A Rage to Kill (12 page)

They had so many feelers out, looking for a link to Sharon’s apartment that the Thurston County detectives hadn’t noticed that the report from the phone company had yet to come in. It wasn’t a top priority. They needed something definite, though. All the theories in the world were interesting, but not something they could take to Thurston County Deputy Prosecutors George Darkenwald and Hank McCleary who had been assigned to the Mason case by Prosecutor Pat Sutherland.

And then, almost a month after they lost their daughter, Sharon Mason’s parents were sorting through mail that had been forwarded on to them in Aberdeen. They opened the envelope from the phone company and read down through the calls listed. Sharon’s father looked up, puzzled. He recognized most of the numbers but there were some he did not.

This was the information that the sheriff’s office had requested, but it had been mistakenly sent to Sharon’s parents. When Mr. Mason brought it to the investigators, they saw why he was concerned.

There it was. Two telephone calls made from Sharon’s apartment on the day she was murdered. The calls were both to San Diego.

The first call was placed at 10:40
A.M.
and lasted eight minutes. Sharon Mason was teaching school miles away, unaware that anyone was in her apartment using her phone. The second call was made at 4:40
P.M.
and lasted seven minutes. Less than ten minutes later, Sharon arrived home and hurried up the stairs to get her overnight bag.

It didn’t take long to find out who Sharon’s killer had called. The morning call had been to a middle-aged woman. When detectives called her and asked her who had called her from Tumwater, Washington, on February 23, she answered quickly, “Oh, that would have been Buddy—my son, Buddy Longnecker—Charles Longnecker, Jr.”

Buddy Longnecker.
Buddy Longnecker, who often lived in the log cabin in the woods behind Sharon Mason’s apartment.

Buddy’s mother said he had called her to say that he had a new job, and that he was on his lunch hour. He had asked to speak to his brothers and his uncle, but they weren’t home. His mother said he had seemed calm, cheerful and completely normal.

When Buddy had called back shortly before five, he had talked to a male relative—a man who had once been convicted of rape, and who had since been jailed once more after an arrest for sexual assault. His mother didn’t know what Buddy had said to him.

The man told the Thurston County detectives that Buddy had sounded fine, but that he had hung up hurriedly.

Buddy Longnecker’s use of his planned victim’s phone to make those calls was patently stupid. Didn’t he
know
that long distance calls were easily traceable? Apparently not. Still, the investigators were haunted by the picture of a man who had apparently spent a leisure ly day in a woman’s apartment, pawing through her private things while he waited for her to come home. Sharon Mason’s home had meant the world to her. She had felt safe there. It was so hideously ironic that one of the few places in the world where she felt secure was the spot where she was murdered.

It was time to bring Buddy Longnecker in. The Thurston County investigators staked out Al Wilkes’ house all night on March 23, ready to arrest Buddy if he showed up there since he wasn’t at the log house in the woods. It was very early in the morning when they saw the back door open and a slight figure emerge. It was Buddy. They saw that he was headed for the woods behind Sharon’s apartment house and radioed ahead to Sergeant Miller and Officer Strohmeyer of the Tumwater police to watch for him and arrest him.

Buddy Longnecker was brought in for questioning, read his rights under Miranda, and told why he was under arrest. He denied ever knowing Sharon or ever being in her home.

K. C. Jones told him that they knew he had been in Sharon’s apartment shortly before she was murdered. “You made calls from her phone,” he said flatly. “We have the records—we can show you. You’re a liar.”

Buddy glared back at Jones. “I am not a liar.”

K. C. Jones looked at Buddy Longnecker with disgust, while Paul Barclift sat quietly by, betraying no emotion at all.

Paul Barclift and K. C. Jones were playing a highly refined version of “good cop/bad cop,” and Longnecker bought it. He announced that he didn’t like Jones because Jones doubted his truthfulness. “I won’t talk to you,” Buddy said, “But I’ll talk to
him
if you leave.”

