A Rage to Kill (35 page)

The “woman” had left the scene in a dirty, dark, old car—possibly a Chevrolet—which had held several occupants of undetermined sex.

Jerry Yates asked the hospital to place a hold on the victim’s clothing and to call if, by some miracle, the youth regained consciousness. Solving a homicide that was not even a homicide yet, a case with so many conflicting witness statements at that, didn’t seem likely.

Dalton Bass was worried. Brad had been gone all of Thursday night and still wasn’t home by Friday night and that wasn’t like him. He would never have stayed away all night without calling. The brothers had talked on the phone Thursday and Brad said then that he was going to try to cash his paycheck Thursday night. He had been temporarily laid off from his shipfitting job but his last paycheck was for over $200.

Dalton called the Seattle police after he’d checked all of his and Brad’s friends. They told Dalton that a Brad Bass had been injured in a street fight and was in the hospital. Shaking his head in disbelief, Dalton Bass was horrified when he reached Harborview to find Brad in a deep coma. He asked where Brad had been hurt and was given the address of the Take 5. As far as he knew, Brad had never patronized the restaurant; he certainly had never mentioned it.

When Dalton Bass asked the detectives where Brad’s truck was, they said they hadn’t known he even had one. Everyone had assumed he was on foot the night he was stabbed. Dalton drove to the Take 5 and looked for his brother’s prized truck. He found it quickly; it was still parked a few paces away from the restaurant.

Dalton knew that Brad seldom carried a wallet, but he thought that he would have had his payroll money with him. Searching the truck, he found approximately $280 hidden in the tape deck.

Dalton called their father, who flew immediately to Seattle. The elder Bass found his son comatose, kept alive only by life support machines. The tracings of the EEG were almost flat, indicating that his brain was barely active. He was told that Brad had almost no chance to survive, and that, if he did, he would live in a state of vegetation. If there was to be any turning point, it would surely come within the next few days.

Brad Bass had chosen to will his kidneys and eyes after death so that they might save another’s life and sight. He was only twenty-three; he could not have known how soon his legacy would be used. On Friday, February 20, one week after he was stabbed, Bass’s brain waves were completely flat. His father asked physicians to remove him from the respirator that made it look as if his chest rose and fell through some conscious effort on his part. It was an agonizing decision for any parent. If Brad could breathe on his own, even if he never regained consciousness, his father would have taken care of him forever. But it was a travesty of life to keep the bloated body of a once vital young man alive by mechanical means.

The breathing machine was turned off. Sometimes miracles happen and clinically dead patients
do
breathe on their own. Brad Bass did not. For two and a half minutes, the doctors, nurses, and his father hoped for some sign of life, but there was none. At that point, with the physicians’ support, Brad Bass’s father decided to fulfill Brad’s wish to donate his kidneys and eyes to someone else.

The life support systems were reconnected, but this time it was only to keep these vital organs alive until donors could be prepared for surgery.

On Saturday, February 21, Brad Bass’s kidneys were removed. Two people would live because of him, but Brad himself was pronounced dead at 2
P.M.
Dr. Donald Nakonechny, Deputy King County Medical Examiner, began the postmortem almost at once. To Nakonechny, there was no question that Brad’s brain was “grossly dead,” and had been for some time. It had softened and swollen as the brain will after death, until it extruded through skull openings and the spinal cord. His cause of death was listed as “anoxic encephalopathy—softening of the brain due to lack of oxygen, secondary to piercing of the right auricular appendage.”

Now it was up to Seattle Homicide detectives to bring in a killer. Most of the information they were receiving had filtered down from the street people through the beat cops. Detective Benny DePalmo got a tip from one of the street officers that the “woman” with the knife was Jacqueline Emerson. DePalmo ran the name through Seattle Police records and found that there was a
Jonathan
“Jackie” Lewis Emerson, twenty-four, whose occupation was listed as a female impersonator. But there was no current address for Emerson, who had a rather lengthy rap sheet for various charges, many of them soliciting for prostitution.

