A Rage to Kill (16 page)

At the same instant, Rauhecker placed his gun at the gunman’s temple, and said quietly, “Drop it.”

The officer was taking a desperate gamble. He had the suspect. But the gunman had him, too.

They stood like that for what seemed like an hour. If one shot, the other might die—but reflex muscle spasms action would make a dead finger squeeze off one last shot. One second. Two seconds.

Three seconds.

Four seconds.

Five seconds . . .

Rauhecker could see the man’s eyes swiveling. “In his peripheral vision, he could see that he was urrounded,” he said later. “Green was coming up over the hood of the car, with Long beside him and Landers was aiming in through the open driver’s window. There were other police cars pulling up on every side.”

The gunman blinked first and put his gun down on the seat. He was silent as he was cuffed and placed under arrest. They knew his name, but they didn’t
really
know who he was. He had told Konkiel on the phone earlier that his name was Michael Olds and that he’d killed before. The Pennsylvania officers did not realize until later just what a big fish they had caught. When they contacted Washington authorities, they realized how close they had come to being blown away.

“He has killed before,” the Washington detective told them. “And it doesn’t bother him at all.”

If Howard Landers hadn’t stood on his brakes as Olds fired at him when the station wagon drew abreast of the patrol car, he might well have been Olds’ fourth victim. He had felt the wind of the bullet as it whizzed by his face.

A mother determined to protect her little boy had saved Fred Green and Walt Long when she knocked Olds’ gun hand off-target. Had Olds decided to take a policeman with him as he died, Rauhecker would never have lived to tell about the memorable capture.

Michael Andrew Olds’s arrest pointed out the chance that a policeman takes when he begins each shift. Every one of the McKees Rocks and Pittsburgh officers involved was willing to exchange his life for those of the hostages. Many of them came close.

Although Olds was docile at the time of his arrest, he became belligerent as he appeared at preliminary hearings in Allegheny County. He was charged with attempted kidnaping, simple assault and battery, violation of the uniform firearms act, and terrorist threats. He was held in lieu of a million dollars bail.

He commented sullenly to Landers and Rauhecker that he had almost wanted to be caught. He felt he couldn’t survive outside of an institution; the real world was too much for him. If Michael Olds truly wanted the security of prison, he had made sure that was what he would get. In addition to the charges in Pennsylvania, federal charges were filed in Ogden, Utah, for the kidnapping and interstate transportation of Tom Young and Ida Burley. And then there were the murder charges in Umatilla County, Oregon, for the shooting death of Stephen Schmerer, and Malhuer County, Oregon, for the execution-style murder of seventy-five-year-old Mary Lindsay.

On Friday, May 6, 1977, Michael Olds was returned to Pendleton, Oregon, under heavy guard. He appeared before Circuit Court Judge Jack Olsen in preliminary hearings. His attorney asked that he be committed to a mental hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Judge Olsen denied the request on the grounds that there would be a profound security risk in removing Olds from the Umatilla County Jail.

Clearly, Michael Andrew Olds should never have been released from prison after his first conviction for murder.

His own defense attorney in the trial for Blossom Braham’s murder agreed. “I feel terrible,” he said. “I hoped that man would have been rehabilitated. Personally, I didn’t believe he would ever be this way after he was released. He was a nice-appearing young fellow. The jury probably thought he had made a mistake and if he served a life term in prison, he’d be rehabilitated. But obviously it didn’t happen.”

But Olds had fooled any number of experts on criminal behavior. All the prison psychiatrists, counselors, guards, work supervisors, and chaplains had praised him highly in their progress reports. Apparently only the prisoner himself knew that he needed the walls and the controlled atmosphere to keep a lid on the hatred that bubbled and boiled within him.

Michael Andrew Olds was the poster boy who illustrated the end result of child abuse. Whether the seed of violence lay dormant within him is a question that can never be answered, but
he
was the first victim, a small boy whose personality was permanently damaged by too little love, too much deprivation and punishment.

The child, who was conceived during a crime of violence, ended, for all practical purposes, his own life with a series of violent crimes.

Michael Olds was convicted of two counts of murder in Oregon and sentenced to life in prison. He is serving his time at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Today, he is fifty-six years old.

Probably nobody is
more consumed by dreams than a teenage girl. At eighteen, everything seems possible: college, a new love, marriage, a baby, an exciting career in a big city. But along with the dreams, there is danger. A lot of teenagers are naive—at least to some degree. They tend to believe that the men they encounter are telling the truth. If a man is good-looking and fun, friendly and helpful, they assume that he is safe. And most of the time strangers are no real threat, even though handsome and friendly men have been known to break hearts.

