The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  "The voice stood out the most," she said quietly. "It just clicked in my head."

  Now, the three young women from Corvallis — two from the restaurant, and one from the fabric store. Each of them circled number five. Again and again Rick Burnett, Neal Loper, and Ron Womack heard the same phrases: "His eyes." "I just got a feeling in my stomach when I saw him." "I remember that voice."

  One of the youngest victims proved to be a most perceptive witness. Merrisue Green and her sister, Megan, the little girls who had been attacked in their own home in Corvallis, had viewed the lineup. Eight-year-old Megan told the detectives that she could not recognize the man who attacked her, but ten-year-old Merrisue could. She drew a careful circle around number five.

  "Merrisue," Ron Womack asked, "why did you circle number five?"

  "Because when, uh … okay … at my house when he came in, he sounded exactly like him and he looked like him too. 'Cause his hair wasn't the same, but his face looked the same, 'cause I know that he could get his hair cut and his hair changed and stuff."

  "Was he the man?"

  "He sounds a whole bunch like him."

  "What about the rest of them, the other five?"

  "They didn't sound much like him. Not at all."

  "So you could, by looking at them and listening to them, you could eliminate those guys?"

  "Uh-huh." She nodded. "'Cause some sounded kinda high-pitched and some sounded low-pitched and they weren't it. He was just kind of a medium."

  "Besides just his voice, do you feel that he looked a lot like the man that was in your house?"

  "Well … his hair didn't look the same. It looks the same color, but it didn't look · … umm … well, it looked changed. His hair wasn't that way and he had a mustache before. He had sideburns, but he doesn't now. He sounded like the same. His facial bones and stuff looked the same to what I can remember."

  "You're picking number five?"

  "Yes. Yes. That's him."

  Merrisue Green was a very intelligent, very observant child. Her attacker had apparently discounted her ability to perceive what was going on around her. But she had seen him and she had seen him without his false beard, without the tape across his nose. She had even memorized the length of his sideburns.

  Next came the employees of the Dairy Queen who had traveled down from Bellevue, Washington, with Detective Gary Trent from that city's police force. The male employee picked the wrong man, but the girl who had been subjected to oral sodomy after the male employee was locked in the freezer recognized Randy Woodfield. Like most of the victims, she found that his eyes were unforgettable. And his voice. "That same tone value, not too many ups and downs. Not a real monotone … but not much inflection. It was the feeling I had when he talked."

  The victim who had been sodomized in an Albany Laundromat had reacted profoundly when she saw Randy Woodfield. She too circled number five. "It sure made my heart race when I saw him. I remember his eyes … and his nose. His voice."

  Not all of the victims solidified the case against Woodfield. The girl who had been shot in the restaurant in Sutherlin, Oregon, wasn't sure which man in the lineup, if any, might have been the gunman. She finally picked number two — tentatively.

  The desk clerk from the Knight's Inn Motel in Ashland, Oregon, didn't hesitate at all: "It's number five."

  And so it went. The majority of the victims picked number five, some adamantly, some tentatively.

  And now it was Beth Wilmot's turn.

  "When it was Beth's turn," Kominek recalls, "we walked out of the viewing area into the interview rooms. I handed Beth the little card and asked her to circle the number that matched the man who had shot her — if he was there — and then sign it. She circled it and gave it to me. I looked down, and there it was: number five."

  Van Dyke stood by waiting. This was the most important victim as far as the probe went. This was the living victim whom the killer had left for dead, the one person who had seen him full face just before the act of murder. Would she remember enough?

  "Tell us why it is you picked number five, Beth," Kominek said quietly.

  "Okay." Beth had begun to tremble, and Kominek could see she was trying hard not to cry. "The reason is that he's tall and the way he was built. I checked his whole body out. His face. Just the way his face was. And I could picture him in a hood, and just everything about him. I chose him. That's why I chose him. His eyes. Everything."

  "That's the man?"

  "That's him!"

  For the detectives, for D.A. Chris Van Dyke, it was akin to winning the Grand Prix. They knew they had the I-5 Killer. Beth's absolute identification had convinced them.

