The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  Schaeffer considered that Randy was talented, gifted, and he had never seen him be spiteful or cruel to anyone. But he had glimpsed a dark side to his best friend on occasion.

  "Randy stole some cassette tapes from some guy in the dorm. I knew he had those tapes, but when the guy asked about them, Randy lied and said he didn't have them. I told him it was his story to tell, and I wouldn't say anything, but that when it came down to his getting into trouble over taking them, he'd have to tell the truth. Later he confessed to the dorm proctor that he'd had them all along, and he gave them back."

  Randy Woodfield dated one girl at Treasure Valley Community College, Sharon McNeill. He seemed to be more attached to her than any girl he'd known before.

  "Sharon did her share of catting around," Schaeffer recalls, "and they were having troubles. Anyway, they broke up."

  Apparently Randy couldn't handle Sharon's rejection, and there were allegations that he had broken into the McNeill home on August 3, 1970, and completely "trashed" Sharon's room in reprisal. Entry had been made through a bathroom window. The only thing stolen was, oddly, a stuffed animal — a small bull, a present given to Sharon by Randy.

  He was arrested by Ontario, Oregon, police and charged with vandalizing his ex-girl's room. He was later found not guilty in a jury trial; there was no physical evidence linking Randy to the vandalism and theft.

  But there had allegedly been incidents of exposing in Ontario too, and it seemed prudent for Randy to move on. He arranged to transfer to Mount Hood Community College for one term. He went alone; Mike Schaeffer enrolled in Southern Oregon College.

  Sharon McNeill's parents were adamant that she have nothing further to do with Randy Woodfield, and she agreed with them. Even though he left Treasure Valley, he continued to bombard the young woman with letters and phone calls. Sharon would eventually be forced to obtain an unlisted phone number. Almost ten years after she had last seen him in Ontario, Sharon received a letter from Randy containing a nude photograph of himself. The final message was a Christmas card in December 1980. She had never given him any encouragement during the decade that intervened between the vandalism incident and his final Christmas card. She often wondered why he would not just let her go and forget her, but his peculiar attentions didn't really frighten her.

  "After we left Treasure Valley," Mike Schaeffer remembers, "Randy never visited me at SOC. A long time later, I got letters from him where he sounded quite religious and was quoting the Bible. It just wasn't him … not the Randy I knew."

  For the next two summers Randy Woodfield returned to the Oregon coast to work — this time for the Georgia-Pacific plywood and stud mill in Toledo.

  Randy had another "girlfriend" during that time — a Newport eighth-grader named Traci Connors.

  "He was home for the summer from Treasure Valley," she remembers. "I met him at the Newport High School football field, where he and his friends were playing football. I used to go and watch them, and I got to know Randy pretty well. It was just friendly; he was sort of the big brother I never had. He was always nice to me, and we didn't really have dates — but I spent a lot of time with him. He'd drive me home from the football field in the black Volkswagen Bug he had then. It had a sun roof, and Randy always had rakes sticking out of it. He took the rakes along to smooth out the longjump pits."

  For Traci it had been a case of platonic hero worship. She was only in the eighth grade, and he was a college man, a football star, who was being nice to her and spending time with her.

  On one occasion, however, Randy had surprised her and frightened her a little. Traci was no more than fourteen or fifteen, and Randy was about twenty. His parents were out of town, and he invited her to spend the night in his house with him. She drank two beers with him, and was thrilled when he kissed her a few times.

  The encounter escalated to petting that resulted in climax for Randy, but she had refused actual intercourse, saying, "No, I don't do things like that."

  "He just said, 'Okay,' and went to sleep in his own bed. I slept all night in another bed, and that was all there was to it."

  Traci would have done almost anything for Randy Woodfield — short of sex. She even intervened and attempted to help him reconcile with the lost Sharon from Treasure Valley.

