Empty Promises (32 page)

He showed his identification all right; he waited until they were thirty feet away from him and then opened fire with a handgun. The agents returned fire as they ducked behind a parked car, but Bowles escaped by running between houses into a thickly wooded area. The Eugene-area task force was made up of seventy-five officers, including FBI agents, Springfield and Eugene city police, Oregon State Police, and Lane County deputies. They began a house-to-house search. When residents of the area tried to return to the streets where
they lived, they were stopped and told to stay away; it wasn't safe to go home. Those who were at home were urged to keep their doors and windows locked and open them only to law enforcement officers with proper identification.
Shortly after the search began, Jill Fina was spotted in a guest house behind a residence in the neighborhood. She didn't resist arrest. She was subsequently charged with hindering prosecution. The woman who owned the guest house was not at home and had no idea that her cottage had been appropriated by the fugitives.
Jill, in custody after her abortive escape honeymoon, seemed to have tired of adventure and danger. She had huge dark circles beneath her eyes as she told the FBI that she and Bowles had been in the Eugene area for seventeen days. She named two men who had assisted them by driving them to a commune-type residence on May 28. There they were outfitted with camping equipment and driven to a rural area outside Eugene. They had stayed out in the woods until one of the men picked them up and drove them to the house where she was arrested.
Jill admitted that she had been in on Carl's escape from the beginning. Prior to the actual escape, she had coordinated the arrangements with the Eugene contacts. She either did not know or would not say where her uncle-companion was at the present moment.
The two men who allegedly helped the escapees were charged with willfully and knowingly harboring an escaped prisoner. The charges were soon dropped on one of the men, however.
Two days later and 500 miles away, Carl Bowles surfaced again. Somehow he had evaded the tight net that lawmen had dropped over Lane County and had
headed east. Kootenai County, Idaho, Sheriff Thor Fladwed would eventually be able to reconstruct Bowles's zigzagging travels.
Sometime during the morning hours of Sunday, June 16, Carl Bowles commandeered a mobile home owned by an elderly couple in Kingston, Idaho, by threatening them with his gun. This location was about fifteen miles east of Coeur d'Alene, well into Idaho. For reasons known only to him, Bowles was heading west at that point, toward Washington State. The trio had driven along Interstate 90 to a spot west of Coeur d'Alene when the elderly man refused to go any farther. Bowles "slapped them around a bit," but left them alive when he fled.
A short time after that, he stopped an automobile driven by a resident of Post Falls, a hamlet of 3,000 just inside the Idaho state line. With an armed Bowles beside him, the driver drove only a few miles before he smashed into a utility pole. Either he was so frightened that he lost control of his car or he hit the pole deliberately. At any rate, Bowles took off on foot.
Next Carl Bowles wrestled a motorcycle away from a young man who came riding down the road. But the police were closing in. Bowles leaped off the motorcycle and headed for the Spokane River. Three Post Falls officers, led by Police Chief Del Larson, were right behind him. They didn't know who he was, beyond the fact that he had abducted at least four motorists at gunpoint. The fugitive jumped into the river, and when officers ordered him to halt he turned and raised his pistol.
It was one of those moments that seemed hours long. Post Falls Patrol Sergeant Jim Guy had the man in the river in his gunsight and ordered him to drop his
weapon. But Bowles lifted it and aimed it at Guy. Guy pulled the trigger.
Carl Cletus Bowles— who until now had walked away from every encounter with the law without so much as a scratch— fell into the river. The water turned red from the severe wound in his abdomen.
Jim Guy had never shot a man before and wasn't happy about having done so now. The sensation of watching blood bubble from another man's belly sickened him. "The FBI told me I did everyone a big favor," he said later, "but that still doesn't make me feel any better."
It was ironic. Bowles, who had slipped through the fingers of some of the most skilled big-city officers in the West, had been shot by a small-town policeman. He was rushed to Kootenai Memorial Hospital where he underwent six hours of emergency surgery to repair extensive damage to his colon. Surgeons speculated that the tough little con would live, barring infection or hemorrhaging.
