by Ann Rule
Patterson returned to Quincy, Washington, to interview Don Majors’s ex-wife in her home. She denied writing any of the letters to Monohan, or that she’d ever heard of him.
“That’s Don’s handwriting,” she said. “He has a typewriter that he sometimes uses to write this kind of letter, too. Or he’ll get his girlfriends to write them. I never wanted anything to do with this smut.”
“When did you two divorce?” Bill Patterson asked.
“He left home seven years ago, but he still stops by to visit. He was here on June second with a woman named Shireen. I don’t know where he is now. His mother lives in Oregon, and he has a brother in Los Angeles.”
She promised to call Patterson if she heard from her ex-husband.
Patterson talked again with Gerda Goss, who also resided in Quincy. She and Don Majors had lived together until late December 1974.
“When was the last time you heard from Don?” Patterson asked.
“He called on the phone and we talked on June second,” she said. “He said he was in Idaho—but I thought he was right here in Quincy. He lies so much that you can’t believe him. He wanted me to call an attorney in Sacramento about getting one of the Aust brothers out of jail. Aust was supposed to be a Hell’s Angel, and I was to tell the lawyer that Don would be down to get him out in a couple of days. I know Ted Aust, too. He used to be Don’s cellmate in prison.”
The Chelan County chief deputy sensed that Gerda Goss was clearly afraid of Don Majors.
She admitted that that was true. “Don has a key to my house still,” she said fearfully.
Patterson handed her his business card, and she promised to call him if she heard from Majors.
The women in Quincy had no reason to worry: Donald Kennedy Majors was far away from them on still another sadistic pursuit. The hits on the Smollett gas credit card were popping up like toadstools as the maroon Chevy headed east. Majors was buying gas, tires, batteries, car parts—anything he could sell. And he was managing to keep one jump ahead of his pursuers.
Majors had another ripe turkey to pluck. He had a voluminous file of letters and notes listing names and phone numbers. He had met them all through ads in swingers’ magazines. One man, in Solon Springs, Wisconsin, sounded like a vulnerable target.
Don Majors now had two women with him—Shireen Gillespie, his latest girlfriend, and a pretty young Indian girl he’d picked up in his last swing through Sacramento. Her name was Tana Chippewa.*
Using the women as bait, Majors set out to make money. He would use his most successful MO: entrap the sex-hungry suckers and then rip them off.
Bill Patterson looked at the map on his desk, marking it in red wherever Elroy Smollett’s gas card had been used. Majors was heading southeast and then angling off toward the Midwest. From late May through all of June and into July, the stolen credit card had been used in California, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and finally, Illinois. Smollett had been issued a new card, but his first card was kept in force. It was a relatively cheap way to track the man detectives believed to be a killer.
Don Majors and his female traveling companions made a five-day stopover in Solon Springs, Wisconsin. They visited with a well-to-do man who had written an ad looking for some “action.”
The man got more action than he bargained for.
While Majors and the two woman enjoyed his hospitality, they never agreed to any sexual activity, finding one excuse after another. Their host became suspicious of his guests, who were eating and drinking him out of house and home, and he confronted them.
That was a mistake. Don Majors forced him into a root cellar beneath his home and bound his wrists and ankles tightly. Then Majors threaded a cord with a lighted lightbulb on one end, trailing it from the root cellar and over the top of the basement door. He left the lightbulb suspended inches above an open container of gasoline. He placed another full container of gas next to the home-made bomb. Majors then nailed plywood over the root-cellar door.
“Now,” he’d shouted to the man trapped inside. “If you manage to get free, and try to push this door open, the hot bulb goes into the gas—and that’s all she wrote. They won’t find you, your house, or most of your block.”
With the helpless homeowner tied up, Majors had taken his time clearing the man’s home of valuables, including his practically new car.
He’d been right about the gasoline “bomb.” Experts said that if the gas and the hot bulb met, the explosion resulting would have leveled the house and the adjoining homes as efficiently as TNT.
