by Ann Rule
O’Leary came into Homicide in October 1989. It was an assignment that few detectives ever want to leave, and he was no different.
Gene Ramirez started out in Patrol, but he broke department policy that says every rookie must work five years in Patrol before he can become a detective. Detective Sergeant Don Cameron had a major case where he needed someone who was fluent in Spanish to serve as an interpreter. After three years on Patrol, Gene Ramirez was assigned temporarily to Homicide. Not only was he a remarkably good interpreter, he proved to be a natural homicide detective. “I’m still here,” Ramirez says, smiling. “I’ve been here for sixteen years.” The other detectives call him “Eugenio.”
John Nordlund served in the Navy until 1966, and then became a clerk in the FBI in Seattle. Asked what he did there, he immediately says, “I can’t tell you,” but then he smiles. Like all FBI employees, he had signed a document swearing him to secrecy about the inner workings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Nordlund wanted to work in law enforcement in a more active way, and the Seattle Police Department was hiring. Another FBI clerk had signed on and encouraged Nordlund to give it a try. Initially, it was a way to stay in Seattle. “I was raised in Ballard [the city’s Scandinavian enclave],” he said, “and I’d already been around the world with the Navy; I wanted to stay home.”
Although they’d worked hundreds of homicide cases, each of the three detectives had cases they would never forget. Steve O’Leary solved the gruesome axe murder of a widow, using, among other clues, a single fingerprint and a stolen banana to establish commonalities between that murder and another attempted axe murder. John Nordlund worked the Wah Mee Massacre, where thirteen people were gunned down in an after-hours gambling spot in Seattle’s Chinatown. The investigators who did the crime scene quite literally waded up to their pant cuffs in the blood that flowed from the victims. Nordlund and Don Cameron found the two gunmen who had been quite willing to sacrifice more than a dozen lives in exchange for gambling money.
Gene Ramirez remembered a 1996 case where a young man was killed under the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Ramirez had a perfect case, a perfect witness—until they got into court and he learned his witness had been in jail at the time he said he’d seen a murder. Disappointed for a while, Ramirez found a better witness. His deceptively gentle questioning elicited the real eyewitness, a girlfriend who had seen it all.
The trio of homicide detectives were as different in personality as it was possible to be; O’Leary was garrulous and enthusiastic, Nordlund, deadpan and cynical—at least on the surface—and Ramirez, soft-spoken and thoughtful. Each one of them was a meticulous investigator who knew people, psychology and how to work a crime scene. Together, they were a dynamite team.
Now, they were starting at the bottom step of a case that was basically “Murder and Attempted Murder of Thirty-Four Victims.” They would try to determine if the killer was still alive. They wondered if it was possible that the shooter was one of the people who had been admitted to six different hospitals: Harborview, University of Washington Medical Center, Swedish Medical Center (First Hill), Swedish Medical Center (Ballard), Providence Medical Center, Northwest Hospital and Virginia Mason Medical Center. If the killer had been so angry at someone or some thing that he had been willing to sacrifice a whole busload of strangers, there was no guarantee that he would stop there.
There was a real sense of urgency about finding out the reasons behind what had just happened. Had the shooter been after Mark McLaughlin personally, or had he only been a target for what he represented?
While Gene Ramirez went to the scene of the crash, John Nordlund and Steve O’Leary joined Sergeant Fred Jordan at Harborview where he was standing by the body of the victim known only as Whiskey Doe. They studied the corpse. The man looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, he was quite handsome and well-groomed and was over six feet tall. Now that the ER staff had wiped the blood away, they recognized a contact bullet wound to the right side of his head.
Jordan showed them the bag containing Whiskey Doe’s clothes; he had worn a brown insulated vest, a long-sleeved purple shirt, blue jeans, a blue-black rubberized waist strap—the kind that people who wanted to lose weight wore—a black tank-top with a Nike logo on it, thong-style briefs with blue and black horizontal stripes, and a blue tie with circular red designs, which was attached to a red and white elastic strap with duct tape. There was an additional red and white strap. Except for the last two items, the clothing was fairly expensive and hardly unusual. The weight-loss strap was strange; the dead man was not at all overweight.
