by Ann Rule
As one of his housemates had described earlier, Whiteside’s room could be reached only by passing through the other man’s bedroom. Here, in his very private quarters, there was more violent “art.” One wall was covered with photos and paintings, some of them depicting satanism and bizarre acts.
The investigators found a second knife in Whiteside’s bedroom—a four-inch hunting knife with a black handle. And they located some puzzling items: in his closet, a male truss with numerous half-inch nylon ropes knotted to it; seven feet of nylon rope on the suspect’s bed with knots in it; and notebooks that contained thousands and thousands of rambling words. Obviously, Whiteside’s attic room had been the site of much reading, writing, and preparation for the final acting-out of his fantasy.
Next, the detectives talked to acquaintances of the suspect who had seen Whiteside immediately after he left his home after changing clothes on the night of the murder. He had arrived at the Gast Haus cocktail lounge and sat down at the bar, ordering two double bourbons and downing them without taking a breath. The barmaid noted that he was shaking as if he was having a “spastic attack,” and that he kept staring at his hands. “His head wobbled too,” she said.
Two of Whiteside’s friends had gone over to him and suggested that they move to a table. He had told them that he’d “hurt someone” in Silverton. When they asked him if he wanted them to call the police, he said no. Nor did he want to talk about what had happened. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow morning,” Whiteside said, “at eight. We can meet and discuss it then.”
At that point, Kent Whiteside had ridden off on his motorcycle and surrendered to the police who had surrounded his house.
Had he gone crazy on drugs? What had triggered such a horrible attack? There had been no sign of drugs in Kent Whiteside’s urine when he was examined just after his arrest, although he obviously had been drinking. Although alcohol was his drug of choice, it didn’t seem possible that several bottles of beer had catapulted him into the carnage at Fran’s apartment.
No, it seemed that Kent Whiteside had known what he was doing, had planned to force Fran Steffen to help him carry out his own death—his final realization of his masochistic fantasy. It was a premeditated act: the note he’d written to Fran was dated December 8. He had had twenty-four hours to think about what he planned to do.
He had been happy—“euphoric,” according to his housemate’s recollection of the early evening of December 9. He had come to Fran’s house and waited for three and a half hours until the other guests had left and Lee was asleep on the couch before he acted. Lee Connors’s unexpected presence had forced him to change his plans only a little. His note had mentioned cutting Fran’s friend. He had apparently been stalking her, keeping an eye on where she went and who she was with. Under ordinary circumstances, Lee would not have been in Fran’s apartment. But Whiteside had included her in his note. She had to be eliminated before he could carry out his obsession.
The filleting knife had been so sharp and the attack so swift that Lee hadn’t even felt herself being sliced open. Forensic pathologist Larry Lewman told Jim Byrnes that if the blade had gone a millimeter deeper or a bit to the right or left, she might never have awakened at all. As it was, only her superhuman effort had allowed her to flee.
Had Fran gasped “Oh God!” because she had seen what had happened to her friend—or because she realized that she herself was about to be stabbed? No one will ever know, any more than they will know if Whiteside had actually presented his plan to Fran and given her the choice of stabbing him or dying herself.
Fran Steffen, the beautiful young mother who had grown up in the peaceful town of Silverton, only to die at 22 at the hands of a berserk masochist, was buried in a simple ceremony. Her little girl, the child who had blessedly slept through her mother’s murder, went to live with her father, the memory of her mother growing dim over the years to come.
Lee Connors recovered from her wounds. Today, she would be almost 50. It is highly unlikely that she has ever been able to erase the searing memory of that December night, or that she ever will.
Kent Whiteside first pleaded innocent by reason of mental defect. On February 18, 1976, he changed his plea to guilty of murder and attempted murder. On April 8, 1976, he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder charge, and the second charge was dismissed.
The Whiteside case was an outstanding example of the effectiveness of interagency cooperation: the Silverton Police Department, the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, the Oregon State Police, the Salem Police Department, and the Mount Angel Police Department all worked together to gather physical evidence, statements, and background on the suspect and his victims in a case fraught with incredible aspects. All of them hoped devoutly that they would never see another like it.
• • •
At the time of Kent Whiteside’s sentencing, a life sentence in Oregon meant that prisoners could apply for parole after about eleven years. But Whiteside had become a cause célèbre. He was a handsome man, and a local woman from the upper stratas of society fell in love with him, announcing that she wished to marry him. She also decried any notion that said Kent Whiteside was guilty of the crimes he had confessed to.
Whatever happened behind closed doors, Kent Whiteside didn’t serve that much time in prison. Through sealed legal proceedings, he was given a pardon in a few years and released from the Oregon State Penitentiary. As recently as 2000, he was living in another state thousands of miles away from Silverton, Oregon. He would be about 65 now. If he has reoffended, the men and women who investigated his crimes of December 1975 have not been informed of it.
A strange finale to a strange case.
“Where Is Julie?”