However, the man trapped in the root cellar managed to wriggle free of his bonds. He located a saw and tediously cut his way through the ceiling, allowing him to escape without disturbing the booby trap. Local investigators later disengaged the lightbulb very, very carefully.
Then they sent out teletypes asking for information on Don Majors and the two women traveling with him.
At 9:15 in the evening of July 8, 1975, the Sacramento office of the FBI received a phone call from Tana Chippewa’s mother.
“My daughter just called me from Illinois,” she said nervously. “A man named Don Majors has Tana captive in a motel in Matteson, Illinois. They’re in room number eight and he’s registered under the name of Wendell Lee. It’s the Matteson Motel.”
Asked for a few more details, the worried woman repeated what her daughter Tana had told her.
“She said that Majors is planning to kill a man at 9:00 a.m., a man at the motel. All I know about him is that his name is Al and he lives in Crete, Illinois. My daughter says this man she’s afraid of—Don Majors—met Al through a swingers’ magazine.”
The special agent in Sacramento immediately sent a teletype to the FBI office in Chicago: “The informant says Majors has a .22 derringer and a sawed-off shotgun. Use caution.”
Next, Tana Chippewa called the Chicago FBI office and said that she had managed to sneak out of the room where Majors and Shireen Gillespie were asleep and was calling from the motel office. “Please hurry,” she begged. “I don’t want to help kill a man.”
A squad of FBI agents gathered quietly outside the Matteson Motel at 1:30 a.m. Tana Chippewa tiptoed out to meet them, whispering.
“They’re asleep,” she told the agents. “But Don’s got guns in bed with him.”
The agents decided not to wait for backup and entered the room through the door that Tana had left unlocked. Majors wakened from a sound sleep to find his bed surrounded by FBI agents aiming guns at him.
When they asked where his weapons were, he gave in and pointed to a spot at the end of the bed where he’d hidden them.
It was a lucky thing that the special agents had been able to sneak up on Don Majors. Had he spotted them, there would almost certainly have been bloodshed. They found a sawed-off .22 rifle loaded, and an operative hand grenade under the covers. The .22 derringer was in Shireen Gillespie’s purse.
Shireen was actually Majors’s captive, too. She had been more afraid to leave the sadistic con man than Tana Chippewa was. Now, seeing Majors in handcuffs, she gave the FBI agents permission to search the Chevrolet, which was registered in her name. The car was full of more interesting items: a sawed-off bolt-action rifle, the silencer for the rifle, ammunition, rubber gloves, black leather straps used in bondage sex, an empty billfold, blank checks, and stacks of sex magazines, including The Players, Sandra’s Erotic Journal, and The Seekers.
There were thirty-five Polaroid snapshots of potential playmates and/or pigeons. Most of those pictured were nude or seminude. Some were tied up, some wore masks, some were having sex with animals; there were two of a very young girl in her underwear. Young and not-so-young bodies twisted in contortions demonstrating almost every sexual position known to man—or beast—including a few that seemed entirely new, even to the FBI.
Donald Kennedy Majors had an operative seven-point indictment out on him involving weapons violations, and this was on top of the warrants out of Wyomin
g and Washington. A federal grand jury in Des Moines, Iowa, had issued a bench warrant for Majors on June 25 for violation of the Dyer Act, which involves taking a stolen vehicle across state lines.
His FBI rap sheet went all the way back to 1947, and he’d fallen for almost everything from being AWOL to forgery, unlawful flight, kidnapping, armed robbery, and grand theft. The list was almost an encyclopedia of crime.
Still, although he’d bragged about killing, Don Majors had never been convicted of murder. At least, not yet.
Majors was booked into jail, and FBI agents talked with Tana Chippewa and Shireen Gillespie. Shireen said she’d met Majors sometime in January when he’d checked into the motel in Nebraska where she was the manager. The long, lean “cowboy” from Washington had enjoyed a bonanza with Frank Monohan’s credit cards. He turned on the charm for Shireen, a lonely woman who felt trapped and bored in her job in the Midwest motel.
