The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  That very night, the I-5 Killer demonstrated that his trackers understood his pattern very well, but he neutralized the bet: he hit Corvallis and Albany.

  On February 9 he appeared at a fabric store in Corvallis at eight P.M. He robbed the clerk of three hundred dollars, threatened her with a small silver gun. Then he forced the thirty-year-old clerk and her female customer into a back room, where he taped their hands, ankles, and mouths with surgical tape. When they were helpless, the now familiar sexual abuse took place. The clerk was fondled as she lay helpless. Then the robber masturbated himself against her face.

  On that same night, the suspect bound and sodomized two young women at an Albany Laundromat ten miles east of Corvallis.

  Considering the circumstances, Holloway and Kominek were chagrined to find that they had been right on target in pinpointing their quarry's next hits.

  In Salem, Dave Kominek fashioned a map that showed the broad blue ribbon of the I-5 freeway as it unfurled from northern California to Bellingham, Washington. He tacked it on the wall of his office and then placed Polaroids of all the composite pictures from the cases they knew about thus far next to it. They were so alike. In some, the suspect wore a hood, in some a watch cap. Rarely, his own curly dark hair showed. Sometimes he was clean-shaven, but most of the composites showed a beard, just as the majority of them featured patches of tape across the nose.

  Dozens of pairs of dark eyes stared back at Kominek and Holloway, mocking eyes that seemed to say, "Catch me if you can, you dumb bastards."

  Kominek stared back, and vowed softly, "You got it, baby."

  CHAPTER 11

  After Shelley Janson left to return to school in New Mexico at New Year's, Randy had begun his new life in Eugene. He moved into the room he'd rented through an ad Arden Bates had placed in the Eugene Register. Arden was twenty-nine, divorced, and had a six-year-old son, Mickey. The rent on the neat rambler on E Street was three hundred and fifty dollars a month, and she was finding it hard to make the payments. She and Mickey didn't need the third bedroom.

  Randy had left Medford after celebrating Christmas with Ralph, and gone to Eugene, where he'd rented a room at the New Oregon Motel. Then he'd gone through the ads looking for a place to live. He called Arden Bates, checked the place out, and decided it would do fine.

  The next day, he'd met Shelley for the first time at O'Callahan's. On New Year's Eve he had gone back with Shelley and paid for the first month. It had been a busy two days for him, moving to Eugene, falling in love, and arranging his new living quarters. Somehow, informing his parole officer that he was moving had slipped his mind. Judy Pulliam assumed that Randy still lived in the Portland area.

  Arden had made it plain right from the beginning that she wasn't advertising for a sex partner; she told Randy that if he had any ideas about that, that her house wasn't the place for him. He'd responded that sex wasn't what he was looking for either; he only wanted a room to live in.

  It had proved to be a satisfactory arrangement. Arden Bates was a little overweight and a little old for Randy's tastes, and he made only desultory passes at her. She found him an easygoing "laid-back" kind of guy, and didn't expect any trouble from him. He told her that he was out of work and living on ninety dollars a week unemployment compensation, but that he had money and she wouldn't have to worry that he could pay his share of the rent and the utilities.

  "If anybody asks you what I do for a living," he kidded her, "just tell them I do bookkeeping for you."

  She laughed. She didn't really care where his money came from as long as he met his obligations.

  Six-year-old Mickey liked the new roomer, and Randy often played ball with the neighborhood youngsters, who were really impressed when he told them he'd played with the Green Bay Packers. He showed them the Packers sticker on the back window of his gold Volkswagen Bug. On one occasion he took the neighbor kids to see the Harlem Globetrotters play basketball.

  Actually, Randy seemed to be the perfect roomer; he wasn't around that much. Arden worked six days a week, and when she was home, Randy was usually gone. He took many overnight trips. He told her to tell anyone who inquired about him that he was out applying for jobs. She wondered when he found the time to look for work. He worked out often at a health club, and he signed up to play basketball with a team sponsored by a local optical firm. He told her he would be attending the University of Oregon when the spring term started.

