The I-5 Killer

by Ann Rule

  And, once again, an attempt was made to blame the shootings in the TransAmerica Building on Lawrence Moore, the loose cannon who had opened fire on patrons in the Oregon Museum Tavern. Moore's alleged crimes had a completely different M.O., and his resemblance to Woodfield was faint. Woodfield was dark and Moore was blonde. They were both young Caucasian males, and that was about all, but Randy Woodfield still clung tenaciously to his story that he was being persecuted for the crimes of another man. Appeals Attorney Babcock contended that Moore should have been brought into the courtroom for the jury to observe.

  Babcock also took issue with Judge Brown's instructions to the jury that it was to presume that all witnesses speak the truth. Since the State had backed up its case with thirty-seven witnesses, and Randy Woodfield had had only twelve (including himself), Babcock felt the State had an unfair advantage, based on sheer numbers.

  Perhaps. But the fact that Randy Woodfield had not had thirty-seven witnesses who could back him up in his protestations of innocence negated the argument.

  Dave Fohnmayer, Oregon State Attorney General, William F. Gary, Oregon Solicitor General, and Stephen F. Peifer, Assistant Oregon Attorney General, responded to Babcock's arguments to overturn Randy's convictions. Speaking for the prosecution, they cited forty-eight cases for precedents to support their arguments.

  The Attorney General's office deemed Lawrence Moore "… irrelevant to the case because defendant failed to demonstrate, beyond mere speculation and conjecture, that Moore was an alternate suspect. Other than by inflaming the jury, Moore's presence in the courtroom could not have exculpated the defendant."

  It was a moot point anyway. Lawrence Moore's attorney had invoked his client's Fifth Amendment rights. Even if Brown had acceded to Woodfield's request that his designated suspect appear in the courtroom, Moore would not have come. Why on earth would he? He was Woodfield's red herring, a smoke screen, a "bushy-haired stranger" beloved of defense teams, and Moore's attorney was not about to bring him into Woodfield's trial to shoulder the blame.

  Moreover, the State argued that Judge Brown was perfectly proper in his instructions to the jury that witnesses are presumed to speak the truth. "The instruction is well established in statutory and case law."

  As to the five-decade length of Randy's minimum sentence, "The State was succinct in their response," the trial Court properly ordered that defendant serve a minimum term totaling fifty years' imprisonment on the four counts. The law expressly permits a minimum sentence of up to fifteen years on each count when the defendant is found to be a "dangerous offender."

  The Oregon Court of Appeals sided with attorneys for the State; Randy Woodfield's appeal was denied.

  Life in prison, despite the term, does not mean life in prison. It means whatever the minimum for life is set by statute in a particular state. In Oregon, life usually means somewhere between ten and twelve years. But the fifty-year minimum set by Judge Brown translates to a first parole hearing for Randy Woodfield in the year 2031, the year that will mark his 81st birthday … if he lives that long.

  Back in 1981, as Shelly Janson's hopes for a future with him faded in a barrage of arrests, Randy wrote, swearing his devotion. To underscore that, he signed his beloved gold Champagne Edition Volkswagen — albeit slightly crunched — over to his fiancée. Shelly wrote back for awhile, and then she faded out of his life. Randall was not the man she had thought he was; he was a stranger — he always had been, really. There could never be a marriage, or babies, or any of the things he had promised her. It had all turned to ashes.

  Although the term is a misnomer in the accepted sense there is a kind of "life in prison" that few outsiders know about — one that most laymen never even think or wonder about, a vast society of human beings captive inside walls. It is a society with its own language, mores, relationships, hierarchy. The majority of inmates are short-timers, men (and women) guilty of crimes against property — but who would no more think of doing physical harm to others than the average man on the street would. Those convicts who have hurt people, particularly those prisoners who have sexually attacked women and children, are relegated to the lowest social strata of prison society.

  The thought of being locked up is horrific to free men, but seasoned cons explain, "You only do one year of hard time; after that, you adjust." It is somewhat harder for a sexual sadist to adjust inside the walls than for other prisoners.