When he checked out of the motel, Majors promised to call and come back. And he did. When he asked her to, Shireen willingly quit her job, and provided her car and her savings for the next meandering trip west to California. If she wondered who the credit cards belonged to that Majors used when her money ran out, or why Don was buying items in one town and selling them in another, she didn’t ask questions. Her new lover’s sexual charisma had her enthralled.
They’d picked up Tana Chippewa in Sacramento. Tana’s “old man” was in jail and she was at loose ends. She’d quickly accepted Majors’s invitation to travel with him and Shireen.
But the con games he practiced were much more than Tana had bargained for. The two women were supposed to serve as sexual bait to haul in men whose names Majors had gleaned from the swingers’ magazines.
It was a pretty good scam. Victims, fleeced of their valuables, weren’t anxious to go to the police. Respected citizens who had kinky sex hangups didn’t want them on the public record. Even the man in Wisconsin who had almost been blown to smithereens by the gasoline-lightbulb bomb had refused to file charges.
Majors was full of braggadocio and claimed to be far more accomplished than he really was. One item found on him when he was arrested was a card issued to Frank Monohan showing he had a private pilot’s license. Majors had carefully blanked out the “small plane” designation and Monohan’s name. He had skillfully changed it to read that he was “Major Donald Kennedy,” licensed to fly “multi-engine jets.” However, the original printing remained traced in the celluloid envelope the license was carried in.
Tana and Shireen had gone along with Majors’s rip-offs of his would-be swinging targets. They had seen his carefully cataloged notebooks, and they weren’t in the dark about what his game was. But Tana had balked when it came to killing. That was why she’d slipped out of the motel room in Matteson to call the FBI.
And Majors’s promises of a wonderful “vacation” across America had worn thin. They were eating at fast-food joints and sleeping in cheap motels. More than that, Majors constantly told the two women that they were going to have to step up their operation of enticing the secretive weirdos into traps where they could be robbed.
“We were barely making it,” Tana Chippewa said. “Even when Don had stolen credit cards from his victims. He wanted money—lots and lots of it—and he didn’t much care how he got it. But he just wasn’t very good at it.”
* * *
The case that had begun when Frank Monohan disappeared in mid-December 1974 ended its first chapter in July 1975. Majors was convicted of the charges hanging over him and was safely behind bars; the women were allowed to go free, and they traveled back to Sacramento, where Shireen moved in with Ted Aust, Majors’s old prison buddy. Tana decided to wait for her man to get out of jail.
In Chelan County, Bill Patterson still didn’t have what he needed to bring charges of murder against Majors in the death of Frank Monohan. Certainly there was no question that the men had known each other, and that Majors had stolen Monohan’s credit cards. But that wasn’t enough to convince a jury that Majors had killed Monohan. Patterson needed physical evidence or, better yet, an eyewitness. So much time had passed between Monohan’s disappearance, the finding of his body, and Majors’s arrest in Illinois that finding an eyewitness would be like finding an unbroken egg left on the field after the Rose Bowl.
But Patterson is a most determined man, and his personal conviction was that Donald Kennedy Majors was probably the most dangerous criminal he’d ever come up against. He wasn’t about to abandon his investigation.
Majors had bragged to the women and male pals that he’d killed “thirty-three and a half people.” Were these only the ravings of an egomaniac, or could his statements be true?
Majors explained the “half” by recalling how he’d shot a man in his Los Angeles apartment with a .22. Majors said he’d gone there to set up one of his “phony orgies.” The bullet had allegedly hit the man in the head, but it had only knocked him unconscious.
“I convinced him he’d just had a spell or a fit,” Majors laughed to friends. “He left and then he had an accident. The L.A. cops pegged it as a traffic fatality!”
Patterson now had many more names and addresses culled from the notebooks Majors carried in his travels. The stubborn detective was prepared to talk to everyone he could locate in the hope that he could find the missing link he needed. He knew that there had been a “man in his thirties” when Majors went on his buying spree with Frank Monohan’s credit cards. Maybe, somewhere in his list of names, he’d find that man. It was even possible that that man had actually witnessed Monohan’s murder.
