Evil Eyes (5 page)

Huff had a deep love for Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan. She had recently been elected to the student government. Her father, William Huff, stated that his daughter worked for Delta Airlines. “She got to see the world when she worked for Delta.” He also knew that his daughter would succeed in whatever she did. “I think she would have been quite successful. She was very attractive, intelligent, and considerate.”

The popular Huff had been out late with some friends. She left one of her friends’ apartment at 3:45
A
.
M
. to return to her own apartment. She drove home, parked her car in the apartment parking lot, and walked at least one hundred feet from her car to her apartment door when she was attacked.

Huff’s autopsy report indicated that her death was brutal. She had been stabbed fifteen times in the heart, four times in the left lung, and six times in the liver. She had a total of twenty-eight cuts through her blouse.

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*

The Ann Arbor press noticed a pattern among the local murders: all white women attacked outside of apart-ments at or around 4:00
A
.
M
. on Sunday mornings. Thus was born the “Sunday Morning Slasher.”

The Ann Arbor Police Department also took notice. They created a task force to put a stop to the brutal murders. Word got out immediately and spread to Detroit.

When Sergeant James Arthurs, of the Detroit Police Department, heard about the Sunday Morning Slasher murders, he could not help but recall a similar attack back in 1969, which he had dubbed the “Paperboy Attacks.” It was an attack by a fifteen-year-old newspaper delivery boy who assaulted a young white woman by the name of Joan Gave, who lived on Van Dyke Street. Arthurs immediately contacted the Ann Arbor Police Department to inform them of the attacker, Coral Watts. Ann Arbor detectives added Watts’s name to an already extensive list of suspects.

Early the next month, on October 6, 1980, at 10:00
P
.
M
., twenty-year-old Sandra “Sandy” Dalpe, of Windsor, Ontario, was attacked and stabbed by an unknown black male on Lincoln Avenue. Somehow, she survived the attack.

Dalpe described the attack.

“I was walking home from a night-school class and I was across the street and two houses back from where I lived,” she recalled. “I heard two footsteps behind me, and as I was about to cross the street, I was stabbed in the back and the knife went through my left shoulder blade.”

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The blow was so forceful that she received broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a three-inch-wide wound.

“Apparently, the knife was one-half inch from my heart.” Dalpe also received a four-inch cut on the right side of her neck, as well as a two-inch stab wound on her left shoulder. She also received two large parallel slices on the left side of her face that she described as looking like “long letter
J
’s.”

These
J
’s were particularly brutal. “One goes from my mouth to my ear,” she recalled, “and the other one [is] one inch below. It completely severed my external jugular vein, the sternocleidomastoid muscle, and the muscles beneath it.”

The damage did not end there. “The spinal assessory nerve and facial nerve [were] severed. I have paralyzed muscles and extremely weak muscles and muscles that have wasted away.”

The attack also made it difficult for her to eat. She also had problems with raising her arms and moving her head. Dalpe claimed that she saw the man who attacked her. “I did see this evil person that morning waiting across the street at a bus stop. He was sitting in it. I thought that was odd and I wondered if he was hurt. I actually felt guilty not seeing if he was okay before I got on my bus to

go to work.”

Dalpe also described her attacker’s method of opera-tion. “I also saw his car in front of the school that night. He drove away as soon as I walked past the car. I saw him crouched beside the bushes. I saw a shiny thing and thought someone was looking for something.”

Dalpe believed the man thought he killed her and had left her for dead. Miraculously, somehow, she survived.

According to the United States Customs, Coral Watts’s

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brown Grand Prix was photographed crossing over the U.S.-Canadian border at 2:15
A
.
M
. the following day.

