The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  It was risky. Most defense attorneys urge their clients not to take the stand; it gives the prosecution too many opportunities to ask embarrassing questions on cross-examination. But Randy wanted to testify in his own behalf. He wanted to explain just where he was on the night of January 18, 1981.

  Randy seemed almost nonchalant as he took the stand, as if he had no part in these proceedings. He did not, however, look at the jury while he testified, a definite error for the defense in body language.

  Burt quickly asked Randy about his previous convictions for robbery and indecent exposure. If Burt brought out his client's criminal record first, it would take the option away from Van Dyke, and it would show that the defense was not trying to hide anything from the jury.

  Randy told the jury that he had been driving between Springfield and Portland on the night that Beth and Shari were attacked. That trip would have taken about two and a half hours, if one went by way of Independence. And, of course, that would have accounted for Randy's time during the vital period between nine-thirty and ten P.M.

  Randy said he'd stopped at a bar in Independence and had several beers that night. However, on cross-examination, Randy told Chris Van Dyke that he couldn't remember where the bar was, or what its interior looked like. "It was just one of your average bars."

  Randy admitted that he had stopped in North Salem on the way from Independence to Woodburn. He had bought beer at a convenience store, made a phone call, and looked at some new cars in a car lot.

  No, he didn't own a coat with a hood. No, he had never worn Band-Aids on his nose.

  Yes, he had bought a silver-plated pistol from an acquaintance in the fall of 1980, and he admitted that a friend had bought him a box of shells, but he'd told his friend later that he'd thrown the gun away.

  "I wasn't supposed to have it," he said, adding that he was already having problems with his parole officer because he changed addresses so often. "I didn't want to go back to prison."

  Randy testified that he had at one time feared that he had herpes and that he'd told a friend about it. "But none of my girlfriends ever complained that they had caught it."

  He was on the stand only thirty minutes, and he had said nothing that might truly help his cause. His alibi, even viewed generously, was weak.

  Reporters speculated in print about Randy's demeanor during this long trial, a trial that could put him in prison for life. He appeared to them as if he were only an observer, not the defendant. He was handsome, he dressed nicely, and he had pretty, well-dressed girlfriends. He didn't look the way killers are supposed to look.

  But then, few killers do.

  The trial was winding down. Dr. Stanley Abrams from Portland arrived, directly from a week-long meeting of the Northwest Polygraphers' Association, to repudiate the validity of eyewitness identification.

  "Eyewitness testimony is very poor — particularly in an emotional situation," Abrams said.

  In answer to Burt's questions, Abrams said it was possible that Beth had identified Randy in the police lineup because he was the only man in the lineup whose picture she had seen earlier.

  On cross-examination. Van Dyke asked Abrams to examine the lay-down of photos that Monty Holloway had shown to Beth at the Spokane airport.

  "The most significant thing, I think, is the hairstyle," Abrams said. "Only one other person in this group has an Afro that resembles Woodfield's."

  "Would you point out the photograph of the defendant?" Van Dyke asked.

  Abrams picked the wrong man!

  "You mean another person looked more like Woodfield in the throw-down than Woodfield in the lineup?"

  Asked to try once more to pick the defendant, Dr. Abrams again picked a wrong man!

  Abrams smiled, embarrassed. The gallery broke into titters, and Chris Van Dyke, turning away so that the jury could not see him, broke into a wide grin.

  The defense's own witness had scored a big one for the prosecution.

  Late on Thursday June 25, Chris Van Dyke presented two rebuttal witnesses. A Portland woman who had been training Randy in the art of bartending said that she had often seen him wearing a waist-length leather jacket with a hood.

  A Salem physician testified that herpes is transmitted through sexual contact but that a herpes carrier does not always infect his partner. If the disease is in remission, the carrier is not infectious.

  It was all over but the final arguments, and they would come on Friday morning. Judge Brown turned to the jurors. "Bring your toothbrushes and pajamas tomorrow."

