by Ann Rule
"After about five minutes I got up and I could walk and I went to the restroom and I looked in the mirror. There was something wrong with the whole right side of my face; it was all swollen out, and there was blood. I was so frightened; I thought he might be outside watching me, so I got down on my hands and knees and I crawled to one of the phones in the office, and I pushed a button and called the operator."
Kominek waited, saying nothing. The story was pouring out from Beth unbidden now.
"Shari was dying then, and I'm scared half to death, afraid I'm going to die too, and that he's going to come back and shoot me again. Then I could see the ambulance lights and the police driving up, and I run to Shari, and I say, 'Shari, talk to me!' Only Shari couldn't say anything. It was too late."
Tears were coursing down Beth Wilmot's cheeks. She turned to Kominek and said. "Do you know my last words were to Shari? The very last words? I said, 'Oh, shit, Shari — we forgot to clean the door,' and her last words to me were, 'Oh, shit. Let's do 'em."
The same thought occurred to the detective and to the sobbing girl at that moment, and it hung in the air of the hospital room. If Beth and Shari had left a few smudges on the front door of the TransAmerica Building, if they had not been so anxious to do a good job of cleaning, they would have been safely in Shari's Bronco and driving away from the parking lot before the killer could get to them.
CHAPTER 4
He was to have been the perfect child, the son his parents had longed for. He was most assuredly not one of the "throwaway" children who are initially unwanted and then buffeted from foster home to foster home. No criminologist could ever call Randall deprived. He was born into a loving home to educated upper-middle-class parents. That he might one day become a criminal, a violent, sadistic killer, seemed patently impossible. And yet, he was to find — and lose — success far beyond any boy's dreams, and finally, instead of fame, he would wallow in infamy.
His father, Walter "Jack" Woodfield, and his mother, Donna Jean, were products of an era when one fell in love, got married, and settled down to raise a small family of perfect children. That was the dream of the forties and fifties. Daughters would grow up, go to college, and marry professional men. Sons would become star athletes, excel in their studies, and make their parents proud.
For many of those young couples who married just after the end of the Second World War, the dreams came true. For others, like the Woodfields, something would go terribly wrong, and they would never understand why. If, indeed, the Woodfields' approach to child rearing was somehow flawed, it was with no thought to harm; from the very beginning, they wanted only the best for their children. By some curious but unwritten rule, families of that time three decades ago invariably wanted to have a boy baby first. Thus the father would have a small image of himself to mold and to present with all the advantages that he himself had missed when he grew up during the Great Depression. Although Donna Jean had had two years of college, the war had intervened, and Jack Woodfield had only a high-school diploma. He had joined Pacific Northwest Bell when he was twenty-one, and he was very successful. He would stay with the phone company for more than thirty years.
Donna Jean Woodfield gave birth first to two daughters in a row: Susan and Nancy, pretty, smart, good little girls. Both parents adored their daughters, but they still longed for a boy, and Donna Jean was certain that her third pregnancy in 1950 would bring the son that would make their family complete.
Friends remember that she selected and then rejected many names for the baby boy she confidently expected, explaining that a name was so important for a boy. The wrong name could make all the difference. Good solid boys' names like John and Charles and Joseph had gone out of vogue by 1950; a profusion of Brians and Kevins and Marks appeared in the "Births" columns in newspapers. The new idea was to give a boy baby a special name, something that he could wear proudly throughout his life. It was no longer popular to name boys after progenitors. Grandfathers might merit a middle name in tribute, but rarely a first name.
Donna Jean finally settled on what she thought was a wonderful name: Randall Brent Woodfield. She would call him Randy.
When Donna Jean Woodfield went into labor late on Christmas Day 1950, it seemed that she was, indeed, about to give birth to a special child. She did give birth to a boy, but not until after midnight; Randall Brent Woodfield was born on December 26 in Salem, Oregon. His mother was twenty-four years old; his father was twenty-seven.