On November 1, 1980, thirty-year-old Mary Angus, also from Windsor, managed to evade Watts. She arrived at her home at 1:30
A
.
M
. after returning from a Halloween party. When she got out of her car, she noticed a well-built black man wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt. She kept an eye on the man as she walked up to her front door. As she took out her key chain, she noticed that the man had stopped to kneel down and tie his shoe. He immediately switched directions and made a beeline for Angus. The young woman screamed at the top of her lungs and bolted for her front door. Her actions startled the man, who took off running. Later, she would be presented with a photographic lineup by the police, wherein she immediately pointed to a picture of Coral Eugene Watts. Unfortunately, she added that she was not 100 percent sure that he was her potential attacker due to the poorly lit conditions.

Once again, U.S. Customs had records that indicated Watts’s Grand Prix was seen crossing over the border from Windsor into Detroit at 2:07
A
.
M
., shortly after the near attack.

Five days later, on November 6, 1980, sixty-three-year-old waitress Lena “Joyce” Bennett’s naked body was discovered hanging by a black trench coat belt from a wooden beam in her Van Antwerp Street garage in Harper Woods, Michigan.

Bennett had driven home from her late-night shift at a nearby restaurant. Unlike the other women discovered in Michigan, Bennett had been sexually assaulted. Allegedly, a broomstick had been inserted into her vagina.

Fellow Ann Arbor Homicide detectives Paul Bunten and Dale Heath believed they knew who was responsible for the assaults and murders in Ann Arbor: Coral Eugene Watts.

On November 15, 1980, fifteen-year veteran Bunten was informed by two beat patrol officers that they spotted Watts as he stalked a young woman at 4:50
A
.
M
. down Main Street in Ann Arbor. It would be the first and only time that any authority figures witnessed Watts’s elaborate game of cat and mouse.

Watts cruised Main Street in his Grand Prix. He honed his sights in on a young woman coming home late that night. He would drive past the woman slowly and pull over a block or so ahead of her. The woman soon became aware that someone was following her. She darted around a corner and headed off in a different direction. Watts doubled back the car and continued to stalk her.

The woman became increasingly frightened. She continued to duck into corners and into apartment doorways to evade the man. The interminable dance lasted for more than nine blocks.

The two officers witnessed the entire ordeal.

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Finally the woman darted around one corner too many for Watts, who lost her in the shadows. She managed to get inside her apartment on the 200 block of North Main Street. Watts was furious.

“He almost went nuts,” Bunten recalled to the
Houston Chronicle
. “The police who were watching him said he got frantic, started craning his head around in the car, trying to see where she’d gone. He even got agitated and ran around trying to see her.”

He excitedly forced open his car door and literally jumped out of his seat. He began to search along the sidewalk and in the apartment doorways to find her. She was nowhere to be found.

Dejected, Watts turned around and headed back to his Grand Prix, only to be confronted by the two officers. With athletic grace and speed, he slipped the cops. The officers pursued him on foot; however, Watts’s All-City running-back credentials helped him make it to his vehicle and blaze out of there. Unfortunately for Watts, his driving skills were no match for his athletic prowess. The officers caught up to him in their police cruiser and arrested him for driving with a suspended license and ex-pired license tags.

A search of his vehicle led to the discovery of something quite unusual. Watts had an oversized dictionary in the backseat of his Grand Prix. Upon closer inspection the officers could see something scratched on the cover. It said, “Rebecca is a lover.” Detective Bunten could not help but be reminded later of the recent murder of Rebecca Huff. The search also turned up blood evidence as well as some wood-carving tools.

The two officers brought Watts in for an interrogation at the Ann Arbor Police Department. “I was certain I had a prime suspect,” Bunten remembered. “What struck me

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was how normal he seemed,” he said of the soft-spoken twenty-seven-year-old Watts. Bunten observed his perp’s calm demeanor. He did notice that Watts’s hands twitched slightly, his only sign of nervousness.

Watts knew that Bunten was not there to talk to him about the vehicular infractions.

“I know what you’ve been up to,” Bunten declared. “I can’t prove it yet, but I will.”

Watts merely looked up at Bunten and said, “I want a lawyer.”

Bunten stopped talking and allowed the suspect to make his phone call. Bunten had no evidence against Watts, so there was no justification in holding him any longer.

Watts was free to go.