But the incredible saga wasn't over yet. The Teletype that went out to law enforcement agencies early on the morning of June 17 was phrased in the taut language of such communications, yet it was ominous indeed:
Wanted: Federal fugitive. Vehicle involved. Carl Cletus Bowles, fugitive. Currently hospitalized in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, after being shot resisting arrest. Investigation at Eugene, Oregon, reveals Bowles at residence of E. C. Hunter and wife subsequent to Friday, 6/14 last. Mr. and Mrs. Hunter, ages sixty-two and sixty respectively, together with 1971 Chevrolet coupe, currently missing from residence. Whereabouts unknown. Bowles advised Hunters and car in Yakima, Washing
ton. Car described as 1971 Chevrolet coupe, tan over beige, Oregon license JHS 772, VIN 16447LCL79284. All law enforcement agencies be alert for information re Hunters and vehicle.
And later in the day:
Urgent. Locate vehicle and missing persons. Possible homicide. Earl C. Hunter, 6
'
3
"
, 235, black hair, wears glasses. Last seen wearing blue checked sport coat, blue slacks, white shirt, and tie. Wife "Vi" Hunter, 5
'
6
"
, 150, brown, blue. This department has reason to believe this couple was abducted by Carl Bowles after exchanging gunfire with FBI agents in this city. Request all police agencies check the areas of their cities where vehicles have been stolen in an attempt to locate the above vehicle. It is urgent that if the vehicle is located, notify the Eugene Police Department immediately to process the vehicle. This request is urgent. Notify Lt. Lonnecker immediately or Sergeant Moreland, Eugene, Oregon. Lt. Lonnecker, E.P.D.
Back in Eugene, Earl Hunter had left work early at 3:30 in the afternoon on Friday, June 24, after telling fellow workers that his wife was upset by the news that an escaped killer was loose near their home. That was the last time he and Vi Hunter were seen. Police checked their empty home after neighbors became alarmed. They found that three of the four single beds in the house had been slept in, leading them to believe that Bowles might have held the Hunters captive overnight. There was also evidence that someone had
shaved off a heavy beard in the bathroom sink. Vi Hunter's glasses were found on the floor of the garage and their car was gone.
Recovering in the Idaho hospital, Carl Bowles admitted that he had abducted the Hunters and used their car, but he insisted that he had let them go in Yakima, Washington. He said they had told him they had friends in Yakima, and would enjoy the trip. Their children, who lived in Seattle, told police that their parents had no friends or relatives near Yakima. They said that Bowles's explanation made no sense at all to them.
If the Hunters had been released unharmed, surely they would have contacted their worried relatives or the police. But their silence was ominous. Days passed, and despite massive searches neither the Hunters nor their car turned up in the Yakima area.
Hoyt Cupp flew to Bowles's bedside and talked to him for two and a half hours in an attempt to learn what had really happened to the Hunters. "I uncovered no significant facts," Cupp said wearily. "He still insists that he left the Hunters safe in Yakima, and that there was no bodily harm. He said he hitchhiked from Yakima to Coeur d'Alene. I do not feel he has been truthful."
The eastern half of Washington baked under temperatures in the mid-nineties as the fruitless search for the Hunters went on. The couple's son went to Carl Bowles's bedside and begged him to tell him where his parents were. But Bowles only said in a convincingly sincere voice that they were perfectly fine when he got out of their car in Yakima. Nothing could shake him from his story.
On Friday, June 21, the Hunters' Chevrolet was
found on a quiet residential street in Spokane, 250 miles east of Yakima. All that nearby homeowners knew was that the car had been there for about a week. No one had seen anyone get into or out of the car. FBI agents processed the vehicle and found a wallet and two pair of men's glasses in the trunk. "But there was no indication there had been any bodies in there."
Hope for the safe return of the Hunters faded rapidly. Investigators who had contacted the oil company the missing couple had patronized for years found that their credit card had been used at a Yakima self-service gas station on June 15, but station attendants could not remember who purchased the fuel.
