The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  "I think that's your basic Harvey Wallbanger with a sillier name."

  "You consider yourself a religious man, Randy?" Kominek asked. "Were you involved in religion while you were in the joint."

  "Yeah, I was into religion a lot then." The suspect stared at his hands. "But somewhere along the line, I guess I just told God to take a backseat."

  The room swelled with silence. And Randy volunteered his feelings about the power of women over prisoners in the penitentiary. "They had women guards watching me when I had to take a piss. They had these nurses in group therapy wanting us to share our sexual fantasies. They wouldn't share theirs with us, so why should I tell them mine?"

  "Do you feel uncomfortable around women?" Kominek asked.

  "No — not at all. I like women."

  Kominek switched gears again. "Do you think your basketball buddies would remember which games you were at, and which you missed?"

  Randy shrugged. "They might; they might not."

  "What position do you play?"

  "Center. I'm their high scorer; everybody passes me the ball. I know what I'm capable of doing. It's a matter of being in control at all times, especially in sports. If you don't have control, things go to shit."

  "You feel 'up' when you're competing? Does it make you more aware of things around you?"

  "Oh, sure. The roar of the crowd and all that. I thought I might be slower in my rookie games at Green Bay, but with forty thousand people watching, it actually speeded me up. I like that. I like to be active, working or playing sports. Sitting around these past couple of months in Eugene has been hard on me. I'm really looking forward to getting back to college. I like studying — except for economics."

  "Randy, we have a problem that you may be able to help us out with," Kominek said. "We have the records from Arden's phone. You called from certain cities in California and other places in southern Oregon where some of our crimes occurred, and you charged those calls to Arden's phone. We've got toll calls listed that you made in Independence and Woodburn, Oregon, on the night that Shari Hull and Beth Wilmot were shot near Keizer, outside of Salem. You seem to have been in several areas on the same days our crimes occurred."

  "I called Shelley in New Mexico and charged it to my phone."

  "Were you in Salem on the Sunday night of January 18?"

  "I might have been. I stop there often, and I call often and charge it to my home phone."

  "Try to remember. The records say you made calls to Salem at one P.M., two-forty-two P.M. and five P.M. on January 18. You made a call from a booth in Independence — just south of Salem — at nine P.M., and from Woodburn — north of Salem — at ten-thirty P.M. Do you know where Keizer is?"

  Woodfield nodded.

  "Did you drive from Independence through Salem toward Portland on the I-5 that Sunday night?"

  The suspect nodded again.

  "Then you would have had to pass through Keizer. You would have been a few hundred feet from where our victims were shot in Keizer between nine and ten-thirty P.M. Our crime occurred in that time frame."

  Randy said nothing.

  "Do you ever do anything that changes your appearance?" Griesel asked. "Change your hairstyle, wear a hat, anything like that?"

  "No. My hair's naturally curly. I don't do anything to it."

  "You always look just the way we see you now?"

  "Yeah … except for when I grew a beard in the joint. They didn't like it."

  "Could you tell us a little about your habits? How late you stay out, what you drink — how much?"

  Randy was more relaxed now. The conversation no longer dealt with the Salem murder. "I don't get drunk. When I drink, I drink beer. It makes me easygoing, maybe a little louder than I normally am. I'm usually home right after the bars close. "

  "Ever get in a fight? When was your last fight?"

  "I don't get into many fights. I don't like getting hit on the nose. That smarts."

  Randy grinned. He felt that he'd slid through the dangerous area of the interrogation. Again, they were only three men rapping.

  "What attracts you in a female?" Griesel asked. "Myself I go for the upper structure."

  "Breasts aren't a big deal for me," Randy answered. "I like a woman with an athletic build. Women with nice asses are usually athletic. I like a woman who dresses conservatively — I don't like revealing clothing. That's not classy."

  "You must meet a lot of attractive women tending bar."

  "Right. Most places I've worked, everybody parties after hours."

  Suddenly the conversation was no longer casual.

