The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  With the information that two women had rejected his advances on the afternoon of January 18, one could surmise that a man of Randy's insecurities might have been quite angry as he drove along the I-5 through Keizer, Oregon.

  Beth and Shari had been shot sometime between nine-thirty and nine-fifty-four P.M. on that Sunday.

  At ten-thirty-one P.M., records indicated that Randy made still another phone call, from a phone booth in Woodburn thirteen miles north of Keizer on the I-5. This call was to Moira Bandon, the woman he had lived with for a few months after he'd gotten out of the penitentiary in July 1979, the woman who'd forgiven him for giving her herpes.

  Moira told Monty Holloway that Randy had asked if he could bunk on her couch that night because he had to take a bartender's exam in Portland the next day. Moira told Randy that she didn't have a spare bed or a couch, but that if he wanted to come up and sleep on her bean-bag chair, he could.

  "He said he was in Woodburn when he called, and he got to my place between eleven and eleven-thirty."

  "What was he wearing?" Holloway asked.

  "Jeans, a blue or green pullover shirt, and a brown leather jacket. He wore Nikes — blue, I think, with either a dark blue or yellow stripe on them. He slept over, and he left about noon the next day. I saw his gold Volkswagen."

  On Monday night, January 19, Randy had tried once more to call Penny Hale, this time from a booth in Tigard, Oregon, just south of Portland. Again Penny had declined to speak with him. She told Jay Boutwell that she had received one of his clever cards later that week, chiding her for playing so hard to get, but offering her another chance to "get close" to him.

  Calls to Salem on February 15 had been made to a home where an eighteen-year-old girl lived. At first Jay Boutwell was extremely interested in this girl; her home was only three blocks from the TransAmerica Title offices.

  The proximity of her home to the scene of the shootings on January 18 proved to be only a coincidence. The girl hadn't even met Randy Woodfield until February 13. She told Jay Boutwell about meeting the man named Randall on the I-5 freeway somewhere north of Tacoma on that afternoon. He'd been driving a gold Volkswagen with a Green Bay Packers decal on the window. She had never dated him, but she'd given him her phone number after he'd finally persuaded her to pull over north of Vancouver. She verified that Randall had planned to be in the Portland area over Valentine's Day and that he'd rented a room at the Marriott Hotel. "He called my house really drunk at about two-thirty or three in the morning on the fifteenth, and my stepfather talked to him. Then he called the next day. He never said anything sexy to me, but when he wanted me to come to his suite in the hotel, I thought he had something like that on his mind. He was very polite, and he was very macho. I never saw him in person except for that one time on the freeway."

  So there was no connection to the Marion County case, but this girl's statements added to the supposition that Randy had been in Beaverton on the Valentine's Day weekend, and Boutwell sent the statement on to Dave Bishop and Neal Loper to add to the growing file they had on the Julie Reitz murder Valentine's night.

  Phone records showed that another vital sequence of calls began on January 29 as Randy headed south toward San Francisco. Detectives had to prove that it was Randy who had made the calls trailing up and down the coast between the twenty-ninth and February 4. Senior Oregon state trooper Richard Davis located the women Randy had called.

  Randy had, of course, kept the phone numbers of the women he had met at the Sandpiper in Medford during the Christmas season just past. He called Lynette Lacey on the way south, and told her that he was leaving for northern California, and suggested he stop by her house and sleep over on the way down. She declined. The next time she heard from him was on February 4. It was eleven P.M.

  "He said that it was so foggy out, and that he was tired and he'd missed the off ramp and had gone to Gold Hill. He just wanted to come over and have a drink. I wouldn't let him, and he promised he would only sleep on the couch and not bother me. He just wanted to get some shut-eye. I still wouldn't let him come over. He said he'd been driving a long time, coming back from his sister's house. I can't remember where he said his sister lived. He said a couple of things that were a little bit screwy, you know, that just didn't make sense. He said 'Okay' when I wouldn't let him sleep here. He talked for about fifteen minutes and hung up. Then I got a letter from him a couple days after that saying he was sorry for bothering me, and that he wanted me to come up to Eugene."

