Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Doris was not unaware of Larry’s eyes following her. It was exhilarating to know she could still attract a man after so many years with no money to spend on herself. Larry wasn’t as good looking as George, and he looked older even though he was six years younger, but unlike her husband, Larry was kind to her. He paid her little compliments and rushed to help her carry the laundry out and bring the wood in. She even allowed herself to flirt a little when George wasn’t looking.

  She knew that Larry wasn’t a much better deal for a woman; he had a police rap sheet longer than George’s, and he was a drinker too. Between them, the two men could easily put away a fifth or two every night, and Larry enjoyed honky-tonking as much as his older brother.

  For a week or so, the two brothers got along, but as the winter storms keened outside, the thin veneer of civility that existed between George and Larry began to crack like the paint on the old farmhouse the trio shared. Liquor served only to bring the hostility closer to the surface. Now, when George gave Doris Mae the back of his hand, Larry intervened, and that made George even angrier. He’d been knocking her around for years and it was none of his brother’s business.

  Shortly after the New Year—in January 1971—George got arrested for driving while intoxicated and without a license. This time it was George who drew a jail sentence. With George locked up, Doris Mae and Larry were thrown together even more. It was pleasant for her to share the home without having to put up with George, even though the presence of the five youngsters didn’t give them much privacy. Maybe they talked about beginning what would be a most dangerous affair, but they didn’t become intimate at that point; they only became allies and the very best of friends. Doris Mae felt as though she had someone on her side at last—someone who would protect her from George’s rage.

  Pete Getchell,* one of George’s new friends, noticed a closeness between Doris Mae and her brother-in-law when he dropped by the farm one night. He wondered what was going to happen when George got out of jail. Pete knew you couldn’t hide the kind of attraction Doris Mae and Larry had for each other—even if they hadn’t consummated their passion yet.

  When George walked out of the Marion County Jail in Salem a few weeks later, the threesome continued to live together as they had before, but tension hung in the air like a palpable thing. George kept smacking Doris, and Larry kept objecting, with most of their arguments occurring in a haze of alcohol.

  Maybe George was getting worried, or maybe he had something else in mind, but sometime early in February, he bought an old double-barreled shotgun and propped it against a wall between his bedroom and Larry’s. He showed it to his good friend Pete but didn’t explain why he’d bought it. Pete hoped that maybe he only wanted to hunt game to feed his family.

  Around the first of March, Larry Light got involved in a tavern brawl. He had objected to something the members of the country-western combo performing either said or sang, and he waded in swinging with a beer bottle. Just as he’d done eleven years earlier, he hit a woman, but not fatally this time. One of the musicians’ girlfriends got in his way, and when Larry was drunk or angry—or both—he attacked first and looked to see who he’d attacked later.

  Like his brother before him, Larry was booked into the Marion County Jail in Salem. While Larry was incarcerated, Doris Mae was a familiar sight at the jail every visitor’s day. His brother, George, didn’t show up at all.

  In fact, George didn’t report for work, either.

  Nor was he seen in the taverns he was so fond of. He wasn’t so popular that anyone missed him very much, but a few people at the lumber mill wondered why he hadn’t called in sick.

  On the first night of spring, March 21, 1971, Silverton firemen answered an alarm that sent them to a run-down farmhouse on the Powers Creek Loop Road. Flames had licked through the roof by the time they arrived and they could hear the terrified screams of children inside.

  The firefighters raced to break into the smoke-filled house and groped for the youngsters. Fortunately, they found and rescued Doris and George’s five children. By the time the fire was finally extinguished, a gaping hole five feet in diameter had been burned through the roof.

  The older youngsters said that they were all alone in the place. Their uncle was in jail and their mother had gone out for a while; they didn’t mention their father at all.

  Doris Mae drove up and burst into hysterical crying as she saw the charred ruins. She was assured that her babies were safe at a neighbor’s house down the road.