Anyone who has ever tried to warn a headstrong young woman of the perils of taking strangers at face value knows it is akin to shouting into the wind. It is even more difficult to warn them about someone they already know and trust. They won’t listen; they are so easily offended by anyone who tries to give them advice. Most girls eventually grow up like the rest of us in the school of hard knocks and disappointments, realizing ruefully that sometimes you have to be hurt to learn. But some, albeit a tiny percentage, put their trust in men who do more than hurt emotionally.

This case is a heart-breaker, not only for the girls who
learned too late about a deceptively friendly man, but for the people who loved them. Even though their tragedies happened three decades ago, and the victims would now be old enough to be grandmothers, I cannot forget them and the lives they never got to live.

At one time or another, every one of us has known a psychopath. Think of someone who lies when there is no need to lie, who has had just too many bizarre adventures for one person. As they grow older, these people will steal your money, step on your face to get your job, break your heart—but they won’t kill you. They are garden variety psychopaths. Terms come in and out of vogue in psychiatric parlance, but the personalities involved don’t change. Today, a psychopath is called a sociopath, or is said to have an antisocial personality. A sociopath remains forever in the early childhood phase of emotional development, never developing the controls or the empathy for others that mark an adult personality. He wants what he wants when he wants it. No one else matters.

He is often glib, charming, attractive, and convincing. He is not hindered by conscience. He lies with the guileless smile of a child, the clear eyes of an innocent. If you are lucky, an encounter with a psychopath leaves you only disillusioned and doubting your own judgment.

Two Washington State girls were not lucky. Their encounters with a psychopath ended their lives. Undoubtedly, many more girls would have died if not for the painstaking detective work of Seattle Police and King County, Washington, Police investigators.

O
n Friday,
November 28, 1969, the bridge tender of the First Avenue South Bridge in Seattle reported for work somewhat grudgingly, his thoughts still on the leisurely Thanksgiving holiday just past. There was little traffic; most people had Friday off too, and even the nearby Boeing Company was closed for the holiday. Idly, he scanned the polluted waters of the Duwamish River that roiled sluggishly beneath the bridge.

Decades earlier, the Duwamish was as clear as glass, pristine as it was in the days when the Indians for which it is named lived on its banks. But it was being destroyed by industrial wastes. As the bridge tender watched the dirty water, his attention was drawn to a large object that bobbed in the waves. He had seen some peculiar things in the river, but now he felt a prickling of apprehension. The object was either a department store mannequin or a human body. As he squinted to see more clearly, he realized that it
was
a body. And it looked as though it had been in the Duwamish for some time.

And that was odd. There were so many people who worked near the bridge, who drove over it. The body could not have been there long; someone surely would have spotted it.

The bridge tender ran for the bridge shack and phoned the Seattle Police Harbor Unit. The police boat reached the river beneath the bridge at 8:20
A.M.
As the officers aboard drew closer to the drifting form, they saw that it was indeed a body—the nude body of a female.

Immersion in water speeds decomposition of a body and the task before the officers was not a pleasant one. Carefully, they hoisted the form onto the police boat. They could see that she had probably been in the river for many weeks, but her age or what she had looked like in life were impossible to determine.

An assistant medical examiner waited on shore with an ambulance and the body was transferred at once to the King County Medical Examiner’s office to await the autopsy that might give some clue as to the woman’s fate. The dead woman appeared to have suffered some facial wounds, but that could have happened long after she was dead, damage done by floating trees or something sharp along the river banks. A rule of thumb for any superior detective is that unexplained deaths are treated first as a homicide, second as a suicide, third as accidental, and only when all other possibilities have been excluded, as the result of natural causes.

Seattle Police Homicide detectives Dick Reed and Roy Moran had drawn weekend duty and they observed as Dr. Gale Wilson performed the autopsy on the anonymous woman. Wilson had held his post as medical examiner for more than thirty years, and was one of the foremost forensic pathologists in the country. If the body held any clues, he would find them.

The woman was five feet, five inches tall, and weighed 130 pounds, but her weight could have varied up to ten percent from life weight because of bloating from gases and waterlogging. Only her hair looked alive, it was a rich auburn-brown, long and thick. Her eyes were brown. Dr. Wilson estimated her age at somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-five, but he warned Reed and Moran that that was only a guess; it was extremely difficult to establish age on a body so decomposed.

