A Rage to Kill (14 page)

He did not call again.

By April 5, tension was still thick on Queen Anne Hill. Extra patrol cars did little to alleviate the citizens’ concern. More than two hundred people had been interviewed, and not one had information that brought detectives any closer to the blue-eyed killer.

In downtown Seattle, cabby Ben Noyes, fifty-two, picked up a fare, a slender youth with red hair and hard blue eyes that bore right into Noyes’ own. “Just drive south,” he ordered, “I’ll give you the address later.”

This was the kind of fare that cab drivers hated. Riders without specific addresses were usually trouble. Sighing, Noyes headed out 10th Avenue South toward Beacon Hill, but he never got an address; instead he felt a gun poking him in the back. His passenger assured him he wouldn’t get hurt if he stayed calm and followed orders. They stopped in a thickly wooded area.

The gunman took all the cash Noyes had, but it was only ten one-dollar bills, hardly enough to warrant a drawn gun. “Now, turn around and head toward Queen Anne Hill,” the passenger ordered.

As they drove north, he made conversation that did nothing to allay Noyes’ fears. “That’s where I killed a lady in a store a couple of weeks ago,” he said laconically.

Just like everybody else in Seattle, Noyes had heard about the Blossom Braham killing. He was scared. If the guy was telling him the truth, he had shot an innocent woman for no reason at all. Noyes figured he was in trouble—and he was. A moment later, the gun roared in the back seat and a bullet tore into the upholstery just behind his back. He wondered if he’d been hit; maybe he was so badly injured he was in shock and couldn’t feel it. And then he realized he hadn’t been shot at all—only the padding in the seat behind his back had been.

“I just wanted you to know this gun is loaded,” the red-headed kid said. “So no funny tricks.”

They were on Third Avenue West when the gunman told Noyes to stop. “Don’t call the police,” he warned as he left the cab and ran down the street.

Noyes did just that, of course, calling his dispatcher.

Officer Harold Countryman was on an assignment checking parking lots for stolen cars when he heard the call. He was only two blocks away and he wheeled his patrol car around and headed for Third West. As he did so, he saw a young male matching the suspect’s description jaywalking just ahead of him. When he saw the police car, the boy broke into a run and disappeared into an alley.

Countryman caught the runner in his spotlight. He turned and faced the officer with a gun in his hand. Countryman leapt from his patrol unit with
his
gun drawn and shouted to the kid to surrender. The red-haired youth hesitated for a fraction of a minute, and then he threw his gun down. Countryman handcuffed him and notified other units of his location.

Was this truly Blossom Braham’s killer, or just a punk kid who had bragged about it to give himself some status?

Detectives Bob Honz and Bill Pendergast questioned the suspect. He said his name was Michael Andrew Olds, he was seventeen, and he gave them an address on First Avenue West as his home—it was only six blocks from the Samuels store.

They questioned him and he played cat and mouse with them, first hinting that he was the person who had shot Blossom Braham, and then backing off. It was four in the morning when Michael Olds finally agreed to give them details of the killing.

He was cocky as he related the story, almost like a child playing cops and robbers. It was hard for the detectives to picture this kid, whose cheeks were still covered with downy fuzz instead of whiskers, as a cold-blooded killer, but he was telling them things that only the shooter could know. Olds claimed that he thought Jay Samuels had moved his hands after he’d warned him not to move. “I meant to kill him,” Olds said. “But she got in the way.”

Later he changed his story. “I’m sure it was no accident. I shot her twice, didn’t I?”

Olds seemed almost to revel in the notoriety he’d provoked, and over the next few days he made himself accessible to newsmen who flocked to the jail to see him. A reporter asked him if he was sorry about killing Mrs. Braham, and he gave an incredibly callous answer.

“At first I thought about the woman’s family and I was pretty shook up,” he said. “But I decided her husband would probably marry again anyway so I stopped thinking about it. I would have killed that cop, too, but he had that spotlight in my eyes and I couldn’t see and I figured he had a gun.”

