Empty Promises (29 page)

"I didn't know whether you'd be here or not," she said.
"Well, you showed up," Stout replied. "That must mean you still want your husband killed."
"That's right," she said. "I have the money right here in my lap. It's all in twenties, but it might be one
bill short. If it is, I'll make it up to you. You can count on it."
"Did you bring his picture and info about the places he hangs out?"
Sandra Treadway was canny. He could see that she was wary of leaving her fingerprints on something. She handed Stout a piece of paper and pen and told him that he could write down the information she dictated. "You ask what you want to know," she said. "I'll tell you and you can write it down." She dictated a description of Burt Treadway's car, gave Stout the license plate number, and told him about her husband's general physical appearance.
"I have decided I want it done on Wednesday night, the seventeenth," she said briskly. "I've got the schedule all figured out. If he dies on Wednesday, I'll have the memorial service here on Saturday and then ship his body back to Michigan for burial on Sunday." Sandra said she planned to fly to Michigan on Sunday morning and be gone for about a week. "I might have the other twenty-five hundred for you before I go… but I'll have it for sure by the time I get back."
She had thought about other locations, but now she was sure she wanted her mother's house in Oakbrook to be the scene of the killing. Wednesday was Burt's night to house-sit there, and he would be alone— he understood that Sandra didn't like him taking his girlfriend to her mother's house. "He probably won't get there until late, though, because he spends most evenings with his girlfriend," she added.
She cautioned Stout that there might be a few hitches in her plan, but she felt she had most of them covered. "There might be a little problem because my
daughter wants to spend some time in that house earlier in the evening," Sandra explained. "But I'll be baby-sitting for her, and I'll just tell her she has to pick up her baby by ten P.M."
"Do you have a key to the house I could have?" Stout asked.
"Yes… I'll give you one."
"How about if I call you Wednesday evening at your house, just to check and see if your daughter's back home?"
"Sure," she agreed. "That would be better." Sandra handed Stout one of her cards, which read, "Sunrise Enterprises Firewood," and told him he could reach her any time at the phone number on the card. Then she gave him a picture of Burt.
"Will you count out the money for me?" Stout asked, but Sandra refused and told him to do it himself. He took the money, which was in an envelope inside another envelope. She had done everything possible to keep her prints off any of the paper. He counted the bills out loud, laying them on the seat of the car. There was only $2,480 there, and Sandra reached in her purse and gave him a single twenty to make it an even $2,500, as promised.
For the first time, Sandra questioned her own motivation and murmured, "I guess I'm not a very nice person for doing this?" And then she chuckled and commented, "But then, you're not any better for agreeing to it, are you?"
The deal was set, the money had changed hands, and Sandra Treadway was about to have the surprise of her life. Walt Stout lightly pressed the brake pedal of his car to signal Suprunowski.
Ski slowly pulled his car up beside Stout's, so close
that Sandra Treadway couldn't open her door wide enough to get out. She looked up, startled, and blurted, "What's this? What's going on?"
"I'm not really Doug," Stout said quietly. "I'm Walt." He identified himself as a sheriff's detective and showed her his credentials. "You're under arrest, Mrs. Treadway."
Suprunowski removed Sandra from the car and advised her of her rights, while Stout let Detective Murphy out of his cramped hiding place in the trunk. Sandra Treadway, red with indignation and shock, refused to say anything at all as she was driven to the West Precinct.
There the detectives counted the money again. There were 125 twenty-dollar bills, half-payment to end a man's life. Sandra Treadway was transported to the Pierce County jail. She was allowed to call her attorney and was then booked for criminal intent to commit murder in the first degree.
Burt Treadway was at the Oakbrook house when the phone rang. It was Sandra, calling to tell him that she was in jail for attempting to have someone killed.
The astonished man asked, "Who?"
"You."
When Walt Stout interviewed the bemused Burt Treadway later, he acknowledged that it was true that his marriage was one of convenience rather than devotion, and that he did have a great deal of life insurance with triple-indemnity clauses. Sandra also stood to inherit two homes with mortgage payoff clauses that would be covered by insurance in case of his death.
