Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  It was Anderson’s first act of anything that came close to kindness.

  So much time had passed. Doug Parry began to wonder if the clerk had understood how desperate their situation was. He’d been listening for the sound of sirens, or the engines of a number of cars turning into the motel’s parking lot. But it was quiet—too quiet.

  He couldn’t know that the Seattle Police Department’s Emergency Response Team was at that very moment moving stealthily outside their room. All the rooms surrounding room 303 were being quietly evacuated.

  Assistant Seattle police chief Richard Schoener and Captain “Smoky” Wesselius of the North Precinct directed ten members of the ERT, who were now deployed inside the Sherwood Inn.

  Expert marksman Ken Starkweather was stationed across the I-5 with a rifle equipped with a scope and binoculars. He had a bead on the room where Anderson was holed up with his hostages.

  Inside 303, Mike Anderson began to get antsy as he thought he heard rustling and movement in the corridor. Even though they were incapable of making much noise, he shushed his prisoners, and placed his ear against the door.

  The evacuation of guests and the infiltration of the tactical squad had been accomplished with so little noise that most people wouldn’t have noticed, but Anderson was jumpy.

  It was near dawn now. Martha Carelli was able to talk a little through her loosened gag, and she assured her captor that he was hearing only the sounds of tourists leaving to get an early start on the road.

  “It’s 5 A.M.,” she reminded him. “Remember, this is a motel, and a lot of people get up early.”

  Anderson accepted her reasoning. A short time later, he said he was hungry. He told them he was going down the hall to find a vending machine to get some candy bars and soft drinks.

  “Remember,” he warned, “if I come back and find that you’ve loosened those ties, I’ll kill you.”

  And then he stepped out into the hallway.

  He hadn’t taken a second step before ERT members J. Guich, G. Reynolds, and their team leader, Gary Veatch, stopped him. They’d been poised in an alcove there, their guns drawn.

  “Hold it! Freeze!” Guich shouted, and Anderson started to run down the hall, ducking into another alcove.

  “Throw the gun out,” the officers ordered. “You’re covered on every side.”

  For moments they were all suspended in an agonizing pause as Anderson held on to his loaded gun. And then he tossed it out onto the rug of the motel corridor. Veatch and Guich approached him and ordered him to lie prone on the floor. They cuffed his hands behind him and checked his pockets, finding the key to room 303.

  None of the tact-squad members had heard any sounds from the room, and they entered with some trepidation. They saw two silent figures bound fast to the beds and were vastly relieved when they moved.

  The officers quickly released them from their bondage. Doug Parry was in good shape, but Martha Carelli was checked by waiting paramedics and then rushed to the Harborview Medical Center for treatment of her injuries. As serious as her condition was, she wasn’t concerned about herself—she wanted to know if her family was okay.

  She was assured that her family was safe. There had never been a second gunman in her home; it had all been a hoax, perpetrated by Mike Anderson.

  Her family was just as worried about her fate, knowing that she was the hostage of a jail escapee with a record of violent crimes.

  Calls were made immediately to the Tri-Cities area, letting their families know that both Doug Parry and Martha Carelli were safe. John Carelli and his grown daughter set out by private plane at once to be by Martha’s side as she was given medical treatment. Her two grown sons headed for Seattle by car.

  As the ERT members surrounded Anderson in the hallway of the Sherwood Inn, he’d dropped the brown paper bag he was carrying. It was stuffed to overflowing with currency—$5,862.50 worth of bills. He hadn’t had a chance to spend even a single dollar of it. He’d netted himself nothing but big trouble when he escaped from the Franklin County Jail. Anderson was transported to the King County Jail.

  Seattle Homicide detectives Bill Baughman and George Marberg were called at home in the predawn hours and asked to respond to the Sherwood Inn to gather evidence in the room where Doug Parry and Martha Carelli had been held hostage.