Lane County detectives proceeded with their investigation as if it were a double homicide. Only the missing couple's son held out hope. "It's my objective opinion," he said, "that he did not shoot them. I think he left them somewhere, probably where they can't escape." There were lots of spots in the broad plains, dry deserts, and sweeping hills between Yakima and Spokane where the missing couple could have been left. They might have been locked in some deserted barn or stranded on some rattlesnake-infested wasteland miles from help.
Finally the bodies of a very tall man and a woman were found in a densely wooded area on farmland about 20 miles south of Spokane. Dr. Lois Shanks, the Spokane County Coroner, said that postmortem exams showed that Earl Hunter had been shot in the chest and head, but there was no definitive cause of death for Vi Hunter.
Earl Hunter had been almost a foot taller than the tiny escapee and outweighed him by close to a hundred pounds. But Carl Bowles had a gun. Why he chose to shoot the Hunters after driving them hundreds of miles
from their home would forever remain a mystery. He had let everyone else he'd ever captured go free. Perhaps Earl Hunter rushed him for the gun and he panicked. No one will ever know.
Federal charges were filed against Bowles for kidnapping and murder. It became obvious that he had never been rehabilitated, for all the kindness shown to him. He was as dangerous as a lion in the streets. Indeed, when Judge Edwin E. Allen had sentenced Bowles to life back in 1965, he meant life. "The defendant in this case should at no time be considered for parole, work release… or any type of program thought up in the future. For the protection of society, he must be imprisoned for the rest of his natural life."
Carl Bowles was only twenty-four years old, a handsome, almost baby-faced young man, when he heard this sentence pronounced. His name has faded from the headlines, but the ten people Bowles took as hostages will never forget him nor will the wife and four children of the lawman he killed or the descendants of the Hunters.
Bowles is now fifty-eight years old. After pleading guilty to three counts of second-degree murder on June 27, 1974, at a special court session held in a conference room at the Kootenai Memorial Hospital in Coeur d'Alene where he was recovering from his wounds, he was transferred to the Idaho State Penitentiary to begin serving a seventy-five-year sentence.
When federal charges were added to his long list of felonies, Carl Cletus Bowles was moved to a federal prison. He lives there today, in one of the most escape-proof prisons known to mankind. Bowles, who was given extraordinary consideration and who laughed in the face of prison officials, spends his days and nights
in a federal prison that is built seven floors beneath the earth. It is doubtful that he will ever see the light of day again.
Norbert Waitts, meanwhile, was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for the Wilson kidnappings and the murder of Deputy Carlton Smith. He ended up in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is still serving his term. Waitts's first possible date of release will be November 14, 2040. If he is still alive then, he will be ninety-nine years old.
Jill Fina went to jail for a relatively short time on charges of harboring and concealing an escaped prisoner. She is almost fifty now, and does not find danger nearly as titillating as she once did.

Killers on the Road

In American criminal folklore, there have always been roving killers who travel the freeways and back roads. Jim Morrison wrote a hit song about them: "There's a killer on the road." The Woody Harrelson movie
Natural Born Killers
explored the same concept. I don't know why the mindless sacrifice of perfect strangers should fascinate us so much. Maybe it's because we all harbor a certain nagging fear that we may meet one of these traveling maniacs one day. They don't fit the profile of serial killers, who always look for a specific victim type. The roving killers have no patterns at all, beyond the fact that they kill unpredictably. Maybe little seeds of violence lie dormant in their brains, only to blossom suddenly, bringing with them the coldest manner of murder.
Why? I don't know why.…
This was the first trial in my career as a fact-detective writer, but it wasn't just that milepost that stamped it in my memory. In the years since, I've attended over a hundred trials but this one keeps coming back to me. The judge, the jury, and everyone in the gallery of the Snohomish County courtroom actually slipped for a time into the consciousness of a murder victim. We all saw what she saw and heard; we all went with her to
the place where she would die. There was no way, of course, that we could actually feel her terror and despair, but this was as close as I ever came to gazing through the eyes of a murder victim. To say this was disturbing and unsettling doesn't even begin to describe what everyone in that courtroom felt.