But Emerson was only one of the names rumored to be the person who’d stabbed Brad Bass. Vice Detectives Bill Karban and John Boren had heard other rumors. One was that the night bartender of a well-known gay restaurant and lounge had been in the crowd around Bass. The bartender had named another transvestite hooker.

Primary responsibility for finding Brad Bass’s killer was assigned to Detectives Ted Fonis and Dick Sanford. They began a tour of several gay gathering places, carrying a laydown montage of suspects’ mugs. Jonathan Emerson was number four. Many of those they questioned seemed to recognize Emerson but they were evasive and wouldn’t admit knowing him. If they did recognize him, they said they had no idea where he was at present.

The detectives went to the club where the bartender, who was supposedly an eyewitness to Brad’s stabbing, worked and learned that he had suddenly taken a trip East. But other witnesses were in town and the detectives were soon flooded with informants. On February 24, one called to give them the name of Sonny Jimson*, who was claiming he had seen the stabbing. Fonis and Sanford found Sonny, a tall, lean, transvestite with bright orange hair. He told them he’d seen the killer. “It was ‘Large Tillie’ Schwenk*,” he said firmly.

Large Tilly, he said, worked as a transvestite hooker and hung around a waterfront tavern. However, Sonny was not as forthcoming when Fonis and Sanford arranged for him to take a polygraph examination. He looked very nervous and admitted he’d made up the whole thing. “I told my sugar daddy that I was there because I was really someplace I shouldn’t have been and I was afraid he’d find out I cheated on him.”

Just on the off chance that Sonny had been telling the truth the first time around, Sanford and Fonis went to the Seashell Tavern and asked for “Large Tillie.” The bartender said he’d never heard of a “Large Tillie” or of Sonny Jimson. He did identify the mug of Emerson as a transvestite he knew as Jackie, and he promised to call them if he saw Emerson again.

DePalmo interviewed the dishwasher of the Take 5 who had been on duty when the attack took place. He had observed “Jackie” and Brad Bass, and recalled that they had been friendly until they got out on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Then a scuffle had started. “It was the ‘woman’ who was kicking and punching,” the dishwasher said. “The tall guy in the brown shirt was just trying to avoid her blows—but he wasn’t fighting back.

“Finally, he grabbed at ‘her’ to stop her, I guess, and her wig got torn off.”

The “woman” had run into the Take 5, screaming she was going to get a knife. When she came out empty-handed, a car had driven around the corner, evidently full of people she knew. She had yelled that she needed a knife and apparently someone in the car had handed one to her. “I didn’t see her stab him,” the witness said, “I looked away for just a second. When I looked back, the guy was looking down at himself and then he held out his hands toward the “woman” as if he was begging her to stop . . .”

While the witness watched, the person in the green pantsuit had hopped into the car and sped off. Everything had happened so fast. The young man had collapsed to the sidewalk and gone into convulsions, but the witness didn’t know that Brad Bass had been stabbed. Something was wrong with him, so he had called to Ike Stone to get an aid car.

He was certain of one thing, however. The person the victim was fighting with wasn’t a woman; he was a male in drag. The dishwasher was positive he would recognize him if he saw him again. The man who’d stabbed Bass had had a distinctive broken tooth. When he saw that, he would know.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out what had happened. Brad Bass had thought that Jackie Emerson was a woman when she came up to his booth. In the dim lights of the restaurant, Jackie had looked very feminine. But in the bright street lights at the corner of Pike and 6th, he would have realized that Jackie was a male and backed away. Jackie Emerson had become enraged and started kicking and beating Brad. And Brad could not bring himself to strike a “lady,” even when he knew she wasn’t a female. He’d backed away and just stood there until Jackie got too rough. Finally, he pushed at “her” and dislodged her wig.

But this had only served to make Emerson more furious, and he’d borrowed a knife from the passing car when he couldn’t get one inside. No more than two or three minutes had passed during the confrontation, but Brad Bass had been terribly wounded by one snakelike thrust of a filleting knife. Because there had been no blood loss, precious time was lost—time that might have saved Brad’s life.

