The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  By 1976 Randy had acclimated somewhat to prison. Since he had been sentenced only on the robbery charge, he did not carry the stigma of "sex pervert" which alienates other prison inmates. He made friends, some relationships that would continue after he had served his sentence.

  Randy was assigned to work in the dining room and kitchen, where he was paid fifty cents a day. He took college extension courses through a program furnished by Chemeketa Community College in Salem, earning A's and B's in courses such as typing, accounting, computer programming, economics, and … human sexuality. He did not participate at first in institutional therapy programs, but he did involve himself in a group-therapy program run by the Reverend Simon Beach. Randy joined the Masters Men's Bible Club, the Freedom in Christ group, as well as a Bible-study group that met informally in the "yard" whenever the weather was nice.

  He was far from abandoned by his family; his approved visitor's list included his grandmother, his sisters, his parents, three of his closest friends, and women listed only as two "Christian girls."

  In his leisure time he played basketball, ran track, and lifted weights until his body developed into a mass of muscles. He soon looked like a candidate for the Mr. America contest.

  All in all, Randy Woodfield considered himself several rungs above the average prison inmate. But he enjoyed the other cons' adulation when he told them about his days playing with the Green Bay Packers. Mostly, however, he concentrated on building up a huge network of correspondents outside the joint.

  Randy wrote to friends from prison, reaching far back into the past. He found the address of Traci Connors, the little girl who had had such a crush on him years before. Traci was surprised to hear from him, and even more surprised to learn that he was writing from prison.

  "I was married when I heard from him. It must have been 1976 or 1977. His letters were kind of off-the-wall. He wanted me to sell some wallets he was making in prison so he'd have some spending money.

  "He never told me why he was in prison, and I never asked him about it."

  Traci Connors wrote back to Randy Woodfield. Although she was a grown woman, she still remembered how she'd felt about Randy when she was only a girl, and she couldn't turn her back on him just because he was in prison. She didn't have much luck selling the wallets he'd made, but he seemed glad to have a correspondent anyway.

  Randy sent Traci a picture of himself and a pretty girl, and she thinks he wrote that the girl was from California. His letter explained that he had been engaged to the girl in the picture at one time, but he said something had happened and they'd broken up. Still, he asked Traci to send the picture back after she'd looked at it. She did sent it back, and enclosed a picture of herself that he'd requested. Their correspondence while Randy was in the state penitentiary was platonic.

  Randy had always been a letter writer, and he kept up voluminous correspondence with old friends while he was in prison. He wrote to Mike Schaeffer, but Schaeffer answered only rarely. They had stayed in tenuous touch until Randy's conviction, but the chasm between them now widened irrevocably. Schaeffer felt guilty about abandoning Randy, and would wonder later if he shouldn't have done more to help his old friend — if it would have made any difference at all.

  Randy Woodfield continued to theorize about what it might have been that precipitated his attacks on women. He speculated to prison psychologists that it might be his ex-girlfriend's fault — because she had rejected him. "I wanted to get back at a girl for something." He thought that his animosity toward Sharon had generalized until he felt vindictive toward all women. Asked if he felt inadequate around females, he said no. He felt that he was attractive to women and that he was quite capable of maintaining a good relationship with a woman.

  His insight into his problems was seriously flawed; his exhibitionism had preceded the breakup with Sharon at Treasure Valley by a half-dozen years. His outward vanity and self-confidence warred with his suggestion that one rejection was enough to spark violence toward all women. No, he had been aggressive toward females for a long, long time — but he could not acknowledge any inadequacy as a male. He was big and strong; he looked like an Adonis. His facade was all perfection.

  As far as sex was concerned, Randy explained to prison psychologists in 1976 that he thought he had found a way to forestall any trouble once he got out of prison. "What's going to help me is not getting involved with a girl physically. I always felt kind of guilty about sex. There's more to life than sex."

  It was, of course, a most unrealistic and patently impossible path for him to follow; sublimation of his burgeoning sexual drive was a simplistic and flawed solution to his problems.

  Randy stated confidently that his life's new goals were to help others, to seek a woman for spiritual reasons, to find a wife and settle down and raise a family when he was free.

  He insisted that he had never hurt anyone. "I am not a violent person."

  Psychologists felt differently, and recommended against his release in the foreseeable future.

  Randy Woodfield did not serve ten years in prison. He soon became con-wise. Being a smart-ass wasn't getting him out, and out was where he wanted to be. He learned that there were approved responses when dealing with prison counselors. He told prison psychologists that he had accepted his guilt, that he realized he needed help. If he got out, the first thing he would do, he promised, would be to seek psychiatric help. He pointed out that he had solid support from his family and friends and that his former employer was willing to give him back his job at the electronics firm.

  "I've come to the point where I am beginning to accept myself and stop being a phony," he told a staff psychologist. "I know I have a problem, and I want to keep on top of it at all times. I've learned to accept rejection from others, especially females. I don't take it personally anymore. It's taken me twenty-seven years to grow up, but I'm making it now. I have excellent family support. I used to be too ashamed to admit that I had a problem. But I found out in Reverend Beach's group that other guys have problems, and if they can overcome them, I can do it too. I am not the same immature fellow that I used to be. I used to just want to play football and have fun. But now I know that work is important. … I've got to stop running and face myself for what I am. I have now got the courage and confidence to meet my problems directly. I no longer feel a need to hide from them."