But Burt Treadway had had no idea that Sandra wanted him dead. He told Stout that she had tried to persuade him to put off their divorce, giving various ex
cuses for the delay. He had put it down to sentiment on her part, wondering if she really loved him after all. "Now I think I'll file for divorce as soon as humanly possible," Treadway said. "Like yesterday."

* * *

Sandra Treadway was released on bail to await trial. On November 13, 1977, however, her own life almost ended in what some might call poetic justice. She had been spending the evening at home with her daughter, Claudette*— the same daughter that Sandra had wanted to be sure was not in the Oakbrook house back in August.
Claudette was separated from her husband, Benny Bowes,* and the rift was far from friendly. Benny Bowes was terribly jealous of Claudette and he hated her new boyfriend with a passion. They had all noticed Benny's car circling the house several times during the early evening. As Sandra sat eating her supper, Claudette ran to the window and cried, "He's here— he's coming up to the door!"
Claudette ran to throw her weight against the door and Sandra joined her, the two women desperately trying to keep Bowes from coming in. But he shattered the door with one kick and strode in through the splintered wood. He had a gun in his hand. Claudette and her new boyfriend ran for the back door, leaving Sandra to face Benny alone. She tried to get away, but Benny Bowes caught her and knocked her to the floor. Screaming epithets, Bowes fired directly at Sandra's chest, and she writhed on the floor bleeding, crying "Benny, you've shot me!"
The gunfire wasn't over. Now Bowes aimed at Claudette's new boyfriend, who stood in the kitchen, hurling bottles at the gunman. Then he ran into a rear bedroom and cowered there. Bowes kicked open the
doors of all the bedrooms until he came to the locked room where his rival hid. He fired two shots through the door, and then walked in, shouting, "Take your glasses off, you bastard— I want to shoot you right between the eyes!"
The gun roared several times. The would-be home wrecker wasn't shot between the eyes, but he was shot almost every place else. As his latest victim lay bleeding, Bowes put the gun to his own temple— but he didn't shoot. Benny was still standing with the gun to his head when sheriff's deputies arrived. They were braced for a standoff, but Benny's suicidal gesture had been only that. The deputies quickly wrestled the gun away from him.
Sandra Treadway and the wounded man were rushed to the hospital, where her chest wound was found to be serious but not fatal. Claudette's new boyfriend was in critical condition, however.
Ironically, Sandra had wanted to kill her husband for money. Jealousy hadn't even entered into it. Her son-in-law, however, had attempted murder out of jealousy alone. They were rapidly becoming the poster family for the old joke: "The family that slays together stays together."
Sandra recovered in time to plead guilty to a reduced charge of solicitation to commit murder in the second degree and was sentenced to serve ten years in the women's prison at Purdy, Washington. Purdy is one of Washington's plusher prisons, but it is still a far cry from the life Sandra had planned for herself once she got her hands on $150,000 in insurance money.
Claudette's boyfriend almost died of his wounds, but he eventually recovered. Benny Bowes pleaded guilty in the shooting and went to prison.

* * *

Not all females are as inept as Carole, Teri, and Sandra. An intelligent, determined female sociopath is as dangerous as any black widow spider. Women kill for different reasons than men, and they employ dissimilar methods. There are really only two reasons why the vast majority of women kill: for love— very broadly defined to include passion, revenge on a faithless lover, jealousy, or a desire to clear away obstacles to an affair— or for money. The promise of riches tends to bring out wickedness in some women. Whether it be for love or money, women plan murder with far more care than do men. They seem to be able to delay gratification longer than their male counterparts. One might say that, even in homicide, women enjoy more foreplay than men.
Perhaps all marital insurance policies should read, "And to my beloved wife, the proceeds of my life insurance… with the express exemption that this policy is null and void if she kills me."