Randy was a beautiful baby, born with a thick head of almost black hair. Within months his slate-blue eyes turned dark too, and his hair became a dense mass of curls. A woman who baby-sat for the Woodfields recalls that Randy was a very placid baby to care for. "He was very quiet. I remember that I worried sometimes because he was almost too good … too quiet."
Randy turned over and crawled earlier than other babies, and he walked earlier too. Jack Woodfield was sure that he had a blossoming athlete on his hands, and he was delighted.
Donna Jean breast-fed her son — that too just coming back into vogue after years of rigidly scheduled bottle-feeding. Randy's older sisters doted on him, treating him like a big doll.
The Woodfields remained in Salem for about a year after Randy's birth, and then moved to Corvallis for two or three years. Jack Woodfield was then transferred to Otter Rock, Oregon, where the family would remain for many years.
The Woodfields felt that it had all turned out perfectly. The girls were a pleasure to raise, and Randy would be the "all-American boy." His father would tutor him in sports, and his mother would see to it that he would have social grace, manners, and popularity. He was such a handsome, smart little boy that it could not be any other way.
There were minor problems; it wasn't long before Randy began to chafe against a household heavily weighted with females, with a father who worked long hours as he rose rapidly through the hierarchy of management in the Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone Company. Randy began to resent his sisters mightily; he complained that they were always allowed to do things that he couldn't. The explanation that they "were older" only enraged him.
Randy concluded that girls got to do what was fun and that girls were free. His sisters could go places by themselves and he had to stay home. Worst of all, he had to have a baby-sitter, and they didn't. As a schoolboy he rebelled against baby-sitters, demanding to be left alone. The few times he was left alone with his sisters, however, his jealousy at them exploded, and there were fights. He felt that he was the one who always got blamed, even if it wasn't his fault. He fumed because Susan and Nancy teased him, and tattled on him, and he was punished.
His mother was usually the one to mete out the discipline — not physically painful, but humiliating to Randy because he felt that he had disappointed her. He was torn early on between his desire to please his mother, to be a "good boy," and his anger at her because it seemed impossible to meet what he considered to be her expansive and unrealistic goals for him. Still, as an adult, he would recall that his relationship with his mother was "real good. I'm closer to my mother than I am to my father."
For the rest of his life, Randy Woodfield would misperceive women, overvaluing them and denigrating himself. In the end, his self-esteem would become totally dependent on how women viewed him.
And yet, for all of his grade-school years, Randy Woodfield would seem to be exactly the child his parents wanted. He was good in school, made excellent grades, and he was exceptional in sports. He and his father participated in what Randy describes as "a lot of father-son activities." He was a boy that any family would be proud of — handsomer than ever as the years passed, and popular with his fellow students. If he was occasionally given to temper tantrums at home over conflicts with his sisters, well … all little brothers acted that way.
Father Knows Best was what people watched on their television sets in the fifties, it was about the kind of family every family wanted to be. The mother never got angry, and the father never made a mistake, and, sure, Bud sometimes
became furious with Betty, his big sister, but that's the way things were supposed to be. In the final scenes, everybody made up and laughed about the problems.
Nobody talked about sex in situation comedies in the fifties. Nobody talked about sex period. And no one, certainly, talked about sex in the Woodfield home. That was something that could wait until high school. This didn't make them different from any other family of that period. Not at all; they were mirroring the image of the times.
Randy soon came to hate his nickname. It was a "baby" name, something his mother called him. His name was Randall, but as much as he fumed, "Randy" stuck to him like glue.
As their family grew, the Woodfields lived in Otter Rock, a town with only a few thousand citizens, located on the Oregon coast. Situated just north of the spot where Yaquina Bay empties into the Pacific Ocean, Otter Rock could vie with any town in America for sheer physical beauty. There seemed to be a "safeness" for children there; the closest "big" town was Corvallis, fifty-four miles to the east, and even Corvallis had only thirty-five thousand residents. Salem and Portland were a goodly stretch up the I-5 freeway, and fears that Otter Rock teenagers might be exposed to drugs were minimal when compared to problems parents faced in Portland.