  "One time Randy had me call up this girl over by Treasure Valley. He couldn't do it because her parents wouldn't let her date him anymore. He said they'd accused him of breaking and entering their house. He said he'd just taken back all the things he'd given her. Except for that girl, he never seemed to have a steady girlfriend.

  "At the end of the first summer I knew him, he went back to college and I didn't see him for a long time. He sent me a couple of letters from school, but I didn't hear from him again until after I'd graduated, and I was married."

  As a grown woman, Traci Connors still remembered Randy Woodfield as "a happy, funny, good person. He stayed in shape, and he was real clean and fun to be with. He had a great memory and he was sincere — not a phony. If you needed help, Randy would help you. He was always macho, and his father always wanted Randy to be something big. It seemed like he tried really hard to be what his parents wanted, but he always thought that his sisters were 'neat' and could do no wrong in his folks' eyes."

  Traci did acknowledge that Randy was a "little sneaky" at times, and particularly good at "planning things out."

  "One time he was going to make money by getting ten cases of Coors beer in Idaho and bringing them back to sell to the kids at Newport High at a profit. He brought the beer and hid it behind some church in town. He sold me a case, but before he could sell the rest of it, somebody found it and stole it. He asked me about that — as if I might know who'd done it, but I didn't know. He wasn't really mad, but he lost money on that deal."

  According to Traci, Randy Woodfield had been very concerned about what other people thought of him — particularly his high-school friends. "After he went to prison that first time, he asked me if Mike Schaeffer was really ashamed of him because he'd been in prison."

  Traci Connors was to continue for years an off-and-on friendship with the man she'd idolized when she was a young teenager. And like so many of the friends who had known Randy in his glory years, she could never really visualize his doing the terrible things he was accused of.

  CHAPTER 5

  By the spring of 1971 Randy Woodfield had passed his twentieth birthday and was far behind the carefully programmed schedule he had set for himself to play big-league ball. He should have been playing first-string varsity by now on a Pac-Eight team: the University of Washington Huskies or the University of Oregon Ducks. The life cycle of an athlete is short. Beyond Y.A. Tittle and a few other "old men" who have lasted in the pros after forty, there aren't many football players who are not over the hill by the time they reach thirty-five.

  Treasure Valley had not proved to be a college where big-league scouts trolled. Randy thought he never should have gone there in the first place. He had repetitive nightmares of waking up at thirty without ever having made it. He'd been a big fish in a little pond, and the world of athletics was full of minnows who got swallowed up when they ventured out of their safe waters.

  Sports was the one area in which Randy felt whole and competent, and he had kept his underlying compulsions quelled, if not completely under control, by working out and keeping his body in prime condition. He was not perfect socially, he was not perfect scholastically, but he was still pretty damn good on a football field and in the 100- and 200-yard dashes. And when he was home in Otter Rock and Newport during vacations and summers, he was still a hero to the kids of the area who hung around the field and watched him catch passes.

  That wasn't enough; that was nowhere near enough. He had made mistakes at Treasure Valley, and his image was tarnished. The theft in the dorm that he'd had to confess. The look in the proctor's eyes when he did, and the ignominy of having to return a lousy bunch of tapes, burned in his memory. The trial over the breaking and entering at t
he McNeills' house had been worse.

  And Sharon. Sharon had dumped him. He'd never been sure that he was masculine enough, a good enough lover, or as well endowed as other men. She'd taken everything he had to give her, and then she'd gone out with other guys behind his back. She as much as told him he didn't measure up.

  He'd thought he might feel better after taking his presents back and leaving her room a mess. But that had only gotten him in more trouble, and then she really wanted nothing to do with him.

  He'd concluded finally that Sharon was treacherous, like most of the women he'd known in his life. She'd run tattling to her folks, and she'd made him look like a fool. That was the whole thing about females. They acted soft and pretty, but they demanded more than any man could be expected to give. He'd kept thinking that if he could just talk to her, it would be all right, but it wasn't, and every time she'd told him to go away, he'd felt worse.

