Empty Promises (33 page)

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Susan Bartolomei and Deanna Buse never met; in fact they lived almost a thousand miles apart. Only a terrible kind of synchronicity placed both of them in the path of two strangers within a short time frame.
Were it not for the unbelievable courage of seventeen-year-old Susan Bartolomei, there might never have been an answer to what happened to Deanna Buse.
Susan was supposed to disappear, too, on the Monday night following Saturday, August 19— the day Deanna vanished.
Howardine Mease and her family were driving along Route 120 in the evening of August 21. They had visited their daughter in Clear Lake, California, and then headed south on a meandering vacation path back to their home north of Santa Barbara. They had planned to drive straight through the night, but as the hours wore on, their brakes overheated from the strain of too many hills along the road. Rather than risk a runaway wreck, the Meases pulled over to a wide spot in the road where they spent an uncomfortable— but safe— night, bundled up in sleeping bags on folding lawn chairs. "We woke up about ten minutes to six," Mrs. Mease recalled. "We packed up our sleeping bags and chairs and drove off. We hadn't gone more than a mile when we saw a person lying in the road that bisected 120. We stopped, and my husband reached the person and called to me to bring a mat right away. I ran back with the mat and saw that the person was a young girl."
They thought at first she must have been hit by a car, and she seemed to be dead. "She was lying facedown
on the road. She was motionless, but when I held her wrist, I found she had a faint pulse. My husband stood by the road to flag down a car to go for help. Two pickup trucks came by and they both said they'd call the authorities."
Helpless to do much, Howardine Mease knelt beside the young woman, and talked to her, assuring her that help was coming. "I asked her her name," she said, "and she said it was Susan Bartolomei and that she was from Ukiah. She gave me her parents' phone number. She told me that she and her boyfriend had been hitchhiking because of car trouble." Ukiah, the injured girl's hometown, was more than 200 miles from this isolated spot. Mrs. Mease wondered if the girl was delirious.
The girl, Susan, gasped that "they" had killed her boyfriend and shot her, but she said she didn't know the shooters. "I asked her who they were, and she said they were two teenage youths, about eighteen, named Mike and John and they were driving a '67 green Mercury with Oregon plates. I asked if they were from Oregon and she said no, they were from Oklahoma. No town. [She just said] 'all over Oklahoma.' "
California Highway patrolman Lloyd Berry got the first call for help at the Moccasin Cut-Off and Highway 120. It came over his radio as an accident call first and was designated "high speed." Halfway to the site, the radio operator informed him that the "accident" was actually a shooting but that he should proceed as fast as he could because no sheriff's car from Tuolumne County was available to respond.
Berry got to the lonely spot in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada just before an ambulance arrived. The dark-haired girl had lapsed into unconsciousness; it seemed to have taken the last of her strength to tell Mrs.
Mease about the two men who had shot her. She was rushed to Sonora Community Hospital.
Howardine Mease gave Trooper Berry the scant information she had gleaned from the victim about her assailants. Evidently a teenage boy had been shot too, and the girl said he had been killed. Berry picked up his radio microphone and relayed the message to the dispatcher that two white males driving a 1967 green Mercury were wanted as suspects in the shooting of a girl.
For the next two hours, the sketchy description of the assailants was broadcast repeatedly over all California law enforcement channels, alerting officers on both outgoing and incoming shifts. They didn't know where the victim had encountered the gunmen, or where her boyfriend might be. There were so many roads between Ukiah and Tuolumne County. It seemed an impossible task.
Someone in the Mease family had spotted some shell casings glinting in the early morning sun on top of a steep embankment next to the road. Police investigators recognized them as jackets from .22 caliber bullets. They could have fallen from the injured girl's clothing, or might have landed there when they were ejected from a gun.
Susan Bartolomei might have been shot on the road and then thrown over the embankment by her attackers. They probably believed she was either dead or so near death that she couldn't identify them— if indeed she knew who they were. As he looked over the bank, Berry could see the impossible route the grievously injured girl had to take to reach the road and any chance of help. The vegetation was crushed 75 to 100 feet down the incline. Green leaves and wildflowers were stained scarlet along the path where the slender girl had
crawled. In this desolate section of the motherlode country, there were no houses. No one would have heard the wounded girl's faint cries for help. Her only hope had been to pull herself up the steep slope to the road— and she had done just that.