  A large part of adjusting to prison life involves fitting into one social group or another. Randy Woodfield has more time to do than almost any other prisoner in the Oregon State Penitentiary. He is a convicted woman killer, a child rapist. The only way Randy can hope to survive in prison is to excel in one of two areas: brains or brawn. He has consistently tested only average in intelligence — but Woodfield remains tremendously strong. He lifts weights, works out, concentrates on keeping the muscle tone that validates his masculinity.

  As long as Randy can hold on to his strength, he will maintain his tenuous balance on the middle to lower-middle rungs of the prison's social ladder. He insists he has "earned the respect" of his fellow inmates, but that is doubtful. His crimes are anathema to prisoners who might consider robbing a liquor store, but who detest a man who rapes and sodomizes women. Randy's strength is his armor, and each passing year erodes it.

  As this is written, Randy Woodfield has served seven years of his sentence. In July, 1983, The Oregon Supreme Court refused to review his final appeal. He will be thirty-eight years old on December 28, 1988, but, like Dorian Gray, he has scarcely aged externally. He keeps his "house" (cell) neat and perfect, and complains bitterly when he is sent to "the hole" for occasional infractions.

  " … I hate to fight and get 'D.R.'s cause they move all your stuff to the property room in bags, like a pile of junk. Things get lost, bent, broken and all dirty. They don't just lock up our cells and save it for us … We have cells and Isolation Building & 'Black Box' for incorrables (sic). Crazy huh?" Randy wrote to a correspondent. "Sick place prisons are!!! Sick people run them too. And sick people live their lives saying other people are sick or weird. Everyone is equal — everyone has problems and will stand before God for Judging others …"

  This is a common and continual theme for Randy Woodfield — that he is "equal." That all people are alike, and that he is no worse than anyone else, and thus should not be maligned.

  For press interviews or on visitors' day, he strides into the room perfectly groomed, his jeans fashionably faded, ironed with knife-like creases. He wears his shirt open to show his muscular chest, and he is as tanned as the Oregon weather allows. Randy is a man totally obsessed with his physical perfection. Time seems to have suspended him in preservative gel; he has no responsibilities, no concerns about earning a living, or about where his next meal is coming from. He still looks like the man who was chosen to pose in the buff for a beefcake centerfold. He still talks and writes as if he were in high school.

  There are more female guards in the Oregon State Penitentiary than there were during Woodfield's first incarceration there, and he continues to vent his rage that women are allowed in areas with male prisoners. And yet, he preens for his female captors, bragging that they sneak up on him to catch a glimpse of his nakedness. One guard laughs as she describes Woodfield's continuing exhibitionism. "I can walk past Randy's cell and he's fully clothed. Five minutes later, when I come back down the line, Randy's stripped and he's flexing his muscles — waiting for me."

  Woodfield's need to expose himself seems as entrenched as it ever was — even if it is directed of necessity, at female guards who are not even faintly impressed.

  A quarter of his life has been spent in prison, and it would appear he has fashioned a world there — although he still writes and talks of appeals. Prison has given Randy Woodfield everything he needs — save the immediate proximity of young females. He has worked his way around that. In a sense, Woodfield still uses women for both his sexual outlet and financial support. He has always been a prodigiou
s letter-writer, and prison life has only increased this activity.

  Randy Woodfield carries on a life through the mail. Women's names and addresses are gold to him. He writes to single women, married women, widows, divorcees, teenagers, gleaning his correspondents from other convicts, from the pen pal columns in tabloids, or in Christian magazines. He writes to women in the Oregon Women's Correctional Center, the facility next door to the prison where he is locked up, his correspondence part of the huge intra-facility mail — requiring no postage — a paper link between men and women. He writes to women held in other jails and prisons across America.

  Some of his correspondents are aware that they are writing to a convict, but some are deluded, believing they are writing to "Randy Woodfield, student at the University of Oregon, 2605 State Street in Salem, Oregon." A handful of women who have journeyed to Salem to surprise their "fiancé" have found to their utter dismay that 2605 State Street is not the University of Oregon's address; the walls of the state prison loom there.