  The double room in the luxury motel was littered with the torn sheet strips that had been used to bind the captives. The bathroom produced bloodstained tissues and towels, which Martha Carelli had used to try to clean the blood from her numerous head wounds. Money wrappers from the stolen currency covered the floor. Baughman and Marberg also found a matchbook with a Tri-Cities phone number written on the back and some mentholated cigarettes left behind by the kidnapper.

  Checking at the desk, the two Homicide detectives learned that four calls had been made from room 303, all of them local Seattle numbers: they were all to the automated information numbers provided by airlines on flight schedules.

  They determined that Mike Anderson had booked reservations on a United flight to Los Angeles that was due to leave at 7:45 A.M. And they realized that if Doug Parry hadn’t alerted the desk clerk, there was every possibility that Anderson would have killed his hostages so that they could not identify him. He would have been long gone to California before their bodies were even discovered.

  But now he was going to go back to eastern Washington.

  “We want him,” investigators from the Pasco Police Department, the Kennewick Police Department, and both Benton and Franklin County Sheriff’s Offices said when Marberg and Baughman contacted them.

  Joyce Johnson, of the Seattle Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Police Department, went to the Harborview Medical Center to take a statement from Martha Carelli. Despite the numerous high-profile cases Johnson had worked, she was shocked when she saw the terribly injured woman. She wondered how Martha Carelli had survived the ordeal.

  ER physicians said that Martha had lacerations and contusions of the scalp and face, a severe concussion, and a broken nose. Her features were so swollen that she was unrecognizable. Even so, the courageous woman insisted on giving a statement.

  Painfully, Martha related the events of her capture to Joyce Johnson. Her only concern was that her family was safe, that she had done nothing to endanger them. It was clear she still wouldn’t believe they had all survived until she saw them for herself.

  Physicians in the ER said that she would require hospitalization and further tests to determine the extent of her injuries.

  Bill Baughman and Homicide detective Al Gerdes ran the .38 Colt taken from Anderson through the National Crime Information Center computers in Quantico, Virginia, and got a hit on it. The Richland, Washington, Police Department had entered it in the NCIC computers six weeks earlier. The .38 had been stolen in the burglary of a sporting goods store in Richland. Someone had entered the store through a ceiling vent and taken fifteen guns and ammunition.

  But Mike Anderson was already in jail by that time. He must have had friends outside who had provided him with the weapon after he escaped.

  Detectives Marberg and Gerdes advised Anderson of his Miranda rights and he gave them a ten-page statement about the kidnappings and robbery of the Giant T. His version of the events correlated with those of Martha Carelli and Doug Parry—with the exception of Martha’s report of attempted rape.

  At length, Anderson admitted that he had attempted to molest his helpless captive. Now that he was the prisoner, Michael Anderson acted obliging and meek. He clearly wanted to come across as a good guy who sincerely wanted to cooperate with the police. He insisted he’d been forced to kick Martha Carelli in the head only to keep her quiet after she’d discovered him.

  Kennewick detective Doug Fearing and Franklin County deputy sheriff Ralph Courson arrived in Seattle armed with a warrant from Judge Fred R. Staples charging Anderson with robbery, assault, conspiracy to commit escape, escape, and a second assault charge.
His bail was set at $250,000. He was released to the eastern Washington authorities for prosecution in their jurisdiction.

  Seattle Police and the Seattle news media had nothing but praise for the bravery of Doug Parry, and they credited his cool thinking with saving Martha Carelli’s life. After a few hours’ sleep, he returned to Kennewick to rejoin his wife and family.

  For Martha, the ordeal was far from over. She had waves of flashbacks caused by post-traumatic stress disorder. Even her own home, which had always been a safe haven, reminded her what she had lived through. She couldn’t go down to her basement alone, and the family garage frightened her. It didn’t help that while he was awaiting trial, Anderson attempted two more jail escapes. Fortunately, they were unsuccessful. Still—when word of these aborted jailbreaks reached the Carelli family—Martha Carelli snapped back into the hours she had spent in abject fear.