He had had $12.75 in bills and change, a Swiss army knife, a key chain with three keys attached, and a Metro bus transfer. He had carried a gun, yes, but the derringer’s cylinder was still loaded with five bullets. He hadn’t fired it.
Jane Jorgensen, an investigator for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, would take custody of Whiskey Doe’s body. She would roll his fingerprints so they could be run through AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) to see if there would be a match. Almost anyone in America who has applied for a job, joined the service, or been arrested has fingerprints on file somewhere.
While the detectives were at the Medical Examiner’s office, the body of the bus driver was brought in. They learned the identity of the first victim in the puzzling shooting: Mark Francis McLaughlin, who was born on June 13, 1954. His address was listed as a single family dwelling in Lynnwood. They listened to a cursory report on his injuries: “two gunshot wounds to the right side.” It would take a complete autopsy to know the extent of the damage caused by those shots.
O’Leary, Nordlund and Ramirez headed out to some of the other hospitals where victims were being treated. They would begin with interviews with those passengers who were able to talk: Jeremy Hauglee, Lacy Olsen, and P. K. Koo all gave O’Leary halting versions of the nightmare they had survived only hours before.
At 7:30 that first night, ID Tech Joyce Monroe entered Whiskey Doe’s thumbprints into the AFIS computers. It wasn’t long before an answer came back: the man was identified as Steven Gary Coole, but, oddly, several birthdates came back: 5/14/57, 5/14/59, 5/15/57 and 5/15/59. Steven Coole had been arrested for shoplifting at the Green Lake Albertson’s Grocery store. Along with that, he had been charged with public park code violations, false reporting, and “obstructing.” He had been in jail in July 1994 for those offenses. There was another shoplifting arrest listed in 1991. There was no information on what he had been accused of shoplifting, and there were no current warrants out for Coole.
It was a start. They had gone from being completely in the dark about Coole’s identity to the knowledge that he was probably from the Green Lake–North End area, and that he’d been arrested for some minor crimes. They still didn’t know if Coole was a victim or a shooter. Most of the witnesses had recalled hearing two spates of shots. Either the shooter had shot both McLaughlin and the man known as Steve Coole, or Coole himself had been the shooter. If the latter was true, he might have been fatally injured as McLaughlin fought with him over control of the bus.
Efforts would be made now to contact all Seattle hospitals to see if there was a medical history on file anywhere for a Steven Coole, and that could lead to information on his next of kin. In the meantime, Coole wasn’t the only passenger whose name would be run through the computers for prior criminal history. But nothing much beyond traffic tickets and some minor drug violations popped up. Somebody on that bus had carried a dark secret inside his head, and the three investigators still had no idea who it was.
Steve O’Leary headed out to talk with more of the injured at one hospital, while John Nordlund went to see others on the list. It was not an easy job. Many of the passengers spoke no English, a few were developmentally disabled, one or two had been drinking just before they got on the bus, and all were in shock and in pain; very few were in a state to provide clear and coherent statements.
At the very least, th
e two detectives figured they could eliminate possible suspects as they questioned one after another of the people who had been on the bus. They weren’t naive enough after years in Homicide to believe they could spot a killer just by talking to him, but they relied on a certain sixth sense, too.
AFIS was demonstrating once again what a remarkable investigative tool it was. Before the whorls, loops and ridges of fingerprints could be matched by a computer, using fingerprints as a means of identifying someone was catch as catch can. The FBI kept single prints on record only for the most wanted criminals in America, and all ten prints were necessary to identify an ordinary criminal. But the AFIS system has virtually changed the forensic identification world. One lone fingerprint can elicit remarkable information. Now, an investigator for the Medical Examiner’s office called Steve O’Leary at 9:30 that first night to say that AFIS had spit out another hit on the prints taken from the unknown man with the bullet hole in his head. But the new information only made the case more bizarre.