On February 25, the detectives were handed the name of another eyewitness to the assault. She was a twenty-year- old girl who made a rather precarious living by her wits. Her nickname was “Chi-Chi,” but her real name was Barbara Palliser*. She reportedly worked as a cocktail waitress. Fonis and Sanford went to the club where she worked only to find that “Chi-Chi” had not shown up for work in three weeks. The manager gave them her last address. They found a listing for B. Palliser in the lobby of a run-down apartment house. She opened the door of her apartment only a crack, and wouldn’t let the detectives in until they pushed their cards under the door.

“I saw it,” she finally admitted. “I saw that guy get stabbed. I’ve been afraid to go to work ever since.” Tearfully, she agreed to go to the homicide offices to make a statement.

“I went to the Take 5 at 2
A.M.
to meet a friend,” Barbara Palliser recalled. “I waited twenty minutes and she didn’t show so I went to walk around and look for her. I still didn’t find her, and I went back to the Take 5. I was standing just inside the front door when I saw a white male in his twenties and a black female impersonator just outside. It looked like he grabbed at her wig and pulled it off. ‘She’ grabbed it back and started swearing. They exchanged words, and ‘she’ threw her purse at someone and asked them to hold it. Then ‘she’ started fighting with him. The onlookers tried to tell them to take it easy. They calmed down and she took her purse back. Then the male grabbed her wig again, and the fight started again. She went inside to get a weapon. Then this car drove up. It looked like there were two black males and one black female—I’m not sure if she was a woman or not—inside. The two men tried to get this ‘Jackie’ in the car but she was really mad and stepped back and started fighting again. The man just kind of reached out toward her, and then he fell down. The car drove away fast with ‘her’ in it.”

The girl known as “Chi-Chi” quickly selected the mug shot of Jonathan Emerson as the “woman” who had stabbed Brad Bass. She had no doubt at all that she was right.

Jonathan Emerson, aka “Jackie” Collins, aka Jacqueline Collins, aka “Jackie” Blackshire had been picked by too many witnesses not to believe that he was the killer of Brad Bass. The King County Prosecutor’s Office filed second-degree murder charges against him on February 26, 1976.

But the charges were filed in absentia. “Jackie” Emerson had gone underground. A flyer describing the five-foot eight-inch, now 160-pound fugitive was sent to California, Oregon and British Columbia as well as Washington State. Jackie’s disguises were perfect, and it was hard to tell
who
he would be next. The bulletin warned that Emerson would probably be dressed as a woman, wearing a wig, false eyelashes and makeup. “Suspect has needle tracks on both arms.”

Every Seattle Police patrolman had been apprised of the urgency in locating “Jackie” Emerson at line-up briefings. The homicide detectives believed if he was still operating in Seattle, he would be spotted sooner or later—even if he didn’t have a permanent address. It was ten minutes to three
A.M.
on March 7 when two first-watch patrolmen observed a woman walking in the 1400 block of E. Yesler Street, not far from police headquarters. She drew their attention because she was very tall and had exceptionally broad shoulders for a woman. She wore a tight green sweater, slacks, and a blue coat. As they studied her more closely they agreed that her billowing hair could only be a wig.

They pulled out the wanted bulletin on Jackie Emerson, and studied it with a flashlight.

“It’s Jackie . . . No doubt about it.”

Jonathan “Jackie” Emerson was arrested and advised of his rights before being transported to jail and booked. He refused to make any statements to detectives without the presence of his lawyer.

With Emerson safely in jail, detectives located the driver of the car who had picked Jackie up at the stabbing scene. The driver admitted that it was his knife that was used to kill Bass. He said he had met Jackie that morning, and he, too, had thought that he was a woman. He said the knife had been in his jacket pocket when he drove up but he denied giving it to Jackie. When he jumped into the car after the attack, the driver said he realized that it
was
his knife, and it had blood on it. He was lying. Witnesses saw him toss it to Jackie.

When Jonathan Emerson went on trial for the murder of Brad Bass, it took a while to get a jury. Prospective jurors viewed the defendant, who sat demurely beside “her” lawyer, as they were asked if they had prejudices or convictions that would make them unable to render a fair verdict. Many did. By Monday morning, May 24, 1976, four women and eight men and an alternate juror had been seated and the testimony began.