by Ann Rule
By late Thursday night, they were approaching Brigham City, Utah. Mike said he wanted to go to a bus station. They took him there, and watched him walk away from Young’s car, half-afraid he would spin around and shoot at them. But he kept walking.
Ida Burley gunned the motor and they were free; they had outlasted him, although Tom Young hadn’t slept for three days and nights. But the gunman’s brainwashing power over them continued for three more hours as they raced back toward Idaho, bound by their promise not to call police, emotionally immobilized by their terror and shock.
On Friday night, an unmarked Oregon State Police car delivered Tom Young to Pendleton to be reunited with his grateful wife. Unshaven and weary, he was still able to joke, “What are all the flowers for? I’m not dead yet. I smell like a hog and I need a shave,” he added, smiling ruefully.
His wife had never expected to see him alive again, but she scolded him, “Don’t ever do that to me again.” Then she hugged the man she had been married to for forty-three years.
“I get hell as soon as I get home,” Young laughed as he hugged her back.
The investigators were relieved that Tom Young and Ida Burley were safe, but understandably frustrated that Olds had such a substantial lead on them. In the three hours that had elapsed before his whereabouts in Brigham City were reported, he could have gone anywhere. Buses leaving Brigham City were stopped and searched, but Michael Olds wasn’t on any of them. He might very well have only pretended he was going to take a bus out of Utah. He could be hitchhiking, driving a stolen car or riding the rails of a train.
Robert Davenport, Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Salt Lake City office, said that they had no leads as the weekend passed. “We just hope a lead will come up. There’s a good chance he may have left the area. We know he’s on the run. And he probably won’t stay in one place for very long.”
Davenport said his best guess was that Olds had headed east, since he was wanted for two murders in the west. It was possible he was going to his estranged wife who was thought to be in Wisconsin. Two of Olds’ victims were women, and he probably was still angry at his wife for deserting him. Stakeouts were placed near her residence in case Olds showed up.
A period of uneasy calm descended. If Olds followed his usual pattern, there would be more abductions, more terrified hostages forced to accompany him as he raced across the country. Police feared they would eventually find more bodies dumped along Olds’ trail.
Saturday. Sunday. Monday. The days passed without word of Michael Olds. Where was he? Was he traveling with someone unable to call for help? He preyed on the old, the sick—people alone on farms or ranches who might not be missed for several days. There were a lot of isolated farmhouses and open spaces between Utah and Wisconsin—or wherever Olds was heading.
And then, on the night of April 11—Monday—Michael Olds surfaced. Incredibly, he had made it all the way across the country without being recognized. McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania is a suburb that edges the west side of Pittsburgh, a community a long, long, way from the vast desert stretches of Oregon, Idaho and Utah.
In McKees Rocks, a young woman left work, headed toward her parked car, and looked up to see a wild-eyed man leveling a gun at her.
“Get in the car!” he ordered.
Her mind raced. She knew that if she got in her car with an armed man, her chance of survival would probably be nil. She might die if she resisted him, but at least she figured she would have a chance. If he shot her where she stood, he wouldn’t rape her. Being alone with him would be worse. She told him she wasn’t going to get in the car, and started backing up, leading him away from her car. It threw him off balance; he obviously didn’t want to draw attention to himself and her resistance was making him nervous. Good.
She saw another employee leaving the building and called out that there was a man with a gun on her. And then she ran. The man with the gun let her go. They called the McKees Rocks Police Department and reported the attempted abduction, describing the stocky stranger in detail.
Police dispatchers alerted officers on duty and a widescale search for the gunman was begun immediately. A McKees Rocks police lieutenant saw a man matching the description in the parking lot of the Eat-and-Park restaurant. As he watched from his squad car, the red-headed man walked into the restaurant. It was hard to keep him in sight in the crowded fast-food establishment.
By the time the police lieutenant entered the crowded restaurant, he realized the one place someone could hide was the rest room.