  Even so, she insisted that when she was well enough, she would testify against her kidnapper. She was frightened, but she was angry too.

  “I’m not one of those citizens who refuse to get involved and won’t aid in prosecution,” she told reporters. “I understand some of this man’s other victims have been afraid to testify—but I swear I won’t be.”

  Martha Carelli was saved from the witness chair when Michael Anderson agreed to plead guilty to the charges against him—but only on the condition that credit card fraud charges be dropped against a woman friend he apparently cared for.

  He received multiple life sentences, to run consecutively. On July 5, 1978, Anderson was convicted in the earlier robbery of the Safeway store and received two five-year terms and a twenty-year term on those charges, all of which would not begin until he had served his consecutive life sentences.

  The aftermath of a crime like Anderson’s stays with the victims longer than anyone realizes. It would always be difficult for Martha Carelli to enter her own house when she was alone. The memory of the man who hid there never went away.

  On one lovely spring day, Martha Carelli stood in her own yard and realized that she was afraid to go back into the house. Forcing herself, she entered and answered a ringing phone. Before she went outside again, she wedged a chair against the basement door.

  While she was gardening, one of her sons came home through the back door, but she didn’t see him. When she went into her kitchen and saw that the chair blockade had been moved, she felt the grip of familiar terror. She backed out of her kitchen and bumped into her son and fainted.

  How long would it be before the dread that someone was waiting, hiding in her house went away? No one could predict that. Her terror diminished with time, but it never completely disappeared.

  The fear that Martha Carelli lived with is a sad commentary on the loss of trust felt by crime victims. Martha was lucky. She survived even though there were innumerable moments when she believed she was about to die. She lived through a dozen desperate hours at the mercy of a sadistic escapee.

  She lived through almost three decades after her rescue, grateful to have a second chance at life.

  The

  Minister’s

  Wife

  This book has explored a number of cases that look at different aspects of domestic violence. When most of us hear the term, our first reaction is to picture victims as vulnerable females, and statistically that is certainly true. Still, I remember a day when I received an angry phone call from a man who had attended one of my seminars and felt I hadn’t been fair when I talked about strife between couples. He took issue with me because I had discussed only female victims who were physically or emotionally hurt by their male partners.

  “Why don’t you care about the men who get hurt?” he asked. “We’re out here, and nobody cares what happens to us.”

  I had to admit that he had a point. Men sometimes do become the targets for punishment, although their abuse tends to be more emotional. And when they are injured by a woman, they hesitate to come forward because they are ashamed to admit it, thinking people will see them as “sissies.”

  And sometimes they don’t come forward because they are dead. I have written books that focus on murder cases where, like a black widow spider, the female was, indeed, “deadlier than the male.”

  The case that follows was one of the most high-profile homicides in America in the past two years. By ordinary standards, the victim was the last person anyone would expect to end up murdered. The accused was just as unlikely to fill such a role. Anyone can be involved in a homicide investigation, of course, but I honestly don’t recall a murder case like this in all of the thirty years I’ve been covering true crime.

  And I’m still not absolutely sure which of the two people involved was the true victim. Perhaps they both were. I do know it’s important to look closely at this case that began in a small town in Tennessee. Perhaps the answer is in those seemingly unimportant details that the nationwide media didn’t focus on as they rushed to spread the news about a handsome young minister and his meek-appearing wife. There are several possible motives and possible catalysts that sparked murder, all of them bizarre.

  Matthew Winkler was a minister in the Church of Christ, as were his father, his grandfather, and many other male relatives. I happen to have grown up in the Church of Christ, attending services there until I was sixteen, mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a boy, my father always went to the Church of Christ in Ohio. It wasn’t so different from other Protestant churches, although instrumental music—including the organ—wasn’t allowed in the Ohio branch, and baptism was by full immersion in a hot-tub-sized pool behind the preacher’s pulpit. The drinking of alcohol was a sin. I recall my elderly and extremely kind grandfather telling me solemnly, “Ann, I would rather see my daughter dead than married to a drunkard.”

