Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Now, Larry spoke about his obsession with his brother’s wife, and his anger over the way George treated Doris Mae. And yes, he admitted that he had still harbored resentment over the way that George had snitched him off to the police on the murder charge in 1959. During the years he spent in prison, he had planned so many times how he would settle that score. Had he consciously followed George to Oregon so that he could wreak revenge? He honestly didn’t know. At first they had gotten along, during the Christmas holidays at the end of 1970. But when George was so cruel to Doris Mae, Larry said, it “kind of set me off.”

  “And I knew I was going to kill him after he hit me between the eyes with a beer bottle.”

  “When was that?” Byrnes asked quietly.

  “It was sometime in January or February back in 1971. I can’t say for sure when. I guess it was three or four days later that I shot him.

  “I recollect that it was on a Sunday when it happened. Doris Mae had shown me where the shells were kept for the old P.M. shotgun after our first bad fight. I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking whiskey when another argument started. When George threw a lamp at me, I went for the gun. Doris saw what was going to happen and she rushed the children out back, except the baby might have been on his table in the kitchen.”

  Larry Light narrowed his eyes as he seemed to envision the scene in the old farmhouse. Byrnes realized it was no longer a hot day in August in Illinois—it was a winter night in Oregon some three years earlier.

  “He told me I’d better get started killing him because he was going to beat me up. I got up and walked into the front room and I was right by the stairs leading upstairs. He threw a lamp at me and I just reached in and grabbed the shotgun and shot him.”

  “Had you been thinking about what you were going to do?”

  “Yeah. I knowed I was going to kill him if he started it again.”

  Larry remembered that he had fired from the hip as George threw up his arms in a futile gesture of self-defense.

  “I dragged George onto the bed and tucked the blanket around him. There was a lot of blood pouring out from behind his left ear. I think he died right away.”

  Larry Light said that Doris Mae had just finished cleaning up the blood on the bed and the floor when Pete Getchell dropped in unexpectedly. The two of them had huddled in the kitchen anxiously as they listened to Pete trying to talk to George. They were “scared to death” that he would figure out George wasn’t taking a nap at all, but was lying there dead. But Pete never caught on. He kept having a conversation with a dead man.

  The next day, after the children had gone off to school, Larry had wrestled the now board-stiff corpse of his brother out to its shallow grave. Doris’s only part in the impromptu burial was to hold the back door open for him.

  In the days that followed, they had both turned to liquor to sublimate the horror of what had happened. That hadn’t been a good idea at all because that was when Larry had gotten so drunk that he got involved in the tavern brouhaha. “And I had to go to jail for a month—and leave Doris Mae out there alone, except for George in the ground.”

  One can only imagine what that month was like for Doris Mae, isolated in the farmhouse, alone at night when the March storms flailed at the windows and the wind howled in the treetops, all the time knowing that her husband’s body lay buried a few feet from her back door.

  On February 25, 1971, Doris had a terrible scare when police officers came to her door. But they had only wanted her because she’d failed to answer a traffic citation. She was mugged and printed but released. No one said anything about her husband, and she didn’t volunteer anything.

  Jim Byrnes figured that Doris Light had probably been looking over her shoulder for three years too, waiting for the past to catch up with her. Larry said he didn’t know where she was.

  “She left me,” he said.

  With the terrible secret they shared, it just hadn’t worked out between them as far as romance went. “I don’t know where she is now.”

  Byrnes finally located Doris Mae Light in Chester, Illinois. When he knocked on the front door of the last address he’d found for her, he recognized her at once from her traffic violation mug shot. She was still pretty and very petite. But she gasped when he identified himself and she ran like a deer across the plowed field behind her house. She hid briefly at a small business where a friend worked, but then she agreed to talk with Byrnes.

  First reading her her Miranda rights, the Oregon detective asked her about the murder.

  “Who did I kill?” she asked faintly.

  “Your husband, George, is dead.”

  “George isn’t dead.” She shook her head emphatically.

  “We’ve recovered his body in Oregon.”

  “George went to the store,” she answered in a curious non sequitur. “George was mean most of the time, but good sometimes. Larry said he wanted George dead, that he has hated him all his life.”

  “Did Larry kill George?”

  Doris Mae didn’t answer at first. Jim Byrnes sensed that she had buried the reality of George’s murder so deeply in her subconscious mind that she was truly having trouble accessing it.

  After a long silence, she answered almost mechanically. She remembered living in Oregon. George had been drunk one day and sent her to the store for cigarettes, but she had run out of gas on the way home. When she finally got home, she recalled that “George was gone.”

  It was as if she’d washed the whole thing away, unable to bear the truth, not an altogether surprising reaction.

  Byrnes reminded her that the old Nash Rambler they’d been driving was still at the house. He asked her how George could have left; it was too far to walk anywhere.

  She didn’t have an explanation for that, but even so, Doris Mae continued to insist that she believed George had merely left her. “When he didn’t come back that night,” she said, “Larry wanted to sleep with me—but I wouldn’t. My husband left me, but I was still married.”