Doctors at Sonora Community Hospital found it hard to believe that Susan Bartolomei had made that climb. She had four bullets in her brain and one in her chest, and her condition was very critical. She was unconscious and unresponsive to treatment and her vital signs were deteriorating.
Susan's family rushed to her side. They knew who her missing companion was. He was Tim Luce, the son of the district attorney of Lake County, California. The young couple had left Ukiah the previous afternoon, August 21. Tim, age seventeen, had planned to drive to nearby Hopland to purchase parts for an old pickup truck he was rebuilding. Hopland was barely ten miles south of Ukiah on Highway 101. He and Susan should have been home for supper, and when they still weren't home by dusk, their frantic parents had called the police. Their concern grew as a whole night passed with no word from them.
Where was Tim? The rescuers who had clambered down the bank to where Susan was found didn't find any sign of him. It was likely he had been pushed out of the abductors' car or that he was still with them. Susan had been nearly unconscious when she said he had been shot, too. Maybe she was hallucinating. He was a young, strong male. If he had been shot, they hoped against hope that he, too, had survived. If they pass through soft tissue, .22 caliber bullets don't necessarily do fatal damage; the danger occurs when they strike a bone. Then the small slugs tend to tumble and do terrible damage. Tim could still be alive but injured and
trapped somewhere in the more than 200 miles between Hopland and Chinese Camp.
All hope for Tim's safe return vanished when the investigators learned that an amateur archaeologist searching for arrowheads near Hopland had wandered into a vineyard adjacent to Highway 101. His eyes sweeping the ground, he had spotted a patch of color that stood out against the green of the grapevines. Moving closer, he saw it was the clothing of a young man who lay sprawled face up on the ground. A halo of blood surrounded his head, and there were dark stains on his shirt. Like a cruel afterthought of his killers, the imprint of automobile tires crisscrossed the boy's chest.
Tim Luce had obviously been killed shortly after he and Susan accepted a ride from someone, but Susan was held captive as the vehicle in which she rode headed south and then east.
Mendocino County sheriff's officers who worked the scene could see that someone had methodically fired small-caliber bullets at close range into Tim Luce's skull and then run over him, probably several times, in a heavy vehicle.
It seemed to be a singular incident, unconnected with other homicides in California. Tim Luce's body was discovered just after sunrise in the early morning of August 22, long before word of Susan Bartolomei's plight reached the Mendocino authorities.
They soon made the tragic connection, however. Patrol officers in Mendocino County came across an old car abandoned about five miles from the vineyard where the young male victim was found. Checking the plates, they learned the car was registered to Timothy Luce. The car, like so many owned by teenagers, was held together by spit, bailing wire, and luck, and some
thing had cracked or blown or boiled over. The car wasn't drivable when officers found it. The question that kept playing over in the investigators' minds now was "Why?" Susan had told Howardine Mease that she and Tim Luce were hitchhiking because of car trouble. Anyone bent on robbery could have done a lot better than two teenagers. His parents were sure Tim only carried enough money to buy some used auto parts from a junkyard.
It wasn't long before investigators found the motive, though. Acid phosphatase tests indicated the presence of semen during Susan's vaginal examination. She had been raped, probably several times. Two predators had given the young hitchhikers a lift. Tim would have recognized the danger they were in early on, and he probably fought to protect Susan from the men who called themselves Mike and John. Tim had become an impediment to their plans. How sad that while his father successfully prosecuted killers, Tim had become a victim of murder.
California officers wanted to find Mike and John. Anyone who would kill so ruthlessly could be expected to do so again. State Highway Patrol Lieutenant William Endicott and Tuolumne County Sheriff's Lieutenant Robert Andre headed the search team. They had one thing in their favor; the killers probably assumed that both Tim Luce and Susan Bartolomei were dead. And if they believed their victims were both dead, there was no reason for the killers to leave the Sonora area. The information that Susan was still alive was deliberately withheld from the media.
