The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  Randy Woodfield would continue to be concerned about his appearance when the media were present.

  The public had to make do with newspaper articles about Randy's apparel and about Charlie Burt's demands that certain evidence be declared "fruit of the poison tree" — that is, illegally seized — and that victim identification of his client in the lineup be excluded from the trial.

  It was all part of the tactics that any good defense lawyer employs. No one could ever say that Randy Woodfield did not have adequate legal representation; Charlie Burt was one of the best.

  And no one except the lawmen and the Marion County district attorney himself really knew what Chris Van Dyke's game plan would be until the actual trial began.

  If Randy Woodfield's life was in limbo, so was Beth Wilmot's. It was arranged that Beth would work in the courthouse cafeteria; she would be the prime prosecution witness, and she had to remain in Salem. She also needed a way to make a living. And so, while the man alleged to have shot her stayed secluded in jail on the fourth floor of Marion County Courthouse, Beth worked in the basement lunchroom, just down the hall from the detectives' offices where Dave Kominek worked. She was still frightened, and Kominek talked with her often, promising that everything would be all right.

  The pretrial hearing began on May 28. Charlie Burt alleged that Randy had been illegally arrested and that the March 8 lineup had been improper. He insisted that the parole violation charge had been a "sheer hoax," and he castigated Randy's earlier attorneys for advising the defendant to appear in the lineup.

  "I would suggest that six months for contempt is better than life for murder."

  Dave Kominek testified that Woodfield's identification by victims of the I-5 Killer was only one of five elements of direct evidence linking to the shootings at the TransAmerica Building. He cited the pubic-hair match, the telephone records, the identification of Randy Woodfield by Marion County Deputy Bernie Papenfus as the man he'd seen near the shooting scene, and the bullet found in Randy's Springfield residence as the other four elements.

  Kominek argued that the search of the Bates home had been legal and that Randy had been fully advised of his rights to remain silent under Miranda.

  Only one victim witness was called to testify at this pretrial hearing: Beth Wilmot.

  Beth described the events of January 18, and then Chris Van Dyke asked her: "Is that man in the courtroom?"

  Beth rose from the witness chair and walked stiffly toward the table where Randy Woodfield sat. She stood directly in front of him, her hands clenched into fists.

  Screaming, she cried. "I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!"

  And then Beth walked back to the witness chair, sobbing.

  Judge Clarke C. Brown asked the press to use discretion in reporting the scene they had just observed, but Beth's outburst was reported faithfully in evening editions and on television news. There was too much drama for newsmen to resist.

  The actual trial promised even more headline stories.

  The trial loomed ahead, and both Beth and Randy had reason to dread it. He would be facing a life term, and Beth would have to repeat once again the terrible details of the attack she and Shari Hull had endured.

  CHAPTER 21

  Randy Woodfield's trial on charges of murder, attempted murder, and sodomy began in earnest on June 9, 1981, in Marion County Circuit Court Judge Clarke C. Brown's courtroom in Salem. The corridors outside the windowless courtroom were clogged with would-be spectators, reporters, artists (because cameras are not allowed in Oregon courts), and law-enforcement personnel. No one — no one — would be allowed to enter the courtroom until his briefcase or purse was searched by Marion County deputies. Body "pat-downs" were accomplished by male and female deputies. Three armed deputies stood by inside the courtroom itself. Feelings about the brutal shootings in the TransAmerica Building were running too high to risk a replay of what had happened in Dallas when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby.

  Outside the Marion County Courthouse, magnolia trees, rhododendrons, and azaleas were in full bloom, but they were buffeted by torrential rains, the frigid wind belying the fact that it was June. Inside the wood-paneled room, the air was close and cloying. There was no sense of season at all. There was no coolness. But no one moved, and all the spectators seemed willing to endure the discomfort so that they might hear the details of this case that had not yet been revealed to the public. The courtroom was designed to hold only sixty spectators. Each of the four benches in the gallery was packed. The first two rows were reserved for the press, reporters, and artists who sat barely three feet away from the man everyone had come to see: Randall Brent Woodfield. Each time a reporter had to leave the courtroom to call in a story on deadline, he asked others to take notes for him. So much was happening so fast that none of the press dared risk missing something. The artists, considerably hampered by the cramped space, sketched continually nonetheless. Images of the man everyone wanted to see took form again and again on their huge sketchpads.

