Authors: Burl Barer
Head Shot (2 page)
Two
June 13, 1984
On June 13, 1984, an anonymous female informant called Tacoma Police Crime Stoppers. She told Officer Rod Cook that Paul St. Pierre, in custody for shooting Andrew Webb, was connected to the unexplained disappearance several months earlier of a young man named Damon Wells.
The anonymous caller said that Wells, reported missing on February 27, had been beaten to death by Paul St. Pierre. She told Cook that “Paul St. Pierre broke Wells's neck, and then they put his body in the trunk of a car and drove off for about four hours. They reportedly put the body in a Dumpster.” That same anonymous source indicated that other people who had lived in the residence as roommates of Paul St. Pierre also had information and knowledge of that incident, reported Officer Cook, “those being Donald Marshall and Mark Perez. According to the caller, Donald Marshall and Mark Perez were going to come to the station and tell what happened, but decided not to when Paul St. Pierre threatened to kill them.”
Based upon the phone call, Detectives Yerbury and Price reviewed the Missing Persons file on Damon Wells. “He was twenty years old, about five feet tall, maybe one hundred ten pounds,” recalled Yerbury. “According to the original report, he lived with his great-grandmother Ann Robertson on South C. Street. The last time she saw him was Friday night, February 24, 1984, at about ten-thirty.”
Mrs. Robertson described Damon as an exceptionally kind and thoughtful young man who was always willing to help others, especially his aged great-grandparents. Damon didn't complete high school, she said. He tried enlisting in the navy but was rejected because of his height, and because he suffered a severe spleen injury in an auto accident when he was ten years old.
The last time Mrs. Robertson saw Damon Wells, they were having coffee in the kitchen at about 10:15
P.M.
when they heard the doorbell ring. Damon got up to answer the door. “It was a kid he knew,” Robertson said. The kid to whom she referred was eighteen-year-old Steve Wood. “Damon went upstairs and got dressed. Then he came down and said, âGrandma, I'm going to be right back,' and that was the end of it. I thought he was going down to Pacific Avenue to buy a pack of cigarettes or something, but he never came back.”
P.M.
when they heard the doorbell ring. Damon got up to answer the door. “It was a kid he knew,” Robertson said. The kid to whom she referred was eighteen-year-old Steve Wood. “Damon went upstairs and got dressed. Then he came down and said, âGrandma, I'm going to be right back,' and that was the end of it. I thought he was going down to Pacific Avenue to buy a pack of cigarettes or something, but he never came back.”
“Apparently, Damon Wells always kept his grandmother informed of his whereabouts, and never gave her reason to worry about him,” said Detective Yerbury. “Naturally, when he didn't come home and he didn't call, she became very concerned and called the Tacoma Police asking them to help look for her grandson.”
“They wouldn't look for him,” lamented Robertson. “The detectives said, âAll kids run away.' I told them he had a life here, that he was happy. I was afraid that maybe he was robbed, even though he left his billfold and Social Security card upstairs. He was wearing a very expensive genuine topaz ring, and he had an expensive watch.”
Saturday, February 25, passed with no contact from Damon. Understandably concerned, his mother, Patricia Wells, called Steve Wood. He told her he and Damon had stopped by a party at a house on Pacific Avenue, and that he got into a fight with a fellow named Andrew Webb. Damon wasn't involved in the altercation, and when Wood decided to make a hasty exit, Damon stayed behind. He assured Mrs. Wells that Damon was fine when he last saw him, and perhaps her son had had too many beers and was sleeping it off somewhere.
As the day wore on, nerves wore thin, and Damon's extended family experienced increasing anxiety. Excuses, rationalizations, and hopeful optimism gradually gave way to desperation. On Monday, February 27, his mother filed an official Missing Persons report with Officer Meeks of the Tacoma Police Department.
“Damon Wells has shown absolutely no history of unexplained absences, according to his mother,” noted Meeks. “He was last seen wearing a blue nylon jacket, blue jeans, and white Nike shoes. He has a âT' tattoo on his left forearm, âDW' tattooed on right upper arm, and a six-inch abdominal scar. Patricia Wells said that her son has no history of drugs or alcohol abuse, and was not currently seeing a female.”