The Conjugal Visit

The social science of penology has come a long, long way since prisons were hellholes unfit for any living thing. No rational person today would wish that another human being should serve out a sentence with torturous punishment, in cells that are filthy and dark, and yet questions remain as to just how comfortable and civilized is
too
comfortable and civilized for those who deserve to be locked up. There are three main reasons to lock someone behind bars: (1) to punish him or her for a crime; (2) to protect society from the criminal; (3) to rehabilitate her or him. In our enlightened era, there are prisons where convicts enjoy a lifestyle some free men might envy. Prisons now have gyms and libraries. Cells have bars, but they also have television sets and radios, and prisoners may hang whatever posters and "art" they like on the walls. A number of penal institutions provide quarters— often mobile homes— where married and engaged prisoners may enjoy conjugal relations with their wives and lovers.
Keeping a prisoner in touch with his family isn't necessarily bad, and it keeps a lot of paroled felons from returning to a life of crime when they are released. But there are cases where too much compassion for convicts ends in tragedy. A handsome prisoner named
Carl Cletus Bowles played such a progressive system as if it were a fine old fiddle and he a fresh bow. Bowles serves as a sobering example of what can happen when concern for a prisoner's sensitivities blinds authorities to potential danger. This consummate con man hoodwinked some of the most experienced prison administrators in the country. A little luck, a disregarded warning, and a beautiful woman willing to throw away her life for him, and Bowles walked free of the bars meant to hold him for life. In retrospect, anyone who believed Bowles's promises needed a refresher course in abnormal psychology.
Carl Cletus Bowles was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1941. He was a wild boy and teenager who always walked just at the edge of the law, sometimes slipping over it. He wasn't very tall, but he was handsome, with a full head of wavy blond hair and perfectly aligned features. Girls and women were always drawn to Carl, and he was a lusty young man. He began his serious criminal career at a young age. He was just past twenty when he served time in Colorado for larceny. Barely free from jail in Colorado, he was convicted for a larceny and breaking-and-entering rap in Oregon in the early 1960s. At the Oregon State Penitentiary, he formed an unlikely liaison with Norbert Tilford Waitts, a man six years his senior. Waitts was a native of Brunswick, Georgia, but his criminal activities had afforded him a tour of the inside of America's jails. He had done time in New York State and was sentenced to prison for assault with a deadly weapon during a robbery of a motel in Tigard, Oregon.
Neither Carl Cletus nor Norbert took well to the rehabilitation aspects of imprisonment; they merely bided their time until they could get out and make up for the lost years. Waitts got out first, on June 1, 1965. He waited impatiently for Bowles's release four weeks later. It was Monday night, July 5, and wisps of leftover smoke from Sunday's fireworks still floated in the air.
The woman working the desk at the same Tigard motel Norbert Waitts had robbed before— which had landed him in prison— was startled to see a customer walk in so late. She thought to herself that he was one of the homeliest men she had ever seen in her life— bald with a long, dour horse face. His arms were covered with garish tattoos. He didn't want a room, he explained, as he stuck a pistol in her face. She handed over the twenty-five dollars in the cash register, but that wasn't all he wanted. She looked desperately around for someone she could cry out to for help, but the parking lot was quiet and the people in the units that spread out from the office had long since gone to sleep. The man with the gun raped her, but he apologized, saying, "I'm sorry to force you to do this… but I haven't had a woman in two years."
When he left, she called the police. She was upset, but she gave a good description of her attacker and she remembered his explanation for raping her. Hearing that, they knew where to look; there is only one place, short of a desert island, where a man is forced to go two years without a woman, and that is prison. Detectives checked descriptions of recently released inmates at the Oregon State pen and came up with a balding, horse-faced man with tattoos on his arms: Norbert Tilford Waitts.
They didn't know where Waitts was, but they didn't have to wonder for long because he surfaced again at 1:40 P.M. the next day. Two men held up the 42nd Street Branch of the First National Bank in Portland. The man holding the shotgun was handsome, in a baby-faced way, and looked to be in his early twenties; the man who actually collected the stacks of money while he held a pistol was older and taller and far less attractive. He hadn't bothered to put a hat over his bald head or a
mask over a face that was a study in misalignment. When he reached for the money, his shirtsleeves slid up and the tellers noted his tattoos. He picked up $15,514 in cash and beckoned to his partner to move out of the bank.