The lieutenant’s heart sank as he pushed through the men’s room door. The gunman was holding a seven-year-old boy hostage. There was no reasoning with him. The boy’s father rushed forward and offered to take his son’s place, but the gunman wasn’t having any of it; he took the father hostage, too.
Captain Konkiel of the McKees Rocks police force placed a call to the restaurant phone and he, too, offered to take the youngster’s place. But the nameless desperado knew a good thing when he had it. He wanted the boy and he wanted a car to make his getaway. Tense minutes ticked by as the McKees Rocks officers tried in vain to reason with him while he also debated with Konkiel on the phone. All the time he bargained with them, he held his revolver against the boy’s head.
“I’ve got nothing to look forward to but the electric chair,” the man panted. “You back off or you’ll have a dead boy and his father, too. I’ve killed before and it doesn’t mean anything more to me to kill them.”
They believed that this stranger meant what he said. Again, he demanded a getaway car. No amount of psychology and coaxing was going to shake him.
Finally, it was agreed that the boy’s mother would be allowed to get the family’s station wagon and drive it around to the back of the Eat-and-Park. There, the gunman and his two hostages would join her. The police knew they had to get him out of the men’s room and, more importantly, they had to defuse the situation to a point where he would ease the gun away from the boy’s head.
Bravely, the mother pulled the station wagon up to the back door, and the man with the gun backed out of the restaurant, keeping her husband and son with him. He signaled to the woman that he would drive. He placed the boy in the luggage area just inside the rear window so that no one would be able to shoot at him from behind without endangering the boy.
Slowly, the wagon pulled away and headed toward Pittsburgh along Route 65, with unmarked cars waiting to fall in behind in a cautious caravan.
Jimmy Laurie, Chief of the McKees Rocks Police Department, pulled a few cars behind the station wagon. He was driving an unmarked detective’s car. The gunman was unaware that Laurie was broadcasting his progress over all the police channels that linked the Pittsburgh Police Department with McKees Rocks.
Pittsburgh Patrolmen Howard Landers and Lewis Rauhecker were working a two-man car out of the Number 8 Precinct on the P.M. shift that night. They prepared to set up a roadblock at the McKees Rocks Bridge with an assist from Patrolmen Fred Green and Walt Long. But, suddenly the station wagon, which had been moving behind them, sped up and passed them. As it did, the man with the gun leaned out and pegged a shot at Landers. The police car braked to a screeching halt, and the bullet missed Landers by inches.
The station wagon stopped, too. Green and Long were out of their car and headed toward the wagon from the front as Rauhecker and Landers approached from the sides. The man with the gun had a bead on Green and Long and he raised his arm to fire at them. At that moment, the mother of the boy hostage realized that at least one of the patrolmen would be killed if she didn’t act. She reached from the back seat, and knocked the gunman’s arm off target. He swung his gun hand and pointed the .32 directly at Lewis Rauhecker’s heart.
At the same instant, Rauhecker placed his gun at the gunman’s temple, and said quietly, “Drop it.”
The officer was taking a desperate gamble. He had the suspect. But the gunman had him, too.
They stood like that for what seemed like an h
our. If one shot, the other might die—but reflex muscle spasms action would make a dead finger squeeze off one last shot. One second. Two seconds.
Three seconds.
Four seconds.
Five seconds . . .
Rauhecker could see the man’s eyes swiveling. “In his peripheral vision, he could see that he was urrounded,” he said later. “Green was coming up over the hood of the car, with Long beside him and Landers was aiming in through the open driver’s window. There were other police cars pulling up on every side.”
The gunman blinked first and put his gun down on the seat. He was silent as he was cuffed and placed under arrest. They knew his name, but they didn’t really know who he was. He had told Konkiel on the phone earlier that his name was Michael Olds and that he’d killed before. The Pennsylvania officers did not realize until later just what a big fish they had caught. When they contacted Washington authorities, they realized how close they had come to being blown away.
“He has killed before,” the Washington detective told them. “And it doesn’t bother him at all.”