  This time, Randy convinced the psychologist that he had gotten his life together, and the counselor would write in his evaluation: "Woodfield's attitude is excellent. This interviewer has met with him many times and has come to know of Woodfield's sincere desire to change. Given Woodfield's good intelligence and abilities, his sound support from others in the community, his insights into himself, his remorse for what he has done, and his sincere desire to change, his long-term prognosis is favorable. He is a fitting candidate for Work Release, and it would be a good transitional move for him to make. It would help to bolster his self-confidence and give him time to readjust to being free again in society. He is not an escape risk. nor is he a violence risk."

  Randy's file was full of letters from and business associates, all of them extolling his basic good character, all of them reassuring that he would never get in trouble again.

  After less than four years of a ten-year sentence, Randy learned he was to be paroled in July 1979. It occurred to him that it had been ten years since his high-school class had graduated from Newport High School and that it was time for a reunion. Since he was still constrained by his incarceration, Randy wrote to another old friend — Alex Carter — and suggested that Alex set up a reunion. Since Alex was happily married to one of Randy's old girlfriends, perhaps he felt he owed something to his former classmate.

  Alex did all the work contacting the class of '69 and organized a celebration for August 25, 1979. With Randy urging him on through letters, Carter managed to draw quite a turnout.

  Randy walked out of the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem two days after the Fourth of July holiday. T
he state of Oregon had furnished him with $86.35 and he had $13.65 in his prison trust account. He was not concerned; he had a job waiting for him.

  He did not expect to return to the walls.

  The official program for the reunion of the Newport Cubs of 1969 listed Randy Woodfield at the head of the reunion committee.

  There was a picnic and a volleyball game on the beach during the day, and that evening, a banquet at the Inn at Otter Crest. Randy Woodfield, out of prison since July 6, was an enthusiastic participant in the reunion. He sported his prison-grown beard and he had a pretty girl on his arm. He posed with the rest of the class of '69 for a tenth-anniversary picture. He joked with Mike Schaeffer and seemed not to bear a grudge because Schaeffer had not written to him during his last few years in prison.

  Randy's classmates were tactful, and no one asked why he had been in prison. Indeed, many of them may not have known that he had been. He talked about playing with the Green Bay Packers, and seemed his old self, quiet but assured. Privately he explained to Alex Carter that he had gone to prison for robbing some Fotomat booths and that he'd been captured after police set up surveillance teams to trap him.

  Half of that story was true — the part about the surveillance teams. Randy had simply omitted some of the more bizarre details of his encounters with the police.

  Randy stayed with his parents during his visit to Newport for the reunion, and then he returned to the Portland area, where he was temporarily living with his sister Nancy until he got on his feet financially.

  He recouped rapidly; his job at Tektronix paid him six hundred dollars a month, plus overtime. He became eligible to borrow from the company's credit union, and he took out a loan.

  Randy had been assigned to the Clackamas County parole office, and to a female parole officer: Judy Pulliam. Again, he had to report to a woman, and meet with her approval in order to stay free. Still, he had a good chance to make it — if he could just stay within the restrictions of his parole.

  Pulliam's supervisor, Terry Gassaway, acknowledges that Randy did report regularly to his parole officer at first. "He was basically hostile to authority. Sure, he would come in and he would report, but he was kind of an ego-macho type. He was evidently a football player and he fancied himself to be a man's man."

  Randy was hard to keep track of because he moved from place to place so frequently, and he was resistant to any direction from other people — either the employees at the Clackamas County Community Corrections Center or his family — but he broke no serious rules that were detectable. There were no incidents between Randy and Judy Pulliam that betrayed his resentment of women.

  "A lot of these guys are hostile toward their parole officers," Gassaway commented, "but there was nothing to show he had hostility toward her [Pulliam] because she was a woman."

  Randy had a lot of girlfriends; he was rarely seen with the same woman twice. Soon his little black book contained 255 names and phone numbers — and all but a handful were women's.

  He abandoned his job at Tektronix for bartending jobs, and that opened a whole world of women to him. He was handsome and sympathetic and charming to the girls who came into the lounges where he worked. If some of them were underage — and many of them were — he was not a stickler for ID.

  He was so dedicated to making up for the four years of forced celibacy in prison that he would later admit, "I screwed up. I was in too much of a hurry, and I got herpes from one of them."

  Traci Connors saw Randy for the first time in years in September 1980. She was in the hospital in Raleigh Hills outside Portland and she phoned Randy and asked him to come and visit her.

  "He came to the hospital on September 4 or 5, and he brought me a kitten. He was the same old Randy — at least he seemed the same. He was working at a bar near the hospital, and he seemed quite happy. He told me that he was going to get into management where he worked. He was driving his mother's gold VW with a sun roof."

  Just as always, Traci found that Randy seemed genuinely interested in what she was doing, and he told her about his life. He explained that he was living with a seventeen-year-old girl named Lucy and that Lucy worked as a cocktail waitress, using ID that said she was twenty-one.

