wall near the body of Frances Brown, a middle-aged nurse. It read, “Catch Me Before I Kill More . . .”)

What did Sharon Mason’s killer mean? What kind of a “deal” could a woman like Sharon Mason have made with a man capable of such violence? It seemed totally implausible—but there it was written in scarlet on her mirror.

The rest of the elegant apartment was clean. The bathroom had not one speck of blood in it; even when the trap in the sink was removed, there was nothing to indicate the killer had washed up there; the plush bath mat was in place, as was the crystal container of fancy soaps on the sink, and the box of bath powder on the back of the toilet.

Technicians dusted every surface of the apartment for latent prints, sketched the rooms to scale, and photographed every room. Now, the real work would start. The investigative team from the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office fanned out to begin questioning the first of over three hundred people who would be questioned before Sharon Mason’s murder was solved.

Paul Barclift talked to the shocked and disbelieving staff at the Roosevelt Elementary School. Sharon Mason had been one of the most admired teachers there, calm and loving with her first-graders, and always ready to help out with school projects. While she had no close friends at school, no one described her as stand-offish or unfriendly; she was simply “a very private person.”

Sharon had talked often about her parents. “She was superclose to them,” one teacher recalled. But as far as her teacher friends knew, Sharon didn’t date, and didn’t even have a close woman friend.

Sharon’s parents told the detectives that they felt they knew her better than anyone in the world, and they knew of no strong attachments she might have had to anyone outside the family. If there had been someone, or if she was frightened about anything, they were positive she would have told them.

Yes, she was afraid of the dark. Yes, everyone agreed that she had been unusually cautious. Was it possible that she had a kind of black presentiment of doom that some potential murder victims seem to feel? Or was Sharon’s unusual vigilance due to the fear of a
real
person or situation that she had told no one about? Certainly, she had reason to be afraid during the last twelve hours of her life because she
knew
that someone had chosen her car to break into—that someone had stolen the key to her apartment.

Was it within the realm of possibility that Sharon had had a secret lover? If she had, it would have been a love unconsummated because the autopsy findings had verified that she was a virgin. Was it an affair only of the heart, or an affair that had never begun? Perhaps Sharon’s lack of interest in making friends or in participating in activities beyond her parents and homemaking stemmed from a passion that was as secret as it was powerful. Had she promised to marry someone—and then reneged? Had she promised not to reveal a love for a married man—and then done so?

What was the “deal” she didn’t keep? Or was it simply a red herring?

Even a woman who kept secrets from the world had to tell
someone.
If Sharon had had a lover, surely she would have entertained him at her apartment, or left at night to meet him. No one had ever seen her with a male companion in the apartment complex, in a restaurant, or at a movie. She was always alone when she registered at the motel where she stayed during power blackouts. And the motel maids said they had never found any sign at all that she had had company there.

The more they found out about the circumspect life that Sharon Mason had lived, the more the sheriff’s detectives felt the lipstick-scribbled words had no connection to her at all.

But the P.S. alarmed the investigators. What did the killer mean by “P.S. ONE MORE . . .? Did another woman have to die before they caught him?

The killer they sought was either very clever or very lucky. All the physical evidence retrieved from Sharon’s apartment was sent to the Western Division of the Washington State Crime Lab in Seattle to be compared with known samples. The steak knife used in the murder could be matched exactly to others found in Sharon Mason’s kitchen drawer. There were no prints in the apartment but Sharon’s. The hair sample clinging to her coat was not her own—but there were no hair samples found to compare it with. The blood in the apartment was all Sharon’s. The killer apparently hadn’t cut himself during the violent attack.

Paul Barclift wondered how an attack of such ferocity could have taken place without Sharon’s upstairs neighbor’s hearing it. Barclift sent K. C. Jones to interview the upstairs neighbor who had heard the unusual sounds the night she was murdered while he himself waited in Sharon’s apartment.

“I shouted and banged on the floor,” Barclift said, “but K.C. didn’t even hear me upstairs. With the neighbor’s television on and his kitchen fan going, there was no way he could have heard Sharon as she was fighting for her life—nothing beyond those three soft cries.”

