The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  The afternoon went well, and he called one of the girls, Moira Bandon, two days later. By mid-August they were living together. Shortly thereafter, Moira was chagrined to find that she had contracted herpes. She forgave Randy, and their relationship lasted until November, when they had a fight and Randy moved out. Beyond the herpes, she had a memento; Randy had gifted Moira with one of his nude photos. He continued to call her for the next year and a half, and they maintained a friendship, even though the romance had gone out of their relationship.

  After Randy quit his job at Tektronix, he was hired by the Cheerful Tortoise lounge, where he worked at a bartender. Fellow employees at the Cheerful Tortoise were puzzled that Randy seemed fixated on young girls of sixteen or seventeen. Although his coworkers found him easygoing and a "pretty nice guy," they wondered why all of his close friends were women. One of the other bartenders describes Randy as "having an eighteen-year-old level of conversation. He was kind of a dumb-blond type — except that he was a man."

  During his Cheerful Tortoise era, Randy did date one woman who was only five years younger than he was, a pretty woman who worked at a bank. She had met him on the street when he was riding his motorcycle. At first she'd found him attractive, but later she saw sides to him that troubled her. He was obsessed with female breasts, so much so that he seemed "kinky" to her. But what really broke them up was their almost complete lack of communication.

  "He just wasn't very smart," she explained to detectives who questioned her years later. "I'm ashamed to think that I dated Randy at all. He wore thin pretty quickly."

  Randy was incensed when the bank teller broke up with him, and he told coworkers at the Cheerful Tortoise that he wanted revenge. But after two days of blind rage, he stopped talking about the breakup.

  Randy wasn't officially fired from the Cheerful Tortoise, but his employment there was terminated by mutual consent with the owners.

  After he left the Cheerful Tortoise, he went to work at the Faucet Tavern on S. W. Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway in Beaverton, Oregon. He had answered an ad in the paper placed by the Faucet management in late March 1980. He was hired on April 9 to be a relief bartender and assistant manager. He worked the night shift from six P.M. to two-thirty A.M. His salary was two hundred and fifty dollars a week, plus tips. The money was good, and the women were plentiful. He liked the Faucet job, but he was let go on the first of October. His employer recalls that Randy was very soft-spoken and that he was simply unable to assert the authority that the job demanded. Randy was certainly big enough, but he didn't seem to have what it took to muscle pugnacious drunks out of the place, nor did he command much respect from the younger employees.

  Within a week or two of Randy's dismissal, three thousand dollars was taken from the Faucet Tavern's cash register. Entry had not been forced, and Randy was the only person other than the owners who had a key to the place. The tavern owners went to Randy's home in Lake Oswego to confront him, and they finally found him hiding in the attic. He denied the theft, but he was furious that he had been accused. He wrote a thinly veiled threat letter to his former employers. Later, with some glee, he admitted to one of his few platonic female friends, Dixie Palliter, that he was the one who had ripped off the Faucet Tavern.

  After the Faucet burglary, word got around, and Randy couldn't find another bartending job. He worked thereafter in jobs that didn't suit him nearly as well as the Faucet had. He was employed for a while at one of the Shakey's pizza outlets, and then as a clerk for a 7-11 store. He was fired from the 7-11 job too, although there were no overt reasons given.

  Randy moved from his sister's home to Park Street in Portland, then to Oleson Road, and then to a rental house on Pilkington in Lake Grove, Oregon. Almost all of his mail bore at least one forwarding address.

  It took a while for some of his correspondents to catch up with him. One letter was forwarded to him — a letter that he would save carefully in his memorabilia file. Randy had made it a practice in the past to send pictures of himself — in the nude or in bathing trunks — to women friends. In late 1979 he had decided to enlarge his circle of admirers. He sent one of the shots of himself with muscles glistening and bulging to Playgirl magazine in Santa Monica, California. Playgirl had had enthusiastic response from readers on its "beefcake" centerfolds aping Playboy's gorgeous female shots. Randy figured he looked as good as any of the macho males he'd seen featured.

