The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  However, Steve Van Ootegham, a hair-and-fiber specialist from the Oregon State Police Crime Lab, would testify that the pubic hair found at the shooting scene and a pubic hair taken from Randy Woodfield's body were microscopically indistinguishable. "There would be only one chance in eight hundred that pubic hairs that look the same under a microscope could come from different bodies."

  Dr. Stanley Abrams of Portland and Dr. Maurice MacDowell of Salem, hypnosis experts who had checked the tape made by Dave Kominek during Beth's hypnosis session, would testify for the defense that Kominek had "inadvertently destroyed her memory ability when he had told her that she would be able to see the gunman's face."

  Dave Kominek took the stand to validate his expertise at hypnosis. He explained that he had had eighty-eight hours of professional training in hypnosis and had used the art in about twenty police investigations. Burt objected on the grounds that Kominek was not qualified to testify as an expert; he was overruled by Judge Brown.

  "Did you make any posthypnotic suggestions to Beth Wilmot?" Burt asked, suggesting that the hypnosis had caused Beth to identify Woodfield in the lineup on March 8.

  "No, sir."

  "Isn't it true that sometimes suggestions under hypnosis are purely accidental?"

  "Yes, sir. But no names were mentioned during hypnosis, because we had no suspect at that time."

  Dr. George Bischel, a Salem psychiatrist, testified that there was nothing improper about Kominek's hypnotic technique. Bischel, who had conducted at least a thousand hypnotic sessions, said that he had reviewed the tapes and transcripts of the Marion County detective's session with Beth and found that Kominek's approach was generally accepted as valid.

  While this preliminary testimony went on for a week, all the policemen, experts, and forensic scientists laying out the structure of the case day by day, Beth Wilmot waited downstairs in the courthouse cafeteria. She was nervous, but she was anxious to testify. She had confronted Randy Woodfield three times now — once during the crime, once during the lineup in Springfield, and once during the pretrial hearings. Her fear of him had been defused, if only slightly. She would be in the same courtroom with him, but his legs would be manacled; he could no longer harm her.

  Still, how many of us would choose to relive a nightmare, to confront the one thing that terrifies us the most?

  All week, the spectators told each other that Beth Wilmot would be testifying at any moment; there was disappointment when she did not appear. The gallery was not nearly as interested in the forensic details as they were in actually seeing the young woman who had survived the shootings in January.

  Many of them had already seen Beth without realizing it, not knowing that the pretty dark-haired girl sipping Cokes in the cafeteria was the prize witness they all waited for. This author talked with Beth in the court house cafeteria. Her hands trembled slightly, but her smile was open.

  "I want to get it over with. I'm afraid, but, in a way, I'm anxious to tell the jury what happened. I can't even be in the courtroom until after I testify, and it's so hard waiting. …"

  On Thursday, June 18, the rumors were true; Beth Wilmot would be taking the witness stand.

  Chris Van Dyke would make the questioning as easy on Beth as he could; Beth had met with him many times, and she liked and trusted him.

  When Beth walked into the courtroom, there were slight gasps. She looked far younger than twenty-one. They saw a tall, very thin girl whose huge dark eyes seemed to dominate her oval face. She looked a little frightened, but the expression in her eyes was one of pure hatred. She stared down at Randy Woodfield, who seemed, at last, ill-at-ease as he slouched at the defense table.

  If it were possible, the courtroom was jammed with more people than there had been before. There were nine reporters and four artists, their fingers flying over notebooks and sketchpads.

  Van Dyke, whose every movement spoke of subdued energy, unfolded his long legs from the prosecutor's chair and walked toward Beth.

  The district attorney began with the easy questions, asking her about her age, her occupation, and her close friendship with Shari Hull. Randy's eyes darted constantly from Beth to Van Dyke as he followed this testimony closely.