  "Why do you think the Beaverton police are so adamant about your being a good suspect in their case?" Kominek asked.

  "They were talking about Julie Reitz, and I knew her. She played up to me."

  "How old was Julie?"

  "Eighteen or nineteen, but she had I.D. that said she was twenty-one. I was surprised at how mature she acted for her age. But I didn't know her that well; I knew her girlfriend better."

  "You ever date Julie?"

  "I won't tell you that. … Well, it's not important anyway. I went to her house once after hours."

  "You told us before that three women you knew had been murdered. Who were those women?"

  "Yeah. Well, there was Julie. Then my best friend's ex-fiancée — Darci Fix. I knew her because my friend introduced us and we went out to dinner. But my friend broke off that relationship before she was shot. And then there was Cherie Ayers. I went to school with Cherie at Newport High School. She was killed in the Terwilliger Boulevard area in Portland. She was a good Christian girl; she helped us set up our class reunion."

  "How was it that you knew her in Portland? That was a long time after graduation."

  "I just ran into her by accident. I think Cherie was going to school there."

  "That's a lot of people to know — and have them all killed in the space of a year."

  "Yeah."

  "Captain Bishop and Detective Loper saw a gun-cleaning kit in your room. What did you use that for?"

  "I never had a gun. I used some of the swabs from the kit with alcohol to clean my face."

  It was a ridiculous explanation, but they let it go. "When you are in Portland," Griesel asked, "where do you stay?"

  "With my friends or my sister."

  "Do you think you might be able to remember where you were on these dates we're concerned about?"

  "If I had to, I could prove it in court that I wasn't in those places."

  Randy Woodfield was not emerging as a suspect who, faced with hard questions, would spill his guts. He was polite, soft voiced, and cooperative — but only to a point. When the queries probed too closely, he threw up walls.

  "It might be necessary to go to court," Kominek said. "On the night of one of the incidents in Corvallis, your landlady told us you didn't come home all night."

  "I find that hard to believe. I've never been away all night — except when I was away on a trip."

  "We'd be happy if you could give us alibis … but it seems evident that you can't do that. We think that you are the I-5 Bandit."

  "I'm not pleading guilty to that one, and I'm not the I-5 Killer. I am not going to defend myself because I don't have to."

  But then Randy began to explain where he had been in late January and early February.

  "I travel a lot. I went to San Francisco on January 29. I drove down there to meet Shelley, my girlfriend. I stayed in Ashland at a friend's house on the way down. I spent the weekend with my girlfriend, and then I drove back up to Oregon."

  "What would be the exact dates?"

  A thin beading of sweat marked Woodfield's forehead.

  "I can't be absolutely sure. I think I left for San Francisco on January 28. I must have been there around the thirty-first or the first of February. I got back to Eugene about the third or fourth. I stayed at my sister's in Mt. Shasta for one night on the way home, and I stayed one night with a friend in Medford on the way back. L
ook, I can't be expected to remember exact dates or times or locations. The past is history. I would like to help you more, but I can't do that at this time."

  The interview had not gone as well as Randy had intended.

  "Do you think you need an attorney now?" Kominek asked.

  "No, I don't," Randy answered, but he gave the two detectives a name and phone number for his attorney.

  "I'm going to call him for you," Kominek said. "We'd like to help you if we could — you're not giving us anything to go on."

  Woodfield stood up. "How are you going to help me? You could put me away forever."

  The interview was over.

  A few miles outside of Eugene, Shelley Janson realized that she would shortly be seeing her lover. Her happy-ever-after love story was about to begin. She was as happy as she had ever been in her life. It had been a long, hard trip, pulling the U-Haul, but it had been worth it. She would be with Randall, and within the year they would be married.

  But when she stopped at a pay phone to call him and tell him that she had arrived, the phone rang endlessly. There was no one home. She tried again later, and then again. She couldn't imagine where Randy might be. Finally she gave up and drove to her father's house.

