by Ann Rule
It was now almost four in the morning, and there seemed to be little doubt that Kent Whiteside had killed Fran Steffen and attempted to kill Lee Connors. He’d been photographed, printed, and booked into jail in Salem after receiving treatment for a badly skinned lower leg—probably the result of his falling as he ran from the scene. Lee Connors had defense wounds, however, and she might have been able to fight him long enough for him to incur that injury.
In a sense, they would be working this case in reverse. They knew who the victims were, and they felt they knew who the killer was. What they did not know yet was why. Nor did the investigators know much about Kent White-side himself, beyond his preference for motorcycles and wildly painted cars. It was going to take a lot of teamwork to find out the motive for such monstrous butchery.
What they learned about Whiteside was the antithesis of what they had expected. It only served to make the slaughter in Fran Steffen’s apartment even more incomprehensible, if possible, than it had seemed before.
Whiteside was a graduate of Stanford University, and he had served several years as a commissioned officer in the Air Force. His discharge had been honorable. Most of his background was impeccable.
Until two years earlier, Kent Whiteside had been employed as a counselor at a nearby university. He had left that position to work as the director of a drug crisis clinic in a large Oregon city. Known for his compassion and his complete professionalism, he was highly regarded by the clinic’s board of directors, which included many well-known Oregon citizens. The investigators had to wonder if they had arrested the right man! The history that they were coming up with was almost impossible to equate with the findings of the postmortem exam performed on Fran Steffen’s body by forensic pathologist Dr. Larry Lewman.
The method of murder was hauntingly familiar to anyone who had read the scores of books written about, arguably, the most infamous murderer in criminal history: Jack the Ripper. Never identified despite the numerous theories about who he really was, “Jack,” too, had eviscerated the hapless women who plied their trade in London’s dark alleys in 1888. The devastation of a human body that lay on Lewman’s stainless-steel examining table looked like the photographs of the Ripper’s victims.
Five-foot-seven-inch, 130-pound Fran Steffen had been stabbed again and again and again by someone in the grip of maniacal fury. Her facial wounds were only superficial—her killer had concentrated mostly on her abdomen, exposing her small intestine. There were stab wounds in her small bowel, mesentery, and aorta. There was a deep, incised wound on the right side of the neck that had severed the carotid artery, the jugular vein, and the cricoid cartilage in the neck. There was a fracture of the fourth cervical vertebra—which would have left her paralyzed from the chest down, had she survived the attack—and deep slashes to her left forearm, finger, wrist, ankle, and thigh.
The immediate cause of death was, indeed, the punctured aorta—the large artery that originates from the left ventricle of the heart and whose branches carry blood to all parts of the body. When this artery is punctured, death follows almost immediately as the heart unknowingly pumps blood rapidly from the body. Fran would also have succumbed, but not as quickly, from the wounds in her neck and abdomen.
Neither Fran nor her friend, Lee, had suffered any wounds to the genital area. However, the very fury of the attacks seemed to indicate some sexual motivation, deviant though it might have been.
That motivation was explained, if a rational mind can accept such an explanation, in comments Whiteside made to Marion County detective Larry Lord on the ride to jail, and also in a scrawled note that criminalist Chuck Vaughn discovered in the clothes that had been removed from the suspect and bagged into evidence.
Whiteside told Lord that he had explained to a female friend shortly before the murder that he had an intense desire for a woman to kill him “like a Christian martyr.” His fantasies revolved around a woman killing him with a knife. The belly had more sexual significance for him than the genitals. He blurted to Lord, “I even stuck a knife in my own stomach when I was 30.” Whiteside said his strange delusions visited him only when he was alone. He said he had tried to be around people and stay intoxicated, believing that he would not act on his obsessions. “But it didn’t work,” he sighed.
When Lord asked Whiteside about the homicide, he replied, “You’re right. I do remember the incident; some of it is vague—but I know what happened. But I want to talk to an attorney before I say anything else.”