Otter Rock was a town full of good neighbors, and the Woodfields were considered "pillars of the community," an exceptionally nice family. Jack continued moving up in the telephone company, and after Randy was ten, Donna Jean took a job at a drugstore in Newport as a clerk. A pretty woman who always dressed with style and flair, she looked several years younger than her actual age. People responded to Donna Jean, but then, people liked the whole Woodfield family.
Randy Woodfield reached puberty early, and his confusion about sexual matters grew, as did his misperception of the female. He was still trying to please his mother, but it was much more difficult now to be the perfect son. He continued to validate his own worth by how well he met Donna Jean's expectations. She was not aware of it; no one was aware of it. Randy resented his sisters because they were in high school and he was only in junior high. They could still go places forbidden to him, and they could take driver training and obtain driver's licenses.
His frustration level reached the danger point. He was a male, and males should be paid attention to. But females were running his life. He felt powerful sexual feelings, and then consuming guilt because he felt that way.
At the same time, the teenage Randy Woodfield was becoming known as the outstanding young athlete in Newport, where he attended school. His coordination marked him a prodigy on the playing field. It didn't seem to matter which sports he tried. He was a star in all of them: track, baseball, basketball, football. The towns of Otter Rock and Newport were proud of him. His father began a scrapbook of pictures and clippings extolling Randy's success. Eventually he would have three scrapbooks thick with Randy's honors. It isn't often that a town as small as Newport, Oregon, can claim an athlete with as much promise as Randy Woodfield showed.
It wasn't enough. The roar of the crowds, his father's pride, and the fact that he seemed slated for greatness could not counterbalance the doubts Randy had about his competence, and, indeed, about his masculinity.
His first overt demonstration of sexual deviance can be traced back to his days in junior high school. When the pressure and conflicts became too great for him to deal with in accepted channels, he began to expose himself. He knew that this was not something a "good boy" would do, but the obsession was all-consuming. Through exhibitionism he could not only demonstrate that he was a male but also subconsciously get back at his mother, who seemed to demand perfection that he could not deliver. Even more gratifying than this subtle revenge was the sight of a woman's or girl's frightened reaction to the shock of seeing his genitals.
The instances of exposure were seldom isolated. Randy would expose his erect organ to a woman on one side of Newport, revel in her reaction, and then sprint to other areas and find still more victims. He reasoned that he was not actually hurting anyone, and that made it, if not all right, at least acceptable. His own fear of discovery concurrently excited him and filled him with dread.
Eventually, of course, he was caught. And he was recognized. Newport wasn't big enough to allow anonymity, and Randy was well known in Newport.
Tragically, he drew no real punishment and was not referred for treatment. The teenage exposer is a somewhat rare phenomenon, and when an exposer is still only in junior high school, bright red warning flags should be raised. But police officials looked the other way. This was the kid that was going to make the rest of Oregon and perhaps the rest of the country look to Newport when he reached his peak as an athlete. To charge him, to perhaps send him away to reform school, would mean the end of the glory of Randy Woodfield.
The exposing incidents were whitewashed. Randy stayed in school, and he stayed at home. Years later, when he was a man and in profound trouble with the law, Randy Woodfield's parents would deny that they were aware of any sexual problems he might have had. It is possible that the officers who encountered Randy in his first acting out of sexual deviance did not tell his parents; it is possible that the suggestion that their son might be sexually abnormal in some way was repressed so thoroughly that the Woodfields do not, indeed, remember.
As far as Jack Woodfield can now recall, ? did not become sexually active until he was in high school. He remembers that Randy mentioned to him once that the girls in high school were "loose." This could have been construed as "man talk," and Jack Woodfield did not pursue it.