  Randy Woodfield's letters move from friendship to intimacy to frank pornography very rapidly. Promises are made, proposals of marriage flow from his pen as easily as comments on the weather. He invariably encloses pictures of himself, and always includes the photograph he prizes most — Randy Woodfield in tiny blue bathing trunks, flexing his muscles, his tanned skin gleaming with oil. That man has a neatly clipped black beard, a trim moustache. That picture is almost ten years old; detectives found it displayed in his room in Arden Bates's house.

  A picture — not of a woman — but of Randy himself placed where he could gaze at it from his bed. Now he uses it to lure pen-pals.

  He has written to dozens, scores, hundreds of women, juggling his replies, explaining, soothing, cajoling and seducing. Many of them send him money, sometimes only a dollar or two. Sometimes thousands of dollars. The wife of a courthouse employee in a parish (county) in a southeastern state was so besotted in the early 1980's by the impact of Randy Woodfield's letters that she gladly sent him thousands of dollars. She also is alleged to have acquiesced to his request that she take a nude photo of her nine-year-old daughter and send it to him.

  Charges are pending against Randy Woodfield in that case.

  A young woman about to be paroled from the Washington State Women's Facility at Purdy began to write to Randy, on a friend's recommendation, in 1983. As soon as she was released that fall, she traveled to Salem where she met Randy in person. She was entranced. Indeed, she was in love. She was even halfway convinced that Woodfield was the natural father of a child she had adopted in Portland a few years before she was arrested in Washington. She wanted to believe that, to think that her family was complete and miraculously reunited.

  The recent parolee had found a mission during those last months of 1983; she vowed to win freedom for Randy. She believed devoutly he was innocent of all charges.

  "I've just come back from visiting him for the first time," she said breathlessly in a phone call to the author. "And I know he's innocent. He's wonderful. Yes, I know he writes to other women — but I'm the only woman he really loves. I'm the one he wants to marry. He's going to introduce me to his family. I know the truth when I hear it."

  She was — is — a nice woman, inexorably drawn to destructive men.

  A few years later, it was a young married woman who began visiting Randy regularly in prison, and who called the author to announce that she was researching a book she would write — a book that would tell the truth. She visited Randy dozens of times, and she believed in him. "Anyone would believe him. He's innocent. He's the most sincere man I've ever met."

  Some of Woodfield's "mail conquests" were pitiful. The mother of a dying child in Florida grew to count on Randy, to believe that he would be allowed out of prison to visit the little boy and to help her through the tragedy that lay ahead. He encouraged her to believe that there was a good chance Oregon authorities would grant him a "hardship furlough" so that he could rush to her side. Indeed, Woodfield may have actually thought he could parlay the child's fatal illness and emotional dependence on him into some time-out from prison.

  There is bleak irony in how well Randy Woodfield understands women. For a male who has demonstrated over and over an almost visceral hatred for the opposite sex, he knows just which buttons to push, when to be forceful, when to offer tenderness. Nowhere is Randy's manipulation of women more evident than in the voluminous correspondence that began in the spring of 1984 between Randy and a female prisoner on trial for murder in Eugene, Oregon.

  In a sense, their "affair" was a true "Battle of the Titans." Each of them has had countless lovers; each is adept at manipulation and "games."

  Diane Downs had made headlines in the Northwest since she and her children were shot on a lonely country road outside Springfield, Oregon, in May, 1983. Cheryl Downs, seven, died, and Christie, eight, and Danny, three, had been left paralyzed. Diane, who had been wounded only in her lower left arm, was arrested on February 28, 1984, and charged with the shootings. The media said that Diane Downs had shot her own children — so that she might win back a married lover who "didn't want to be a daddy." That charge had yet to be proved, but Diane Downs's history indicated that she was a woman who predicated her whole existence upon being "in love," and on her sexual appeal to men.