  Beth trembled almost imperceptibly, but her voice grew in strength. She told about the janitor's job that she and Shari had shared. "We got to the TransAmerica Title Company office on River Road about nine-ten or nine-fifteen that Sunday night. We were done with our work in about twenty minutes. Shari started the truck. We were ready to go, but we noticed a window was dirty. I went to get the spray bottle. … When I came around the corner, he was standing there with Shari."

  Beth described the man who stood there holding a gun. He'd worn jeans, tennis shoes, and a dark jacket with a hood covering his head. "He had a Band-Aid across the bridge of his nose."

  "Is he in the courtroom?" Van Dyke asked.

  "He is. … Right there," Beth answered. She pointed to Randy Woodfield.

  "Are you sure?"

  "No doubt. That's the one."

  Randy's expression didn't change at all. But then, it seldom did; he spent most of his time scribbling notes on the yellow legal pad in front of him.

  "How far away from you was the man when you first saw him?"

  "About three feet."

  "Were the lights on?"

  "Yes. It was very bright. The gun barrel was aimed right at me when the man ordered us to get in the back room. He ordered us to take our clothes off and lie on the floor there."

  Asked to explain what happened next, Beth bowed her head and started to cry. It had been difficult enough for her to give a full statement to Dave Kominek; now she would have to tell a packed courtroom the intimate details of the attack she and Shari had endured. But it had to be done. Beth told the jury that she and Shari had been forced to perform oral sex on the intruder and that he had commanded her to fondle Shari. He had also attempted intercourse with her.

  Van Dyke led Beth gently through a re-creation of the scene in which her best friend had died.

  "Shari was crying, begging him not to hurt her."

  "Where were you at this point?"

  "I had my face against the counter, and then I heard a shot. He shot her in the head. He shot me. He shot her again. He shot me, and she moaned and he shot her again."

  Tears had welled up again in Beth's eyes, and she fought to retain her composure.

  "I pretended I was dead. I was afraid that he would shoot me a third time. He shot Shari the third time because she moaned. I couldn't hear anything except for the ringing in my ears. I waited about five minutes before I got up, and then I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and the whole right side of my face was swollen."

  Beth explained that she had been rescued by the sheriff's officers and the paramedics and that she had spent the next several days in the hospital.

  "Did you have any aftereffects of the attack beyond your head wounds?" Van Dyke asked.

  Beth looked down. "Yes. About ten days later, I learned from a doctor that I had contracted herpes and that that is a disease usually transmitted by sexual contact."

  Charlie Burt's job in cross-examination was difficult. A kind man, but a keen minded attorney, he now had to play the "bad guy" in questioning a trembling, crying girl.

  He asked her a little about herpes. It was clear that Burt hoped to suggest that Beth might have had herpes for some time — that she had suffered, not a first episode, but a recurrence of the disease after the attack.

  She was adamant that she had never had it before the night of January 18. She described what she now faced for the rest of her life.

  "It can go away, but you never get rid of it," Beth explained. "It's in your blood system. I can get something at the drugstore, but there is no cure."

  "Did you have sexual intercourse in the month preceding the incident?" Burt asked.

  "No."

  "Have you ever had intercourse?"

  Van Dyke objected, and Judge Br
own sustained the objection. The sexual history of rape victims is often an issue in trials; women who have already endured a major psychic shock are put in a position of having to defend their morals. But Judge Brown was not going to allow this to happen to Beth Wilmot.

  Burt's main thrust was not Beth's sexual history, however. He wanted to shake her on her memory of the man who had shot her. He questioned her repeatedly on the color of her assailant's hair.

  "You said that your assailant had a hood over his head. Your best recollection is that you don't know what color his hair is, do you?"

  "No … but his eyebrows were dark. I don't think he'd have blond hair."

  "How many photographs of men did you look at after the shooting?" Burt asked.

  "About a hundred, but I didn't recognize any of them."

  "When did you first see a picture of the defendant?"

  "In March when Detective Holloway came to Spokane and showed me pictures of five men."

  "Did you identify Mr. Woodfield at that time?"

