by Ann Rule
“A very good child,” Daniel Cool said, “Well-mannered, quiet. The neighbors used to comment and say, ‘He’s such a good boy,’ but I guess all kids are good.”
Silas had graduated from North Plainfield High School in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1973. He had always earned respectable—if not spectacular—grades. If Silas had a passion, it was golf, although he had never played on a high school team. “He played at local clubs,” Daniel said.
In his yearbook, Silas gave his plans as “playing golf at the farm.” But his father was convinced that he had hurt his back severely during one of his mighty swings.
Girls? Daniel couldn’t recall that Silas dated girls in high school. “My wife and I thought that was because of his ‘scoliosis problem.’ It made him on the shy side. I wish we could have caught that earlier . . .”
The only job Silas had had in New Jersey hadn’t lasted long. He had worked as an usher in a theater. “He lost that one because they caught him leaning against the seats,” his father told O’Leary. “But that was because of his back problems hurting him.”
Silas moved to Seattle in 1979. “He just wanted to explore the West Coast and he ended up in Seattle. He had a little Mustang then, and he drove out there—straight from New Jersey to Seattle.”
Even though he had no friends in Seattle, Silas hadn’t had trouble getting a job, not with his civil engineer training. “He had lots of different jobs—all different jobs. But he lost most of them because of his back problems,” Daniel Cool recalled.
In about 1985, Silas had gone to work for the county. Cool didn’t know why that had ended, but it had. He thought that Silas’s back must have gotten really bad about the same time.
“He called us on March 25, 1989. He said he was going to move back home and we talked him out of that. His back was bad. He told me once in 1989 that his back was so bad he just wanted to swat people.” And still, his father didn’t want him to give up and move home, although his mother worried.
Cool recalled that Silas had made “a mistake” in applying for disability for his back, and never got any compensation from the government. So the family had started to support him. “I think we’ve probably given him at least $75,000 over the years,” his father said. “Silas was just doing everything he could for his back pain. He had magnetic belts he put on, and massagers, and he lay down a lot. He told me one doctor said he just had to live with it. He came back here and we took him up to a hospital, and they didn’t make us feel very confident. Since then, he just didn’t go to any doctors.”
Despite the chronic pain he seemed to be in, Silas didn’t take any prescription medication, relying, his father said, on vitamins and health food supplements.
It seemed impossible to O’Leary that a man could be as disengaged from the world as Silas Cool had been and not have someone notice. He pushed a little harder, “He never exhibited any behavior as a child that would concern you—or your wife? Never had any psychiatric care?”
Daniel Cool was adamant that Silas had never been under psychiatric care. Steve O’Leary got the impression that this would have been shameful for his family. No, his father insisted. Silas had been fine. Fine. “No—No counselors. No problems. I hear he was eating in soup kitchens out there?” his father said uncomfortably.
“Yes—to save money,” O’Leary said.
This was difficult for the old man; he had tried his best to see that his son had enough to get by on.
“Did Silas ever seem depressed or angry?” O’Leary asked.
“No. Oh, one time we went out to dinner—when he was here a month ago—and he seemed a little irritated about the service. I think that was at the International House of Pancakes.”
Silas had always come back once a year to see his parents on the East Coast. “We saw Silas last October,” his father said, “when he came to see us for twelve days. We find it really hard to believe that he shot a bus driver. This would have been totally out of his character. I bought him a BB gun once, way back when he was a sophomore in high school. I don’t know what ever happened to that, but he wasn’t interested in guns. Never.”
As O’Leary tried to find something that might account for the tragedy on the bus, he elicited only “normal” things in Silas Cool’s childhood. His father remembered that he had been a Boy Scout, and had gone to Bible school. He had never been in the service. He was never interested in guns at all.
“In the last several months,” O’Leary began, “can you think of anything different in his behavior?”