The two bank robbers slipped out into the street and disappeared into the crowds in downtown Portland before the first police arrived.
Waitts's description was becoming familiar, and it wasn't hard to find out whom he had buddied with in the penitentiary: Carl Cletus Bowles. They certainly made an unlikely pair, but prison officials said they had been good friends— who had, incidentally, been released within a month of each other.
The bank employees picked out Waitts and Bowles from the lay-downs— the glossy sheets that showed photographs of six other men mixed in with the true suspects. Witnesses were positive that this was the pair who had robbed the bank. Within hours, a two-state search was under way for Waitts and Bowles. Both were charged with bank robbery, and Waitts faced an additional charge of rape.
It was 11:15 that night in Springfield, Oregon, some 110 miles south of Portland, when Lane County Deputy Carlton E. Smith patrolled on his first night shift. He was in a one-man car, something departments try to avoid but are sometimes forced to resort to due to a shortage of manpower.
Smith was thirty-three years old. He had a wife, four children, and a stepchild to support, and he'd chosen police work because it gave him an income while he studied to become a teacher. He had served two years on the Eugene, Oregon, Police Department, and then had resigned to drive a dairy route because the money
was better. But Smith couldn't get all the credits he needed to be accredited as a teacher in night school. He'd already taken a number of night courses in education at the University of Oregon, and now he needed to attend day classes in order to get his degree. So he'd gone back to police work, working 8:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. and attending classes during the day. Somehow he would find time to study.
The Lane County sheriff's dispatcher heard Smith's voice on the police radio: "This is fifteen at Goodpasture and the Delta Interchange. I have a 1959 Triumph, license 9F 6773. 2–10." It was a routine call. Something about the sports car had alerted Smith; maybe the driver was speeding or had a headlight out. The next communication would normally be his request for a wants-and-warrants check. Instead, Smith's voice said, "Fifteen to thirty-three. Can you come?" He was asking for backup.
Thirty-three was Watch Commander Sergeant Howard Kershner. Kershner was not alarmed when he heard the call. Smith sounded calm, and it was standard operating procedure to request a watch sergeant in certain situations. Only later would Kershner wonder if Smith had some inkling of the danger he was in and had really been calling for help. Before Kershner could respond to Smith, he heard the most dreaded words any policeman can hear "Oh, my God!" Smith cried. "I'm shot."
As Kershner sped to Smith's location, he held his mike in one hand, broadcasting the description of the Triumph, instructing all law agencies in the vicinity to set up roadblocks. If the shooter had slipped through the dragnet, he could be on the I-5 freeway, which was a straight shot south to the Mexican border, or a straight shot north to Canada.
Kershner was the first officer to get to Smith. A
passerby was already bent over the deputy, who lay sprawled on his back beside his patrol car. "I think he was alive when I drove up," the white-faced man said, "but I'm afraid he's dead now."
Two men from a nearby home said they heard shots and ran out to see the stopped patrol car and a red sports car racing away.
Carlton Smith hadn't had a chance. An autopsy revealed that he had taken the full blast of a shotgun at close range in his left side. Just to make sure he died, his killer had pumped seven bullets from a handgun into his body as he lay helpless.
There appeared to be no motive except pure evil, unless the gunman needed to make sure that he would never be identified. Whoever drove that red Triumph must have had more than a traffic stop on his mind.
Two Eugene police officers spotted the Triumph in south Eugene and gave chase, but they lost it. They later recalled that they had never wanted so badly to stop a car, and they'd felt searing frustration as they watched the powerful car pull away from them. But the investigators did have the Triumph's license number. Carlton Smith had given it to the sheriff's dispatcher when he radioed in. The Oregon Motor Vehicle Department in Salem, the state capital, always had someone on duty, and the night clerk checked the records and told the Eugene investigators that the car had recently been taken in on a trade by a car dealer in Salem.