  They discussed arresting him immediately for murder on probable cause, but they didn't want to risk the slightest chance of a reversal on a legal technicality. Van Dyke left at once to drive to Salem, taking Beth Wilmot with him. She didn't even want to be in the same town with Randy Woodfield.

  Van Dyke went directly to his office to do the paperwork, working through most of the night. He obtained a district-court warrant early Monday morning, charging Randall Brent Woodfield with murder, attempted murder, and two counts of sodomy in the attacks against Shari Hull and Beth Wilmot. Van Dyke called Kominek in Eugene.

  "We've got it, Dave. The warrant will be ready at ten-thirty A.M. You can arrest him then."

  At ten-forty-four A.M., Captain Dave Bishop, Corporal Monty Holloway, and Detective Dave Kominek went to Randy Woodfield's cell and charged him with the four counts, placing him under arrest for charges far more serious than parole violation.

  Woodfield looked at the three detectives. "I knew it. I knew last night that you guys were charging me."

  It was almost impossible to judge Woodfield's emotions; he wasn't angry, and he didn't seem particularly anxious. He seemed to have known it all along. And then Randy shut up; he had nothing more to say.

  Dave Bishop and Dave Kominek drove Randy Woodfield back toward Salem, where he would be placed in the Marion County Jail. They thought if they left right away they could have Randy safely in jail before the press got word of his arrest on murder charges. They didn't spot any reporters or photographers during the hour-and-a-half drive, but as they headed to the jail entrance with their barefoot prisoner in his white coveralls, the dark morning lit up. Photographers popped up everywhere, lined up three deep to get their first glimpse of the man who was rumored to be the I-5 Killer.

  "Do you want your leather coat so you can hide your face?" Bishop asked his prisoner.

  Randy shook his head. "It's too late. They've all seen me now anyway. Let's keep going."

  While they were booking Randy into the Marion County Jail, he turned to the two detectives. "My only regret is that I didn't have a chance to shave or put on clean clothes before I had to face the news cameras."

  But Randy was a crowd pleaser right to the end. He'd held his head high and grinned directly into the cameras.

  The pictures turned out great, and they were flashed up and down the West Coast via news-service wires in time to make the early editions. The Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco six-o'clock news broadcasts all showed Randy Woodfield ambling into the Marion County Sheriffs Office. Randy was smiling broadly. He might well have been a sports star coming home after a triumphant game. Only he wasn't. He was quite probably the most prolific sexual criminal in Oregon criminal history. He would garner far more headlines over the next months and years in this role than he ever had as a star athlete.

  Chris Van Dyke held a press conference, facing the packed room cautiously. He explained that additional charges might be forthcoming, although none were planned at the moment.

  "Do you think there's a link between the Salem crimes and the I-5 Killer?" a reporter called out.

  Van Dyke was not about to risk a premature tipping of his legal hand. "It really remains to be seen at trial whether or not there is a link between those — the various crimes. There are a number of similarities."

  "Can resi
dents along the freeway relax now?"

  "Let's say that anyone concerned about Shari Hull's murder and the shooting of Beth Wilmot can rest more easily. Events last night convinced me to go to the grand jury. I can't elaborate. I simply made the decision we had a strong enough case to press charges here."

  A month earlier, Monty Holloway had told the press that the I-5 Killer "was probably one of those individuals who, when he's caught, all of his neighbors will say, 'I can't believe it. He's such a nice guy.' "

  And Holloway had been right on target. Reporters scattered to gather shocked quotes from people who had known Randy Woodfield. And all of them said essentially, "I can't believe it. He was such a nice guy."

  In Eugene, Shelley Janson read the headline stories and stared at the pictures of Randy smiling at the camera as the two grim-faced detectives held his handcuffed arms. The text that followed was so devastating, she could not assimilate it. Randall had been charged with murder. The police thought that her Randall, her gentle, sensitive lover, was the I-5 Killer. She didn't believe it. It had to be some kind of grotesque mistake.