“He was slightly agitated—but more on his own, again, like he’d be lying on the bed with his back problem in the afternoon, and he’d take a little walk somewhere. He could only go so far, and then he’d have to lie down again. He had that ‘twitching’ in the neck. The back situation was what he mostly complained about.”
As far as Daniel Cool knew, his son had no friends in Seattle. He never talked about anyone. No dating, no interaction with anyone at all. This had not, apparently, seemed strange to the old man. This was how Silas had always been.
“Did he talk about the buses?”
“Never mentioned them—except to say they had good bus service in Seattle.”
“Any hobbies?”
“Oh, he used to have a bicycle. I don’t know if that’s still in the apartment. He used to do bike riding when he first went out there. He used to go to the library a lot. He swam for his back. He used to swim a lot. That’s how he got in trouble on the sixteenth.”
“Do you know why he gave the officer a false name?”
“He was just a little irritated with the arresting officer. And he didn’t have any ID. And then he slurred his name so it sounded like ‘Steve’ instead of ‘Silas.’ ” Daniel Cool said he had arranged for the bail bondsmen to get his son out of jail after the misunderstanding at the pool.
“And, until last Friday,” O’Leary tried again, “he never exhibited any anger toward anyone, and he never expressed any interest in getting back at anyone?”
“Not at all,” the old man sighed, utterly defeated by the catastrophe and loss that had come to him in his mid-eighties. “Boy, that’s what surprises us. All of a sudden, flip your lid, and shoot a bus driver . . . . It’s astounding to my wife and me. We can’t figure that out. There’s [got to be] a motive behind that. You go on a bus with a couple of guns? My wife and I can’t understand that.”
Nor could anyone else.
Steve O’Leary thought that it must have taken an incredible amount of sheer will for Silas Cool to keep a “lid” on his rage when he visited his parents. Or it may have taken a tremendous amount of denial for them not to see that the perfect, well-behaved son was losing his mind. It was probably a little of both.
But maybe Silas’s asocial behavior wasn’t strange to his parents. They had no close friends in New Jersey, or anywhere. Daniel’s sister in Wisconsin was the closest person to him, outside of his wife, Ena. The Cools had never been mixers. They had one son. One cat. They had their own interests.
During the processing of the wrecked shell of Bus Number 359, a loose .38 pistol was found where it had apparently skidded along the floor. That gun was tested for fingerprints, and on November 30, a single print on the magazine proved to be that of Silas Cool. That was good physical evidence linking Cool to the gun, but now the gun had to be tied to Mark McLaughlin’s murder.
The .38 was test-fired in the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab and the bullets were compared to those taken from McLaughlin’s body. The lands and grooves that striated the metal were identical. A gun with Silas Cool’s print on it, and an AMT .38 caliber pistol that came from the box in his living room, had been used to shoot Mark McLaughlin. It was all there.
Gradually, the picture of the man who had sent a busload of human beings over the Aurora Bridge was becoming three-dimensional. A county worker who had been Silas Cool’s supervisor a decade earlier when he worked for the King County Building Department called the investigators. “He was a weird
fellow,” the man recalled, adding that Silas had had few social graces and didn’t get along with his fellow workers. “He was a racist, too,” the man said. That was totally against policy in King County. The supervisor said that Cool had been allowed to resign from his job, but in reality his presence in the department was so controversial that he had been forced out.
Pictures of Silas Cool had been posted at bus stops and stations to see if anyone recognized him. It remained hard to determine if Cool had had a particular beef with Mark McLaughlin or if his vengeful act had been directed at the world in general. A female Metro driver called the investigators to say that Cool’s face was very familiar to her. He’d been on her bus a couple of times. “At the end of last winter, he got on my shuttle route near Green Lake,” she said. “He immediately started complaining about the temperature inside the bus. He wanted no heat on. He actually walked up and down the aisle opening windows. He was complaining about germs in the air . . .”
Cool’s behavior had been bizarre enough to frighten her, she said, and she was relieved when he got off after a few miles. “But I saw him again when I was driving downtown. He wanted to go to the University District and I told him I was the slowest bus to get there. That time, he was very well dressed.”