Informed of the beer bust attended Friday night by Damon Wells, Meeks drove to the house on Pacific Avenue. He intended to question the residents, but no one was home. Two days later, Detective Price was assigned to the case.
“On March second, I contacted Steve Wood at his father's barbershop,” reported Price. “He said that they had been at the party for a short time when a guy named Andrew Webb arrived. Shortly after, Webb and Wood got into a fight. They were told to move it outside, at which time Wood ran. He said that the last time he saw Damon, he was in the house.”
Wood also told Price that Damon didn't know the other guests at the party, that they originally went to the party to see someone named Mark, and that both Wood and Wells drank some beer. Wood drank ten to fifteen beers; Damon consumed six. “He had a good buzz on,” remarked Wood.
“According to the report,” recounted Yerbury, “Detective Price returned to the house on Pacific Avenue and spoke to residents Christopher and Paul St. Pierre. The brothers confirmed Wood's account. Chris St. Pierre said he didn't know Damon Wells, and wasn't paying attention to who was at the party. His older brother, Paul, said the same thing.”
Looking for any possible clue, police searched Damon's room at Robertson's home on March 22, 1984. Per Detective Price's report, all they found were his wallet, one unidentified phone number, and his clothing. He also continued his investigation by calling the mystery phone number. Judy Kraft of Sumner, Washington, answered the call. She told Price that her husband, Jerry, knew Damon, but neither she nor her spouse had heard from him recently.
Detective Price kept working the case, and all trails brought him back to the house on Pacific Avenue, the venue for the Friday night fight of Steve Wood and Andrew Webb. On May 7, Price located Webb in an apartment on South M Street.
Separated from his wife and child, Andrew Webb said that when he arrived at the party, Steve Wood and Damon Wells were already there. He admitted having words with Steve Wood, and that their verbal exchange escalated into a fistfight.
“Webb said that after the fight he cleaned up in the bathroom and left,” said Price. “He didn't know what happened to the victim, and he has no additional information.” The original investigation into Wells's disappearance was unable to establish Damon Wells at any location other than the Pacific Avenue party.
“The circumstances surrounding the anonymous phone call were very unusual,” Yerbury later commented. “We don't often receive detailed descriptions of alleged homicides. We took it very seriously.”
Based on the call to Crime Stoppers, and Yerbury's prior knowledge of Paul St. Pierre's potential for violence, the detectives decided to conduct interviews with the two men mentioned by the anonymous callerâMark Perez and Donald Marshall. “We wanted to establish if the information received from the woman who called Crime Stoppers was correct,” explained Yerbury. “If we were to request a search warrant for the house on Pacific Avenue, we would need more justification than a phone call. We would need some corroborating indications of reliability.”
Mark Perez, twenty-two, was contacted on June 14, 1984, and readily agreed to the interview. “I moved into [address] in September of 1983 with Don Marshall, my brother Steve Perez, and Chris St. Pierre,” he explained. “We were all doing OK in the house, and my brother had a girlfriend there for a short time. They moved out, and we had Chris's brother Paul move in. Sometime after Paul moved in, there was an incident at the IGA grocery store where Paul shot someone at the store in self-defense. After that, Paul was on sort of a âpower trip' and none of us could disagree with him in any way, so things got kind of tense around the house.”
Perez told detectives that Steve Wood was a friend of his, that Wood brought Damon Wells to the party, and described the fight between Steve Wood and Andrew Webb. “I told Steve I didn't know what had started the fight, but that he'd better leave. The last I saw of Damon,” Perez said, “he was standing between the kitchen door and the hallway door. Steve jumped off the porch and ran down the street. Andrew held his nose and went straight into the bathroom. I assumed Paul was also in the bathroom because he came out and asked Don, Chris, and I where Steve's friend Damon had gone. We looked around outside and came back into the living room, looked in the basement, and didn't see him anywhere. When I attempted to get into the bathroom to check on the condition of Webb's nose, I was denied access by Paul St. Pierre.”
“As a final note to that interview,” stated Yerbury, “Perez indicated that the subjects were in the bathroom approximately a half hour, and then they left stating that they were taking Webb to the hospital for examination of his injuries.”