  But this Randy didn't look the way anyone expected.

  Randy Woodfield had been touted in the media as a massively muscled professional athlete. The man in person seemed strangely diminished, not a superman after all. He scarcely resembled the cocky, grinning prisoner who had been photographed as he was led into jail in March. Three months behind bars can change a man.

  Randy wore a gray-and-tan plaid shirt and gray slacks; the slacks were too big for him now, and his tightly cinched belt gathered up loose folds of cloth. His two-tone saddle shoes looked collegiate, but then, Randy seemed always to have clung to the glories of his college days. The schoolboy effect was marred by the manacles on his ankles.

  Occasionally Randy's dark eyes glanced toward the gallery. His hair was still permed into tight curls, and his jaw showed the blue-black of a beard that must be shaved at least twice a day. His skin was muddy, pimpled, marked with old acne scars and the gray of jail pallor; he had not seen the sun for a long time. He sat slouched in his chair, shoulders bent, and he no longer looked either powerful or dangerous. He looked, if anything, humbled — a predatory creature brought down and caged in mid-rampage.

  Those in the gallery seemed a little disappointed. They had expected someone different. They had expected to find the legendary "I-5 Killer" to be larger than life, and he was not. The defendant didn't look husky enough to play high school football, much less for the Green Bay Packers. Indeed, he didn't look dangerous at all now.

  Was he a killer? That was another question altogether.

  The underlying tension and tragedy in a murder trial are always subtly hidden by proper courtroom procedure. The prosecution and the defense always begin with cordiality and politeness. As does the judge. The fireworks come later — if at all.

  Charlie Burt and Chris Van Dyke could not have been more opposite in personality and appearance — Charlie, the old pro, a defense attorney who seldom lost, going into yet another murder trial in his long career, and Van Dyke, tall, exuberant, a Young Turk facing the first murder trial of his career.

  Burt dressed in conservative three-piece suits, while Van Dyke occasionally would wear a sports jacket and slacks.

  The young D.A. grinned often, and, as always, reminded the gallery of his father with the physical similarity and the way he moved. But this was not a half-hour television comedy; this trial was deadly serious, and no one realized it more than Chris Van Dyke. The last seven months of his life had been totally taken up with this case. Like the detectives he had had no real personal life, he had missed sleep, and he had agonized over the problems — first in catching the suspect and then in prosecuting him. No matter how many murder cases he might prosecute in the future, Van Dyke would never, never forget this, his first.

  Judge Brown also had tremendous burdens on his mind; his wife was in the hospital, facing the possibility of quadruple bypass heart surgery. But he kept those worries to himself.

  The proceedings began in a most civilized
manner. Judge Brown smiled at the defendant. "Good morning, Mr. Woodfield."

  " 'Morning."

  Randy Woodfield's voice was a surprise too; he sounded like a boy. The soft voice his alleged victims had described did not match the macho jock image.

  "'Morning, gentlemen," Judge Brown said to the opposing attorneys.

  And now the jury selection began. There were fifty-five potential jurors in the first jury pool. The selection would move ahead tediously. Three of the would-be jurors were excused because they said they had already reached a conclusion as to the defendant's guilt or innocence. Several of them knew witnesses or relatives of the victims. And then there were the usual excuses: upcoming military duty, vacations, and one man who told Brown that he would be of "dubious durability" as a juror because he was "nursing a kidney stone."

  Of major concern to both sides were the potential jurors' attitudes toward hypnotism, the credibility of physical evidence, and the reliability of witness identification.

  A repeated question from Chris Van Dyke dealt with the ability of an individual to recreate in his mind something he has once experienced. The D.A. wanted jurors with eidetic imagery — who could literally "see" a memory on the "TV screen" of their minds.