The first-degree murder trial of Thomas Eugene Braun and Leonard Eugene Maine in Superior Court Judge Thomas G. McCrea's courtroom had been a long time coming. More than three years had passed since the brutal crime they were accused of had occurred. Now, finally, these two young men, their skin faded to a greenish-white jail pallor, were charged with four felonies: first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, grand larceny by possession, and robbery. The jury would not know that they were also accused of other crimes in other jurisdictions. What they would learn, however, was chilling enough.
Deanna Buse was born toward the end of World War II and turned twenty-two on August 19, 1967. Had she not met up with two strangers on that summer day so long ago, she would now be almost fifty-five and probably a grandmother. She was a very pretty young woman with delicate features and a halo of soft brown hair. She was a newlywed, married to Denton Buse, a longshoreman, for less than a year.
Deanna worked for the United Control Company at their Redmond, Washington, location. In the late sixties, Redmond was still a sleepy rural town northeast of Seattle where the residents knew one another and where there were far more pastures for horses
than office buildings. No one in Redmond had ever heard of computers or software. The concept that would make Microsoft revolutionize communication had not yet bloomed in the brain of Bill Gates, who was still in grade school. There were no condominiums or shopping malls or fast-food restaurants in Redmond. It was a different world then, a safe place to live and work. So were most of the other little towns in the area— Issaquah, North Bend, Monroe, Snohomish.
Deanna and Denny lived in Monroe, and they both worked hard so that they could one day have the house and family they wanted. During the week, Deanna worked from eight until five, and on Saturdays she went in for an early morning shift. She usually left home at 4:00 A.M. and was through by 2:30 P.M. She always went to her mother's home after work on Saturdays to do her laundry, and she always arrived by 4:00 P.M.
But on August 19, she never made it to her mother's house. This was totally unlike her, and her mother began to worry before five. She knew Denny was working, so Deanna couldn't be with him.
Deanna had gone to work that day, and her coworkers remembered walking with her to her car in the company lot a little after 2:30 P.M. Deanna drove a dark maroon two-year-old Buick Skylark, which she kept immaculate. As far as any of her co-workers recalled, Deanna was happy that day. If she had been worried about anything, she didn't let it show. She was smiling at them as she drove away shortly before 3:00 P.M.
Denton Buse was a handsome, muscular twenty-six-year-old. He was very concerned when he learned
Deanna had not arrived at her mother's house. When he got home from his job at 9:00 P.M. that Saturday, everything was as they'd left it. Nervously, he waited there for Deanna to come home. She had to be visiting friends or relatives. He tried to tell himself that she must have mentioned it to him and he'd forgotten, but he couldn't remember that she'd had any plans. Denny Buse called every acquaintance and all of her family but no one had seen or heard from Deanna after she left work.
Surely, if she had been in an accident, someone would have been notified. There were some lonely, heavily wooded spots on the road between Redmond and Bellevue as it meandered along Lake Sammamish, but the road between Redmond and Monroe was well traveled. It seemed impossible that an accident would have gone unnoticed.
"We grew more and more worried," Denny Buse would recall, "and finally, at 12:15 A.M., after calling all the hospitals and the state patrol and not finding out anything about an accident, we called the sheriff's office and reported Deanna missing."
At the first light of day, Buse and his father-in-law drove back and forth over Deanna's usual route from their home two miles north of Monroe to the United Control plant. They scoured the areas on either side of the road fearing that they might spot the Buick Skylark crashed there. They searched for several hours— and found nothing.
Snohomish County officers, led by Chief Criminal Deputy Russ Jubie, scoured the county for some trace of Deanna Buse. Four days after she had vanished, their hopes for her safety faded. Either Deanna Buse had reasons of her own to disappear— which her family
said was impossible— or she was being held captive. Or worse, she was dead.