That did not, however, prevent Bunten from pursuing his man. In essence, he became Watts’s stalker.

Bunten was relentless in his endeavors. He began by calling other police jurisdictions and finding everything he could to tie Watts to the Sunday Morning Slasher killings. Bunten spoke with the Kalamazoo Police Department about the murder of Gloria Steele. Apparently, the wound patterns inflicted on Steele were reminiscent of the stab wounds on Glenda Richmond. Kalamazoo detectives informed Bunten that Watts was a key suspect in the Steele murder; however, they could not secure any evidence to pin it on him.

Bunten discovered information about Watts’s various stints in mental institutions. He also found out that Watts may have been terrorizing the city of Detroit as well. Finally, Watts’s former psychiatrist and former attor-ney warned Bunten that he had probably found his

killer.

All of these factors led Bunten to round up several

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officers and begin a 24/7 surveillance of Coral Eugene Watts. “We turned into insomniacs,” he stated.

Apparently, at first, Watts was unaware of the watching eyes. Only five days after his arrest, at 7:00
P
.
M
. on November 20, 1980, he allegedly attempted to attack sixty-year- old Rita Pardo in an apartment complex laundry room in Windsor, Ontario. A man wearing a dress shirt, dark pants, and a light brown trench coat grabbed Pardo from behind and began to choke her with his hands. She screamed and the man hightailed it out of there. Watts’s Grand Prix was not tracked crossing the border from Canada to the United States later that night; however, he was seen the next day wearing clothing that was similar to what Pardo described.

The pressure of the surveillance was increased substan-tially the following day. According to Bunten, a meeting was held at the Detroit Police Department that included Bunten, Sergeant James Arthurs, Detroit Police Internal Affairs, the state of Michigan police force, Windsor, Ontario authorities, and Homicide Squad Seven. Their purpose: somehow try and find a way to stop Coral Eugene Watts before he killed again.

They all followed Watts’s every move. They followed him to work at E&L Transport, the trucking company, located on the 21000 block of Hayden Road in Woodhaven; they followed him to the grocery stores; they followed him as he went to visit his girlfriend Beverly Frye’s house.

“He knew we were watching him,” Bunten recalled with relish. “He’d get out at a traffic light and yell at private citizens, thinking they were cops.”

Watts would occasionally jump in his car and head out of the Detroit area. Sometimes he would drive for more than three hundred miles, stop, turn around, and head

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back home. He was always on the go, always on the prowl, and always on the lookout.

Bunten turned up the pressure when he secured a search warrant for Watts’s Inskter apartment and the Ceaser household as well. Officers did not find anything in his apartment. They did, however, find a tennis shoe with blood on it in his mother’s house. The blood could not be traced.

The main reason for searching Watts’s various prem-ises had been established. Bunten was trying to get under his suspected murderer’s skin.

Bunten continued to be a nuisance for Watts. A few days later, on November 26, 1980, Bunten secured a warrant for a tracking device for Watts’s Grand Prix. Four days later, the detective secretly attached the bug-ging device, a “beeper type transmitter,” to the undercar-riage of Watts’s ride.

“He got paranoid,” Bunten said of Watts. “He knew we were watching him and the longer we watched him, the less he’d move around. He got to where he almost couldn’t leave his neighborhood.”

Indeed, the killings in the greater Detroit Metropoli-tan area and Ann Arbor area came to a halt over the next two months.

The warrant for the tracking device ended on January 29, 1981.

That same day, Bunten moved in for the kill. He cor-ralled Watts at the Ceaser home on the 28000 block of Avondale Street and brought him into the Detroit Police Department Homicide Section for questioning.

The interrogation lasted more than five hours. Despite Bunten’s seasoned ability at getting suspects to talk, he could not crack Watts.

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“I used every means I know to get somebody to confess. . . . He’s so streetwise, nothing would work.”

Again Bunten was surprised by how easygoing Watts was. “He was nice. He was polite. If you can forget what he does, he’s seems like a soft-spoken, timid, but personable, pleasant person.”