  Van Dyke questioned a former mayor of Salem, also a well-known sports referee: "Have you ever had anything happen to you that was so frightening or so wonderful that you can close your eyes and picture it again in your mind?"

  The answer was, "No, I can't say that I can."

  It was a fascinating question. Those in the gallery who did "see" with their minds (almost all the reporters could) were surprised at the number of prospective jurors who could not. And it was essential to the prosecution that jurors could understand how Beth Wilmot had remembered the man who had shot her.

  Chris Van Dyke asked one juror: "Would you remember a person who confronted you with a gun three and a half feet away in a well-lighted room and later killed your best friend?"

  "Yes … I think I would."

  Charlie Burt was going at it from the opposite direction.

  "Do you think a person can think he recognizes someone and still be mistaken? There's going to be evidence that what she believes is not true."

  Again and again, Burt asked various would-be jurors if they had ever approached someone they thought they knew, only to find out they were mistaken.

  And so the jury pool moved through the witness chair, people of all ages from all walks of life — a pipe fitter, a meat cutter for Safeway, a retired gentleman. And finally a jury was selected. They were all Caucasian, four men, eight women, with one male and one female alternate.

  The final list included: an Oregon Department of Justice payroll clerk, a teller at a Salem bank, a mathematician and freelance writer, two housewives, an employee of Crown Zellerbach, a data processor for the state of Oregon, an employee of the Oregon Department of Revenue, a sheetmetal worker, a mechanical draftsman, an insurance company clerk, and a secretary for the Oregon State Department of Revenue. They ranged in age from twenty-seven to fifty-six.

  The alternates were a forty-two-year-old female Greyhound bus driver and a seventy-year-old man retired from the hotel-casino business in Nevada.

  A true cross-section of the Oregon population, they would decide Randy Woodfield's future.

  The trial began on Thursday, June 11, 1981. Chris Van Dyke rose to make the opening statement for the prosecution.

  "Despite his best efforts to disguise himself, a trail of evidence was left by Randall Woodfield. He left a 'road map' of evidence. The first thing he left behind was a living victim — who confronted that man eyeball to eyeball."

  Van Dyke listed the evidence, circumstantial and absolute physical evidence, that the state would present to the jury:

  The victim identification of the defendant in the lineup.

  The bullets. Bullets removed from Beth Wilmot and Shari Hull were .32-caliber Remington Peters. A rare bullet — a .32-caliber Remington Peters .32 Colt long bullet — had been found in Randy Woodfield's gym bag. That bullet, when tested at the Oregon State University Neutron Activation Center, had proved to come from the same batch of lead as the bullets taken from the victims' heads.

  The pubic hair found on the rug of the TransAmerica Building. That hair had been found "microscopically indistinguishable" from the pubic hair of Randy Woodfield.

  Blood tests done on the swab of semen found in Beth Wilmot's mouth. The tests had shown that her assailant was either an A or a B secretor. Woodfield was a B secretor.

  Herpes. Within two weeks after the shooting incident, Beth Wilmot had been diagnosed as having herpes. Randy Woodfield had herpes.

  Telephone records. Telephone records from the home where Randy lived placed him at the scene of the TransAmerica shooting. Van Dyke gave the jury a precise timetable. Woodfield called a Salem number from a phone booth in Independence at 9:01 P.M. on January 18. The suspect entered the crime-scene building between 9:35 and 9:45 P.M. At 10:04 P.M. the defendant had been seen by Bernie Papenfus a mile from the double shooting. At 10:30 P.M. two phone calls were made from a booth in Woodburn, north of the shooting scene. "The driving times from all these sites correspond with the crime time," Van Dyke told the jury.

  "The state has forty witnesses," Van Dyke said. "A trail of evidence was left which will point conclusively to Mr. Woodfield."

  Defense Attorney Burt rose to give his opening statement.

  Burt said that Beth Wilmot had "simply picked the wrong person." He disputed the use of the hypnosis session performed by Dave Kominek, suggesting that Beth had been confused by the session and that had caused her to select the wrong man.