  She waited there for Randy to call.

  CHAPTER 17

  Monty Holloway and pilot, Oregon state trooper Graning, had flown out of Eugene in a state plane at five-thirty A.M. on March 4. They contacted Beth Wilmot at ten after ten that morning in the Spokane airport. Ron Griesel had constructed a throw-down of Polaroid photos, including a picture of Randy Woodfield taken the day before, and Holloway held his breath as he watched Beth stare at the five photos. Randy was number three.

  There was a long silence. Beth placed her index finger on Randy Woodfield's picture, but she said nothing for minutes. And then she handed the lay-down back to Holloway.

  "I'm not sure," she said. "I think … unless I'm sure, I won't pick any of them. I will have to say it's none of them."

  Holloway felt crushing disappointment, but he could not urge Beth to reconsider. The game wasn't over yet. Beth had seen a man with a hood over his hair, and she had seen that man while she was in the grip of profound terror. The photo of Randy showed a man with a full head of dark hair, half-smiling at the camera. The voice, the mannerisms, the size of the man didn't show in the Polaroid.

  "Beth," he asked, "will you come down to Eugene? We'll be having a lineup where all the victims can actually look at the man we have in person. We'd like you to be there."

  "Which one is it? Is he one of those men I just looked at?"

  "I can't tell you that. We want you to see him with an open mind. Will you come?"

  "Of course."

  It was too dangerous to fly Beth to Eugene in the small plane. As it was, Holloway and Graning were forced to set down when the plane's wings iced up while crossing the treacherous Cascade mountain range. Arrangements were made for Beth to travel to Eugene by bus.

  Back in Eugene, the detectives from eleven police agencies were working frantically to tie up all the tangled leads. Randy Woodfield was in custody, but on a basically fragile charge: parole violation. They had no gun, despite the media's hints that they had found one. They had very little physical evidence; they were sure that most of what they needed had gone up in flames in Arden Bates's fireplace. They had a prisoner who was, at the very least, reluctant to give them any information on his travels. They were hampered by the fact that they were working in the glare of press attention. One slip and the error would be emblazoned in headlines.

  They had a tiger by the tail.

  The little house on E Street was cordoned off by the police with rope, along with the lot next door to it. A huge sign was nailed to the picket fence: "NO TRESPASSING: INVESTIGATION SCENE — BY AUTHORITY OF THE SPRINGFIELD POLICE DEPARTMENT."

  The only thing missing was hawkers selling balloons and hot dogs.

  The detectives worked to make their case so strong that nothing could crumble it. First, there would be a search warrant of the premises where Randy Woodfield had lived. Next, every victim who could be located would be transported to Eugene to view a lineup. People who had been part of Randy's life during the previous months and years had to be contacted.

  Not surprisingly, most of them were women.

  Dave Kominek had finally received funds from home; he would no longer have to sleep in the Springfield jail, but it would be a long time before he returned to Salem.

  The search warrant came first. On March 5, at six fifty P.M., Benton County District Court Judge David Smedena signed the warrant.

  YOU ARE THEREFORE COMMANDED to make immediate search of: the single-family wood-frame brown-colored home located at 3622 South E Street, Springfield, and the area immediately surrounding that dwelling in Lane County, Oregon,

  TO SEARCH FOR: a false beard, white adhesive tape, silver pistol, blue jeans with a button above the zippered fly, a dark stocking cap, a blue or green waist-length jacket, a red-and-white-checked paper sack bearing the logo of "Fabric Patch," brown army-type boots, a brown waist-length jacket with hood, blue gloves, tennis or jogging shoes, a Smith and Wesson .38-caliber revolver (or other small revolver), as well as head, facial, body, axillary, and pubic hairs, transferred clothing fibers, and semen stains on any underclothing and/or trousers as well as any ashes and unburned parts of material found therein.

  In addition to the items listed, the detectives had the right, legally, to seize any articles not listed which were in clear view and seemed to bear a connection to crimes included in the I-5 pattern.