  In May 1980 he received a letter in response from Playgirl:

  Congratulations! You have been selected for possible publication in Playgirl's Guy Next Door feature.

  Please return the enclosed model release and information sheet as soon as possible.

  Don't be discouraged if you do not hear from us right away. We reconsider all submissions each month.

  Playgirl will notify you when we determine the issue for which you have been selected.

  Thank you for your time and patience. Playgirl looks forward to seeing more of you soon.

  Sincerely,

  Alison Morley

  Photo Editor

  The letter came addressed to R. B. Wood. Randy was willing to bare his muscular body to the readers of Playgirl, but had apparently planned to do it with a pseudonym. He thumbed through Playgirl eagerly each month to see if his picture had been selected. It was never there, and, given his later notoriety, the magazine had been prudent in choosing not to feature him.

  By the late spring of 1980 Randy had set up housekeeping with still another woman: Lucy Grant — the girl he had described to Traci Connors when he visited her in the hospital. They signed a lease together on June 10, 1980, for the house on Pilkington Road in Lake Grove, Oregon, on a month-to-month basis. Randy and Lucy promised to pay three hundred dollars a month. His cohabitation with Lucy was the longest stretch of domesticity he had ever enjoyed with a woman, and he'd been expansive when he described his love affair to Traci Connors, sure that Lucy was faithful to him despite her penchant for inviting young men home to listen to her stereo and party while he tried to sleep after working all night.

  Randy himself operated under his own moral guidelines; he kept an eye out for new conquests. While he was living with Lucy, he met a seventeen-year-old girl named Julie Reitz at the Faucet Tavern. That meeting took place in August 1980. He'd graciously looked the other way and allowed the underage girl into the tavern. Julie, like most teenage girls, found him "cute" and she flirted with him. Later she met him for lunch. He told Julie that he'd been hurt by a lot of girls and that he couldn't risk seeing her anymore. This was, of course, a challenge to the teenager, who thought that she could make it up to him. That he was an older man only made him seem more desirable. Julie went out with him one night a few weeks later. She wasn't used to hard liquor, and she became intoxicated. They returned to the town house where Julie lived with her mother. Her mother was not home that night, but they were chaperoned by one of Julie's girlfriends.

  To Randy's disappointment, the girls slept together, and he had to sleep in Julie's mother's room. In the morning he pranced into the girls' bedroom wearing only his bikini underpants and crawled into bed with them. He fondled Julie a little, but he left when she told him he had to.

  The pretty teenager continued to be fascinated with Randy — until she found out that he was a liar. Julie, naively believing she was comforting a man who'd been hurt badly by women, had been furious when she ran into him in a bar named Euphoria. Randy, of course, hadn't been bereft of female companionship; he was living with Lucy Grant. And Lucy was with him when Julie spied him at the Euphoria.

  Julie became almost hysterical and called him an "asshole" for lying to her. And then she started to cry and ran out of the bar.

  But after that Julie thought about Randy Woodfield, this handsome man thirteen years older than she was. When she saw him again, she apologized for screaming at him at the Euphoria. She told a friend later that she expected him to call her, saying that they had worked out all the misunderstandings they'd had. "We've agreed just
to be friends."

  Randy and Lucy Grant broke up in the fall of 1980, but not because of Julie Rietz; Lucy didn't even know about Julie. It may have been that Randy finally had enough of Lucy's young male friends; it may have been something else. Whatever caused the rift, his relationship with Lucy Grant disintegrated into petty quarrels. When Lucy explained to him that she thought she should date other men, Randy was devastated. She had turned out to be just like Sharon, his love at Treasure Valley, who had betrayed him, just like Moira, just like the woman who worked at the bank. None of them really cared about him.

  Lucy was so anxious to move out that, as she laughingly told friends, she had forgotten to unplug the water-bed heater. The water bed melted, and Randy threatened to sue her. Lucy responded by telling Randy she was going to bring him into court to demand her share of the rental deposit. He countered with a scrupulously polite letter saying that she would get her money — minus any utilities owed. He told her he had gone to a lawyer over the matter.