Another Metro driver remembered Silas Cool, who had gotten on his bus in the downtown area. “He was unruly and obnoxious,” the male driver said. “I’ve seen him on my bus three or four times this year.”
It appeared that Silas Cool’s obsession, passion, avocation, hobby—his whole life—had been spent riding the buses of Seattle. He had acted as if he owned them, and he was frequently abusive with the drivers.
Still another driver called John Nordlund. He knew Silas Cool, too. “He would just stare at me—a blank intimidating stare. And I would just stare back at him. He had a reduced fare permit, but I haven’t seen him since last summer.”
A second female driver notified the homicide detectives that she recognized Silas Cool. Her voice was a little shaky as she recalled how he had boarded her bus at the north end of Seattle only one week before the bus crash. “He got on my bus and immediately started harassing me. He made comments about my ‘beautiful face and eyes,’ and I had to forcefully tell him to be quiet and sit down.” She said she hadn’t reported him; he had seemed like just another person who was either drunk or mentally disturbed, and every bus driver in the city had to deal with those problems every day.
More and more calls came in from bus drivers. Silas Cool hadn’t been a big problem but he had been a problem all over the city. A woman driver recalled that he’d been on her bus, which had a route that went east and then south of downtown—the opposite direction from Cool’s apartment. “He got on the bus, sat in the middle, and he was checking out teenagers,” she said. “I noticed him especially because it was dark out and he was wearing sunglasses. He scared me—enough so that I called my coordinator and reported it.”
Nobody at North Plainfield High School had thought much about Silas Cool in the years since graduation. Apparently, he hadn’t drawn much attention when he was in school. He had been sent an invitation to his class’s twenty-fifth reunion, which was to be held on the weekend after Thanksgiving. Because Silas was one of the “lost” graduates, the invitation was sent to his parents. There was no response.
The welcoming cocktail party for The Class of 1973 was just warming up in New Jersey at six P.M. on Friday, November 27. In Seattle, it was, of course, three P.M., moments before the shots sounded on Bus Number 359.
By Saturday afternoon, the reunion in North Plainfield was buzzing with the news of one of their former classmates. They couldn’t help but speculate that Silas Cool might have made some kind of statement meant to shock them. If that was the reason behind the shooting, it had worked. His name was on everyone’s lips at the reunion. Silas Cool was not someone who stood out in anyone’s memory. He wasn’t memorable for anything but his name.
“Cool” was slang that seemed to get recycled every generation or so. But Silas Cool was not “cool” at all. He wasn’t anything but average. He didn’t drink or go to parties. He didn’t date. “He was a very quiet kid,” one male classmate said. “Not a troublemaker.”
It was faint praise. When members of the Class of 1973 were approached by the media to give quotes, few of them had anything to offer more than speculation about why somebody would shoot a bus driver; few even remembered who Silas was, or if they did, they could not recall a single anecdote involving him.
His English teacher in tenth grade saw the story on the television news and said, “I found it very hard to sleep last night. People are obviously very different the rest of their lives than they were in tenth grade, but he was a really nice kid and he fit in.” He said Silas had laughed at jokes, once someone made the effort to draw him in.
Silas’s biology teacher remembered a loner, but one who showed no sign of problems. “He was what I would call a straight-arrow kid, typical student, clean-cut—but you never know what’s going to happen in someone’s lifetime that would make them do something like he did in Seattle. I’m flabbergasted.” His journalism teacher said he had been “sweet and kind,” but that he had never stood out from the crowd.
It was the same at Middlesex College in Edison, New Jersey. Silas had attended classes there from September 1975 to June 1978. He had gotten an A in statics, the study of forces in structures, but that was one of his few outstanding grades. His professor couldn’t recall him. “No one remembers him specifically,” Frank Rubino said, “but when they check back in their record books, everybody finds him . . .”