One of the first people Patterson found was the man who counted as the “half” murder. Only he wasn’t dead, and he hadn’t been killed in a traffic accident. And he didn’t live in Los Angeles. He lived in Spokane, Washington, where he held a most respected professional position.
The man, like almost all the other swingers Patterson contacted, didn’t want to talk to him. Still, he finally admitted there had been an odd occurrence one evening when Majors came to his apartment. He said he’d bent over to adjust the stereo, and the next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor with a terrible headache and Majors was on top of him, twisting his arm behind his back.
“I had blood on my head, but Don told me I’d had a seizure, hit my head on a sharp corner, and that he was just trying to bring me out of it.”
Patterson had little doubt that that man was walking around with a .22 slug in his head. “But he won’t have an X-ray,” Patterson says. “He doesn’t want to know what’s causing his headaches; he doesn’t want to be involved in any investigation that might blow the cover off his respectability.”
As far as the other thirty-three murder victims that Majors claimed, he might well have been telling the truth. More likely, he was starting with the truth and then shading it with his talent for dramatic embellishment.
Bill Patterson was in touch with law officers from New York to Oregon. He found dozens of cases where well-dressed businessmen’s bodies were found dumped along side roads, their credit cards missing. Eight of the unsolved cases resembled Donald Majors’s MO very closely and were near enough to the itinerary that Patterson charted from the credit-card hits that the Chelan County detective felt Majors could have been involved. Three murders in Tucson, Arizona, seemed to have Majors’s stamp on them, and Patterson placed him fifty miles away from the death sites around the same time. There was another in Cicero, Illinois—and more across the country. All were men who had received phone calls, gone out to meet someone, and never returned.
Coincidence? Or validation of Don Majors’s boasting that he was a champion killer? The term “serial killer” had not yet been coined in the midseventies, but in the more than three decades since then, several cross-country truck drivers have often proved to kill in a serial manner.
Bill Patterson’s main task, however, was to forge the essential link in the Monohan case. Over the next two years, he picked up the burgeoning case file and perused it over
and over again to try to find something he might have missed. He talked to hundreds of people, people caught up in Majors’s life in both direct and tangential ways. Frank Monohan’s murder ate at Bill Patterson, taunting him silently.
In spring 1977, Patterson journeyed to Sacramento to talk again with Ted Aust and Shireen Gillespie. He knew that Majors had stolen a credit card from one of Aust’s friends in May 1975 at Aust’s home in Sacramento, and he wanted to talk with Shireen again.
Shireen had long since grown disillusioned with the man who’d promised her a new home with all her furniture shipped out from Nebraska. Don Majors had said he would marry her; instead he fleeced her of her life’s savings and involved her as a sexual decoy in their headlong flights across the country.
Two years later, she was more than willing to talk in detail about something Majors had once told her. Patterson wondered if it was just another of his fantasies or if it might actually be real?
“Don told me this story,” Shireen began. “He told me that he’d driven across a mountain pass with some boy who had his mother’s car. He told me about killing some guy and dumping him.”
This was new information, and Patterson weighed it, hoping that it was Majors’s admission to the murder of Frank Monohan.
He was thinking about it as he and Aust tore up the floorboards of a bedroom in Aust’s house and crawled down into the space beneath the floor. Majors’s former cellmate had suddenly recalled that, when Majors visited him in May of 1975, he’d seen him tear up some papers or credit cards before they’d repaired a sinking floor and boarded it up. That was the day that Elroy Smollett had helped with the remodeling, the day that Smollett’s gas credit card vanished.
Patterson remembers that night in Sacramento well: “We were down there with the rats and the black widow spiders, and there was a storm and the lightning and thunder was rattling the house. We didn’t find the torn-up credit cards, but I suddenly had a revelation that was stronger than any bolt of lightning outside. Shireen had been telling me about a ‘kid with his mother’s car.’