There was the mystery of Sharon’s Oldsmobile. The neighbor saw it at five and at ten, as clean and shining as she always kept it. The next morning, it was covered with mud and vegetation. Sergeant Dick Nelson collected samples of the dirt and weeds from the undercarriage of the car and took them to the geologists at the Washington State Highway Department’s Materials Lab in the hope that they would be able to pinpoint the area where the car might have been. Unfortunately, both the weeds and the mud were common to many spots in Thurston County.

It was a long shot, a routine procedure in a frustrating homicide investigation. Another far-out possibility was that there might be something in Sharon Mason’s phone records that could help them find her killer. The investigators asked Pacific Northwest Bell for a copy of long distance calls made to and from Sharon’s apartment. The phone company representatives said they would forward a report as soon as the records could be compiled.

The area around the apartment house had been searched once, and it was searched again. The investigators found nothing in the building itself, and nothing in the parking lot. Several hundred yards behind the apartment property, the fir forest thickened and the shadows were deep even during the daytime. Among those trees, they found a rude dwelling—a log cabin made of saplings and interior tar paper walls. It was heated with a crude pot-bellied stove fashioned from a barrel. The floors were hard-packed dirt. It looked as if no one had lived in the shack for a long time. With the gaps in between the log walls, it would have been freezing in the wintertime.

Paul Barclift and K. C. Jones talked to people who lived in neighboring houses and learned that teenagers had built the place one summer a few years back, planning to use it as a clubhouse.

“Nobody lives there permanently,” a neighbor said. “Sometimes we’ll see smoke coming out of the chimney, though.”

Walking back through the woods, the detectives saw the apartment house emerge in their line of vision. They came to a jerry-built ladder made of two-by-fours where someone had leaned it against a tree. Testing it first, Barclift climbed up into the tree. He realized that someone standing on this perch could look down into the windows of the apartment house below. He felt a chill and wondered if someone had watched Sharon Mason’s windows and seen her as she moved around her apartment. Had her killer stood here and developed a sadistic obsession for her?

His hands sticky from the tree sap, Barclift climbed down and gestured to Jones to climb the tree. They agreed that someone had a bird’s-eye view of Sharon’s windows.

The two detectives looked now for the teenagers who had built the log shack, or who might have used it. They finally found two boys who admitted they had been up to the cabin.

“We met some guy up there,” one of the kids said. “He’s about twenty. He says his name is ‘Buddy.’ We gave him a lift to his friend’s house—guy named Al Wilkes*.”

K. C. Jones knew Al Wilkes. He was on probation for burglary, but he was a small-time crook with far more nerve than brains. He had no record of violent crimes, particularly not violent sex crimes. “He lives with his father,” Jones told Barclift.

When the two detectives went to the Wilkes home, they asked about someone named Buddy. Al Wilkes nodded and said that Buddy Longnecker sometimes bunked at their place. In fact, Buddy was there now. Buddy Longnecker was nineteen, a short, skinny kid who looked as though the next wind off nearby Black Lake would blow him away. Buddy said that he wasn’t working at the moment and lived mostly with friends. He readily admitted that he sometimes lived in the little log shack in the woods, but he shook his head when they mentioned Sharon Mason’s name.

“Nope,” he said. “I don’t believe I’ve met her.” And it wasn’t likely that he had, the investigators thought. Sharon was eighteen years older, and a world apart in social status, interests and education. Buddy and Al became simply two more names on a long list of people they had talked to. It had been three weeks, and the Thurston County detectives had checked on the whereabouts of dozens of known sex offenders in the Olympia area. They hadn’t been able to place any of them at Sharon Mason’s apartment, in the woods behind it, or around the school where she taught.

They were holding their collective breath, but there had not been “one more” killing, and they hoped that that message on Sharon’s mirror had been an act of bravado and not a sick promise. They had been unable to find any other sexual attacks or homicides with an M.O. that was similar to the Tumwater teacher’s murder. Research told them that sexual sadists enjoyed the “staged murder scene,” and the man they sought had played out a flamboyantly cruel drama.