  He had tried to tell himself that he and Sharon were through. The hell with her. There were other women. But the memory of Sharon's betrayal would sneak up and confront him when he least expected it. It was almost impossible for him to really let go of her. Indeed, he would come to blame his "bad luck" at losing her for his growing sexual obsessions.

  In the spring of 1971 Randy registered for classes at Portland State University. Portland State seemed to him to be a far better choice than Treasure Valley in his quest for eventual football fame. And Portland State's coaches were certainly pleased to have Randy.

  Portland State wasn't in the Pac-Eight, of course. They played other small universities in Oregon and Washington, some of them very good, considering their size: Willamette (where his mother had gone to college), Linfield, Whitman, George Fox, the University of Puget Sound. The pros didn't draft many players from small colleges, but there were always some scouts keeping an eye out — just in case. Jim Zorn had come out of Cal-Poly-Pomona, and Eddie LeBaron had come from the College of the Pacific. There were scouts who still called Randy from time to time. If he could make a good showing at Portland State, he still had a chance to achieve his dream.

  After the spring term at Portland State, where he participated enthusiastically in spring practice, Randy once again worked for Georgia-Pacific, this time for the entire summer. He did not earn much during his employment there, and he applied for and was granted food stamps from the Multnomah County Public Welfare Commission in September 1971.

  Randy attended Portland State on a full-time basis from 1971 to the winter semester of 1973. He majored there in health education and physical education, and made average grades. He was a valuable member of the Portland State football team's line, a wide receiver who could be counted on to perform. He somehow managed to combine spring training for football with track, in which he once again competed and won in events that demanded speed. He also took courses in handball, wrestling, weight lifting, and gymnastics.

  He worked part-time as a cook and waiter at the Burger Chef restaurant near Portland State.

  But there had been a distinct personality change in the young football star by the time he arrived in Portland. He had been quiet, but something of a prankster, occasionally a thief, sporadically gripped by rage at rejection. He had, of course, been an exhibitionist, but that was still a side of him that no one claims to have known about — no one but the police in his hometown. He had never been a show-off, and he was not in 1971.

  Randy turned, at Portland State, to religion. His teammates of that era describe Randy Woodfield as "soft-spoken and mild-mannered … very, very religious." He was a member of the Fellowship of the Portland State University Campus Crusade for Christ and of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He was known to date only "Christian girls." Indeed, he embraced religion with the same fervor he had hitherto shown only for athletics, as if combining the two pursuits could cleanse him of whatever demons waited inside, scratching and clawing to get out.

  And there were demons.

  No matter that Randy Woodfield's football career had picked up appreciably when he moved to Portland State, no matter that he was once again being wooed seriously by football scouts from the pros, and no matter that he could date almost any coed he chose. He was still an exhibitionist; the sexual rush he got when he exposed himself to horrified women was so much stronger than any other gratification.

  There is little doubt that there were many, many episodes of exhibitionism for which he was not caught. He had the whole of Portland to rove in, and he had only to drive across the bridge over the Columbia River in his old Volkswagen to be in Vancouver, Washington. The majority of women don't bother to report exposers; the fallacy remains that exposers are not inherently dangerous, just as voyeurs are thought to be basically harmless. Certainly the experience can be momentarily shocking, but if women are not actually touched or abused, they tend to put the incident out of their minds.

  Still, Randy Woodfield, the tall-dark-and-handsome football star, the Christian athlete, was playing Russian roulette with his genitals. There had to come a time when he was reported, when his speed at running from the scene was not swift enough.

  His first adult arrest occurred in Vancouver, Washington, on August 7, 1972. He was charged with indecent exposure and he was convicted. He received only a suspended sentence. There is no record of probation. There is no indication that authorities at Portland State were aware of either his arrest or conviction.

  He maintained his "Mr. Clean" image on campus, attending religious meetings and doing well in class and better on the playing field. He traveled to Lake Tahoe, California, in 1972 and 1973 to participate in conferences for the Campus Crusade for Christ, taking a janitor's job at the Driftwood Lodge there to support himself.