  Next, Davis talked with Denise LeNoir, the young Ashland divorcee whom Randy had met on December 26, the same night he met Lynette Lacey. Randy had struck out with Lynette on January 29, but Denise had been more amenable, at least initially.

  "It was a couple of weeks after I met him on the day after Christmas. I got a phone call one afternoon when I was home sick from work — that would have been around January 20 — and he mentioned he was planning a trip and asked if he could stop by. I said sure, but just let me know. He said it would be within the next week or so, and sure enough, it was. I got a call at home late on the night of the twenty-eighth, and he was at the exit — the Ashland exit from the I-5 — and he wanted to know if he could come over for coffee and wanted directions."

  Randy had told Denise that he was going to San Francisco to meet his friend Ralph. He also intended to visit his sister in Mt. Shasta, and he seemed concerned about snow on the mountain passes. Randy called his sister, in fact, from Denise's phone to find out about weather conditions, charging the call to Arden Bates's phone.

  Denise told Davis that she'd begun to wonder a little about Randy's past. He told her he'd been in Portland to go to bartending school, but she knew such a school didn't involve much time.

  "He left a big blank spot, you know, in his past. Like he wouldn't mention what he had done before that. He was very hesitant to talk about what he had done before that."

  Evincing great concern over the snowy pass conditions, Randy asked Denise if he could sleep on her couch. She felt sorry for him and told him he could. Then he suggested that they sleep together.

  "He made the comment that there would not necessarily have to be any sex. He said, 'Don't you want a nice warm cuddly body once in a while?' I told him I did sometimes, but not with him. I told him if he wanted to sleep on the couch, he could, but that was all."

  When Denise told him she didn't want to sleep with him, he insinuated that she was either frigid or afraid — that something must be wrong with her. He told her about several young girls who were anxious to "party" with him, and said that all the girls in his neighborhood thought he was "really neat."

  And then Randy had acted as though his proposition was only a joke, but he still hinted that if he couldn't get to sleep, he would come upstairs and "bother" Denise.

  He did not approach her during the night, and he laughed at her the next morning. saying, "Well, I didn't bother you, did I?"

  "He was very calm about it," she told Davis. "He made insinuating remarks, but it was always a joke. He gave handfuls of candy to my kids; he had foil-wrapped chocolate candies in his pockets."

  When Denise walked Randy to his car, she saw a teddy bear in the back of the gold Volkswagen and he told her it was a present for a friend. And then Randy had asked about a motel on the I-5 : the Knight's Inn in Ashland. Davis was interested in this; this was the motel that was robbed five days later by a man with a silver gun and tape on his nose.

  "He sent me a postcard later," Denise recalled. "It said something to the effect that he'd tried to get close to me, and I wouldn't allow it, and I didn't want romance, or something like that, and I knew where he was if I changed my mind."

  Back in Eugene, Dave Kominek and Ron Griesel interviewed Randy Woodfield again the day after the search warrant was executed. They found their suspect more closed up than ever. He did not want to talk with them about anything — not even his prowess as an athlete.

  CHAPTER 18

  Shelley Janson had pulled into Eugene o
n March 6, 1981, her U-Haul trailer full of her belongings, ready to move in with Randall. But now she could not find her fiancé. The phone in the house he shared with Arden Bates rang endlessly, and she could not imagine where either Arden or Randy had got to.

  Finally, through friends, she learned that he had been arrested. Determined to find out how such an improbable thing could have happened, she called the Springfield Police Department and was put through to Beaverton Detective Neal Loper.

  Shelley Janson met with Loper and Monty Holloway and consented to a taped interview about her relationship with Randall Woodfield. The detectives saw before them an exceptionally beautiful girl, slender, with long dark hair. They looked at each other and shook their heads slightly. Most men would have considered themselves lucky to be engaged to a woman like this. Their investigation suggested that she had not been enough for Randy.