Ballistics tests showed that Olds’ gun was the weapon used to kill Blossom Braham. He had stolen it in a robbery in the north end a few days before the murder. Olds reveled in his infamy, and enjoyed seeing his picture in the paper, even though he was going to spend his eighteenth birthday in jail. He had never had any identity and now he did.

Michael Olds was charged with first degree murder and robbery and went on trial on December 11, 1961. He pleaded innocent by reason of mental irresponsibility. Olds’ sordid and unhappy past became familiar to Seattle readers. The pictures of him in the newspaper showed him as a soft-faced Mickey Rooney–lookalike; he didn’t look anything at all like a killer. The defense cited the number of foster homes he had endured and said he had been “neglected, ill-treated and ill-fed during most of his life.”

The trial was a tear-jerker that fostered Olds’ vision of himself as a criminal folk-hero. His real mother, now thirty-two and married, surfaced and told reporters she had come at last to stand beside her son. She sobbed as she said she regretted that she had never been in a position to help him. But there was surely no way she could help him now.

King County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Tony Savage did not dispute the facts concerning Olds’ childhood, but he questioned whether the past entitled Olds to kill capriciously and coldly. He produced a witness who said Olds had left a card game a half hour before the murder, and returned an hour later. They had all sat there, cards in hand, listening to the radio bulletins about the killing. Mike hadn’t betrayed any nervousness at all.

On December 15, 1961, the nine-man, three-woman jury returned with a verdict at 11:00
P.M.
They had found Olds guilty of murder in the first degree but recommended mercy. Savage didn’t fight for the death penalty. “I am personally opposed to the death penalty in all cases,” he said years later. “I had a deal with my boss that any time I tried a first-degree murder case I didn’t have to ask for the death penalty.”

Because the death penalty wasn’t requested, Judge George Revelle sentenced Michael Olds to two life terms, to run concurrently. Washington State law at the time pretty much dictated that a life term was thirteen years and eight months, so the earliest date Olds could be paroled would be when he was just over thirty. The public didn’t realize that; they thought he would be in prison for life.

Judge Revelle recommended that Michael Olds be given psychiatric treatment. Everyone involved expected that he would be transferred to the maximum security unit at the Eastern State Hospital where psychiatric treatment for prisoners was handled.

There is no evidence that Olds ever received psychiatric care.

Over the years, the winds of change affected many of the principals in the case. Tony Savage left the prosecutor’s office and started a private practice that was to see him become one of the most noted criminal defense attorneys in Seattle. Detectives Bob Honz and Bill Pendergast rose through the ranks of the Seattle Police Department and, tragically, both died young. Harold Countryman resigned from the force. Dick Schoener became assistant chief of police.

Somewhere in the morass of files concerning Michael Andrew Olds, a psychiatrist’s urgent warning was lost, or forgotten, or disregarded: “The superficial conforming facade that masks sadistic sexual impulses adds to the danger that Michael poses to the community,” the doctor wrote. “Michael requires close surveillance and external controls.”

Olds “really adjusted well” to prison life, according to an assistant superintendent of the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. He became an active member of the Lifers With Hope Club. He was “just a regular type resident [prisoner],” his friends and guards noted.

The memory of Blossom Braham, dead with a bullet in her brain at the age of thirty-eight, faded in the minds of everyone except for the sons and husband and family who lost her so suddenly.

By 1974, Michael Olds was no longer a hot-tempered eighteen-year-old kid. He was a thirty-one-year-old man, a “model prisoner,” with nothing negative on his prison record. With so much good time, Olds was paroled on November 4, 1974. Ironically, his early release didn’t even rate a line in the Seattle papers.

Michael Olds settled down in Walla Walla, the eastern Washington city where he’d finally found a home in the penitentiary there; the shadow of the walls of the prison didn’t seem to bother him. He obtained a job at the City Zoo Pet Center, and he began to court a divorcée with six children. He married her, and for a while it looked as if the jury’s faith in him fourteen years before had not been misplaced; they had saved him from hanging, and now he was still a young man—and free.

The owner of the City Zoo found him a dependable employee who did his job well. He didn’t make a lot of money, but he tried to supplement his salary by playing cards.