As we have seen earlier in this book, many homicidal mysteries go unsolved for decades. And others may never be solved. But it is extremely rare to find cases where answers never come at all. In my view, the very worst tragedies are the sudden disappearances where there is no body, precious little evidence, and no proof of what may have happened. The majority of the stories I have investigated where someone simply vanished concerned young women. Has the missing woman decided on her own accord to walk away from her life? Is she, like some overly dramatic teenage girls, trying to make her parents or her boyfriend worry about her? That has happened. Was she abducted against her will? Is she being held captive somewhere, prevented from contacting those left behind? Is she being tortured or has she been sold—as our mothers used to warn us—into prostitution in some distant country?
Is she dead or alive?
In the last few years alone, there have been several disappearances of attractive women who seemed to have been swallowed up by the earth. I think the whole country rejoices when there are news bulletins about the very occasional happy endings. Teenager Elizabeth Smart, who almost everyone thought was dead, came home to her family in Salt Lake City in 2003 when Utah police officers spotted her walking with the bizarre self-proclaimed prophet who had kidnapped her.
But Brooke Wilberger, 19, Utah college student, who disappeared on May 24, 2004, while visiting her sister in Corvallis, Oregon, is still missing. Like most of the missing women, Brooke was going about the mundane chores of life—washing the glass chimneys of the lights in her sister’s apartment complex. Still missing, too, is anchor-woman, Jodi Huisentruit, 29, of KIMT-TV in Mason City, Iowa. Jodi was undoubtedly seized by someone who watched her as she walked from her apartment toward her car between three and four A.M. on June 27, 1995.
On November 22, 2003, Dru Sjodin, 22, was talking to her boyfriend on her cell phone as she walked out of a Grand Forks, North Dakota, mall after work. He could hear some kind of struggle on the line and then nothing. A convicted rapist, Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., paroled only six months earlier after serving twenty-three years in prison, was arrested six days later and charged with Dru’s kidnapping—but he would not say where she was. After many months of searching, and with the help of Denny Adams, owner of Territory Search Dogs, and
his search bloodhound Calamity Jane, Dru’s body was found on April 17, 2004. It had been buried in the snow in Crookston, Minnesota.
The first television announcements that Dru had been discovered had sounded so hopeful that I can recall saying aloud: “Thank God.” The sheriff in charge of the investigation into her disappearance was misleading when he announced, “Dru Sjodin is home.”
But only her body was home. Dru herself had been dead for months, probably since shortly after she was abducted. Her family and the others who loved her at least knew where she was and that she was not in pain or fear. But she wasn’t really “home.” Only her mortal remains had come home.
On May 15, 2004, Calamity Jane found the body of 21-year-old Erika Dahlquist, missing since the previous October 30. By herself, the resourceful bloodhound found Erika and lay next to the remains of the pretty blonde until Adams tracked Calamity down.
Even U.S. Congressional intern Chandra Levy’s skeletal remains turned up in a Washington, D.C., park months after she vanished. Most people who followed Chandra’s disappearance believed she was gone forever, cleverly disposed of by the man who killed her. Most rumors said that she had been hidden under a cement parking lot. Her killer, of course, is still free.
Rumors are seldom much help in homicide investigations. Sometimes, the missing women are just gone. Forever.
Just as the mystery of who killed Sandy Bowman continued for thirty-five years, and stayed in the top layers of my memory all that time, there is another sad puzzle that keeps coming back to me. A beautiful young wife whose name is Julie Weflen vanished seventeen years ago in Spokane County, Washington, and each year on the anniversary of her disappearance—September 16—I think of her, and wonder what happened to her.
If Julie had vanished today, I’m sure that her disappearance would have garnered the kind of headlines that Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, Dru Sjodin, Brooke Wilberger, Laci Peterson, and Lori Hacking have. As it was, newspapers from Spokane to Los Angeles covered Julie Weflen’s vanishing with at least one feature story. None of the coverage helped in finding her.
At least, Sandy Bowman’s body was found within a few hours of her death, although admittedly that is small—if any—comfort. But Julie is still gone. Now and then over the years, I have written about her, hoping to trigger some memory in the mind of a witness who may not even know he or she was a witness to foul play.
And I admit that I hope the person who took Julie away from her husband and her family, and from her many friends, will read this, too, and be made aware that his days as a free person are coming to an end.
It would serve him better to turn himself in now than wait for the Spokane County sheriff’s detectives to come for him.
Julie Miner Weflen was a modern young woman whose wide smile and petite figure belied the strength at her core. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, Julie was quite beautiful. She had perfect posture, something she had had to fight for when as a teenager she was diagnosed with scoliosis (curvature of the spine), had surgery to place a steel rod in her back, and then spent six months in a cast from her chin to her hips.
To see her, nobody would have guessed what her job was. She looked like a kindergarten teacher, but she was actually a power station operator for the Bonneville Power Administration. She had been with the BPA as a safety officer since 1977 when she was only 18. When she applied for the promotion, executives in the power company blinked: this was a man’s job. Indeed, she was the only woman out of six applicants. If she was hired, she would be responsible for the lives of linemen out on the poles. She would have to know instantly which lines to reroute when a lineman was repairing a power outage. Second only to that was the importance of knowing which switches to throw so that widespread blackouts wouldn’t occur.