  CHAPTER 19

  Even though Randy was locked in the Marion County Jail in Salem, the probe went on. There were so many crimes, so many victims, and so many ragged ends to be knit up into the fabric of the case.

  Shasta County Detective Gene Farley contacted Randy's sister in Mt. Shasta to see if Randy had, indeed, stopped to visit her family on his trip to northern California. Susan, three years older than Randy, said that he had been there — twice. On the way down, he'd stopped on January 30 for lunch. He'd been wearing the blue plaid shirt she'd given him for Christmas, and blue jeans. He'd called to get Shelley's flight number, and then continued south. He'd come back before eleven P.M. on Tuesday, February 3. They'd sat up talking about his relationship with Shelley, although he had told his sister that he and Shelley were not engaged yet. (Shelley, of course, had flown back to New Mexico thrilled because she thought she was engaged.) Randy also talked about jobs he might get in Eugene, particularly a job working at a golf course. His sister said she'd been a little concerned about Randy's unemployed state but that he'd seemed confident that there was no problem. He hadn't seemed nervous, and he hadn't seemed tired.

  "What time did Randy leave your home after his second visit?" Farley asked.

  "Before noon the next day — February 4. He stopped by my husband's office to say good-bye to him."

  Farley talked next to Randy's physician brother-in-law. Yes, Randy had left that afternoon to head back to Eugene after stopping at his office to discuss his relationship with Shelley.

  Even though Farley had difficulty understanding how Woodfield — if he was a guilty man — could have been so calm in his visits to his sister's home, the times and locations all matched.

  There had been the rape and robbery at the Burger Express in Redding early on the evening of February 3. Ten miles north, and an hour later, the double homicides of Janell Jarvis and Donna Eckard occurred. The Shasta County detective crew estimated that the killer had cleared Mountain Gate before nine P.M.

  And Randy Woodfield had shown up to visit his sister in Mt. Shasta, sixty miles north of Mountain Gate on the I-5, before eleven! If, as Farley suspected, Randy had committed the ugly murders in Mountain Gate, they had not affected him any more than a rest stop along the freeway.

  And then the next day, Randy had left Mt. Shasta in the afternoon after a cozy family visit, and headed north again. That evening, Jessie Clovis had been subjected to hours of sexual abuse in Yreka, thirty-five miles up the freeway.

  Randy's relatives thought he'd worn a leather jacket when he visited them. The living victims in Redding and Yreka had described a green windbreaker. And a green windbreaker had been found during the search of the Bates home in Springfield.

  Randy's sister and brother-in-law were stunned to learn on March 5 that Randy had been arrested for parole violation when a friend called from Eugene. They were shocked almost speechless when the second set of charges was filed on March 9.

  Randy had seemed the same as always when he'd written to them in the first week of March. He'd talked of setting up a chess-by-mail game with a mutual friend, and about his new love. He'd sent a note to thank them for putting him up on February 3. He'd called the next day to say Shelley was driving up, asking if she could stay with his sister and brother-in-law. They had welcomed Shelley, and they'd been pleased to see that Randy had finally found a really nice woman to settle down with.

  And now, like almost everyone else who was close to Randy Woodfield, they could barely believe he had been charged with murder.

  There was one young woman who was not as thunderstruck by Randy's arrest as his other friends were. That was Dixie Palliter, twenty-two. Even before the lineup had taken place, Neal Loper had headed back to Milwaukee, Oregon, to speak with Dixie Palliter, the young woman everyone said was Randy's one platonic girlfriend. There were rumors that Dixie had accompanied Randy on at least one of his trips up into Washington State, that she had talked about helping Randy buy a gun. The G.I. Joe receipt Loper had found in Randy's wallet indicated just such a purchase. The .32 was missing, the .38 was missing, and so was the little silver gun described by so many of the victims.

  Dixie had told Loper she had agreed to purchase a gun for Randy. "But I changed my mind, and I never picked it up."