If Howard Landers hadn’t stood on his brakes as Olds fired at him when the station wagon drew abreast of the patrol car, he might well have been Olds’ fourth victim. He had felt the wind of the bullet as it whizzed by his face.
A mother determined to protect her little boy had saved Fred Green and Walt Long when she knocked Olds’ gun hand off-target. Had Olds decided to take a policeman with him as he died, Rauhecker would never have lived to tell about the memorable capture.
Michael Andrew Olds’s arrest pointed out the chance that a policeman takes when he begins each shift. Every one of the McKees Rocks and Pittsburgh officers involved was willing to exchange his life for those of the hostages. Many of them came close.
Although Olds was docile at the time of his arrest, he became belligerent as he appeared at preliminary hearings in Allegheny County. He was charged with attempted kidnaping, simple assault and battery, violation of the uniform firearms act, and terrorist threats. He was held in lieu of a million dollars bail.
He commented sullenly to Landers and Rauhecker that he had almost wanted to be caught. He felt he couldn’t survive outside of an institution; the real world was too much for him. If Michael Olds truly wanted the security of prison, he had made sure that was what he would get. In addition to the charges in Pennsylvania, federal charges were filed in Ogden, Utah, for the kidnapping and interstate transportation of Tom Young and Ida Burley. And then there were the murder charges in Umatilla County, Oregon, for the shooting death of Stephen Schmerer, and Malhuer County, Oregon, for the execution-style murder of seventy-five-year-old Mary Lindsay.
On Friday, May 6, 1977, Michael Olds was returned to Pendleton, Oregon, under heavy guard. He appeared before Circuit Court Judge Jack Olsen in preliminary hearings. His attorney asked that he be committed to a mental hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Judge Olsen denied the request on the grounds that there would be a profound security risk in removing Olds from the Umatilla County Jail.
Clearly, Michael Andrew Olds should never have been released from prison after his first conviction for murder.
His own defense attorney in the trial for Blossom Braham’s murder agreed. “I feel terrible,” he said. “I hoped that man would have been rehabilitated. Personally, I didn’t believe he would ever be this way after he was released. He was a nice-appearing young fellow. The jury probably thought he had made a mistake and if he served a life term in prison, he’d be rehabilitated. But obviously it didn’t happen.”
But Olds had fooled any number of experts on criminal behavior. All the prison psychiatrists, counselors, guards, work supervisors, and chaplains had praised him highly in their progress reports. Apparently only the prisoner himself knew that he needed the walls and the controlled atmosphere to keep a lid on the hatred that bubbled and boiled within him.
Michael Andrew Olds was the poster boy who illustrated the end result of child abuse. Whether the seed of violence lay dormant within him is a question that can never be answered, but he was the first victim, a small boy whose personality was permanently damaged by too little love, too much deprivation and punishment.
The child, who was conceived during a crime of violence, ended, for all practical purposes, his own life with a series of violent crimes.
Michael Olds was convicted of two counts of murder in Oregon and sentenced to life in prison. He is serving his time at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Today, he is fifty-six years old.
As Close as a Brother
Probably nobody is more consumed by dreams than a teenage girl. At eighteen, everything seems possible: college, a new love, marriage, a baby, an exciting career in a big city. But along with the dreams, there is danger. A lot of teenagers are naive—at least to some degree. They tend to believe that the men they encounter are telling the truth. If a man is good-looking and fun, friendly and helpful, they assume that he is safe. And most of the time strangers are no real threat, even though handsome and friendly men have been known to break hearts.
Anyone who has ever tried to warn a headstrong young woman of the perils of taking strangers at face value knows it is akin to shouting into the wind. It is even more difficult to warn them about someone they already know and trust. They won’t listen; they are so easily offended by anyone who tries to give them advice. Most girls eventually grow up like the rest of us in the school of hard knocks and disappointments, realizing ruefully that sometimes you have to be hurt to learn. But some, albeit a tiny percentage, put their trust in men who do more than hurt emotionally.