Julie had studied for three years, mastering twenty lessons every six months, sending her answers to tests to Bonneville by mail and then taking oral examinations to assess her knowledge. She did all this and put in at least forty-hour weeks on the job at the same time.
Undaunted, Julie convinced Bonneville higher-ups that she could do it. Out of the six applicants, she was one of the two promoted. She had to memorize complex electrical formulas and the training was tough, but she had proven she could do it, even though she initially suffered hazing and jokes in the male-oriented world she worked in. She figured it was just part of establishing herself, and she let it slide off her back. The very men who teased her soon grew to respect her.
Julie met Mike Weflen in Portland at a jazz concert in 1980. He was a handsome man with thick blond-brown hair and slate-blue eyes who was five years older than she was. Mike, 26 then, and a troubleshooter for a condominium developer, had dated his share of pretty girls. But he knew at once that Julie was special. “You can just sense a kind of comfort when you meet some people,” he recalled.
At the end of the evening, he asked her out to dinner, and from that moment on, they were together.
Julie’s parents liked Mike, and his folks were delighted to meet Julie. “The best description of Julie,” Phyliss Weflen, Mike’s mother said, “is that she radiates love.”
Mike and Julie dated for three years and then they were married on June 25, 1983. They were both outdoors people, although he was a skier and she loved riding horseback. They dreamed of having a family and he promised her she would have her own horses one day. Looking back, he smiled as he said, “You know, we really didn’t have any particular common interests; we just got along.”
The Weflens moved to the Seattle area a year and a half later. Mike worked as a commercial painter. When Julie was offered another promotion with the Bonneville Power
Administration in Spokane County, east of the Cascade Mountains near the Idaho border, Mike told her to go for it. He figured he could start a painting business in Spokane as well as in Seattle, and they both liked the idea of a quieter, safer life in the far less metropolitan area of Spokane County. Julie had gone to school in Oregon, and Mike was from South Dakota, and they both preferred the slower ambience of a small town to living in a big city.
Sometimes Julie’s salary was higher than Mike’s, but it didn’t bother either of them. They were a team, committed to each other. At first, Julie worked on various shifts inside a BPA building that was fenced and locked, and Mike never worried about her. But she hated shift work because it seemed as though they had no time off together. That was one of the reasons Mike took painting jobs: he could correlate his work time with hers.
They were both happy when Julie was promoted again, to “pool operator.” Part of that job required her to go around to the substations in the county and check on them, but that was almost always during the daytime. “If she worked nights,” Mike recalled, “I’d follow her in my truck, but I really never worried about her on the job during the day, and neither did she. I did worry about her sometimes at night.”
Julie went off to work in jeans, heavy boots, and a hard hat, and Mike found that he had been right about relocating his business: he soon had more jobs than he could handle by himself. They were able to buy a nice little house with a barn on fourteen acres, twenty miles north of Spokane, just beyond the town of Deer Park. Soon, Julie had two horses, Sonn and Tony. Sonn was a palomino quarter horse, and her son Tony was a chestnut brown. They even had “two cats in the yard” as the popular song went: Si was a Siamese, and Shakes was black and white.
Julie was one of the gentlest souls Mike had ever met. She wouldn’t kill bugs, and she carefully took spiders outside and let them go. She raised four orphaned kittens on a doll’s bottle.
“One time,” Mike recalled, “she thought a skunk had one of the kittens and she came running to me, shouting, ‘Get your gun!’—but it turned out the skunk was only chewing on a chicken bone. Of course, she wouldn’t have let me shoot the skunk anyway.”
Even though Julie wasn’t yet pregnant, she and Mike agreed that one parent should stay home with the children, and they had discussions about which of them would quit his (
or her) job and be the main child-care-giver. They had traded the role of wage earner back and forth ever since they’d been together and it had always worked out. If Julie believed in equal rights for both sexes, then Mike was just as fair-minded in his thinking.
Mike painted their house gray and white, and Julie decorated the interior in a comfortable “country” style. She hung gingham curtains and covered pillows with the same fabric, with a color scheme of pink, blue, white, and mint green. She collected knickknacks that featured ducks and flowers, and a hand-carved “Home Sweet Home” plaque that summed up what their house meant to them. There was a delft-blue carpet in the sunken living room with a braided rug on top of it, and a fireplace for the icy winter nights.
“We were so happy,” Mike remembered. “Things were just starting to come together.”
Their lives were as perfect as lives can be. They were very much in love, and they looked forward to having children.
• • •
The summer heat of eastern Washington was dissipating and the evenings were growing downright chilly as September 1987 was half over. The leaves on the beech trees were beginning to turn bright yellow, and the Weflens were thinking they would soon have to get in hay for Sonn and Tony before snow fell. Just as lilacs bloomed everywhere in Spokane County in the spring, fierce winter storms could be counted on to leave towering drifts. Julie would probably have to deal with more power outages as lines snapped from the weight of ice storms, and Mike’s painting business would be less busy, with only indoor jobs.
• • •
On Tuesday, September 15, Mike and a fellow painter headed for a job in Ritzville, a small town eighty miles southwest of their spread in Deer Park. They expected to be gone at least overnight, but Mike hoped to get home by Wednesday night.