  "I made a tentative identification of one of the men, but I wasn't sure. I told him I didn't want to pick anyone out I wasn't sure of."

  Van Dyke asked Beth what had caused her to pick Randy Woodfield from the lineup.

  "His whole body — his forehead, his nose, his shoulders — just everything about him."

  After two hours on the witness stand, Beth was excused. She had balked at giving her address at the time of the shooting, because she still visited there, and she was afraid. Local papers agreed not to print that address, and they kept the promise.

  On the ninth day of the trial, Dixie Palliter — Randy's old friend from Beaverton — testified. Considerably chastened now, and no longer so anxious to protect Randy, Dixie told the jury that Randy had had a gun and that he'd told her he'd thrown it in a river after the shootings on River Road.

  Evidence was introduced that he had acquired a box of the rarely sold .32-caliber long Colt bullets about a month before Shari and Beth were shot. "I bought a box of bullets for him on December 19 from the G.I. Joe store in Milwaukee. He checked to see if they would fit a silver gun he had with him. I saw him cleaning the same gun about the first week of January."

  "Did Randy ever talk to you about disguises?" Van Dyke asked.

  "He said something about a Band-Aid over his nose."

  Van Dyke called gun-shop employees to demonstrate to the jury just how rare the .32 long Colt bullets were.

  The manager of G.I. Joe's said that of the 3,039 boxes of ammunition sold in her store in 1980, only four boxes were Remington Peters .32 long Colts.

  The manager of a sporting-goods store in Salem said that his store had sold seven hundred and fifty boxes of pistol ammunition over a nine-month period.

  "How many of those were .39 long Colts?" Van Dyke asked.

  "Two. We have six boxes of that type of bullet on our shelves, and some of them have been there for twenty years."

  It was to be a full day. Penny Hale, eighteen, who'd met Randy at TGI Friday in Beaverton on January 10, a week before the Salem shootings, described the hooded dark leather jacket he'd worn that night - very similar to the coat Beth had described.

  Penny told the jury that Randy had followed her home, stayed until four A.M., and that she had avoided all his calls since. The calls that had trapped Randy by placing him in the vicinity of the TransAmerica shootings had been made to Penny's apartment.

  "There were four or five calls on January 18," Penny testified. "The last call came at nine."

  "Are you sure that call didn't come in around eight?" Burt asked.

  "No, it was at nine," she answered firmly.

  Dave Kominek took the witness stand again. He explained that the vital telephone calls had come from phone booths — at Independence at one minute after nine P.M., and then Woodburn at ten-thirty-one P.M.

  "Did you drive between those booths to estimate the time required?" Van Dyke asked Kominek.

  "Yes, sir. I drove several routes from Independence to Salem, and from Salem to Woodburn."

  "And what did you find, as regards to time?"

  "Trips from Independence to Salem took between twenty-one and twenty-eight minutes."

  The shootings, of course, had taken place just outside Salem between nine-thirty-five and nine-fifty P.M. Randy's driving time was, at the most, forty-five minutes from one phone booth to the other; that left almost an hour unaccounted for — more than enough time for him to have shot Shari and Beth ….

  Captain Dave Bishop, who, along with Neal Loper, was the first of the hundreds of officers in the long probe to home in on Randy Woodfield, testified on this tenth day of trial: "I could see Beth Wilmot's face when she viewed the lineup. It appeared that she had seen a ghost. She was extremely frightened."

  Bishop also told the jury that he had heard Randy admit that he had herpes.

  The ends of the case had been so tangled, but now, in the courtroom, they were coming together in a pattern that made ultimate sense.

  Almost every day of the trial now, there were enough histrionics to titillate the gallery.

  Arden Bates, apparently consumed with guilt that she had helped the police trap her former housemate, testified that Randy was "one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet" and described the weeks that he had lived in her home in Springfield. No longer did she see him as a womanizing macho man; she might have been describing the perfect boy next door. As she left the courtroom, she suddenly threw her arms around Randy and started to cry. She had to be pulled away from him by a courtroom deputy.