  Burt also told the jury that the scientific evidence had not been tested properly. He maintained that the bullets did not match, nor did the pubic hair, nor did the seminal fluid. "He couldn't possibly leave an A enzyme. He doesn't produce it."

  And Charlie Burt had another ace up his sleeve.

  There had been a particularly sensational shooting spree in Keizer, Oregon, on May 7, 1981, and Burt hoped to cast suspicion on that gunman, suggesting that that man, Lawrence Moore, might also be responsible for the attack on Beth and Shari.

  On the Thursday night of the seventh, Moore, twenty, had burst into the Oregon Museum Tavern and opened fire. Within seconds, four people were dead and nineteen wounded. Moore had pleaded innocent by reason of mental defect and was awaiting trial.

  Van Dyke termed Burt's allusion to the Oregon Museum Tavern shooting case as a "red herring," saying that there was no evidence at all that might link Moore to the TransAmerica shootings.

  When the trial was a week old, Judge Brown made his final decision on allowing the jury to view Moore. The decision was that they would not. "Mr. Moore will not be called as a witness in this case," Judge Brown said, "because I feel it is immaterial and irrelevant from the testimony I have received."

  CHAPTER 22

  A trial is, in essence, the re-creation of the crime the defendant is accused of, and of the investigation that followed. Beth Wilmot would have to live through it again, just as all the detectives who had sought the man who shot her would relive their months-long probe.

  What it came down to was which witnesses the jury would believe. Charlie Burt had suggested that Beth's testimony would be a bid for sympathy, testimony from a young woman whose description of her attacker had changed from one version to the next. And, in a sense, that was true. Her description of the gunman had changed slightly in the five statements she'd been asked to give to various authorities. This variance would be one of the defense's strongest points. She had said during some stages after the attack that the man had dark brown hair, and during others, that he had had brown hair or light brown hair. But the first description, the description given to Liz Cameron, the Salem police dispatcher, the one that was freshest in her mind immediately after she was shot, was: "White male, about twenty-seven, five feet, nine inches to six feet tall, dark brown hair. Band-Aid on nose, je
ans, leather jacket."

  Chris Van Dyke pointed out to the jury that that inventory of characteristics closely matched the defendant.

  Deputy Bernie Papenfus, who was not laboring under the disadvantage of a bullet in his head, had seen the running man just after the call for help came in. And Papenfus identified Randy Woodfield as the man he'd seen. Charlie Burt countered with the argument that no man could run that far that fast. But could an athlete in perfect condition have run 1.2 miles in six minutes?

  Papenfus disagreed with Burt's time estimate. It was his understanding, he said, that Beth had waited at least five minutes in the TransAmerica Building before she called for help. "And I think track people can come close to that [time]."

  Detective Jay Boutwell, who had ridden to the hospital with Beth, said that, by that time, she had trouble focusing her attention. He had suggested that Beth describe the gunman by comparing him with the people around her, and she'd had only himself and the two paramedics to compare her assailant with.

  A nurse at the hospital testified, "She said it [the man's hair] was darker than Stuart's but lighter than Joyce's." (The paramedic's.)

  Dr. Robert Buza, the neurosurgeon who had taken the bullet from Beth's head, testified that the pain medication she was receiving when she described her attacker as having light brown hair "is known to cause temporary amnesia."

  For spectators, the legal jousting was absorbing. Burt was good, very, very good. He was folksy and low-keyed and he explained to the jury that the defense had to play "catch up" after the prosecution had a head start. He would produce his own experts who were just as authoritative as the prosecution's experts were.

  For the defense, Dr. Kay Carlisle, an expert on hair identification who worked at the Primate Center in Portland, would assert that the pubic hair could not be absolutely traced to Randy Woodfield — or to any human source positively. And that is true; hair and blood have not yet been isolated scientifically so that they can be conclusively traced to one source and one source alone. Forensic-science experts predict that, one day, both hair and blood will be traced to one individual, but that time is not yet here.