The Tumwater investigator nodded to Barclift and left the interrogation room. They didn’t care
which
of them got the truth as long as he confessed. As soon as the door closed, Buddy Longnecker broke into tears. He sobbed as he told Barclift that he was ready to tell the truth.

But Buddy Longnecker scarcely seemed to recognize fact from contrived fantasy. He wiped his eyes and began a bizarre story.

“I knew her,” he said earnestly. “I met Sharon a few weeks ago at the Southgate Shopping Center. She had a For Sale sign on her car—a 1972 Oldsmobile 360 Rocket Jet Automatic.”

That was an accurate description of Sharon’s yellow Oldsmobile, but as far as Barclift knew, she had had no plans to sell it. Longnecker continued his recollections. He insisted that he had become friends with Sharon, and that he had gone to her apartment “about fifteen times.” He even drew a crude sketch of the floor plan to prove his story, pointedly omitting the bedroom where Sharon had died.

That didn’t prove anything. Barclift knew that Buddy had been in the apartment. He had had plenty of time to memorize the floor plan during the day he spent there.

“I helped her correct school papers,” Buddy said. “And she gave me beer and wine.”

Sharon Mason didn’t drink, and first-graders didn’t do papers that required correcting. Paul Barclift fought to keep his incredulity from showing.

“Hey,” Buddy said. “We weren’t romantically involved or anything—”

“Really.”

Buddy said he knew nothing about Sharon Mason’s murder, only what he had heard on the radio. “I went there, all right, to make those two phone calls. But I left before she came home. I didn’t even know she died until I heard the news the next day.”

“She let you go into her apartment to make calls, did she?” Barclift asked. “And you just met her because her car was for sale? Nobody else told us her car was for sale.”

Buddy Longnecker studied the wall behind Barclift, blinking rapidly. “Well, really I met her when I was hitchhiking. She picked me up.”

Paul Barclift knew what Sharon’s lifestyle had been like. She would no more have picked up a hitchhiker than she would have gone big-game hunting. The kid was lying.

“We smoked some pot together in her car,” Buddy said.

Barclift wasn’t as confrontational as K. C. Jones had been, but he quietly pointed out to Buddy that he could not have known Sharon Mason to be saying such things about her. “You’re not even close to describing the kind of woman she was. I don’t think you knew her at all.”

“Yes, I did. I knew her really good,” Buddy insisted.

At length, Buddy Longnecker changed his story once more, although he insisted that he had been an invited guest in Sharon’s apartment. He admitted that he had been responsible for her death, but that it had all been a terrible accident. “I had these ‘Numchucks’ [Nunchaku Sticks], and I was playfully showing her how they worked.”

Barclift knew that the sticks were deadly weapons. They were developed in the South Sea islands centuries ago. Nunchaku Sticks were made of extremely hard wood, connected by a rope or thong. Their inventors used them to thresh grain, but they doubled as lethal weapons. If one stick was held in the hand, and the other whirled, it could split a brick—or a skull—like an eggshell. Remembering the way Sharon Mason’s head had been struck, her teeth shattered, made Barclift wince.

Buddy had been taught to use Numchucks by his friend, Al Wilkes. “See, Sharon found me waiting when she came home from work, and she invited me in,” he said. “And she and I were smoking dope and drinking brewskis and she asked me how they worked.”

Barclift asked Buddy why no one in the apartment house had seen him hanging around her front door, and he said he didn’t know.

“Did you write anything in her apartment?” the detective asked quickly. Buddy Longnecker paused for a moment before he answered.

“I wrote on her mirror.”

That was it. That was something that no one but Sharon Mason’s killer could have known. “What did you write?” Barclift asked.

“I wrote, ‘You didn’t keep the deal.’ See, she was pretty loose and she wanted to know what would happen if a person hit certain places [with the sticks]. The
deal
was that I would show her if she didn’t get hostile. We started running around and she went in the bedroom and fell, and blood started coming out of her mouth.”

“What did she hit when she fell?”

“She knocked the radio off the dresser.”

There had been no radio in Sharon Mason’s bedroom. “Did you take the radio?” Barclift asked.