  For Randy Woodfield, the trial must have seemed like a black-humor This Is Your Life, with D. A. Chris Van Dyke as the M. C. Many of Randy's old girlfriends testified, and now he watched as a former convict-buddy took the stand. When Van Dyke asked Tony Niri, twenty-nine, how long he had known Randy, Niri answered that he had known him "socially" since September 1975.

  "Socially" in this case meant that they'd done time together in the Oregon State Penitentiary.

  Niri said that he had seen Randy on occasion wearing a hooded jacket, gloves … and a Band-Aid across his nose. He also said that he'd seen Randy carrying a dull chrome pistol around in late 1980, a "small revolver."

  Charlie Burt, of course, took advantage of the fact that Niri was an ex-con, and ex-cons are notoriously suspect witnesses. When he asked the witness a question about guns, Niri said he really didn't know much about guns.

  "You'd have to know something about guns to be an armed robber, wouldn't you?" Burt asked sarcastically.

  "Not really," was Niri's mild reply.

  The defense began its case on June 23. Charlie Burt worked hard to convince the jury that Randy Woodfield sat in the defendant's chair solely because he had been mistakenly identified. He went over the discrepancies in hair color again. He told the jury that Beth Wilmot's description, overheard by paramedics, fit Lawrence Moore, the suspect in the Oregon Museum Tavern slayings, far more closely than it did Randy Woodfield.

  Indeed, the paramedics had actually seen a person on Church Street N.E., after they'd left the emergency room, who resembled the man Beth Wilmot had described. The man had looked more like a picture of Lawrence Moore, according to the medics.

  The usual "war of the psychologists" took place. Dr. Maurice McDowell told the jury that he didn't believe anything "pertinent" had resulted from Kominek's hypnosis of Beth.

  And then Burt called Kay Carlisle, the scientist from the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center in Portland.

  "I don't believe hair should ever be used to identify a person," Carlisle said. "The only exception would be a case involving congenital abnormalities where rare types of hair were produced."

  Carlisle said she had examined the same hairs that Ootegham had and that she couldn't even say for sure that they were pubic hairs, much less identify the person they'd come from.

  It was really a matter of which experts the jury would believe.

  Shelley Janson was standing behind
her fiancé. She still did not believe that Randy had anything to do with the shootings on January 18, 1981, or, indeed, with any of the other crimes he had been accused of. Although it must have been exquisitely embarrassing for her, Shelley took the stand and told the jury that she had known Randy since December 10, 1980, and was prepared to answer questions about their most intimate relations.

  In answer to Burt's questions, Shelley said that she had been intimate with Randy several times.

  "And did you contract herpes?"

  "No, sir. I did not."

  "Have you ever seen Randall with a hat on?"

  "He never wore either a hat or a hood. It would look funny on his hair."

  This statement seemed to be straining at gnats. If Randy Woodfield had used hats and hoods as a disguise, he probably had done so to change his normal appearance, and "looking funny" would not have mattered.

  In reality, Shelley had seen her lover such a pitifully few times — a few days at the end of December and a weekend in San Francisco. After that, she had only seen him behind bars. It would seem impossible for Shelley to know what his usual habits were, or what he usually wore on his head.

  For Shelley, who had seen her dreams of the future vanish like smoke, the only small comfort was that she had not contracted her fiancé’s herpes.

  The trial had been going on for more than two weeks now, and tempers were eroding. At times, Chris Van Dyke and Charlie Burt appeared to be about to leap at each other's throats, arguing, and, according to Judge Brown, playing up to the press.

  "Both of you are attempting to try this case in the newspapers," Brown snapped. "I'm telling you, we're going to quit talking to the press!"

  The jury didn't hear that exchange, nor had the jury seen any media coverage of the case. But the public was lapping it up.

  Randy Woodfield had scrupulously avoided looking back at the gallery during the entire trial. But on June 25 he had to face them head-on. Randy was going to testify.