  The jury would be sequestered during deliberation. If they did not reach a verdict by Friday evening, they would spend the weekend, perhaps the next week, away from their homes.

  Chris Van Dyke spoke first. He suggested that Woodfield's manner on the witness stand had hardly been that of an innocent man. "It was the demeanor of an arrogant, cold, unemotional individual."

  And then Van Dyke went through the damning testimony and physical evidence that had come out during the protracted trial:

  Positive ballistics and hair comparisons; eyewitness identification by a victim who had been left for dead; friends who had seen Randy with a Band-Aid for disguise; friends who had seen Randy wearing the hooded leather jacket.

  According to Van Dyke, everything presented had led directly back to Randall Brent Woodfield as the man who had shot Beth Wilmot and Shari Hull.

  Burt contended that Beth Wilmot's descriptions of her attacker had varied a good deal and that the description had grown more detailed as time went on. "She's simply been adding to it because people have been pestering her."

  Charlie Burt proposed that Randy's activities on the night in question were such that he could not have been in Keizer at the time the attacks took place. He had been traveling, Burt said, during the time he was supposed to have been in the TransAmerica Building.

  "Hair is a valuable tool," Burt said scathingly, "but only if you want to nail someone."

  Chris Van Dyke had one more chance to speak to the jury. "Randy Woodfield says he can't remember any details of the tavern. If I'd been accused of murder, I'd make darn sure I'd remember where I was!"

  There was one aspect of the case that no one has ever been able to explain, and Van Dyke admitted that he couldn't either.

  "I can't tell you why someone who seemed to have everything going for him would commit murder. … "

  And then it was over — all over except for the deliberations of the jury.

  It took them only three and a half hours, and only one vote. The decision was unanimous on that first vote: guilty. Guilty of murder. Guilty of attempted murder. Guilty of two counts of sodomy.

  Beth Wilmot and Shari Hull's mother were in the gallery when those verdicts were read. They both broke into tears.

  But later, as she reached the second-floor elevator, Beth Wilmot was, at last, smiling.

  "This is the happiest day of my life," she said.

  An equally happy Chris Van Dyke gave credit for the strong prosecution case to "high-quality police work and a very courageous victim." He estimated that the case had occupied his life full-time for two months and that it had cost an already financially pressed county a quarter of a million dollars.

  But for Randy Woodfield it was only round one. Many, many trials lay ahead of him. Charlie Burt told reporters that Randy seemed to have accepted the verdict, that he understood that was the way the judicial system worked, and that he did not seem bitter.

  Indeed, in a letter written to a friend a few days later, Randy sounded anything but bitter. Once again he was counting on God and religion to see him through, although Shelley was visiting him and writing him often.

  He wrote that he was awaiting another psychiatric evaluation for his PSI (pre-sentence investigation) report. He then expected to gear up for the next trial, to be held in Albany.

  He vowed he would seek psychiatric help from the state mental hospital because he was now convinced (once again) that his penchant for robberies and sexua
l assaults was something he had no control over. He compared the period just past to a dream from which he was slowly emerging.

  Whatever the courts and psychiatrists at the state hospital should decide, Randy wrote that he had focused on his future. He would work hard, wherever he was, to seek the Lord and become a minister.

  Randy had told Dave Kominek in Springfield that he had "told God to take a backseat." Now, as always, when Randy was backed to the wall, he talked fervently about religion and seeking psychiatric help.

  He asked his friend to read Romans 8:28 "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose."

  Those who had sought Randy's conviction and imprisonment felt the same way.

  CHAPTER 23

  During the summer of 1981, the months that followed his conviction on all charges in the first trial in what promised to be an almost endless series of trials, Randy Woodfield existed in a kind of limbo. He had not been sentenced, nor would he be until the fall. Whatever the sentences would be, he surely faced years and years in prison. Randy continued to read his Bible, and to send scores of letters out to friends. He was once again the pious, subdued Randy. All of the rampaging sexual attacks had apparently become, in his own mind, only "a dream."