  Shelley came across as totally naive. Loper and Holloway were sorry that they had to explain the charges against her lover. Shelley agreed to have the interview taped; she had never been in any kind of trouble with the law, and she was open with the detectives.

  The romance that she had found so perfect that it might have come right out of a novel was reduced now to two sides of a tape cassette that would become part of a police file.

  Shelley told the truth. She believed that the truth would help Randall. She told the two detectives about the weekend she'd spent with her fiancé in San Francisco on January 31-February 1, only five weeks earlier. She had left him to fly back to New Mexico, and Randall had left to drive back to Eugene. Yes, she'd been terribly worried because she hadn't been able to reach him until Thursday morning, February 5. She'd been terrified that he'd had an accident.

  But when she'd finally reached him, he was fine. He'd told her about a speeding ticket, about having to buy a new battery and tires. She thought he'd spent the extra time at his sister's house in Mt. Shasta. He had seemed a little tired on the phone, but he'd been explicit about his need for her, telling her how much he missed her.

  "He told me that the trip back had been very expensive for him."

  Shelley turned over a packet of Randall's letters to her; she was sure they would show what kind of man Randall was. He'd spent the time since she met him — two months — trying to find a job, trying to get back into college. He couldn't be guilty of what people were hinting. She simply refused to believe it.

  Jack Woodfield came to the Springfield jail to see his son. The shock of the ordeal showed on the older man's face; it had seemed to the elder Woodfield that Randall had finally pulled his life together, and now his father was facing a situation that might break any parent's heart. Jack and Randy met in the presence of Dave Kominek. Randy slipped again when he explained his latest trouble with the law to his father. He said that he had been out with "a girl" the night she was killed in Beaverton and that the Beaverton police had questioned him about her death. He told his father that the girl had been to a Valentine's party that night, and he'd seen her after that.

  Randy had never before admitted being with Julie Reitz on Valentine's night. None of the detectives had ever told Randy that Julie been to a Valentine's party that night.

  He talked earnestly to his father of his innocence, apparently oblivious of the fact that he'd just contradicted statements he'd previously given to Dave Bishop and Neal Loper. At first he'd denied even knowing Julie Reitz. Then he'd admitted dating her at one time, and then he'd admitted having sex with her. Now he had told his father in Kominek's hearing that he'd been with Julie only hours before her murder.

  Randy Woodfield continued to maintain his innocence to detectives when they questioned him, but he was getting progressively more tense — this despite his ace in the hole, which was his delusion that the women in his life would do anything for him, even lie if necessary.

  One of Randy's Eugene girlfriends had gone to a detective and told him that Randy had confided to her that the police were following him because they thought he had killed a girl in Portland on Valentine's Day weekend. "He asked if he could count on me for an alibi. I told him that I wouldn't lie for him, and I asked him why, if he was innocent, he didn't just cooperate and tell the truth. He said he couldn't really do that because of the way he'd been spending his time. He dropped the conversation when I made it clear I wouldn't lie for him."

  Randy had good reason to be nervous. With every day that passed, he seemed to be in a little more trouble. The lay-downs of mug shots that Kominek had sent to every agency involved had drawn several "hits." On March 7 the victims in Bothell, Washington, who had encountered the I-5 bandit on December 21, 1980, identified Randy Woodfield from the lay-down. Chief Rudy Plancich of Bothell obtained an arrest warrant listing Randall Brent Woodfield as the alleged perpetrator of those crimes.

  Physical evidence was piling up, witnesses were verifying what lawmen suspected about Randy's travels along the freeway, and now the time was ripe for the lineup. Would any of the victims recognize Randy Woodfield as their assailant? The I-5 Killer's disguise had been very effective in altering his appearance — the beard, the tape over his nose, and the watch caps or hoods over his hair. But many of the victims had commented on the distinctive qualities in his voice, the soft, well-modulated tones that seemed to war with the ugly things he had said and done to them.