The note found in Whiteside’s clothes was a study in horror that indicated the drug counselor had planned the attack on Fran for at least a day before it occurred. The note was not a confession per se; it was more a final statement by a man who hoped to be murdered.
What he had written appeared to be designed to absolve his killer of guilt. It read:
Monday, December 8
Fran—Show this to the cops and you should be found innocent soon enough. This note is written to witness that I, Kent Whiteside, now set forth to threaten Fran with her life unless she does as told and shoves the butcher knife below the navel—aorta severing deep and then eviscerates and emasculates me. I tell her either she murders me this way or I gut and mutilate her and her friend. So, Fran was forced by me, to kill and mutilate me. She is innocent and will have acted under force and fear of butchering death. So I have found my purpose in life, leaving it via that lifelong fantasy come true—death by gutting done by a beautiful, naked slut. Who can say the drumm [sic] beat I hear is good or bad. Some part of me can hardly wait to see that 10″ steel blade sliding murderously thru the flesh of my belly.
Kent L. Whiteside
Viewed in retrospect, it was, of course, apparent that Fran Steffen had refused to comply with her killer’s weird masochistic fantasy. And so it was Fran, not Whiteside, who had died.
There were still many questions. The investigating agencies held a conference on the morning of December 13. Teams were set up to handle specific tasks to be sure that every vestige of evidence and background information on this incredible case was unearthed.
George Holland of the Silverton Police Department would work with Larry Lord of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office to research additional background on Whiteside in an attempt to chart his movements in the forty-eight hours prior to the crime, and to interview his housemates and all those he had contacted after the killing.
Jim Byrnes and Dave Kominek of the sheriff’s office would team up with Corporal James Gros-Jacques of the Oregon State Police to interview Lee Connors, who was fighting valiantly for her life in the Salem Memorial hospital. They would also talk in more depth to Lee’s boyfriend, who had been in the same building—although in another apartment—when the attack took place.
Silverton Detective Lieutenant Woodall and Detective Vern Meighen of the Salem Police Department would talk with all the friends of Fran and Lee they could locate, photograph all witnesses, and coordinate the witness statements they collected with the crime lab to validate physical evidence with the personal recollections of the victims’ associates.
It would be December 16 before Lee Connors was well enough to give a comprehensive statement to Byrnes and Gros-Jacques about what had happened to her. She recalled that she and Fran had attended a party the night before and had therefore gotten very little sleep. On the morning of December 9, Lee had worked her regular shift at the Two Grandmas restaurant in Silverton—where she and Fran had both been waitresses—from ten until two P.M. Fran and her small daughter, Melanie, had come in for lunch, and later the three of them had visited friends.
Fran had expected to have a date that evening, but it had been called off. Lee said she’d had a fight with her boyfriend, Will Grant, and had planned to spend the night upstairs at Fran’s apartment.
“I went to Will’s apartment and brought my dog, Sam, back with me to Fran’s,” Lee remembered, “but Will took Sam home again later.”
Lee said she and Fran, along with little Melanie, had watched television until Mela
nie got tired about 9:15.
“We were all tired that night,” Lee said. “Fran left the living room to put the baby to bed, and I was kind of dozing on the couch when I heard somebody knock on the door about 9:35. When I opened it, Kent Whiteside was standing there. Neither Fran nor I know him very well, so I told him I was sleepy and just watching TV, and that Fran had gone to bed.”
He hadn’t seemed to take the hint. He stood there with a beer bottle in his hand.
“Was he drunk?” Byrnes asked.
Lee shook her head. “He didn’t seem to be. But I couldn’t shut the door in his face, and it didn’t look like he was going away so I finally asked him if he wanted to come in. And he just walked in and sat in Fran’s green chair and made small talk,” Lee said. “I told him we were tired from a party the night before, and he told me that he was ‘partying tonight.’ ”
At one point, Whiteside told Lee that he had to get something from his car, and he left, only to return in about five minutes.
“What did he bring in?” Gros-Jacques asked.