  Doris was reprimanded for leaving young children alone, and she was contrite, promising that it would never happen again. She hadn’t been gone long at all, she said, and thought her older children would be okay looking after the babies. Clearly, a terrible tragedy had been averted.

  It was only a week later that the fire alarm sounded again and the address given was the same farmhouse. The Silverton fire crew raced back to the Light residence, fearful that this time they might not reach the children in time. This fire was not as severe as the first, however. Sparks from the crumbling chimney had ignited the roof again, but Doris had been at home and called for help right away.

  The firefighters felt sorry for the slender woman who lived alone in a house that was clearly unsafe and without even the smallest human comforts. For the children’s sake, and hers, too, they condemned the property and told her she would have to move out. She nodded her head distractedly when they asked her if she understood.

  On April 3, however, when Chief Larry Carpenter checked back, he found the house still occupied. Once again, he gave Doris Mae notice that she had to move out of the red-tagged house. No one realized that the Light family were only squatters, and that they hadn’t even been paying rent.

  The next day, the house was empty.

  Chief Carpenter contacted the out-of-state owner and explained that the property was a menace. He suggested that it should be razed before anyone was injured—or killed. The owner, surprised to hear anyone had been living there, agreed at once.

  On April 18, the Silverton firefighters burned the house, the sheds, and accumulated trash in a controlled training exercise. Nothing remained but the old car atop the well and some charred beer cans.

  Spring winds danced over the burned weeds and blew curls of ashes into the air.

  But soon nature regenerated the property. Lupines and California poppies and buttercups bloomed amid the ashes, and the old farm with its firs and cherry trees became a thing of beauty instead of an eyesore. Doris Mae never got to see how pretty the land there could be, despite her hope that she could stay there through the spring and summer and plant a little garden.

  Where she had gone was anybody’s guess. Sadly, nobody knew her well enough to wonder.

  The Lights had disappeared as quickly as they’d arrived, and folks in the region thought little of them. Pete Getchell missed his friend George Light and wondered why his old buddy had moved on without even saying good-bye. He mentioned it a time or two in the taverns and was finally semiconvinced that George had simply fallen back into his wandering ways.

  More than three years later, by August 19, 1974, the Lights were only dim memories around the Powers Creek Loop Road. But in the Marshall County Jail in Lacon, Illinois, on the eastern shore of the Illinois River, a prisoner wrestled with a burning conscience he hadn’t even known he had. He peered out the bars at the flatland shimmering in the heat of the August afternoon and in his imagination saw, instead, the old farmhouse and cherry orchards of Oregon. It was a strange thing; he’d made it clean away, and now his damned conscience was nagging him. He’d done it partly for revenge, partly because he wanted the little woman so much—and now the revenge had turned to ashes in his mouth and the woman was gone.

  In the intervening years since he’d pulled out of Oregon with Doris and the kids, Larry Light had come close to dying. Even though he was only in his early thirties, his heart had gone bad on him. Despite all the trouble he’d caused, the state of Illinois had paid for
his open-heart surgery while he was in jail for parole violation. He felt somewhat better, but he still had to take heart medication all the time. He was suddenly aware of his own mortality, fearful of dying with a terrible burden on his soul. And here he was in jail again on a theft charge. He couldn’t even sleep. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing George’s face the way it was at the last.

  Larry rattled the bars and called to Marshall County undersheriff Russ Crew: “I gotta talk to somebody in Oregon—Salem, Oregon.”

  Crew listened as the prisoner insisted. “Look, it’s about a murder out there. Believe me, they’ll be interested in what I have to say.”

  Crew and Sheriff Moe Berg questioned Light closely to see if he was up to something, but he kept insisting that he had to talk to Marion County sheriff’s detectives. The Marshall County lawmen put a long-distance call through to Salem and reached Captain Richard Bay. “This man says he killed his brother out there back about three or four years ago. Says he left him in the ground and that he’s probably still there.”