  Monty Holloway and Dave Bishop worked to set up the lineup. The "cons" in the lineup would all be police officers, and for a very good reason. If it ever became necessary to regroup that lineup, the participants would be easy to find. If they chose other prisoners to stand beside Randy Woodfield, they would undoubtedly scatter to the four winds as soon as they were released from jail.

  The officers chosen were from the Springfield Police Department, the Lane County Sheriff's Office, and Multnomah County in Portland. Woodfield, as well as all the other men in the lineup, would wear a short-sleeved pale gray Springfield jail shirt and dark gray trousers. Each man would be barefoot. Each had dark curly or wavy hair and wore a mustache. They all had wide shoulders and athletic builds. They were all between twenty-five and thirty-two. Kominek made the decision not to have the men wear fake beards and Band-Aid disguises; witnesses usually remembered voices, eyes, general bearing, and those disguises might only confuse them.

  The investigators did not want to skip any vital legal steps. They contacted Woodfield's attorney and asked him to come to Eugene to okay the men selected for the lineup and to attend the lineup itself.

  "They left out the number three," Kominek recalls, "because Woodfield had been number three in the lay-down shown to Beth, and that might have weighted it. They left out one because we didn't want someone to say 'Is this the one?' They tried to think of everything they could to make that lineup totally without prejudice."

  The lineup was set for Sunday afternoon, March 8, in the Springfield Police Department. It had taken three days after Woodfield's arrest to round up more than two dozen of the victims assaulted by the I-5 Killer.

  Before the lineup, the victims were led into a large room, where Ron Griesel made sure that they did not converse with each other. Each victim had a memory of what he or she had seen; the investigators wanted no transfer of information. The victims tried not to stare at each other and tried not to surmise what the others might be doing there. The tension in the room was almost palpable. Confronting a man who might be the one who had filled every one of them with abject terror — even seeing him through a glass wall — would be frightening.

  And then the word came that the lineup was ready.

  Shasta County Detective Sergeant Gene Farley and Captain Dave Bishop stood at the doors of the viewing room.

  The lineup moved across the stage in the six-by-six-foot room at five-forty-eight that afternoon. Randy Woodfield was number five. Monty Holloway asked the six men to face front, turn left, turn right, turn so that their backs showed to those viewing them from behind one-way glass. He asked each man to repeat certain phrases: "Do what I say and you won't get
hurt." "Where is the back room?" "Count to one hundred before you move." "Don't call the police." "Lay down on the floor. Look at the floor." "Put the money in the bag." "Does this feel good?" "Aren't I big?"

  On the other side of the one-way glass, Dave Kominek stood just behind Beth. He could not see her face. She didn't move. She said nothing at all. It was impossible for him to sense what might be going through her mind. She was so still that he wondered if maybe this whole phase of the probe would be all for naught.

  Dave Bishop and Chris Van Dyke were in a position from which they could see Beth's face when the six men walked out onto the stage. Both Van Dyke and Bishop saw the color drain from Beth's face. Her normal olive skin had turned as pale as chalk, yet her expression was only one of intense concentration as her eyes scanned each man in the lineup. Van Dyke and Bishop looked at each other. Could this be it? They would have to wait until they saw whether Beth circled a number on her card.

  When the lineup was completed, victims were taken one at a time into an interview room, where detectives Neal Loper and Ron Womack from the Beaverton Police Department, and Rick Burnett of Shasta County questioned them. All the interviews were taped, and each victim was asked to mark a card with the six numbers on it, and then to sign it.

  Womack began the questioning with the victims from the Burger Express in Redding: the owner, her husband, and the teenage employee who had been sodomized and raped in the restroom. The owner picked number five (Randy Woodfield) because of his voice, his eyebrows, his facial structure. Her husband picked number five, but was not as sure. The rape victim could not make a choice; she had been so terrorized by the gun that she had obeyed her rapist's orders not to look at his face.

  Jessie Clovis was next to mark her card. The rapist who had jumped into her car on the main street of Yreka had ordered her repeatedly not to look at him, but she'd recognized number five from his voice, his eyes, and his build. She had looked hard at him as he walked away after leaving her naked in Yreka.