The sleepy dealer answered his phone at 3:30 A.M. "Yes," he said groggily. "I know that car. In fact, I just sold it tonight— last night now, I guess. I was just getting ready to close at nine P.M. These two fellows walked in, looked the car over, and bought it for $895 in cash money. They gave me mostly twenty-dollar
bills and this one guy said he'd been saving up his money to buy a good sports car."
The buyer's name? Norbert Waitts. The salesman identified mug shots of Waitts and Carl Cletus Bowles as the men who had bought the red Triumph. Buying the car was a clever move because if they were stopped, Waitts would have proper legal registration for the vehicle. But they were stopped, and something had gone terribly wrong.
What had made them shoot Carlton Smith? Had they simply panicked at the sight of a uniform? Or were they such confirmed cop-haters that their reflexes took over? No. It was most likely they knew they would be in trouble from the moment Smith picked up his radio to check on wants and warrants. If there was a "want" out on them for the bank robbery that afternoon, Waitts's name would have brought an immediate hit. Their names had not been broadcast on civilian radio stations yet, so they couldn't be sure that they were wanted— but they hadn't taken that chance.
Their new car was useless to them now. Waitts and Bowles realized that, and officers found it abandoned in a field adjoining a residential area only an hour after Deputy Smith died. That probably meant they were on foot. Police, sheriff's deputies, and FBI agents covered the area like an army of ants on a sand hill, and yet the two killers evaded them again. Searchers realized that they must have stolen a car or hidden in some house in the neighborhood next to the field.
Lane County Sheriff Harry Marlowe was of the opinion that the fugitives had somehow gotten ahold of a car. At eight the next morning, a young girl called the police to say that her mother and brother weren't in the house. Elizabeth Banfield and her twelve-year-old son
had simply disappeared during the night, leaving four other children alone in the house. The Banfield home was only three blocks from the site of the abandoned Triumph.
The child who had alerted the police said her mother would not leave her children at home alone without at least telling them where she was going. The child had a vague memory of voices in the night, but she had rolled over and gone back to sleep, believing that she was only dreaming. "Then when I got up this morning," she said, "I found the lights on in the kitchen and my mother and brother were gone."
Her father, Larry Banfield, was working far away from home on a dam project in northeastern Oregon. When he was notified that his wife and son had disappeared, he was just as dumbfounded as the rest of the family. The Banfields' five-year-old Ford Thunderbird was also missing.
There was good reason to worry. Elizabeth Banfield was described to lawmen as an extremely attractive redhead. In light of the attack on the Tigard motel clerk and the vicious killing of Carlton Smith, there was no reason to think that she would be safe. Her twelve-year-old son's fate might be even bleaker. Once the youngster had been used to slide past roadblocks and was no longer of value to them, police feared that Bowles and Waitts would dump him.
Teletypes were sent to all eleven western states, and police up and down the West Coast were alerted to watch for the Banfields' T-Bird with Oregon plates. Radio and television news flashes warned people, "Do not attempt to stop this car. Ascertain the location of the vehicle and report it at once to your local police."
That Wednesday morning passed with agonizing
slowness, and then, at noon, the stolen car was found. It was located 125 miles northeast of Eugene, ditched in a remote logged-off area high in the Cascade Mountains along the Santiam Pass. The two loggers who spotted it approached it slowly. They had heard the news broadcasts and they half-expected to find the bodies of the missing woman and her son inside. But the car was empty.
The Oregon State Police expressed grave concern for the safety of the woman and boy when they saw the car; there was no longer any doubt that they had been taken as hostages by the ex-cons, but where were they now? The car had been driven to its resting spot along a rugged logging road. When the road came to a sudden end, the driver had obviously made an effort to turn it around but it had become hopelessly stuck in the soft sand; the tires had dug in so far that the back portion of the T-Bird's frame actually rested on the ground. "Whoever left it here had to walk out," one officer muttered. The unspoken question was whether the woman and boy had walked out, too. The area had been logged off, but acres and acres of waist-high brush had overgrown the fir stumps that dotted the area. Beyond that, the densest of forests soared skyward. If the hostages had been left here, they could easily die in the wilderness before being found. Worse, if they'd been gunned down like Deputy Smith, their bodies might never be found.