  He, the real Randy, was coming back to reality, a reality that he seemed to have fashioned for himself. If his crimes had taken place while he was in a dream or a fugue state, then no one could blame him.

  And surely he would not have to take any responsibilities for his attacks on women; those attacks had been committed by the "dream" Randy.

  Oddly, Woodfield seemed to bear Dave Kominek no particular grudge, no more than a player on a losing football team might resent his counterpart on the winning squad. Kominek's side had won this one. The detective and the convicted killer talked in Randy's cell sporadically during the weeks after the Hull-Wilmot trial. On one such visit that took place just before sentencing, Kominek suggested to Randy that he might venture some hypotheses about the Darci Fix-Doug Altic murders. Randy made no objections, and sat back to listen to the detective's theories.

  "This is strictly between us, Randy," Kominek began. "But this is the way I think it happened. I think you were very, very angry with Darci for dumping your friend, Tim Rossi. I think you were even so angry that you thought she should die. You were disgusted with the kind of woman who would walk off and leave her boyfriend hurting. It happened to you, and you didn't like the fact that Darci had done it to Tim. I think you went to her house last Thanksgiving Day … "

  Randy didn't move; he held his muscles taut, waiting.

  " … You had a gun with you. I think the gun was the .357, the one with the interchangeable barrels that belonged to Tony Niri, your friend from the joint. You saw Darci and Doug having a great time, not caring about what they'd done to Tim. And you put the gun to the backs of their heads and you blew them away. Then you found Darci's gun — the little silver gun her father had given her and you took that. I think you used that little silver gun a lot. When it got too hot to keep, you threw it in a river. Isn't that right?"

  Randy's dark eyes bore steadily into Kominek's. He was silent for seconds, minutes — and then he nodded slowly.

  It was a moot victory for Kominek. A small personal satisfaction that one part of the puzzle had been clarified. "But we couldn't use it," he recalls. "Those other guns were gone — probably forever. Still, when I laid out the Fix-Altic murder case to Randy, he never contradicted me. I'm still convinced he killed them."

  Kominek also suspected that Woodfield had killed many, many more women than he had ever been accused of. There had been four murders of pretty young women in Huntington Beach, California, homicides that occurred during a period when Randy visited there.

  There were the unsolved murders of Marsha Weatter, nineteen, and Kathy Allen, eighteen, in Washington State. The girls' homes were in Fairbanks, Alaska, but they'd been traveling in the Continental Forty-eight when they vanished. The pair was last seen hitchhiking two miles west of Spokane at the junction of Interstate 90 and U.S. Highway 2 on March 28, 1980. They were seasoned hikers who considered themselves capable and strong; they carried full backpacks as they held their thumbs out.

  A college student recalled having given Marsha and Kathy a ride from Missoula, Montana, to Spokane, and they indicated that their plan was to hitch to Seattle, 270 miles west. From there, they planned to catch a flight home to Fairbanks on March 31.

  But they never made the plane, and they never came home again.

  Months later, long after the volcanic eruption of Mt. St. Helens on May 18, 1980, the bodies of Marsha Weatter and Kathy Allen were discovered close to the I-90 freeway, buried beneath the fine gray ash that blanketed Eastern Washington when Mt. St. Helens blew. Like the victims of ancient Pompeii, the girls had lain buried, not by any human hand, but by nature. They had each been shot in the head.

  Late March, 1980, was just before the time Randy Woodfield started working at the Faucet Tavern. He was between jobs, he had no steady girlfriend at the time, and he was a constant traveler on his days off.

  Even so, it was a fairly remote possibility to conclude that Randy in his gold Volkswagen had veered off his favorite North-South I-5 corridor to troll for female victims two hundred miles away from Beaverton. The Weatter-Allen murders have never been solved, and they remain a question mark in Dave Kominek's mind.