  Whereas Randy had shown overt anger when Sharon and the other women had rejected him, he had now learned to mask his anguish; he would not let Lucy see what she had done to him. But her defection only solidified his feeling that women were not to be trusted, that they would only pretend to love him and then betray him with other men.

  Tim Rossi, Randy's best friend and former roommate, had suffered a similar blow. When Tim had moved from Portland up to Tacoma to accept an assistant professorship at Pacific Lutheran University, it had strained his relationship with his steady woman, Darci Fix. Darci had told Tim that she had found someone else. The young professor took the breakup well, and he had remained on friendly terms with Darci.

  Tim told Randy that he and Darci had broken up when Randy visited him in Tacoma on October 11, 1980. It was not a propitious visit; Tim found that Randy had changed radically since they'd known each other at Portland State, since they'd shared an apartment after they left college. The pious, gentle young athlete had disappeared, and in his place Tim saw a swinger, a man who talked incessantly about women and bars. Randy was furious with Darci Fix for breaking up with his longtime friend, almost as angry as if she had left him.

  Darci had only weeks to enjoy her new love; on November 27, 1980 — Thanksgiving Day — the bodies of Darci and her new boyfriend, Doug Altic, were found in Darci's Portland apartment. They had been shot, execution style. Tim learned about Darci's death the day after the double murder in a phone call from Randy.

  Tim was shocked speechless; he had visited Darci and Doug on November 25, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and everything had been normal then. In talking with Portland police detectives, Tim asked if Darci had had a chance to use her gun to protect herself.

  The response was, "What gun?"

  Tim said that Darci had had a small handgun when he lived with her. Her father, a physician, had given it to her for protection. In fact, Tim had seen the gun on November 25.

  "It was lying on the floor next to her bed, a silver gun with a white handle. It had a short barrel. I don't know much about guns, so I couldn't tell you the caliber."

  Darci's father told detectives that it had been an old .32 chrome revolver, so old that it had never been registered. He would not be able to identify it if it were found - except by appearance.

  The gun was missing from the apartment when Portland detectives inventoried the contents, although nothing else was missing. They turned the place upside down trying to find it, but it simply wasn't there.

  The murders of Darci Fix and Doug Altic have never been solved, nor has the missing gun ever surfaced.

  Moira Brandon (Randy's first live-in lover, whom he had met on the freeway) saw the newspaper articles about Darci's murder and called Randy to tell him that Darci had been killed. She located him at his sister's home in Portland, where he had moved after breaking up with Lucy Grant. Moira was puzzled at the flatness of Randy's response to the shocking news. He seemed to accept it without any emotion at all. She might have been giving him a weather report for all the shock he showed at the news.

  Darci was not the first among Randy's female acquaintances to be murdered in the fall of 1980. Cherie Ayers, who had graduated from Newport High with Randy in the class of 1969, was raped and killed in Portland on October 10 sometime before midnight. Cherie had worked with Randy on the class reunion held right after his release from the Oregon State Penitentiary. A brilliant, pretty woman, she had attended Oregon State University in Corvallis and then the University of Oregon Medical School. She was working in Portland as a radiologic technologist at the time of her death.

  Portland Police Detective Bob Dornay investigated the murder of Cherie Ayers. It was a particularly ugly homicide; Cherie had been bludgeoned on the head and then stabbed repeatedly in the neck. In checking through a list of Cherie's friends, Dornay discovered that Randy Woodfield had visited Cherie many times at her home on S. W. 9th Place in Portland when he moved to Portland after being paroled. Given Randy's prison record, he was questioned closely during the murder probe. Dornay found Randy's answers about his whereabouts during the vital time period evasive and deceptive. He asked Randy to take a polygraph examination, but Randy refused to submit to a lie detector.