One of the best clues to body identification are dental records, but the dead woman’s teeth would be of little help. Four teeth were missing and she had no fillings in her remaining teeth. Her fingernails were well cared for; they were long and filed neatly, and were still coated with platinum-colored polish. She had small hands and feet. She wore a Timex watch, which had stopped at 3:10. But whether it was
A.M.
or
P.M.
, they had no way of knowing.

There was a silver friendship band on her ring finger, left hand, and, in her hair, a white metal barrette.

She had eaten kidney beans and ham within hours of her death.

None of this information seemed likely to identify the Jane Doe victim. Like her age, the cause of her death could not be determined as precisely as it would if she had been found sooner. She had suffered cerebral contusions before she died. Someone had struck her on the forehead and around the bony orbits of her eyes causing injury to the brain itself.

There seemed to be evidence of some hemorrhaging in the strap muscles of her neck indicating she may have been strangled, too, but tissue damage made it impossible for Dr. Wilson to be sure. But one thing
was
certain; she had been alive when she entered the river, although she was undoubtedly unconscious. River silt was evident in her larynx and trachea.

Who was she?

The best chance of identifying her might be through her fingerprints. Because her fingertips were so decomposed, it was relatively easy to slip the loose skin off and send the outer layer with ridges and whorls still apparent to the FBI for possible matching.

Not really hoping to find much, Detective Dick Reed and his sergeant, Ivan Beeson, went back to the banks of the Duwamish near where the body had floated. They scoured the river banks searching for some item of clothing, I.D.—anything that might be linked to the drowned woman. They found nothing.

Dick Reed pored over all the Seattle Missing Persons reports, looking for a woman answering the description of the body found in the Duwamish. Descriptions of the “Jane Doe” appeared in
The Seattle Times
and
Post-Intelligencer,
asking for citizens to come forward with information. As always, there was a flurry of calls. Some of them even looked promising.

Two area women had told friends that they were going to Vancouver, British Columbia, some weeks before, and they seemed to have disappeared completely. The women had criminal drug abuse records in both Washington and British Columbia so their fingerprint classifications were on file.

The FBI Lab in Washington, D.C. was trying to raise the prints from the woman in the river, but it would be days before FBI technicians could complete the difficult process. It might even prove impossible.

Several people had viewed the corpse and a few had made a tentative identification. It was well nigh impossible though to be sure with only a visual observation.

A man familiar to police because he hung around Seattle’s skid row told detectives about meeting a “lonely woman” at a waterfront charity shelter. “Sometimes she called herself Margie,” he said. “Sometimes it was Betty—and sometimes she said her name was Sue. I expect none of those were her real name. She had a little drinking problem. Not real bad, you understand. But I haven’t seen her around for a month.”

The man first identified a morgue photo of the unidentified body as his friend. But then he remembered that “Margie-Betty-Sue” had had a rather distinctive tattoo in a “sort of private part of her person.” The murder victim had no tattoos at all.

People seeking lost daughters, wives and friends filed through the county morgue, but there was always something that didn’t quite match. The body was too tall, or the eyes were the wrong color. She was not the “lost sister” from Bothell. She wasn’t the runaway daughter from a posh neighborhood on Mercer Island. Nor was she either of the two women who’d traveled to Vancouver. On December 5, the FBI was able to make prints from the dead woman’s fingertips, but they did not match those on the rap sheets of the two missing women.

More devastating to the search, the FBI had no record in their voluminous file of the “Jane Doe’s” prints. Apparently, she had never been printed so one of the better methods of identifying nameless bodies was lost to the investigation.

Nevertheless, the Seattle investigators made up bulletins for every law enforcement agency in the U.S. and Canada with the woman’s description and her fingerprint classification. If there was someone out there who missed her the detectives would hear about it in time. Though nothing came in that shed any light on the case, they would not give up.

The lack of response was frustrating. Until the Jane Doe body could be linked somehow with the world she lived in, the people she knew, the predictable patterns of her daily existence, finding her killer would be impossible.

In January of 1970, the pitiful corpse was buried as a “Jane Doe” in Grave Lower 6, Lot 122, Section J at Riverton Crest Cemetery. Somewhere, there was probably someone who loved her and who waited for some word from her. The detectives who had tried so hard to identify the lost woman did not forget her. “Someday, we’ll find out who she is,” Dick Reed commented, “And when we do, we’ll find her killer too.”