  Loper wanted to talk in depth with Dixie again; he was not convinced she was telling him the whole story. On March 10, armed with a grand jury subpoena for the records pertaining to the purchase of .32-caliber ammunition from a G.I. Joe's store in Milwaukee, Oregon, by Dixie Palliter on December 19, 1980, Loper found that that purchase had indeed taken place. Dixie continued to deny that she had bought the ammunition. Other records verified that Dixie had also purchased a .22-caliber weapon on October 10 but that she'd returned the gun and gotten her money back on December 10.

  On March 10 at six-thirty in the evening, Neal Loper of Beaverton and Jay Boutwell of Marion County contacted Dixie at her home.

  Dixie Palliter, who worked as a Portland bus driver, told the detectives that she had met Randy Woodfield when he was a bartender at the Faucet Tavern a year before and that they'd become good friends. "That's about it. We just continued being really good friends."

  Dixie was the first woman the investigative team had encountered who had had only a platonic relationship with Woodfield. Randy had been living with Lucy Grant in Lake Oswego and Dixie was going steady with a man when they met. "We got to be such close friends 'cause he was splitting up with Lucy at the time, and I talked with him about my problems with my boyfriend."

  "So you had something in common?" Loper asked.

  "Yeah. At first it was kind of like dates, except, you know, nothing ever came of it."

  "Dixie," Neal Loper said firmly, "I don't think you've been telling us the truth. I think you know more about Randy Woodfield's activities than you're admitting. We've gathered a lot more information since the last time we talked."

  Dixie Palliter became visibly nervous; the interview was not going well for her.

  Well, there were some things she hadn't told them. Dixie was not very adept at remembering dates; she thought a robbery involving Randy had taken place around Christmas 1980. She admitted that Randy had mentioned robbing a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream parlor in Washington. "He said he went into Baskin-Robbins and made a girl get on the ground and … I can't remember his words. I just know that he said he made her get on the ground and told her to put the money in the bag, and then he told her just to remain on the floor until he was gone."

  Dixie thought that the robbery had occurred somewhere off the freeway near Seattle.

  "Did he mention anything about disguises or anything?" Boutwell asked.

  "Uh … he mentioned about a beard."

  "Anything else?"

  "Uh, hmmm … A Band-Aid over his nose."

  "Did he say why he did that?"

  "Well, I guess, 'cause that's so you
can't be identified because the nose is supposed to give you away."

  Asked if she had ever seen the beard, Dixie said no. Loper suggested that she was not a very good liar. Dixie's relatives had surmised to the detectives that Dixie might have been along on some of the robberies in Washington. But Dixie continued to insist she had not been with him. She had heard him talk about a silver gun, however. "He wanted to take it down to his dad's — that's why he needed the bullets — practice shooting. Another reason was that these guys that smashed up his car were giving him a bad time, and they weren't going to pay for it, so he said he wanted to flash the gun on them if they were going to try to beat him up or something. He said that he would just show them the gun, but he wasn't going to have bullets in it."

  "He tell you about the 7-11 too?" Loper asked.

  "Well, they showed it on TV, with that guy that was holding up one of the stores, and it showed him [on film from the hidden camera]. I think he had a cap on that kind of looked like him; I don't know."

  Dixie allowed that she was the "type of person you can confide in," but she balked at discussing any of the dozens of other crimes alleged to have been committed by Randy Woodfield.

  Loper and Boutwell were convinced Dixie knew more than she was telling. She finally admitted that Randy had gone with her to buy a little silver gun and that Randy had chosen it. But she had returned that gun in December. She thought that perhaps he had used that gun when he'd gone to Washington. Later she admitted that Randy had another gun that she thought he'd obtained "through a private party." But she said she'd never seen it.

  "Where did he get the gun?" Loper probed. "What private party? Tell me what happened."

  "I don't know who it was. I swear to God I don't."

  "Was it a dirty gun? Stolen? Clean? What?"

  "Uh, oh … I think it was just … Maybe a friend; I don't know. See, I wasn't too interested. I didn't really want to hear all this stuff. I wasn't wanting to hear about all, you know, a gun and stuff, and I'm scared to death of guns myself. You guys act like I'm just … I'm telling the truth. Get that lie detector in here so I can —"