“They returned about forty-five minutes later,” stated Perez, “and Andrew had a creamy stuff that he was putting on his noseâit had no bandages. I was drinking beer and watching TV in the living room when they returned, and I got up to use the bathroom. Paul and Don Marshall were in there wiping down some blood. The blood was on the sink, above the toilet, and below the windowsill.”
After Perez finished his statement, Yerbury attempted to contact Donald Marshall. “I left word with his employer that we wished to speak with him. Then, at about one that afternoon, we got word that Marshall wished to speak with
us.
We met him at Friday's Unfinished Furniture, where he worked as a salesman.”
us.
We met him at Friday's Unfinished Furniture, where he worked as a salesman.”
“When I first lived at [house number] Pacific Avenue, I lived with Steve Perez and his girlfriend, Vicky, Mark Perez, and Chris St. Pierre. I moved in with them and it was nice living with them. Everything was normal,” said Marshall, “just like regular roommates. Then, after about two months, Chris's brother Paul moved in. Then, after that, Andrew Webb moved in about two weeks later. Then things started to change. Everyone seemed more aggressive, a lot more drinking, and things were more rowdy.”
Once again, the shoot-out with Kevin Robinson at the IGA store was perceived as a significant turning point. “Paul seemed to change. He seemed like he was more of a macho man, and he talked a lot about killing. Basically, everyone was afraid of him in our household, with the exception of his brother Chris.”
Don Marshall's version of the Friday-night party, the Webb/Wood rumble, and Steve Wood's hasty exit was almost identical to that of Mark Perez. His memories of the postparty bathroom incident, however, were significantly more upsetting.
“As I came out of my bedroom,” he told the detectives, “and was going by the bathroom, I heard a scuffle, pounding on the walls, someone fell into the toilet seat and hit the floor. I heard, like, legs kicking up and down off the floor like someone was in pain.
“Paul said, âAndrew, that drunk motherfucker, got blood all over the place'; then he asked Mark Perez to help me clean up the blood in the bathroom while they took Andrew to the hospital. At this point, I noticed the toilet seat was broken, blood around the washup sink, the left wall, and the right wall when you first come into the bathroom. It was mostly spotty, but the blood on the wall looked deep and dark.”
When Andrew Webb and the St. Pierres returned from their supposed visit to the hospital, Marshall found it peculiar that they built a fire and began burning their clothes. “I then confronted them on exactly what was going on, or if they were hiding something from me. Andrew put his hand on my chest and stated that I don't need to know nothing, and that we Marshalls used to be something but we ain't nothing now, and he also said to me that I don't need to know shit.”
If Don Marshall harbored doubts concerning the appropriate time to consider future residence options, they evaporated in the heat of Andrew Webb's scathing remarks. “I decided that I was going to move from that point on, and I told Mark Perez that he should move, too. I never returned to the house by myself from that day on because I was afraid of what might happen.”
Marshall had good reason for concern, according to Andrew Webb. “Paul and Chris were angry with Don for moving out so quickly. They said he had chicken shitted out on them, and they talked about wasting him because they feared he would tell what he knew.”
On Monday June 11, Chris St. Pierre showed up at Friday's Unfinished Furniture. He wasn't there to buy a bookcase. “He said that everyone was talking too much. He told me that I better shut my mouth and don't worry about anything. Then he showed me a handful of bullets he had in his pocket, shook his head, and walked away.”
Two days later, said Marshall, he heard secondhand that Paul St. Pierre had “picked up some kid on the way to the Rush concert and took him to the house on Pacific Avenue to buy some drugs. Somehow, an argument broke out between Paul and the kid in which Paul just pulled his gun out and blew the guy's head off. At this point,” admitted Marshall, “I really feared for my life, and when a friend advised me to come forward, that's exactly what I did.”
“The friend who advised Don Marshall to come forward was a gentleman named Roy Kissler,” recalled Detective Yerbury. “Don Marshall told us that Mr. Kissler would be very valuable to our investigation, and that Paul St. Pierre allegedly confessed to Kissler, giving him graphic details of a homicide. Naturally, we got hold of Mr. Kissler, and he was eager to meet with us and give a sworn statement.”
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