  An almost compulsive saver of records and minutiae, Randy Woodfield carried souvenirs, notes, old checks, letters, cards, and miscellaneous papers wherever he went. He filled several notebooks with memoranda on religion, and one contained his "personal testimony" as a born-again Christian. In it he deplored his constant seeking after three goals in his life: "to be successful in school (grades); to reach the highest honors I could in my range of athletics; and to be popular with all the girls."

  He testified that he had turned away from religion because he thought his life was more exciting without the rules and regulations that constrained his friends. He wrote that he had come to see that his former achievements were "actually only trophies or memories I could hang on the wall. I suddenly found myself going nowhere in school and just wandering around."

  The Campus Crusade for Christ and the summers in Lake Tahoe estranged him somewhat from his father. Jack Woodfield was concerned that Randy was plunging into religion with almost maniacal fervor. There were arguments between son and father that seemed to have no resolution. Had Jack Woodfield known of the struggles within his son, he might have welcomed anything that could divert Randy from the path he was treading.

  Randy Woodfield was, then, in the early 1970's, an avowed Christian, but it did not seem to help with his sexual obsessions. It did not stop his prowling to find women to whom he could reveal that he was a male, and a male with genitals he now considered exceptionally large.

  Some of his victims were more puzzled than frightened. They saw a handsome, well-built young man — a man they might have been eager to date, given other circumstances — who stood in the shadows with unzipped fly, whispering softly: "Look at me. Look at this." This wasn't the standard creepy little man or some senile old fool forcing them to look at his pitiful penis. This man just didn't fit the stereotype they had come to expect.

  But of course there are no valid stereotypes for sexual criminals.

  Randy Woodfield was caught and arrested again on June 22, 1973, in the Portland area, and charged with indecent exposure, resisting an officer, and attempting to elude arrest. He appeared chastened and repentant in court. He was sentenced to five months and twenty-five days in jail (which he did not serve), and one year's probation. The resisting-an-officer charge was dropped.
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  On February 22, 1974, he was arrested for public indecency and received five years' probation. Counseling was a mandatory part of probation — but he never followed up on it. And no one forced him to.

  Records did not indicate that he had ever actually hurt any woman, and he seemed to the sentencing judges to be a good risk. He was a student, a star athlete, and" he had goals. He was working to support himself at the Tektronix Company in Beaverton, Oregon. Beyond that, there was — and is — the continuing problem of overcrowding in prisons. If every exposer arrested were sent to "the walls," the walls would burst. Twice more, then, Randy Woodfield was given a suspended sentence and placed on probation. His promises sounded sincere; he always promised he would seek therapy if he thought he could not control his impulses to expose himself. He reported regularly — although grudgingly — to his probation officer.

  After the 1973 football season at Portland State, Randy Woodfield's dream came true. He was drafted in the seventeenth "out" by the Green Bay Packers! The small-town football hero had seemingly achieved the impossible.

  Vince Lombardi had been dead for three years, but the Packers' glory still lingered: five NFL championships and two Super Bowl victories. This was the team that the boy Randy had watched avidly on his family's television set through his growing-up years. This was the top, not some "loser" team, but the best. The very best. The Green Bay Packers wanted him.

  Randy signed his contract on February 20, 1974. The Packers therein promised to pay him — a "skilled football player" — sixteen thousand dollars for the period extending from the date of signing until the first of May following the close of the 1974 season. In addition, he would receive room and board and traveling expenses during preseason training, as well as during the regular season. To sweeten the pot, there were bonuses to be had. For Randy Woodfield there was a three-thousand-dollar bonus going in. If Randy should survive the cuts and become a member of the forty-seven-man roster for the first league game of the 1974 season, he would receive an additional twenty-five hundred dollars. If he should catch twenty-five passes in the regular NFL season, he would receive two thousand dollars, and if he should catch thirty passes, he would be rewarded with a three-thousand-dollar bonus.