  Bay said he would check on men missing in Oregon, and on any records there for the Light brothers, promising to get back to Berg as soon as possible.

  But Richard Bay failed to locate any information on unidentified bodies matching the description of George Light, the purported victim, that had been found near Salem. That didn’t mean, though, that there wasn’t one still lying undiscovered. He passed the information on to Lieutenant Jim Byrnes, who was the chief of detectives in the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. Byrnes placed a conference call to Lacon, Illinois. Byrnes talked to Larry Light while Sheriff Berg listened in. Byrnes carefully advised Light of his rights under Miranda before he began to question him.

  Larry Light insisted that he had killed his brother, George, with a shotgun after an argument sometime early in 1971. “Then I buried him out in back of the house,” Larry blurted. “He’s about two feet down, wrapped in a blanket.”

  “When you shot him, was he facing you?” Byrnes asked.

  “He was facing me—then he turned. I shot him in the head—left ear.”

  “What type of gun?” Byrnes asked.

  “A sixteen-gauge shotgun.”

  Larry explained that he and Doris Mae, George’s wife, had covered George with a blanket as if he were asleep and waited until the next morning to bury him. “It only took about half an hour to bury him; the dirt was real loose. George shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  Byrnes jotted notes on the pad in front of him, as Larry gave specific directions to the body. He described a shed in the back of the farmhouse that was approximately ten by twenty feet. “George is next to the middle of the shed on the north side.”

  It was a most unusual confession for Jim Byrnes; the killer was thousands of miles away, only a disembodied voice on the other end of the phone line, but he spilled out information in a tumble of words like water bursting from a dam. Once started, he was unstoppable.

  “I’m curious. Why are you confessing this now after all this time?” Byrnes asked.

  “Because it was my brother I killed and I have had this on my mind for three years and I want to get it over with as it has bothered me.”

  Byrnes assured Larry Light that his crew would search the area he had described and that he would hear back from them as soon as they had something definite.

  Jim Byrnes called Marion County district attorney Gary Gortmaker and told him about the information that he’d just received from Illinois. Then he checked local rec ords for any mention of George or Larry Light. He found that they had both served terms in the county jail in early 1971. George had been there first—in January. Larry had served thirty-three days of a ninety-day sentence in March and was released on the first of April to return to Illinois for parole violation.

  The FBI rap sheets on the two men listed scores of felony offenses.

  Byrnes saw a notation that a Silverton police officer—Bill Laws—had followed up some rumors about George’s disappearance. Laws had gone so far as to question Doris Mae Light, but she told him that George had abandoned her and the children and that she had no idea where he was. The poor woman was living in abject poverty with a pathetic bunch of little kids, and Laws didn’t doubt that she had been abandoned.

  It was early in the morning in the third week of August 1974 and the dew still clung to wildflowers on the old farm property when ten searchers arrived. Jim Byrnes, Captain Dick Bay, District Attorney Gary Gortmaker, his assistants Robert Hamilton and Richard Morley, Marion County detectives Larry Lord and Jan Cummings, Corporal Ron Boedigheimer, Deputy Jim Lovin, and Oregon State Crime Lab technician Richard Brooke began their search of the isolated property on the Powers Creek Loop Road. The buildings were gone, the undergrowth thick and tangled. It was a far different place than Larry Light remembered.

  Was there really a body lying here, undiscovered? It hardly seemed possible. All the landmarks that could have helped them were gone. The investigators poked beneath the weeds, searching for the foundations of the house and sheds that had once stood there. Jim Byrnes figured that the shed Light described had to have stood beyond a lean-to used for storage.

  They would begin with a backhoe. Cautiously, the operator broke into the ground, scraping the topsoil off until the red Oregon dirt was exposed in an ever-widening circle. At first, only rusted cans and old beer bottles surfaced. But thirty minutes after the backhoeing began, the shredded corner of what appeared to be a rotting blanket came into view. A chill came over the investigators, one that defied the burgeoning warmth of the day.