  Another darker question mark is the murder of twenty-one-year old Sylvia Durante, a beautiful young cocktail waitress at the Red Robin restaurant, a popular "yuppie" super-hamburger/watering hole in Seattle. The Red Robin was located just off I-5 in the University of Washington district, hard by the Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge. It was crowded every night and packed to the rafters on weekends.

  Sylvia's body was found in the bedroom of her apartment in December 1979. Investigating Seattle Homicide Detective Gary Fowler noted marks on her ankles and wrists that suggested she had been bound before she was strangled.

  There were flowers from a secret admirer nearby, and there was no apparent forced entry. The victim had undoubtedly trusted the wrong man, invited — or allowed — him to visit her at her home.

  Sylvia Durante was a lovely brunette, a vibrant girl — filled with joy for life, and, like Shelley Janson, she had been actively seeking the one right man for her. Sylvia preferred dark-haired, muscular men. Randy Woodfield fit her qualifications precisely. But did Sylvia Durante ever meet Randy? No one will ever know.

  There is no physical evidence linking Randy to Sylvia Durante's murder. However, traffic citation records indicate that Randy Woodfield was in Seattle during the week before Sylvia's death. He had even played Good Samaritan to a young nurse whose car ran out of gas shortly after she left work on the night shift at the University Hospital.

  The nurse had been wary of the big dark-haired man at first, but he'd been so boyishly charming that she'd finally relented and locked her car, allowing him to drive her home. He'd been such a gentleman and had rescued her from a long hike in the wee hours; she even gave him a kiss good night.

  The University Hospital is located a scant half-mile from the Red Robin. And the Red Robin is to the University District what O'Callahan's and De Frisco's were to Eugene, the yuppie pick-up spot. Randy would have gravitated to it like a beacon in the night.

  A close perusal of the voluminous files on the Durante case, however, elicits no mention of a "Randy." There is a letter that Sylvia wrote to a cousin, a letter in which she writes enthusiastically about meeting an interesting man from Portland — a man she hoped to see when she visited there during the Thanksgiving holidays, 1979. Was that man Randy Woodfield? No one knows. The trail that might link Sylvia Durante to Randy ends there.

  Again, is the Durante case simply a questionable combination of geographical locations and timing? Of fascinating circumstantial similarities? Without more evidence, it would be premature to link the three Washington State death
s to Randy Woodfield.

  Woodfield certainly didn't need any more trouble. As it was, he faced so many trials that he might expect to spend the next several years going from court to court to court.

  On August 28, 1981, the Municipal Court of Redding Judicial District, County of Shasta, State of California, officially charged Randall Brent Woodfield for a violation of Section 187 of the California Penal Code. In legalese, the criminal complaint read:

  Rick Burnett of Shasta County Sheriff's Office, the county of Shasta, being first duly sworn, on information and belief, complains and accuses defendant Randall Brent Woodfield of the following crimes:

  COUNT I:

  The said defendant, Randall Brent Woodfield, on or about February 3, 1981, in the county of Shasta, state of California did willfully, unlawfully, and with malice aforethought murder Donna Lee Eckard, a human being.

  It is further alleged that in the commission of the above offense, the said defendant personally used a firearm, to wit: a handgun, within the meaning of Penal Code Section 12022.5.

  FIRST SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCE

  It is further alleged that the murder of Donna Lee Eckard was murder in the first degree and was committed by the defendant, Randall Brent Woodfield, and in addition to such murder, said defendant is now being charged with having murdered and has murdered Janell Charlotte Jarvis, on or about the same day, said murder being murder in the first or second degree, within the meaning of Penal Code 190.2(a)(3).

  It is further alleged that the murder of Donna Lee Eckard was committed by Randall Brent Woodfield while the defendant was engaged in the commission of … the immediate flight after having committed and attempted to commit the crime of burglary in the first or second degree, in violation of Penal Code Section 460, within the meaning of Penal Code Section 1 90.2(a)(17).

  The document continued, repetitive and concise, dry as only legal documents can be, the horror and pain and ultimate tragedy of the victims buried somewhere within the tedious terminology.