Randy Woodfield's father states adamantly that his son had no problems while growing up. He was not involved with alcohol or with drugs; Randy had participated in none of the forbidden activities that many teenagers dabbled in in the sixties. His father recalls that Randy was extremely close to his mother, both as a child and as a young man.
One of Randy's closest friends was Mike Schaeffer, now a teacher at a Newport school. Schaeffer even now cannot comprehend that Randy would ever hurt anyone, much less kill someone. When Schaeffer and Woodfield were close, Schaeffer recalls that Randy was not a "kiss-and-tell" dater, so Schaeffer never knew what sexual contacts Randy might have had. He would date one girl almost exclusively for a few months at a time — but never longer.
"He had a good relationship with his parents, but whenever he did anything wrong, his mother always knew," Schaeffer remembers. "He threw a party once his folks were out of town. He was really careful, and he put throw rugs and plastic over the carpets so there wouldn't be any damage done, and then he rounded up a crew of girls to stay around after the party to clean up. That place was just immaculate afterward, but when his mother got home, she knew. She just seemed to know everything he was doing."
Randy Woodfield was a very important member of the class of 1969 at Newport High School. He is well remembered.
"He was a beautiful kid, the star football player," one of his classmates recalls. "He was a relatively popular kid."
Some members of his graduating class recall Randy as a quiet, almost shy young man. Others say that Randy was given to pranks — things like teasing animals.
The girls Randy had dated for a while — all of them long married now — were the most popular, the most desirable girls. Interviewed by detectives in 1981, some of them were in tears over Randy's arrest. At least one of them could not bear to watch the television news and see Randy in handcuffs. Her husband, one of Randy's friends who stayed supportive for years, comments that she ran from the room whenever Randy's image flashed onto the screen.
Randy always seemed to prefer younger girls. Perhaps he found them less threatening, less controlling. As he grew older, he would continue to be attracted to girls a half-dozen or more years younger than he. He liked to have his girlfriends wear jeans, and he was disturbed when they wore sexy or what he called "flashy" clothes. He liked slender girls, but he was invariably attracted to big-breasted girls.
He was a good student at Newport High School, excelling particul
arly in mathematics, and he was moved into advanced math classes. Teachers would later praise his intellectual ability and the way he seemed to get along with everyone. The Newport Rotary Club once selected Randy as Boy of the Month. He belonged to the German club; he was much more than "just a dumb jock."
But it was in sports, of course, that Randy Woodfield made the more lasting impression. He made the all-state first team in football when he was still only a junior, and again when he was a senior. He received an honorable mention in all-state basketball when he was a senior, he played varsity baseball, and he was a sprinter and field-event specialist on the track team. His ambition — his obsession — was to play professional football, and few who knew him doubted that he would achieve that goal. He was a wide receiver without peer, and you could confidently put him up against any end from high schools in Portland or Seattle — or Houston, for that matter. According to Randy, in his senior year he was recruited for sports scholarships by "all the major colleges in the Northwest," and there is no evidence to dispute that.
Randy was very handsome, despite a stubborn case of teenage acne, and he was big — almost six feet two inches tall, a hundred and seventy pounds.
The world should have been his oyster.
The summer after graduating from high school, Randy Woodfield worked for Pacific Northwest Bell in Newport, driving trucks and cleaning and repairing telephone booths. In the fall of 1969 he enrolled in Treasure Valley Community College in Ontario, Oregon. Ontario is a town only slightly larger than Otter Rock, all the way across Oregon and hard by the Idaho border. His good friend from high school, Mike Schaeffer, was his roommate at Treasure Valley.
For the year he was at Treasure Valley, Randy made a GPA of 2.5 — roughly a C+ average. He was co-captain of the varsity football team and was on the varsity basketball and weight-lifting squads. In track, he held the freshman record for the long jump: twenty-two feet six and a half inches.