Olds’ marriage soured in the fall of 1976. He complained that his wife nagged him all the time and that she and the children wanted to move back to Wisconsin. He had tried to go along with that, and they all relocated to the Midwest. But after a few months, Olds was back in Walla Walla—alone. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened, but he went back to work at the pet store. They were glad to have him. He found himself a room with a kitchenette and half-bath for fifty dollars a month.

The female manager of his rooming house was later to describe him as “an awfully sweet guy” who had few visitors but who would often visit with her. Sometimes, they watched television together.

At 1:30
A.M.
, on Sunday, April 3, 1977, Michael Olds was playing cards in a Walla Walla tavern. The other patrons noticed that he was flashing a thick stack of bills when he had always been close to broke before. It was almost sixteen years to the day since Olds had left a card game in Seattle to kill Blossom Braham.

Sometime later that night, Stephen Schmerer, a twenty-three- year-old Walla Walla cab driver, called his office to let them know he had a fare who wanted to be driven to Pendleton, Oregon, some forty-two miles south of Walla Walla.

Schmerer’s cab should have been back in service within two hours, but he didn’t notify the dispatcher that he was back in Walla Walla. Efforts to reach him via radio elicited only silence. The dispatcher worried, but then he figured that Schmerer had decided to call it a night after his Pendleton run.

When Michael Olds’ employer opened the pet shop for business the next morning, she discovered that $356—which had been in the cash register—was gone. She didn’t want to think that Michael had taken the money, but he was the only one besides herself who had the key to the cash register.

On Tuesday, April 5, Stephen Schmerer’s cab was found burrowed deep in a wheat field north of Pendleton. Schmerer was found inside, long dead of bullet wounds.

Law enforcement authorities looked at the series of coincidences: Michael Olds hadn’t shown up for work, the pet store had been robbed, and Olds hadn’t been seen at his rooming house. All of these things had happened within the same time frame as Stephen Schmerer’s departure for Pendleton with his fare. It was too much to overlook when they considered what Olds had gone to prison for in the first place.

A “stop for questioning” teletype on Michael Olds was transmitted to the thirteen Western states, and Seattle police were alerted that Olds might be heading to the coast. He had several relatives in the Seattle area and was rumored to have a grudge against some of them. The name “Olds” sent shivers through the officers who remembered him from 1961. They looked at the current photo of the suspect. The boyish facial planes were now gone; at thirty-four, Olds was a beefy man who was five feet nine inches tall and weighed 180 pounds.

Although stake-outs were set up at the homes where he might be expected to turn up, there were no sightings of Olds reported in Seattle.

On Wednesday, April 6, friends of a frail, arthritic, seventy-five-year-old widow named Mary Lindsay became concerned. Mary lived by herself in Ione, Oregon—near Pendleton—and her friends tried to check on her every day, but today she hadn’t answered her phone. They drove out to her country place and found her always neat kitchen a mess and her usually well stocked ice box was empty. Mary Lindsay was a light eater; she couldn’t have devoured all that food. And there was no way that the elderly woman would have left her home for more than a few hours without informing someone. They reported Mary Lindsay missing.

A call from Mrs. Tom Young* who lived near Pendleton did nothing to assuage the worst fears of local lawmen. Mrs. Young said that she and her husband, seventy-two, had been driving on a back road near Pendleton the evening before when they came upon a reddish-haired man standing in the middle of the road. He had signalled to them to stop, and then waved a gun at them and commandeered their car.

The Youngs had been forced to drive to their home, and the gunman had held them hostage all night. “He told us he’d killed before and he wasn’t afraid to do it again,” Mrs. Young told Umatilla County deputies.

On Wednesday morning, the man said he was going to take their car. They were relieved just to have him out of their house, but he dashed those hopes when he said that he was taking Mr. Young with him. Mrs. Young told the deputies that she packed them a lunch of sandwiches, partly because she was worried about her husband’s being hungry and partly because she thought if she was friendly to the kidnapper, he might not hurt her husband.