  I would come to learn that there are many Church of Christ congregations, and their tenets and taboos can be vastly different from one another. Our Ann Arbor church was far less forbidding than the one we attended when visiting my grandparents in Ohio.

  Divorce, however, is an abomination for a minister in the Church of Christ. That may have been why my grandfather preferred death to the dishonor of living with a drunk.

  In the state of Tennessee, where the Reverend Matthew Winkler preached, divorce was not a viable option. How could a minister hold up his head if he couldn’t keep his own marriage intact?

  Selmer, Tennessee

  Selmer, Tennessee, was reportedly named for Selma, Alabama; perhaps the r was added because of the way local dialect pronounced it. Located in West Tennessee, Selmer is the county seat of McNairy County, the kind of Southern town where people tend to know one another. Many residents belong to extended family clans. Few citizens are wealthy; the median income is $38,000 a year, and a sixth of Selmer’s people live below the poverty level. There is a small hospital there, an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school. There are a few family-type restaurants and, of course, a Wal-Mart.

  In many ways, it’s a “Mayberry” kind of town, where most people smile and say hello to everyone and wave at drivers passing by. They eat “dinner” at noon, not “lunch.” They eat “supper” in the evening.

  McNairy County had its own almost-fictional sheriff in the 1960s and 1970s: Sheriff Buford Pusser became famous as a crusader, a tremendously tall man carrying a big stick, who waged war against corruption in his county, whether it was suspect politicians or bootleg whiskey stills. In August 1964, he and his wife, Pauline, were ambushed and she was shot fatally. Buford lived almost exactly seven more years, his face scarred by the bullets that killed Pauline. Immortalized in the Walking Tall films by actor Joe Don Baker, Pusser died at thirty-seven as he lived, in a highly suspicious auto crash. His legend hasn’t faded and his life is still honored.

  Icons and folktales he left behind still attract tourists.

  Long after Pusser’s term in office, McNairy County has been tarnished by rumors of corruption, and Sheriff Tommy Riley was convicted in October 2005 of “facilitation of
jail escape,” but avoided a verdict of “official misconduct.” One of the women in the county jail became pregnant after alleged intimate encounters with a jailer. Riley was charged with helping expedite her escape so that she could have an abortion. Through judicial diversion, Riley kept his job and avoided a three-to-six-year jail term. He was sentenced instead to three years of supervised probation.

  District Attorney Elizabeth Rice demanded that he be ousted from office, however, citing “bad judgment” on the part of the presiding judge.

  Most of Selmer and McNairy County is home to far more ordinary people who respect the law. Cotton, soybeans, corn, wheat, and hay grow in the fields that surround Selmer, and many farmers also raise horses, cows, and hogs. Loggers cut down trees and deliver them to sawmills. Scrap metal is the other main industry for the men of Selmer, and there are junkyards piled high with crushed cars and worn-out appliances awaiting transformation.

  And then there are preachers and others at the two dozen churches in town. Located near the center of the Bible Belt, Selmer has needed its churches: the forty-five-hundred residents in Selmer might well wonder what kind of unlucky star has crossed over their town in the past decade and a half. Devastating tornadoes have touched down in Selmer, wreaking millions of dollars in damage and taking lives.

  In 2007, dark shadows continued to hover over Selmer. NASCAR racing is a tremendously popular sport in the South, and, along with an estimated forty to sixty thousand other fans, Selmer residents were looking forward to the annual Cars for Kids Show, on the weekend of June 16 and 17. It was a huge draw in this small town, and usually raised at least $200,000 for charities that benefit children. The parade was a hit on Saturday, but a modified drag race at 6 P.M. on Mulberry Avenue, a city street without barriers to hold the crowd back or protect them, ended in disaster. It was intended to be a controlled burnout—the race car’s rear tires spin until they blow out, while the brakes are on for the front wheels. The stunt generally produces clouds of dark smoke, thrilling crowds.