  For the next four days, three dozen detectives and criminalists from state crime labs moved through the three bedroom home. Each detective's entrance and exit was carefully monitored with date and time on a log kept by officers stationed at the doors. There was no sense of time for the investigators. The home's lights burned twenty-four hours a day. If anything of evidentiary value remained in Woodfield's residence, they would find it.

  Eventually, sixty-four separate items were removed from Arden Bates's house — most of them useless for evidentiary purposes.

  Criminalists in the lab would determine which evidence was important. For now, the search team had found interesting circumstantial evidence: many pairs of blue jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a blue-maroon-and-white knit shirt, several pairs of sports shoes, a jogging outfit. All of it fit with the clothing worn by the man who had attacked so many women. But many, many men wore clothing like that. Some of the items bore dark stains. Would it prove to be blood? Was there some minuscule bit of evidence in that prodigious haul that would link Randy Woodfield with any of his victims?

  There was.

  One pubic hair seized under the search warrant from Woodfield's body was microscopically indistinguishable in class and characteristics from the single pubic hair found in the TransAmerica Building on the night of January 18 when the two were compared under a scanning electron microscope.

  One lone .32-caliber bullet was found in the pouch of a racquetball bag in Randy Woodfield's bedroom. The Remington-Peters .32 Colt long bullet was a rare bullet, a very rare bullet. It was the same type of bullet used in the shootings of Beth Wilmot, Shari Hull, Janell Jarvis, and Donna Eckard. Only the one bullet, tucked away in a pouch of Randy's sports bag. Why had he saved it? Had he perhaps forgotten it, or was there some compulsive reason to save this one dread souvenir?

  The rest of the evidence proved to mean nothing. The stains on Randy's clothing were not blood. There had been traces of blood and semen on Randy's mattress — but criminalists found there was not enough to test for origin.

  Arden Bates told detectives that she had never used her fireplace, that the ashes found there had come from a fire after she and Mickey had moved out. But the fire had consumed whatever was burned there almost totally. All criminalists in the state-police lab could isolate were nails, melted glass fragments, bottle caps, aluminum foil, and metal lids. The supposition was that Randy Woodfield had been
doing more than toasting marshmallows while surveillance teams had waited outside. There was no way now to know just what had been burned in the fireplace.

  But the case was building, brick by brick. Senior Oregon state trooper Richard L. Davis had been sent off to check phone numbers Randy had called in Medford and to follow up on calls Randy had received from women there. Marion County Detective Jay Boutwell would interview the individuals whose phone numbers Randy had called in Salem on the afternoon of January 18 and on February 15. Neal Loper contacted Pacific Northwest Bell security and received the names and addresses of the subscribers for each number called.

  Randy Woodfield's long-distance phone calls, made from pay phones and billed to Arden Bates's phone, when correlated with his constant contacts with the women he expected to be waiting by the phone for him, proved that he had been in the vicinities of the crimes he was suspected of.

  "Once we had homed in on him, the case against Randy Woodfield became like a runaway landslide," Kominek recalls. "It took so long for that first rock to let go and tumble down the hill, but then everywhere we turned we found more things that tied Woodfield to our victims. Little pebbles of information grew into boulders. And everything pointed to Randy."

  Lieutenant Kilburn McCoy and Detective Jay Boutwell interviewed two young women Randy had called continually on Sunday, January 18, Penny Hale and Lou Lester, and established that Randy had indeed been headed for Salem that day. The detectives heard about the "weirdo" who had followed the Salem girls home from TGI Friday in Portland on January 10.

  "We tried to lose him on the road, but he stayed right behind us," Penny explained. "I gave him a cup of coffee, sent him on to Eugene — but after that, he kept calling me. I didn't want to see him again, and I avoided his calls."

  Randy had apparently expected that Penny would welcome him with open arms. When she wasn't home to receive his calls on Sunday, he asked another girl to accompany him to Portland, but she too refused him.