Jamestown, known locally as Jimtown, was a picturesque one-block hamlet three miles from Sonora. It was a railroad town back in 1897. It was eleven o'clock in the morning when Constable Ed Chafin arrived in
town, after making his customary early morning rounds. He had heard the police radio call regarding two fugitives and had checked passing cars that morning with a little more care than usual. Chafin knew which cars belonged to locals and which belonged to tourists; there weren't that many of the latter lately.
He spotted a green 1967 Buick parked on Jamestown's main street in front of the hotel. It was unoccupied, and it bore Oregon plates. There was a car parked in front of it, and Chafin pulled in behind it, deliberately nudging its bumper so the Buick could not be driven away. He got out and walked around the car, studying it. Something wasn't right. The girl who had been shot had gasped that her attackers had driven a Mercury.
And yet…
He had a feeling. "Sometimes when you've been in law enforcement long enough, that happens," he recalled. "I knew in my gut that I was looking at the getaway car. It was dirty and dusty, but on the trunk I saw two perfect handprints in the dust— from small hands— as if maybe the girl had been forced to lean against the car."
The car sure looked road-worn and the interior was cluttered. There were broken crackers, crumpled cigarette packs, an old blanket, and a small man's jacket on one seat. Chafin radioed Bob Andre and Bill Endicott to tell them about the car. The color and the plates were right; it was close enough to take a second look.
The highway patrol officers called for backup to meet them in Jamestown. Trooper Lloyd Berry, who had just delivered emergency blood to the Sonora hospital for Susan Bartolomei, headed for the scene.
When the lawmen checked the guest register in the local hotel, they realized they weren't looking for crim
inal masterminds. The names Mike Ford and John Ford were scrawled on the page. They hadn't even bothered to change the names they had used with their victims.
"You know them?" Chafin asked the clerk.
"Nope. They're strangers."
"What do they look like?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Young, messy, wild hippie hair. Both of 'em could do with a shave and a change of clothes— and a night's sleep."
"Are they upstairs now?"
"I think so. In rooms 19 and 26."
Within a matter of minutes, Andre and Endicott had cleared the lobby and the area surrounding the hotel. They were given a master key and they headed up the staircase to the second floor. Trooper Berry, armed with a shotgun, waited at the rear exit of the hotel while other deputies and highway patrolmen, who had sped to Jimtown, surrounded the building. Room 26 was at the top of the stairs while number 19 was near the end of the hall. The lieutenants bypassed number 26 and walked quietly to the more distant room. Endicott carried a shotgun while Andre held a handgun. Andre slipped the key into the lock of room 19, and the door swung open, but only a few inches; it was secured by a chain. Through the crack in the door, they could see a figure sleeping on the bed. Andre pushed his gun through the opening and said, "Put your hands up— come over here and unlock this chain." The man on the bed hardly seemed dangerous. He followed Andre's orders meekly, sliding the chain along its slot and letting it hang free. He was a small man, and young— probably a teenager. He wore only sagging undershorts and he seemed bewildered. He put up no resistance as they instructed him to lie down on the hall floor while they handcuffed him.
The next stop was room 26. Again the chain lock held. "Kick it open," Endicott ordered urgently. He could see the second suspect lying facedown on the bed, but his hands were hidden under the pillow. If he was only feigning sleep, he would have the opportunity for a clear shot at the officers through the door opening. As the chain snapped, Endicott shouted, "His hands— watch his hands!"
Andre was beside the bed in an instant, grabbing the man's hands before he had a chance to go for a gun. The second suspect was taller and more muscular than his partner but they hadn't given him a chance to fight back.
The two had been sleeping soundly. They must have believed that Susan Bartolomei was either dead or so near death that she would never identify them. They were caught only twenty miles from the spot where she was found.
Lieutenant Andre entered room 19 and emerged with a brown plaid plastic bag— the type used to carry car blankets. He'd found it very heavy when he lifted it and he checked its contents. In the bottom lay two hand weapons; a fully-loaded automatic .22 caliber Ruger, and a Frontier Colt single action .22 caliber pistol, also fully loaded. The drawers in the nightstands in both suspects' rooms had .22 caliber hollow-point bullets rattling around in them. Constable Chafin and Lieutenants Andre and Endicott led the surprised suspects from the hotel to waiting patrol cars. They were transported to the Tuolumne County sheriff's headquarters in Sonora. They didn't look like desperadoes, but they did look nervous as they underwent intensive questioning.