On November 16, less than two weeks earlier, a King County ID officer had run prints of a John Doe for the Lynnwood Police Department. “They came back to a Steve Gary Coole.”
O’Leary was elated, but not for long. Lynnwood police had arrested Steve Coole, but they didn’t really know who he was. He was only a most peculiar man who had been hanging around a local park. On November 9, 1998, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, a father had been waiting for his nine-year-old daughter to take a shower after a swim in the pool at the Recreation Pavilion in Montlake Terrace, Washington. Because it was a public facility, he stood guard outside the curtain where she showered. He was glad he had when he was startled to see a tall man walk up and boldly peer over his shoulder into the shower stall.
“Back off,” the father had said forcefully. “My daughter’s taking a shower in there.”
The man, who was described as tall and slender with a mop of brown hair streaked with gray, did move away—but only for a moment. He kept coming back, and walking much too close to the shower area several times, initially ignoring the father’s warnings. “On the third warning, he finally left,” the father told the Lynnwood police. “But I remembered him and what he looked like.”
One of the lifeguards had noticed the man too, and she wondered why he was hanging around the pool.
A week after the incident, the girl and her father were again at the Montlake Terrace pool when he saw the man who had acted so strangely before. He decided that he wasn’t going to wait for trouble; he dialed 911. The officer who responded to the call spotted the suspect in the Jacuzzi, and waited for him to move into the locker room. There, he attempted to talk with him. He took the most basic initial approach, asking the tall man who he was and when his birthday was. But the stranger insisted he didn’t have any identification on him. Finally, he agreed to give the officer his name.
“Stewart Coltrane*,” he said, adding that his birthdate was May 15, 1957.
“Why were you hanging around the girls’ showers last week?” the policemen asked. “You were making people nervous.”
Coltrane was adamant that he had done nothing wrong. “I just wanted to use the shower,” he said. “She was taking too long, and I was getting impatient. I just wanted to see if she was done yet.”
But he had been so persistent that he had alarmed the little girl’s father, and he didn’t seem to understand that, at best, he had used bad judgment. He insisted that he’d been within his rights. The officer told Coltrane it would be best if he left the Rec Pavilion. He headed off down the street, while the investigating officer checked computer bases for Coltrane’s name. He learned there was no Stewart Coltrane who’d been born on 5/15/57, and he quickly steered his patrol car in the direction the suspect had walked.
“I got nothing on that name and birthday you gave me,” the officer said when he caught up with the tall man, and Coltrane quickly gave him three more birthdays: May 14, 1957, May 15, 1959, and May 14, 1959. He didn’t seem to be developmentally disabled, but he didn’t even know his own birthdate! None of the dates he gave drew any hits on the computers as matching up with the name Stewart Coltrane. The suspect had then explained that he was from New Jersey. Maybe that was why the Northwest computers had no record of him. The policeman nodded and ran the name and the four birthdates through New Jersey computers. They drew no hits either.
Coltrane refused to show any documentation that would prove his identity, nor would he give the names of anyone who might identify him. If he hadn’t been hanging around kids in the shower, the officer would have let it go. But there was something a little ominous about the man. He wouldn’t give his home address or phone number. He demanded to talk to an attorney, deliberately escalating the conversation into an incident. At length, when he still would not give any accurate information about himself, he was booked into the Lynnwood jail for “obstructing.”
“Stewart Coltrane” was given a “cash only” bail of $1,000. He wasn’t in jail long. Someone in New Jersey contacted a bail bondsman in Seattle who provided the $1,000 bail. Stewart Coltrane, the alias for Steve Coole, walked out of the Lynnwood Jail a free and unidentified man.
O’Leary and Nordlund found the latest information confusing. If the dead man from the bus crash was both the shooter and the suspected child molester in Lynnwood, it made no sense. The M.O.s were completely different, and they both knew that the profiles for sex offenders and mass killers weren’t the same.
Even so, the Seattle homicide detectives were getting closer to finding out who the dead man really was. They ran the name Stewart Coltrane and found an address on 15th N.E. Gene Ramirez, O’Leary and Nordlund headed out there at 10:30 Friday night. They found the Ponderay Apartments easily enough, a four-story, square building in the University District.