  Diane's image appeared almost daily in Oregon papers and on television, and Randy Woodfield was impressed by both her beauty and her notoriety, the latter perhaps more of an aphrodisiac to him. He craved publicity as much as he craved sex. The combination of Randy Woodfield and Diane Downs seemed, to him, to be a dynamite duo. No telling where they could go — together.

  But first, Randy had to "meet" Diane.

  In late spring of 1984, Diane was being held in the Lane County jail, the same jail where Randy himself had been booked when he was arrested three years earlier.

  He wrote to Diane, who, at twenty-eight, was seven months into her sixth pregnancy, and about to go on trial for murder. He felt it prudent, for the moment, to keep his true identity secret until she got to know him. He didn't want her to leap to hasty conclusions about his background. He used the name of another prisoner in the Oregon State Penitentiary, and signed his letters "Squirrely," or "Michael," or "Just me."

  Mail from prison is almost always rife with unusual punctuation. A smiling or frowning cartoon-circle face at the end of a sentence is the most universal touch. Lower case "i's" dotted with a circle, fat exclamation points, "Ha-Ha's" XXXXs and OOOO's for kisses and hugs. Randy used all these — and more — in his letters. He favored a line drawing of a funny little man with pop eyes and his tongue sticking out of his mouth, the insouciant image appearing here and there to augment his words. Randy's style was staccato, spinning the reader and keeping her off balance. Randy peppered his letters with phrases and questions: "You smiling?" "How about it?" "You with me, Di?" and "Yowza!"

  Even in letters, he demanded constant and immediate acceptance. And he had, perhaps unwittingly, chosen a woman whose whole life revolved around having a man. Diane was definitely looking — and the women's section of jail offers little choice. She was without a lover when Randy Woodfield came into her life.

  Because Diane Downs was an escape risk, letters coming in to her were copied. Later, when "Squirrely" could not resist sending her the familiar blue-bikini picture of himself, jail censors recognized Woodfield as one of their former tenants. He too was considered an escape risk, and his letters were copied. Their fevered correspondence grew into thick stacks of letters.

  Initially, when Diane knew her secret admirer only as "Squirrely," he bombarded her with supportive missives. He was fascinated with the gynecological details of her condition, and asked for an in-depth description of her pregnancy, what her pelvic exams were like, and how a baby was delivered. They made bets — these two total strangers — on when the infant would be born, and whether it would be a boy or a girl. If a boy, "Squirrely" suggested that Diane name the child "Ian Randall."

&nb
sp; When Diane Downs was informed of the true identity of her steamy correspondent, she questioned him about his murder and rape convictions. He evinced shock and hurt feelings at her lack of faith, and they were estranged for days. But they soon made up.

  Randy's letters were gallant; Diane apologized for doubting him, and he apologized for being so angry. " … It's a crazy world here, and I try and do my own time. Well a little bit of yours too. (Ha) I may get into a fight (over her innocence) yet dear friend. But don't you worry about it none. I will be stubborn and stand up for what I believe in."

  Diane Downs's future was up in the air, her trial lasting week after week. The letters coming down to Eugene from the Salem prison were encouraging. "Squirrely" and later Randy offered a strong shoulder to cry on.

  "I want ya to live and work in Salem or Portland (if acquitted)," Randy wrote. "And get to know my family too. Me better for sure! Deal? And if you go to OWCC — SHAME — then I will want your promise to marry me and work with me on writing our own book about Justice in America, and how we can handle it all together. I know this is a shock to ya, but why not marry me and be able to visit me too? You could always divorce me later (Ha). Well?

  "Something to think on and dream about. You will need a dear friend next door to ya if you come here and I need you too. I'm sincere and want you to think about this. O.K. Di?"

  She continued to write. He told her about run-ins he had with "dudes about my sex-crimes. I stood my ground to earn respect. I'm no woman killer, and I am angry as hell and will fight for my honor to exist."

  Randy repeated to Diane Downs again and again that they were both paying the price for crimes they hadn't done, and vowing his sensitivity to her. "Smile now — I care. You're just too sweet … "