  The Ayers crime scene had given up little physical evidence. There were secretions found in the young radiologist's vaginal vault, but no alien pubic hairs were detected. Dornay obtained Randy Woodfield's blood type from records at the state penitentiary: B negative. Analysis of the secretions in the victim's vagina indicated that they had not come from a B-negative secretor. Although Dornay was not entirely convinced that Randy had no connection with Cherie's murder, he was eliminated as a suspect. Still, there was always the possibility that the secretions might have come from an earlier sex act with another male, or might even have been the victim's own vaginal moisture.

  At any rate, despite Dornay's gut feelings about Randy's involvement, there was not enough physical evidence to charge him with Cherie Ayers' murder. Her murder has not been solved at this writing.

  It seemed odd that Randy had been closely associated with two women who had been murdered in the space of six weeks, so close that detectives had questioned him intensively in each case. Possible within the parameters of the law of averages … but odd.

  Randy continued to be consumed with his pursuit of women. Although he complained that women had done him wrong, it did not occur to him that he had been far from a constant lover. In his mind, the fault always fell on the female's shoulders.

  After a spate of recriminations and bitterness, Randy adjusted to losing Lucy Grant. He plunged into promiscuity. His hobby, his avocation, his passion, was women. He "hit on" almost every young woman he encountered. He was clumsy and transparent in his approaches, but by the sheer law of averages he scored with a lot of them.

  Randy Woodfield had a grossly distorted view of the male-female relationship. When it came to women, his greediness verged on obsession. He was like a starving man let loose in a bakery, a man who snatched at everything he saw, taking one bite of every delicacy and then throwing it away before he could savor it. If one woman was good, two were better. If two made him feel safe, then three … or five … or a dozen might possibly fill his yawning need for feminine acceptance. Once he had made some contact with a woman, however tentative, he wanted to keep her in his stable. He bombarded her with calls and clever cards and drop-in visits to be sure that she remembered him and considered him important. He used the telephone compulsively, running up huge long-distance bills. That was necessary to ensure that all of his women remembered him. He often called late at night to remind them that he was thinking of them.

  His frenetic campaigns didn't always work. Randy approached three kinds of women. Women near his own age saw through him immediately; they found him a shallow, odd phony and refused even to give him their phone numbers. Women a bit younger and less worldly found him, initially, rather attractive, but on closer inspection there was something about him that frighte
ned them, and they refused his further attentions. Only the younger girls, like Julie Reitz, or the truly naive fell for his line of patter and professions of undying love.

  Randy stalked most of his quarries in bars, the kind of bars where young singles gather, where both sexes are looking for that one true love. He was a handsome man; no one would argue that. His hair was permed to a thicket of dark curls, his mustache was neat and luxuriant, his eyelashes were so long that they just missed seeming feminine, and his muscles rippled. His only flaw was the scarring that remained from his teenage acne.

  Randy dressed for his prowls in designer jeans and plaid shirts open almost to the waist to reveal his broad hairy chest. He wore the de regueur gold chain and pendant, and boots with heels that made him even taller than his six-feet-two. His voice was deep and soft, and he never was disrespectful. He asked women to dance, and he bought them drinks. He referred to his "sad childhood" and suggested that his life had been one of tragedy.

  He "fell in love" instantly, fixing all his attentions on each woman he approached. If he was rejected, he moved quickly to the woman sitting on the next bar stool. But he pushed too hard for intimacy. He held their hands at the bar, and he tried to kiss them. He moved from "What's your name?" to "I think we could fall in love" in a matter of minutes. He begged to be allowed to go home with his choices that very night. He would only sleep on their couches, he promised.

  Randy's approach to women was so frenzied that he turned most of them off, and they rolled their eyes at each other when he wasn't looking and called him a "weirdo" in giggling whispers. He skipped vital steps in forming relationships; his greediness showed. Just as men, even in the sexual revolution of the eighties, find little value in a woman who is too easy, even marginally sophisticated females found Randy as transparent as a male dog in rut. And they turned their backs on him. Sure, he was a handsome hunk, but they were looking for something more than that.