It wasn’t difficult locating Coltrane’s unit; he was listed as the manager of the apartment house there. That was a bit of a surprise. They knocked, not really expecting anyone to answer; they figured Coltrane was lying on a slab at the M.E.’s office.
But someone answered the door, a large man with glasses. His hair wasn’t shot with gray and he was neither tall nor slender. “I’m Stewart Coltrane,” he acknowledged. “How can I help you?”
Coltrane gave his birthdate, and it wasn’t even close to the ones given by the man at the public pool in Lynnwood. He looked as puzzled as the investigators until John Nordlund mentioned the name “Coole.” Coltrane nodded. He knew a man named Cool. “Silas Cool,” he said. “You must mean Silas Cool. He’s one of the tenants here. I hardly know him, but let me take a look at his records.”
Coltrane checked the rent ledger. “Cool moved into Apartment 209 on June 18, 1985. He pays rent of $475 a month.”
“What’s he like?” O’Leary asked.
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“He’s lived here for more than thirteen years, and you don’t know what he’s like?”
“I never see him. He keeps to himself. I see him maybe two, three times a year, tops.”
Ironically, the real Stewart Coltrane’s career dealt with people who were mentally and emotionally disturbed and he considered himself fairly good at recognizing people who were on the edge. He had never seen anything that unusual about Silas Cool, save for the fact that he was a loner. Coltrane said Cool paid his rent on time, minded his own business, and always kept his windows covered. As far as he knew, nobody in the apartment house knew Cool any better than he did.
It was with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension that Coltrane and the three homicide detectives headed up the stairs to the south side of the building. They noted two small windows in the back of the unit as they stood outside the door to Apartment 209. They knocked, but no one answered. They hadn’t really expected that anyone would. Then Coltrane slipped the master key into the lock and turned the knob.
Ramirez, Nordlund, and O’Leary entered a dark apartment that smelled of dead air, dust, dirty clothes, and a strange sweet-sour mediciney odor. Even when
they switched on a light, it was still dim; the bulbs were only forty watt. But they could see that this was a very small one bedroom unit. A short entry hallway led to the living room. There was a combination dining-room/kitchen area adjoining that, and a door led back to a bedroom and bathroom. The place was unkempt and dreary, and it had only a few cheap pieces of furniture. It looked lonely, and had a flat, lifeless quality about it.
Nordlund, Ramirez and O’Leary were looking for answers to what seemed an unsolvable mystery. If Silas Cool was the second fatality of the bus crash, they would never be able to ask him what had happened. All they could do was hope that there were some clues in his drab apartment.
They didn’t have to move far inside before they spotted something that gave them goosebumps. There on the cluttered divider between the entry hall and the dining area were stacks of Metro Transit schedules, far too many for an average bus rider to have kept. They towered more than a foot high, and had begun to tumble down onto the dining room floor. They were for many different bus routes, all over the City of Seattle, and for other cities, too. Here, too, were notes Cool had written to himself, reminders that if he missed a Number 6 bus, he could catch a Number 40 within minutes. It looked as if Silas Cool’s life had revolved around buses.
A man’s wallet lay on the divider, too, with a driver’s license inside made out to Silas Garfield Cool, born on May 14, 1955. That was a familiar date; the suspect at the pool had apparently given his correct birthdate—but with the wrong year, and his apartment manager’s name instead of his own. However, this driver’s license had expired in 1987, eleven years earlier.
The whole apartment had that lifeless feeling, like a place out of a William Faulkner story. The picture on the license was of a very handsome young man, a man probably in his late twenties. He looked like a younger version of the man in the ER, but it was hard to be sure.
They walked through the apartment, aware of their own footsteps, half-holding their breaths against the stale odor. There was a jumble of papers on the dining room table. Among them, O’Leary found a card from an attorney in North Plainfield, New Jersey. On the back, someone had jotted down a man’s name and a Bainbridge Island, Washington, address.