  Arden also marveled that Randy lived like a playboy, even though he had no visible means of support beyond his unemployment checks. He brought home prime steaks to cook, and several cases of beer at a time. He bought a forty-dollar plant for the living room. When his car was in the shop, he took taxis. He had the Volkswagen fitted out with five stereo speakers and a "fuzz-buster" to detect police radar traps. He talked a lot about his girlfriend, Shelley, in New Mexico and told Arden that he was going to send her a round-trip plane ticket to come and see him. He bought presents often for Shelley too, and mailed the mementos of his devotion to her.

  Arden saw Randy snort cocaine, and she knew that that was a very expensive habit. In the evenings that he was in town, he patronized bars like De Frisco's, the Pour House, the Tavern on the Green, or O'Callahan's.

  Arden noticed that Randy seemed addicted to the telephone; he made long-distance calls as easily as most people called across town. Her phone bills were huge, but Randy always paid his share, so it didn't concern her.

  Her roomer seemed obsessed with communication in all forms. First, it was the phone, and then it was the mail; Randy hated to leave the house until he'd picked up his mail. And he did get a lot of mail, not only from Shelley but also from other women.

  Sometimes Arden wondered just how committed Randy was to his New Mexico girlfriend. If he did love her as much as he claimed, he wasn't demonstrating much fidelity to her. His landlady saw that Randy was fascinated with teenage girls. What he did outside the house was his own business, but she was annoyed when she saw him coming on to her sixteen-year-old baby-sitter. Arden came home a few weeks after Randy had moved in and found him in bed with the teenage sitter. Arden expressed her disapproval, and wanted to take the girl home, but Randy had said, "No, she doesn't want to go home." and closed the door to his room.

  The girl developed a tremendous crush on Arden's thirty-year-old roomer, and Arden found her with a naked Randy three or four times more when she was supposed to be baby-sitting.

  Still, Arden talked with the girl and figured out that actual intercourse hadn't taken place. Then she tried to convince Randy to leave the girl alone, saying. "Why do you bother with her? She doesn't even give in to you."

  He only shrugged.

  On two occasions he brought women home. First, it was two young girl hitchhikers he'd picked up. One girl looked about sixteen, and the other said she'd just turned twenty. He'd taken the girls into his room for several hours, and then told Arden he was leaving to drop them off at Lane Community College in time for their evening class there.

  There was another woman, a pretty dark-haired young woman in her early twenties. Arden was up when the pair walked in at eleven-thirty one night, and she tactfully left them alone and went to bed. When she woke up, it was after three and the television in the living room was sending out a steady drone. She looked for Randy but he was nowhere in the house. He was home the next day. She didn't ask him about the girl; it was really none of her business. Their agreement was that she would go her way and he would go his.

  In spite of his constant womanizing, Arden found Randy's demeanor around women quite gallant; he treated them politely and deferred to their wishes. Still, she termed him a "Mr. Ego" when she watched him posing and preening in front of women like a high-school kid might to get attention.

  Arden planned to move from the house on E Street on April 1, and until then her living arrangements were fine with her. She knew nothing about Randy's background, and she didn't care to know. He paid his share, and he wasn't underfoot much of the time. Wh
en he was home, he was invariably pleasant, and nice to Mickey and the other kids. It was working out well.

  As for Randy's life during the first months of 1981, he did write and call Shelley often, and he did send her presents, along with declarations of his love. While Shelley dreamed of marrying him and bearing his children, while she started to play tennis and do aerobic exercises so that she would be worthy of him, and while she gazed at his pictures unable to study, Randy continued to prowl looking for other women.

  He apparently could not stop; he was as addicted to the conquest of women as some men are to heroin. And no matter how many he seduced, it was never enough. He still felt empty.