“I broke it up, and threw it away in the garbage cans at Al’s . . .I didn’t mean to do it.”

He was talking now about killing Sharon Mason, but he continued in his version of their deadly encounter. He insisted that she had been playing with the Numchucks and he’d been trying to teach her how to use them when she accidentally hit herself in the mouth.

Buddy Longnecker veered off into a self-serving description of Sharon’s last moments, saying that she had asked him to kill her after her teeth were accidentally broken. He recalled hitting her four or five times with the powerful sticks. Then he had gotten a steak knife from the kitchen and stabbed her in the neck.

Paul Barclift barely managed to keep his voice steady. “Did you undress her?”

“When we were running around, we started to get, you know, sexually involved. She wasn’t hurt at that point. She took off her clothes.” Buddy insisted that they had had consensual sexual intercourse.

“Did you ever put your hands on Sharon Mason’s throat?”

“Yes. Because she wouldn’t stop shaking.”

He had an answer for everything, for all of Sharon’s wounds, all the while maintaining that they had happened “accidental.”

After he had left Sharon on the bed in her room, Buddy Longnecker said he had dumped out her purse. “And I found $75 in her coat pocket. I bent her driver’s license—to hide her identity.”

Buddy admitted taking the yellow Oldsmobile. “Al and I went ‘jeeping’ with it on the Army reservation.” That would explain why it was gone for hours, and returned covered with mud and weeds.

He said he had thrown her keys in the sword ferns behind her apartment house. (When detectives searched later, they found them there.)

Buddy said he had burned his bloodied clothing in the oil drum that served as a stove in the cabin. “The Numchucks?” He had thrown the broken sticks out in the woods, but he had come back later and gathered them up.

Once Buddy Longnecker told his story, the investigators found a lot of physical evidence that tied him inextricably to Sharon’s murder. What they never found, however, was a single shred of marijuana in her apartment, a beer bottle, a roach clip, or anything that would substantiate her killer’s claim that the two of them smoked and drank together.

When Barclift asked him about that, Buddy said that he had “picked up all the pot and roaches and took them with me.”

“Was there anything else written on her mirror?”

“Yes,” Buddy said. “ ‘P.S. And one more.’ ”

“What did that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“After everything was over, what did you do with the knife?”

“I was kneeling down after she was on the floor, and I poked it into the carpet—between her legs.”

“Is there anything else you would like to tell me?” Paul Barclift asked.

“Yes. Before I left, I told her I loved her.”

Charles “Buddy” Longnecker, Jr. was charged with Murder in the First Degree, First-Degree Rape and Second-Degree Burglary, and bound over for trial in Thurston County Superior Court. He entered a plea of guilty by reason of insanity.

There was no doubt any longer about who had destroyed Sharon Mason’s safe little world in a sudden, fierce attack. Buddy Longnecker had carried out a classic sexually sadistic homicide. The question was how he got to the place where he could plan and carry out such a cruel murder at the age of nineteen.

Buddy Longnecker’s parents had divorced when he was a small child, and although he called his mother on the day of Sharon Mason’s murder, she did not raise him. He was separated from her when he was about six—the age of Sharon’s first-graders. By the time he was in his teens, he was a drifter with no real home. He had been arrested for burglary before. The most telling arrest was for entering the bedroom of a sleeping woman. As she slept, unaware that an intruder moved quietly nearby, Buddy stole her purse and her car keys.

The progression of sexual sociopathy is relentless. Most rapists begin with seemingly innocuous crimes: window peeping and exposing. Sometimes, they move on to fetishes; they steal women’s panties and bras from clothes lines and laundromats or collect their shoes. When those activities no longer satisfy, they move on to closer contact, contriving more stimulating scenarios. Buddy Longnecker had entered at least one woman’s home and pawed through her things. There were probably others. He climbed a tree with his clumsily-built ladder to his perch where he could observe Sharon’s apartment. He must have known her routine perfectly. He knew when she left for work, and when she came home. He knew that she left each weekend, although he probably didn’t know where she went. At length, he broke into her car to get her house keys.