“I didn’t see. I guess he must have had something in his pocket,” Lee answered. “I didn’t want to fall asleep with him sitting there and I kept hoping he’d take the hint and leave, but he just stayed on and on.”
Trying very hard to keep in check the emotional memories that threatened to bring tears, Lee Connors closed her eyes, remembering that night a week earlier. “We heard Fran’s voice from the bedroom telling Melanie to settle down,” she said, “and Whiteside looked toward the bedroom. I don’t know if he even knew I wasn’t alone until then.”
Lee estimated that it was probably around 10:30 when two of their younger male friends knocked at the door. She let them in and saw they were a little drunk. Still, she was relieved to see them. They asked Whiteside to go and buy beer for them, and he agreed, returning about eleven.
By this time, Fran had gotten up to join the group, but Lee dozed over the next two hours while Fran and the three men drank beer. When she woke occasionally, Lee said she noticed that Kent Whiteside seemed to be “out of it. He wasn’t really included in the group,” she said. “He wasn’t part of the party, but he was still sitting there in the green chair, and he was still there when the other guys left about one A.M.”
Lee recalled that she had drifted into deep sleep on the couch. She woke up sometime later—not knowing why, but sensing that a weight had just been lifted from her chest.
“I felt funny,” she said. “That’s the only way I can describe it. I’d fallen asleep on my side, but I was lying on my back. I saw a shadow or a figure go toward the bedroom. I could see Fran between the bedroom and the living room. I think she was dressed. He was behind Fran and he had hold of her left wrist with his left hand. I heard Fran scream, ‘Oh, God!’ ”
It was at that point that Lee realized that her jeans had been loosened and pulled down around her thighs and she reached to pull them up. Then she felt the blood. She stood up, almost tripping over her jeans. She moved toward the door and came close to falling down again. Somehow, she managed to get through the front door and recalled slamming it behind her. She remembered that she had begun to run toward her friends’ house but realized to her shock that her intestines were hanging out.
“I needed both my hands to hold them in,” she said. “So I stopped and dropped my jeans. I heard Fran’s front door open and the sound of him gasping, and then his feet pounding as if he was running after me. I thought he was trying to catch me and drag me back, but then I heard his Volkswagen start up and tear off.”
Somehow, she had made it the block and a half to safety, despite the fact that, at one point, her small intestine had caught on a protruding bush, and she had to stop and literally tug it free.
Even a week after Fran Steffen’s murder, it still sounded like a nightmare, like nothing the detectives had ever heard before. Jim Byrnes showed Lee four photos of similar-looking men. She quickly identified a picture of Kent Whiteside as her attacker. She also recognized a picture of the jeans she’d worn that night. She was not familiar with the copper bracelet they had found. It would subsequently be traced to Kent Whiteside.
Lee Connors was only five feet two inches tall and weighed just 103 pounds, but doctors said she had defied the odds against her and won. They cautiously predicted that she would be well enough to leave the hospital in a few weeks.
As for why Kent Whiteside had attacked her and Fran, Lee had absolutely no idea. Neither of them had ever dated him, and they considered a man of 35 a little too old to fit in with their crowd. They had barely known him as anything more than a guy who sat at the fringes of their social circle.
The investigators who talked with Cal and Sue Vonnet,* the young couple to whose home Lee had run, heard similar comments. Kent Whiteside had not been a meaningful part of Fran’s life in any way at all—until the night he ended it. Cal Vonnet said that they had been in bed asleep when the doorbell rang and then Lee had come through the back door screaming, “Get me a doctor! I’m dying! I’ve been cut!”
“I helped her lie down on the floor,” Cal said, “and then Lee said, ‘Kent Whiteside went crazy and did something terrible to Fran.’ ”
Cal Vonnet said he had never heard Fran mention Whiteside at all, and he himself had never met the man. Cal’s wife, Sue, was Fran’s best friend. “We’ve been friends for years,” she said, “and we roomed together in the past. I knew Whiteside when he was a counselor at the university where we went, but not very well. Fran met him in the spring a year or so ago, but she only knew him very casually. She didn’t meet him again until this year—when they were going to the same restaurants and bars. And, even then, they only said hi to each other.”