  If a day went by when he didn't have a date, or two or three, he was depressed. He was nice to girls, he bought them drinks, and he didn't bring up sex in a raunchy way. He could not understand why they rejected him when he wanted to get closer. He could not see that he skipped vital steps in the courting process. High-school girls might fall for his brand of "instant love," but girls with any experience at all saw how superficial he was. Superficial and a little weird.

  He had to find more women. He looked in the bars, he looked on the freeway. He was living two lives now. He had been polite and considerate to women, and it had gotten him nowhere. He found far greater pleasure in taking what he wanted. After each incident in which he made helpless women do what he wanted, he felt better for a while.

  But for such a little while.

  On Friday, February 13, 1981, Randy found himself on the I-5 freeway south of Seattle headed back to Portland. He spotted a pretty girl driving in front of him, and pulled in close behind her. She was an eighteen-year-old student heading home to Salem. She noticed the man in the gold Volkswagen Bug with the Oregon plates pull alongside her several times. He smiled and pointed off the freeway, motioning with his hand as if he held a drink. She shook her head no. He was not that easily discouraged, and pulled off near the Thunderbird Motel in Kelso, apparently expecting to follow. She grinned and sped up.

  It wasn't long before she saw the gold Volkswagen in her rearview mirror again: he had raced to catch up with her. He pulled up into an adjacent lane and smiled broadly, pointing again to the side of the road. When she didn't respond by pulling off, he drifted back behind her. She wasn't alarmed; she was intrigued. The man was good-looking, and she was tempted to stop and talk with him.

  They were close to Vancouver when she finally pulled into the Whimpy's Burger Stand lot and waited for the dark man to join her.

  She found him very nice. He told her he was twenty-five and that he lived in Portland with his sister. He said he'd been a bartender but he'd had to quit because someone was selling illegal drugs in the restaurant where he worked. He mentioned Eugene and said he would be going to the university there. It was really an innocent encounter, she thought; they never even got out of their cars. But she did give him her phone number in Salem.

  That was all Randy needed. Over the Valentine's Day weekend he called her several times. Her stepfather answered the phone- and talked to Randy at two-thirty A.M. on Sunday, February 15, but refused to call his daughter to the phone. Whoever the guy was, he sounded very intoxicated.

  Randy called again at eleven that Sunday morning and asked her to come to his suite in the Marriott Hotel in Portland. She said no.

  It didn't matter; Randy was pursuing a woman, and nothing would deter him. He looked up her phone number in a reverse directory and found out her address and last name. He began to send her cards. She thought his letters were rather strange. She never dated him.

  But she remembered him.

  So many women would remember Randy Woodfield, remember dates and places and things he'd said. In the end, it would be women who would help to trap him, women who could place him in areas where it was dangerous for him to have been remembered. He left his name with them almost compulsively. He told them too much about himself, never worrying that he might have left a trail for someone to follow.

  CHAPTER 12

  Valentine's Day was an important holiday for Randy Woodfield; it was the ultimate romantic date. He tried to make sure that none of his women would forget him, sending out dozens of cards, and, of course, the yellow roses to Shelley. He planned to spend that weekend in Beaverton, Oregon, his old stomping grounds, and he wrote to several girls there, promising that he would take them out to dinner when he was in town. He planned to rent a room at the Marriott Hotel in Portland and throw a party on Saturday, February 14. He was running true to form; most of the girls who received Valentine cards were very young, some of them still in high school.

  Randy had one platonic female friend in Beaverton, Dixie Palliter. Dixie had a steady boyfriend, but she liked Randy and was an avid listener when he discussed his escapades and his problems with women. She assured him that she would be able to spend some time with him while he was in Beaverton. He planned to call the girl from Salem he'd met on the freeway in Washington, and he also expected to see another of his old prison buddies.

  Randy had so many tentative dates for that Valentine's Day weekend in Beaverton that he could not possibly have kept them all, but he wanted to be sure he had all bases covered.