No one knew Silas Cool when he was a teenager, and no one knew him when he was forty-three. He seemed to have spent his whole life on the edges of other people’s lives, a person of so little importance that few remembered him.
In his Seattle apartment, he was “S. Cool,” the man whom his neighbors didn’t know.
Seattle reporters flew to New Jersey to try to get an inside look at Silas Cool’s life there. Eric Sorensen of the Seattle Times managed to obtain an interview with Daniel and Ena Cool. He found them in their very small, one-floor home, decorated modestly with some of the things they had brought back from their travels. The pair of bronzed baby shoes were from Singapore and had a little plaque reading, “Silas Cool, May 14, 1955.”
Ena Cool, seventy-seven, spoke with a South-African accent, still, as she echoed the bewilderment of her husband. “I can’t believe Silas is dead,” she said. “I can’t believe he’d do something like that. He was here only a month ago, and he didn’t give any indications he would do such a thing. You always think—if you’re left alone, you’re going to have your son around. But it’s not happening that way.”
Ena Cool said that she had been forty-three when Silas was born, and Daniel was forty-seven. As older parents, they accepted his quietness happily. “He was quiet, unassuming, a mind-his-own-business type. He never bothered anybody,” Daniel said proudly.
Ena and Silas were always close. After he graduated from high school, she recalled that he had gone with her back to South Africa when her mother became ill. While he was there, he had trained as an architect for the engineering department of the City of Durban. She said he was very good at the kind of drawing architects and engineers use—all straight careful lines and angles.
After he drove his Mustang out to Seattle, his parents had never really been sure what Silas’s life was like—apart from his back problems. They lived their lives 3,000 miles apart except for his yearly October visits. Although they believed he had scoliosis, he had never been treated for it in the traditional way—by wearing a full body cast to straighten out the curvature of the spine.
They didn’t know about his jobs out west, except that he lost them often. Ena Cool remembered visiting her son in Seattle in 1991, but, oddly, she described an apartment at a different address than the one he had lived in since 1985. Either she was mistaken on the date, or her son had rented a clean, nice
ly decorated apartment on a temporary basis so that she would not be disappointed in him. She was positive the nice apartment was on Taylor Avenue N. Silas Cool could not have taken his mother into an apartment with photographs of naked women on the walls and stacks of pornographic videos. Where had he taken her during her visit seven years earlier?
His parents admitted that Silas had been easily angered during his last visit home. He had spent those twelve days in October with them, and he had been angry that they had to wait in line at the restaurant—the incident Daniel Cool related to Steve O’Leary. Silas had insisted that they leave the line and go to another restaurant, his parents said. Yes, he had been angry at the neighbor’s dog for barking, and he had yelled at it. But what was neurotic about that, they asked? Anyone would have.
Although Silas’s parents had sent him nearly $700 a month, plus gifts at Christmas and on his birthday, the airplane tickets to fly home in October, and his aunt had been very generous, he was frustrated because he didn’t have any income that he’d earned himself. He felt that he was a burden on his parents, which, of course, he was. His mother sometimes thought that there must be some job that he could do with his hands, a job that wouldn’t strain his back.
“He was just wasting his life, when you think about it,” she said sadly, “But what can you do?”
Ena showed Eric Sorensen the last postcards that Silas had sent them. He called them “E and D” and the cards read like a normal, cheery, communiqué. He spoke of a PGA golf tournament that was to be held in a Seattle suburb, and of his walk to Albertson’s grocery near Green Lake. He asked if their ancient cat was still growing fatter. He told them what he had eaten for supper, and about riding a bus. He sounded like the son they wanted so badly to believe in.
Toward the end of his life, his mother said she had urged Silas to move back home. His room was still there for him, a small room with barely space for a bed, a dresser, and a postage stamp of a desk. He had resisted that idea, because he needed to move around. “He said he could do more there [in Seattle],” Ena Cool said. “He could get around on buses and go where he wanted to go, whereas here [without a car], you’re pretty stuck.”