  The backhoe was pulled away; now the digging would have to be done by hand. Whatever clues might remain from the events of three years ago would be fragile, too easily destroyed by anything but the most meticulous hand search. Byrnes and Bay bent to the onerous task beneath a blazing August sun.

  Working in a carefully roped-off area, Byrnes found a broken segment of desiccated bone fragment. It was too large to have come from an animal. It was a piece of human skull. Next, he and Bay discovered wadding and a few pellets from a shotgun shell. Two hours after the first find, Byrnes located the upper teeth of a human being.

  George Light, the punitive husband, the Judas brother, had lain in this quiet ground decomposing for more than three years. Just as his brother, Larry, had predicted, his entire skeleton was there, still clothed in a shirt and blue jeans—the material virtually intact while the flesh beneath had rotted.

  Byrnes attached a tag, “Light, George, 8-20-74, #74-7731,” to the femur bone of one leg.

  They had searched for more than nine hours, and it was after five when the scene was cleared, the skeleton removed, leaving Boedigheimer and Lord to complete the diagramming of the exact spot where the grave had been unearthed.

  Jim Byrnes made reservations to fly back to Illinois to talk to Larry Light in person, while the other investigators followed the trail the Lights left behind in 1971.

  Jan Cummings and Ron Boedigheimer talked to Pete Getchell, the only friend George had made in Oregon. Getchell said he’d bought George’s horse from Doris and Larry after George had “took off,” and he tried to recall the last time he’d seen his friend. He remembered dropping into the farmhouse sometime late in February and finding the three Lights engaged in one of their increasingly frequent battles. Doris had run out of the house with George right after her.

  “He smacked her a good one and she screamed and ran back in the house while Larry tried to break it all up.”

  Getchell said he’d gone back a day or so later and Larry and Doris told him that George was taking a nap.

  “I told them I had to talk to George, and before they could stop me, I went and looked in the bedroom. I saw him stretched out on the bed. There was a blanket tucked up tight under his chin; he had his jeans on, and his boots were there on the floor beside the bed.”

  Jan Cummings suspected that George might have already been dead when Getchell peeked into the bedroom. “How did he look?” she asked. “L
ike a normal guy sleeping?”

  “Well, George’s face looked awfully bruised up, and it was kind of all red and swollen,” Getchell said. “But I figured it was just because of another fistfight. Him and Larry was always swinging at each other.”

  Suddenly Getchell realized what Jan Cummings had suggested. He looked at her and breathed, “You ain’t telling me George was dead when I was looking at him?”

  Jan Cummings nodded. “What did they tell you when George disappeared?”

  Pete Getchell’s face turned pale green. “They said he took off for Chicago—just like that,” he said. “And I believed them, didn’t even think otherwise. And I bought the horse when they also took off for Illinois. I don’t know what happened to that old gun. It was a real old one, like maybe fifty years old. Maybe it got burned up in the fire.”

  Cummings and Boedigheimer checked at the Lone Pine grocery store and learned that Larry and Doris Mae had been in to cash a check sometime in the first week of April 1971. The store owner said that he hadn’t had enough money in the cash register to cash a check so large. “It was one of those IBM checks like the welfare gives—almost $400 worth. They never did come back to pay us what they owed us—let’s see, here it is: $31.42.”

  That welfare check was probably why Doris Mae had stayed in the old house even after it was condemned. She and Larry needed that money to get out of Oregon.

  Halfway across the country in Sheriff Berg’s office in Lacon, Illinois, Jim Byrnes faced the man who had confessed on the phone to murder. Larry Light was still anxious to shed himself of the burden of guilt he’d carried for three and a half years. He said he was willing to pay whatever penalty he had coming for killing his brother.

  Byrnes realized that had Larry not confessed, George’s body might never have been discovered. Somewhat ironically, the crime had been effectively covered up by the Silverton Fire Department when they burned the farmhouse and outbuildings.