  The captain of detectives in the Beaverton Police Department was Dave Bishop, a tall, handsome man nearing forty. Bishop, gruff-voiced and punctilious about detail, had risen rapidly through the ranks in the Beaverton department. He was a superior detective and an indefatigable investigator. His brains and his dedication to duty made him a likely candidate for an administrative office. They also made him a likely candidate for ulcers — which he had. The cop's occupational hazard.

  On that Valentine's Day in 1981, Dave Bishop was attending a religious retreat at St. Ignatius in Portland. He had looked forward to two days without urgent phone messages. Two days without dealing with the mechanics of death and violence.

  But early Sunday morning, Bishop received a call from his office. "We have a dead body, with suspicious circumstances."

  The body was that of Julie Ann Reitz. Julie Ann Reitz, who had been one of Randall Woodfield's admirers, if a long time back; Julie, who had once called him an "asshole" when she found him with another woman.

  Julie, who still lived with her mother and a female roommate in a plush duplex on S. W. Cherryhill Drive in Beaverton, had celebrated her eighteenth birthday only two days before. She had had plans to attend several Valentine's Day parties on Saturday night, although she wasn't going with a date. Both her mother and her roommate were also away until the early hours of Sunday morning.

  When her mother returned home, she found all the lights blazing, and then she saw, on the stairway of the town house, Julie's slender naked body. Thinking at first that the girl might have fainted, or even passed out after drinking more than she could handle, her mother rushed to help her up. But up close she could see that Julie's long light brown hair was stained mahogany with her own blood. She thought that Julie must have struck her head on the newel post and been knocked unconscious. But Julie did not respond to any stimuli, and her mother dialed frantically for help.

  Ambulance attendants saw almost at once that Julie Reitz hadn't fallen; she had been shot — a near-contact wound to the head — and she was dead. The body was left on the stairway, and Beaverton police were called. Uniformed patrolmen verified that this, indeed, was a homicide, and cordoned off the crime scene to await detectives.

  Captain Dave Bishop and Detective Neal Loper took charge of the case.

  There were no signs of struggle. It looked as if Julie had been running down the stairs toward the front door when she was cut down by bullets. Likely her killer had been just behind her, and he — or she — had stopped the victim from flinging open the door to run for help.

  Julie's mother and roommate said that the door to their home was always locked and that Julie would not have let a stranger in, particularly not late at night. That meant, surely, that her murderer was someone she had known and trusted. And if she'd known her attack
er, he might well have felt killing her was the only way to keep his identity secret.

  Like most teenagers, Julie had trusted a lot of people. Because she had been beautiful enough to be a model, Julie had had many male admirers. She dated frequently, mostly men near her own age.

  Julie had graduated from high school just a month before her murder and she had been working as a clerk in a children's clothing store, Kids for Sure.

  In an effort to retrace her activities on Valentine's evening, Loper and Bishop talked with her friends. She had been seen at several parties that Saturday night, and the last time anyone had seen her was around two in the morning. There had been no arguments, no incidents at all during the evening that might spark murder. The last time anyone saw her, Julie had indicated that she was on her way home.

  In talking with Julie's friends, Dave Bishop learned that an older man, a man in his forties, had been attracted to her, and had insisted that she accept expensive presents from him. She had not been even vaguely interested in him. The detective captain wondered, however, if the man might have taken the rejection badly.

  It was as good a place to start as any. On Sunday evening the man was located in an expensive Beaverton restaurant. He was haughty when asked to leave his steak dinner to speak with detectives, but Bishop informed him quietly that a murder investigation took precedence over his meal. He could talk there, or he could talk at headquarters. Meekly the man followed Bishop out of the restaurant.

  He was able to present a solid alibi for his time on February 14.

  A young man was located who had spent time with Julie at a Valentine's party.

  "I was with her at ten, but that was the last time I saw her. I didn't take her home."

  The youth passed a polygraph test. Three other teenage boys who had been with Julie at various times during the crucial evening were given polygraphs. All of them passed.