Sometimes, Sue said, Fran and Kent Whiteside had been at the same parties. “Everyone knew Fran had a boyfriend who visited on weekends, but she was kidding at this one party when she said that she needed a ‘weekday boyfriend.’ ”
The Oregon detectives realized that Whiteside had evidently taken her seriously. During November, he’d tried to find out where Fran lived but none of her friends would give him specific directions. Then he’d dropped in on Will Grant and found out that Fran lived in the same building. A few days later, he’d come to Fran’s apartment.
“After that, Fran tried to get a girlfriend to be there when he was there, because he was coming on too strong,” Sue Vonnet said. “We thought he was a little strange, but we weren’t afraid of him. We were never afraid of him.”
Sue Vonnet said that Whiteside had been boorishly blunt at times. At one party he’d walked up to her and asked her without preamble, “Do you want to fuck?” She could see why Fran didn’t want to be alone with him.
“He was an older guy trying to be cool. He hung around Tiny’s Bar in Mount Angel and tried to join in our crowd, but we’re all in our early twenties and he was an outsider. He seemed like a loner, and his weird conversations were pretty boring.”
Will Grant, Lee Connors’s boyfriend, said that he’d known Whiteside and had found him out of his element too. “He lied to me and said Fran had given him her address because she wanted him to drop by, but that he’d lost it. And then he asked me where she lived, and I thought it was okay to tell him,” Will said sadly. “I wish I’d never told him.”
“Did you hear any sounds from upstairs that night?”
“I slept right through it. I didn’t notice any noise because they’d been pounding on the walls before, trying to get me to wake up. They were joking then.”
It was apparent that Fran Steffen had had no relationship with the man who killed her. Still, she hadn’t been truly afraid of him. She had only been a bit uncomfortable when Kent Whiteside kept dropping in to see her. She could have had no way of knowing that she had been chosen to play an important role in Kent Whiteside’s ultimate fantasy.
Whiteside’s psychopathology became clearer as Jim Byrnes and James Gros-Jacques talked to more people who had known him in the different areas of his very compartment
alized life. The Kent Whiteside who had skillfully directed the drug crisis clinic and counseled unhappy students for several years was a far different man from the misfit described by the younger set in Mount Angel and Silverton. A fellow clinic worker told Byrnes and Gros-Jacques that “everyone always loved Kent.” Whiteside had been most competent in his job, frequently traveling in his capacity as director to give lectures and seminars on drug-related problems. He had had a bad experience in Vietnam while in the service, however, and friends related how he had occasionally broken down and sobbed over people he allegedly had killed while there.
A social-worker friend said that Whiteside had begun to deteriorate over the past year. When the woman he lived with moved out in February or March, his ability to cope seemed to vanish. He reportedly dipped heavily into drugs himself, trying everything but apparently not becoming hooked on anything. Oddly, it was old-fashioned alcohol that he became addicted to.
Whiteside’s fascination with masochism was not a new aspect of his personality, however. He had told one confidante that he had stabbed himself twice—once when he was eleven and once a year or so before the night Fran Steffen was killed. A check on medical records for the suspect showed that he had suffered a shotgun wound at the age of 13, but there were no details on the circumstances. A self-inflicted knife wound when he was 30 had necessitated an exploratory laparotomy, but he recovered from the abdominal surgery without incident.
Lieutenants Woodall and Byrnes, Corporal Gros-Jacques, Detective Larry Lord, and Officer Holland searched the house where Whiteside, living on unemployment compensation during December, resided with his two housemates. The house had been empty and secured by police since the night of Whiteside’s arrest, with his roommates lodged at a local hotel.
There was a startling painting in the living room of a man with a knife pressed against a woman’s throat. The kitchen wall bore a painting of a horseman holding a stick on which a human head was impaled. Lord found only one small spot of blood on the bathroom sink, but Holland located a tan parka stained with blood. The parka bore Whiteside’s name on the back.