  Later, Doris said that they had finally had a sexual relationship. She admitted to Byrnes only that she’d always “thought” Larry had killed her husband but that she wasn’t sure.

  Maybe she was telling the truth—or maybe she was saying what she had to believe now or she would go crazy.

  Back in Oregon, Pete Getchell, whose mind had been completely boggled at the thought that his last view of George Light was of a dead man, continued to recall the events after the killing. He’d seen Doris Mae and Larry a few days later and warned Larry, “George is going to kick your ass,” after he saw Larry caressing Doris.

  Larry had only grinned and commented cryptically, “I have already whipped his ass and sent him down the road.”

  Once the illicit duo had returned to Illinois, their affair was short-lived. Larry had been arrested for parole violation and went back to prison at Menard, and Doris and her children had settled in nearby Chester.

  Both Larry and Doris were extradited to Oregon to face the charges for a long-hidden crime. On September 5, 1974, Larry Light pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree murder (after dismissal of first-degree charges) and was sentenced to ten years in the Oregon State Penitentiary.

  One week later, Doris Mae’s first-degree murder charge was dismissed and she was charged only with being an accessory after the fact.

  She pleaded guilty to the latter charges on November 5, 1974, and received a five-year suspended sentence. Consideration was given to the fact that she had five young children to care for.

  All her life, Doris Mae Light ran from one unhappy situation to another in search of freedom to live a happy life, only to find herself more and more enmeshed. Suddenly she was free of both the men who had trapped her: the brothers who first coveted her and then bound her into a special kind of slavery.

  Perhaps Doris Mae’s compassionate sentence was a fitting end to one of the strangest murder stories in Oregon history. Where the years since have taken her, God only knows.

  If
she is still alive, she would be sixty-six years old.

  The

  Chemist’s Wife

  There are many obsessions that trigger human decisions; of them all, none may be as deadly as pathological jealousy. It can drive some to commit acts so despicable that they are incomprehensible to a rational individual, beginning with treating a woman as a possession. A woman in this kind of relationship is caught in a cage—as surely as if she were actually hemmed in by iron bars. Not only is she in danger, but so is anyone who might try to free her.

  My mail and e-mail are full of desperate pleas for advice from women trying to move out of unhappy liaisons where they feel trapped or, worse, live in fear. What they once believed was true love was really their partners’ need to control them. When they try to leave, they are threatened, demeaned, and even physically attacked.

  How I have wished that I had answers and solutions for them, but the law has few remedies for women who are afraid, short of restraining orders to bar stalkers from approaching them—and those are really only pieces of paper with little clout. Even when the woman, her family, and her friends know in their hearts that tragedy lies ahead, police cannot arrest someone for what he might do. That would take away his rights.

  Some women run away, hoping to disappear in a town or city far away, but that means leaving their families behind. Most don’t have the financial resources to do that. If there are children involved, moving would mean the loss of grandparents, schools they are used to, a familiar life they trusted. And in custody disputes, it is often illegal to take children away from their fathers and refuse visitation.

  The small percentage of wives or lovers who have been backed to the wall in terror and fight back, killing the men who have stalked them, don’t walk away untouched. Even if they are not charged with murder and sent to prison, they inevitably suffer profound emotional damage, and they live the rest of their lives full of guilt and regret.

  In the end, this seems to be an insoluble problem, one that might be avoided only if women could see beyond the romantic façade of a suitor who promises her the world while he is steadily separating her from her family and her friends.

  The lover who insists that he loves a woman so much that he wants to be with her all the time—and tells his love object that she should want to be with him constantly—is almost always a burgeoning stalker.

  When Emily Borden * encountered Terry Ruckelhaus* for the first time, she was just fifteen years old, albeit a mature-looking fifteen. She could pass easily for twenty. The attraction between the teenager and the twenty-six-year-old chemist was immediately apparent to anyone who observed that first meeting.

  They met in Hawaii, where Terry worked for Emily’s parents. Despite the eleven-year disparity in their ages, Emily was allowed to date Terry. Maybe her parents knew they couldn’t stop the couple from seeing each other and hoped that Terry wouldn’t seem so enticing to their daughter if they didn’t make a big fuss about it. Perhaps they hoped the connection between the two would die of its own weight.

  Then again, Terry appeared to be the kind of young man that any parent might covet as a future son-in-law. He was brilliant, clean-cut, and the scion of a wealthy Texas family. He looked just as young for his age as Emily appeared to be mature for hers. Anyone who didn’t know their ages wouldn’t have given them a second glance.

  The Borden family originally moved to Hawaii from Alaska. When her parents closed down their Hawaiian business interests, Terry and Emily had been dating exclusively for six months and showed no signs of slowing down. Emily was adamant that she wasn’t going to move away from the islands with her family and leave Terry behind. Only then did her parents realize that their gamble that she would grow tired of Terry hadn’t worked. Emily insisted on remaining in Hawaii.

  Her family wasn’t at all happy with this idea, but it was extremely difficult—if not impossible—to argue with a sixteen-year-old girl in love. If they forced her to leave the islands, she would probably just run away and return to Ruckelhaus.