Nine months after she was buried, on September 7, 1971, a report came in that tentatively linked the dead woman with a missing teenager from a small town east of the Cascade Mountains of Washington. Some weeks after the “Jane Doe” was buried, a Missing Persons report had come in from Mr. and Mrs. Murphy* of Cle Elum, Washington. Their daughter, Georgia*, eighteen, had disappeared while on a visit with relatives in Seattle during October and November of 1969.

Georgia was five feet, two inches tall and weighed 110 pounds. She had brown hair and blue eyes. Tragically, but inevitably, neither Seattle nor King County police connected the missing Cle Elum girl with the unnamed woman pulled from the Duwamish. The physical characteristics given for Georgia Murphy and those charted during the “Jane Doe’s” autopsy were widely disparate. The dead woman was five feet five; the Murphy girl was said to be five feet two. Their weights were different and Dr. Wilson had estimated the victim’s age as from twenty-eight to thirty-five, while the Cle Elum girl was only eighteen. There was really no reason to link the two.

At the time that Georgia Murphy was reported missing, Seattle Police Missing Persons detectives had done some routine checks: utilities companies, phone listings, unemployment records, to see if she had established residence in Seattle and had stayed in the city by choice. But they hadn’t gone further. Georgia was eighteen and considered legally to be an adult so it was impossible for the police department in a large city to spend their time and resources trying to find someone who had the legal right to leave home.

Now, however, in 1971, King County Detective Ben Colwell and Detective Sergeant Ray Jenne had new information on Georgia Murphy. Georgia had gone missing not from the city, but from the county. Her parents had said in their missing report that she’d intended to stay with an uncle and his family who lived in a mobile home park in the south end, a park not far from the Duwamish River. But the uncle didn’t know where she was.

Colwell perused the records of all the unidentified female bodies found since October of 1969. None of them came close to Georgia Murphy’s description—but the woman in the river had been found very close to the trailer park. He called for a conference with Don Cameron and Ted Fonis of the Seattle Homicide Unit.

The four detectives studied the picture provided by Mrs. Murphy, and shook their heads. The missing girl smiled gently in what appeared to be a graduation photo. She was pretty in an elfin way, and she had short dark hair and light blue eyes. The handwritten description on the back of the picture described a petite girl.

“I don’t think it’s Georgia. The location of the body is the only thing that fits,” Fonis commented. “But we’re willing to push it and see if we can find some positive identification. It’s remotely possible that the height and weight could be way off. Teenagers grow and parents aren’t always aware of just how tall they are. The eyes? That’s rougher. Without contacts, people’s eye color doesn’t change. But let’s see what we can turn up.”

Detectives Fonis and Cameron drove to Cle Elum, a tiny hamlet on the other side of the Cascade Mountains some seventy-five miles from Seattle. Once a thriving mining town, it had become picturesque—but quiet. It was the kind of town kids often left behind as they set out for adventure in the world.

The information they received from the worried parents was not promising. Georgia had always been a girl who trusted people—sometimes at her own peril. She had longed for love and new experiences, and laughed at her family’s concern for her. At eighteen, she believed that there was no situation she couldn’t handle.

There were no dental records available for Georgia Murphy; she had always had perfect teeth. As far as her mother knew, Georgia wore pink nail polish—not platinum. Her eyes were definitely blue. There was no question about that. Georgia Murphy had had a very slight foot deformity on her left instep which she favored when she walked. And to the best of her parents’ knowledge, Georgia had never had her fingerprints taken.

But yes, Georgia
had
worn a Timex watch with a silver band. (The Timex found on the unidentified body had a gold band.) And, yes, she had worn a silver ring of some sort on the third finger of her left hand.

*   *   *

Georgia Murphy’s parents fought to retain their composure as they recalled the last few days they had spent with their daughter. She had been accepted by the Army as a recruit in October of 1969, and she had been excited about going into the service. Because she knew lots of people in Seattle, Georgia left a little early to go to the city to report for duty. “She left on about October 28 to say good-bye to her friends there,” Mrs. Murphy said. “She was going to stay with her uncle.”

Her mother said she received word from the Army that Georgia should report for duty on November 5. She had relayed this message to Georgia’s uncle, and just assumed he had told Georgia.

Oddly, Georgia’s uncle had shown up in Cle Elum on November 11. He said that he and his family had left Seattle for good and were moving on. He returned all of Georgia’s clothes—except one outfit her mother remembered: her blue jeans, a blue blouse, blue nylon jacket, and her tennis shoes.