  Randy explained the ground rules of his relationship with Lucy. "I love her, and she loves me, and we don't sleep with anyone else, but we each have other friends. The only thing that bothers me is that I come home from work ready to go to bed, and Lucy comes home later, and then all of her guy friends are out partying in the living room when I try to sleep."

  Traci saw Randy Woodfield once more — on September 7, 1980 — when she visited the bar where he worked. She talked with him for about half an hour and then got up to leave.

  "I told him I was going to hitchhike home, and Randy got real upset. He offered to pay for a taxi for me. He told me that I didn't know what kind of people might be out there, and he asked me what I would do if a crazy person got hold of me. I finally took the bus home so he wouldn't worry."

  CHAPTER 7

  Beth Wilmot remained in the hospital on January 22, 1981, recovering from both her wounds and the shock of the attack that had taken the life of her best friend. She was still under guard. Until the night of January 18, Beth's life had been uneventful. Born on May 30, 1960, she had grown up in California, attending Castroville Elementary School in Castroville, and graduating from North Salinas High School in Salinas. In the short resume she'd mailed to Salem businesses in early January, 1981, Beth had attached a sheet listing her work experience. She was only twenty, and the list was short; she'd worked as a cashier at the Giant Artichoke Restaurant in Castroville and as hostess and bus girl at the Apple Tree Restaurant in Spokane. She had had a semester of typing and two years of home economics. She described herself as being five feet five inches tall and weighing one hundred and fifteen pounds, and noted that she had never learned to drive.

  Of the three personal references she'd given, Shari Hull was now dead, and the other two were from out of state. Beth was virtually alone now in Salem, and Dave Kominek and his wife, Gail, "adopted" Beth, letting her know that there were people in Salem who cared about her.

  As Beth recovered, she received another blow. Physicians at Salem Memorial Hospital discovered that she had contracted herpes; the killer-rapist had infected her with the venereal disease for which there is no cure.

  Dave Kominek sent out the first of what were to be a flurry of bulletins, seeking information on the killer he sought. Using an Identi-Kit, technicians had come up with a composite picture of the suspect. Later it would prove to be incredibly similar to the actual killer. In that first flier, the line-drawing image stares back at the viewer through cold eyes set in a rather handsome mustached face. The hair is covered by a hood-cap garment.

  Suspect: WHITE MALE, 25 to 30 years, 5' 1 0" to 6', 140 to 160, sandy color hair, i.e.: brn to dishwater color, collar-length. Ruddy complex (possibly pockmarked). Deep Voice. Clothing: blue jeans, tennis shoes, hooded tan-colored jacket (vinyl, leather, or polyester). Waist-length. Wearing driving type gloves.

  Weapon: Dark blue revolver, with four to six-inch barrel. .32 cal. 6-shot.

  Any avail. info, contact Det. Kominek or Det. Boutwell, Marion County SO. Ph. 588-5113. Refer to our case CR81- 3152.

  When that first bulletin went out, Dave Kominek had no warning of the deluge of calls that would follow. There were scores of departments working unsolved assault cases against young women. At this point, no connections had been made. When the pieces finally fell together, a hundred detectives would realize that they were all looking for the same man. But in the first days of February 1981, they were looking for a phantom who seemed to rove at will up and down the I-5 freeway.

  Kominek conferred with the new district attorney for Marion County, Oregon, Chris Van Dyke. Van Dyke would be catapulted into the public eye as he worked constantly with the detectives who sought the man called the I-5 Killer. And, like the lawmen, he would find that all personal considerat
ions would be put on hold until the killer was caught. Seven months of his life would be totally taken up with the I-5 Killer.

  Van Dyke had lived with celebrity all of his thirty years, but a different kind of celebrity. Chris Van Dyke is the son of comedian Dick Van Dyke, and he resembles his famous father a great deal. He too is tall and lanky, and the grin that spreads over his long-jawed face is his father's grin. He moves with the same awkward grace. By 1981 Chris had traveled far from Hollywood — both in distance and in lifestyle.

  Chris Van Dyke attended college first at Occidental University in Los Angeles. He took a year off to travel before graduating, a year in which he covered twenty thousand miles seeing the United States. Months of that period were spent in the Northwest, and he found the region much to his liking. He attended Whitworth University in Spokane for a while, but he returned to Occidental to receive his undergraduate degree. He obtained his law degree at Arizona State University, graduating near the top of his class.

  The Northwest still beckoned to Van Dyke, and, as fate would have it, one of his professors at Arizona State was Oregon Supreme Court Justice Arno Denecke, on sabbatical to teach there. When Van Dyke had his law degree, he knew that the place he wanted to be was Oregon, and he applied for positions there. Justice Denecke remembered the young lawyer and the brilliance he had shown in grasping the law. He hired Chris Van Dyke as his legal assistant and Van Dyke moved to Salem in 1975.

  After two years with the chief justice, Van Dyke served as a deputy district attorney in Benton County in Corvallis, Oregon, for two and a half years, and then he returned to Salem to work in the appellate division of the Oregon Attorney General's office.