This case is a heart-breaker, not only for the girls wholearned too late about a deceptively friendly man, but for the people who loved them. Even though their tragedies happened three decades ago, and the victims would now be old enough to be grandmothers, I cannot forget them and the lives they never got to live.
At one time or another, every one of us has known a psychopath. Think of someone who lies when there is no need to lie, who has had just too many bizarre adventures for one person. As they grow older, these people will steal your money, step on your face to get your job, break your heart—but they won’t kill you. They are garden variety psychopaths. Terms come in and out of vogue in psychiatric parlance, but the personalities involved don’t change. Today, a psychopath is called a sociopath, or is said to have an antisocial personality. A sociopath remains forever in the early childhood phase of emotional development, never developing the controls or the empathy for others that mark an adult personality. He wants what he wants when he wants it. No one else matters.
He is often glib, charming, attractive, and convincing. He is not hindered by conscience. He lies with the guileless smile of a child, the clear eyes of an innocent. If you are lucky, an encounter with a psychopath leaves you only disillusioned and doubting your own judgment.
Two Washington State girls were not lucky. Their encounters with a psychopath ended their lives. Undoubtedly, many more girls would have died if not for the painstaking detective work of Seattle Police and King County, Washington, Police investigators.
On Friday, November 28, 1969, the bridge tender of the First Avenue South Bridge in Seattle reported for work somewhat grudgingly, his thoughts still on the leisurely Thanksgiving holiday just past. There was little traffic; most people had Friday off too, and even the nearby Boeing Company was closed for the holiday. Idly, he scanned the polluted waters of the Duwamish River that roiled sluggishly beneath the bridge.
Decades earlier, the Duwamish was as clear as glass, pristine as it was in the days when the Indians for which it is named lived on its banks. But it was being destroyed by industrial wastes. As the bridge tender watched the dirty water, his attention was drawn to a large object that bobbed in the waves. He had seen some peculiar things in the river, but now he felt a prickling of apprehension. The object was either a department store mannequin or a human body. As he squinted to see more clearly, he realized that it was a body.
And it looked as though it had been in the Duwamish for some time.
And that was odd. There were so many people who worked near the bridge, who drove over it. The body could not have been there long; someone surely would have spotted it.
The bridge tender ran for the bridge shack and phoned the Seattle Police Harbor Unit. The police boat reached the river beneath the bridge at 8:20 A.M. As the officers aboard drew closer to the drifting form, they saw that it was indeed a body—the nude body of a female.
Immersion in water speeds decomposition of a body and the task before the officers was not a pleasant one. Carefully, they hoisted the form onto the police boat. They could see that she had probably been in the river for many weeks, but her age or what she had looked like in life were impossible to determine.
An assistant medical examiner waited on shore with an ambulance and the body was transferred at once to the King County Medical Examiner’s office to await the autopsy that might give some clue as to the woman’s fate. The dead woman appeared to have suffered some facial wounds, but that could have happened long after she was dead, damage done by floating trees or something sharp along the river banks. A rule of thumb for any superior detective is that unexplained deaths are treated first as a homicide, second as a suicide, third as accidental, and only when all other possibilities have been excluded, as the result of natural causes.
Seattle Police Homicide detectives Dick Reed and Roy Moran had drawn weekend duty and they observed as Dr. Gale Wilson performed the autopsy on the anonymous woman. Wilson had held his post as medical examiner for more than thirty years, and was one of the foremost forensic pathologists in the country. If the body held any clues, he would find them.
The woman was five feet, five inches tall, and weighed 130 pounds, but her weight could have varied up to ten percent from life weight because of bloating from gases and waterlogging. Only her hair looked alive, it was a rich auburn-brown, long and thick. Her eyes were brown. Dr. Wilson estimated her age at somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-five, but he warned Reed and Moran that that was only a guess; it was extremely difficult to establish age on a body so decomposed.