  And Terry promised to take good care of Emily, assuring her family that she would be safe with him.

  At first, things were fine, but soon their financial picture grew desperate. Although Terry had five years of college with majors in biology and chemistry, he found it difficult to find a new job. The young couple lived on unemployment for six or seven months. This didn’t bother Emily; she was adept at making money stretch, and she enjoyed keeping their apartment immaculate.

  There were a few obstacles that kept her from being truly secure, however, little warning flags that troubled her. First, there was Terry’s temper. The slightest things could send him into towering rages. One day his car broke down and he threw a screaming tantrum about it. Emily was shocked at how angry he was, but then the storm clouds passed as quickly as they’d come. After all, she figured, he was worried about money and they needed their car so he could look for work. Terry was probably just reacting to the frustration of one problem piled on top of another.

  When he couldn’t find a job by mid-July that first year, they decided to return to the mainland and try their luck there. Terry’s family in Texas welcomed them into their home and the young couple lived there for three months. Finally, Terry found a job performing lab tests on the effects of acid and weather corrosion on different structures. With his salary as a chemist, they soon had enough money to move into their own apartment.

  They never had a formal marriage ceremony, but Emily considered herself to be married, at least under common law. She had all her identification documents changed to read “Emily Ruckelhaus.”

  Their lives should have been running smoothly now—but something was wrong. Emily knew she was a good housekeeper, but she was never able to please Terry. No matter how much she scrubbed and waxed, he continually complained that she kept the apartment like a pigsty. She sighed to her friends, “If he even finds two dishes sitting in the sink, he freaks out.”

  It wasn’t just her housekeeping. She recognized that she often made him angry. Worse, she didn’t even know why. He continually changed the rules about how they should live, and what he expected her to do. She never quite measured up.

  When he was mad at her, Terry was like an enraged bull. She found it hard to keep any kind of a wardrobe together. During his temper tantrums, he tore at her clothing, literally ripping her blouses from her body. Time after time she stood there humiliated, her clothes in shreds.

  Their quarrels took on a perverted pattern. Something Emily had said or done would set him off. Sometimes it was something as minuscule as her paying seven cents too much for a half gallon of milk. Terry would get an odd smile on his face and say, “Come on, sweetheart. We’re going to have a little talk.”

  Emily dreaded what was going to come next.

  Terry pulled the drapes and locked all the doors. Even their pet dog, Amber, recognized that something bad was about to happen and ran to hide under the bed.

  And then Terry would beat his teenage “wife.” He knocked her to the floor and kicked her, screaming, “God dammit, Emily, I’m going to kill you!”

  He seemed to take sadistic pleasure in her terror and confusion. “What’s the matter?” he taunted. “You’re scared, aren’t you? You’re damned right you’re scared.”

  And then he would go into a terrifying monologue about what a “mean S.O.B.” he really was. Emily saw that he took great delight in reminding her of that.

  Terry began to watch Emily’s every movement. If she went to buy groceries, she had a time limit. If she didn’t return within five minutes of her limit, he locked the doors on her and made her beg to be let in. Only when he felt that he had subjected her to enough humiliation would he let her in. Then Terry would make her sit across from him while he carefully checked the supermarket’s receipt against what she had brought home.

  Terry had no reason whatsoever to suspect Emily of going against his wishes or cheating on him with another man. In spite of the jealous rages and beati
ngs, she still loved him with the kind of unwavering devotion a young woman feels for her first love. She kept hoping that they could somehow find their way back to the way they had been when they were first together. She tried to obey his rules—rules she didn’t understand and that changed so rapidly that she could never keep up with them.

  Terry succeeded in completely isolating Emily. She was far away from her own family, alone—except for Terry—in a strange city. She tried to believe that he would change, that she could live up to his expectations so the beatings and psychological torture would stop.

  But her life only grew worse. One night, Terry threw her all the way across the room, and a huge gash opened on her knee when she landed on something sharp. Another time, he slapped her so hard with his open hand that her lip split, and then he grabbed her by the hair and methodically slapped her until her head bounced like a rag doll’s.

  As suddenly as he’d started, he stopped. He looked shocked as he gazed at her with obvious distress.

  “I just realized I was beating the shit out of you,” he said, begging for her forgiveness.

  Emily took a job in Fort Worth—because Terry asked her to. They needed more money to pay their bills, he said. But then he resented the time she was away from him, and he was jealous of the men he believed she talked to at her job.

  It became routine for her to show up at work with scars and bruises on her face. Her fellow employees and boss worried about her, but she brushed aside their questions. She was ashamed and she was frightened.

  Terry had sayings he enjoyed repeating. “A good woman needs a beating every day,” he said. He explained to her that he knew she still loved him, so it was all right for him to beat her.

  Although Emily was no longer allowed to see her girlfriends, Terry had several male friends. Their opinion of women matched his. When he complained that he didn’t trust Emily, one of his friends said, “Just put her on a chain.”

  “Well, she knows I love her,” Terry said. He really believed that a woman would submit to anything as long as she was sure of her man’s devotion.