But I Trusted You

by Ann Rule

  “We drove my mother’s car, a 1972 Caprice.”

  Curt said Majors had told him the reason for their trip was to talk to a man in Seattle about the trucking business. Majors had called the man from a pay phone.

  “He told me we were going to have dinner with him. And we met him at the Holiday Inn.”

  “What did he look like?” Patterson asked.

  “Middle-aged. He had gray hair, and he was well dressed. He said his name was Frank, and he paid for a big steak dinner for all of us at the Holiday Inn.”

  “Which Holiday Inn?”

  “The one on the Duwamish River. There used to be a drive-in theater across the highway from it.”

  So far, everything Curt Goss was telling him matched other information they’d had for three years. Patterson began to feel a slight thrill of anticipation. He didn’t let Curt see that, though.

  The conversation at dinner hadn’t been about the trucking business—not at all. It had been about Majors’s ex-wife. Majors had described her in glowing terms and convinced Monohan that they should leave that night to drive to Quincy so that the wealthy engineer could meet her. Although they’d already rented two rooms at the practically new motel, charged to Frank Monohan’s American Express card, the two men and the sixteen-year-old boy left for Quincy. At least, Curt, who was driving, thought they were going to Quincy.

  “The man—Frank—was sitting next to me in front, and Don was in the back. Don told me which turns to make, because I didn’t know the roads. I followed his instructions to turn off the freeway into a small town not far from the motel. It was late and it was raining hard. We hadn’t reached the Seattle city limits when Don told me to turn into a big place where a lot of trucks were parked and to stop the car. I stopped, and he looked around and told me to drive on.

  “We drove all around these little side streets and then he told me to stop again in this place that was mostly vacant lots. That’s when he shot Mr. Monohan.”

  For Patterson, it was almost unbelievable. After years of trying to get Don Majors pinned to the wall, he finally had his eyewitness, someone who had been only inches away from Frank Monohan when he was shot.

  “I heard this loud explosion,” the teenager continued. “And then Frank just fell over next to me. I almost drove off the road from the shock. I couldn’t believe Don had actually killed the man.”

  Majors had told Curt Goss to keep driving toward Quincy. “He said he would kill me too if I tried to go to the police.” Curt believed him; he’d just seen ample proof of what Don Majors was capable of.

  They headed up I-90 toward Snoqualmie Pass some fifty miles away. To people in other cars, Frank Monohan appeared only to be asleep, but the terrified teenager could smell the blood that was dripping into puddles on the car floor. He felt as if he was living in a nightmare.

  “When we got up to North Bend, Don told me we were going to stop and put Frank in the trunk. We went a little past North Bend and onto the side of the road and parked.”

  It was pitch dark by then, and fir trees loomed like dark monsters as Curt and Don Majors carried the deadweight of Monohan’s body and loaded it into the trunk. The car seat and floor were saturated with blood, but it was dark and Majors figured no one would see it.

  “We stopped at a truck stop beyond North Bend for coffee, and Don told me to shape up, that what was done was done.”

  “So you kept going to Blewett Pass and dumped the body?” Patterson asked.

  “No,” Curt said. “We turned around and went back to the Holiday Inn south of Seattle. We had those two rooms that Frank paid for, and we were beat. We slept the night there.”

  “Where was Frank Monohan’s body?”

  “It was in the trunk.”

  Curt Goss said they had eaten a leisurely breakfast, and then dumped Monohan’s pickup truck in the back corner of a tow yard, where Don Majors didn’t think it would be found for a long time.

  Patterson was baffled by the thought that Frank Monohan waited in the trunk of Majors’s borrowed car.

  “So what happened next?” he asked, bending his head over a yellow legal pad, taking notes so Curt couldn’t see the expression on his face.

  “Then we went Christmas shopping. We went to a clothing store, a shoe store. He got a train set and tracks for his son. He got a camera. We went in a lot of stores.”

  Around noon, on December 14, they’d headed back home to Quincy. At Blewett Pass, Majors told Curt they were going to dump the body, the body that had lain in the trunk while Majors used the victim’s credit card for Christmas shopping.

  “I was afraid he was going to kill me, too,” Curt said. “So I did everything he told me to. We waited until there were no cars, and Don took Frank’s feet and I took his head and we threw him in a snowbank. Then we drove on into Wenatchee and Don made me clean the blood out of the car in the car wash there. Later, when my mom asked why the seat was wet, he told her he spilled a coke on it.”

  Curt said they’d gone to his mother’s home, where they spent the night. He’d been afraid to tell his mother what had happened.

  “I didn’t tell her about it until six months later, and then we were both too frightened of him to tell anyone else.”

  “Would you be willing now to testify in a court of law about what you just told me?” Patterson asked Curt.

  “Yes. If it means we could put this nut away.”

  Frank Monohan had had no warning at all that he was about to die. He’d believed he was on the way to meet a warm and willing woman who was “dying to meet him.” He hadn’t even been nervous about the side trip they’d made into the little town of Auburn to look at “some trucks.”

  And he had died without a sound when Don Majors shot him from the backseat of Gerda Goss’s car.

  Curt said that he, his mother, and Majors had gone to Yakima the next day to do more “Christmas shopping.”

  “I knew my mother was scared because Don never had any money and now he had all those clothes and cameras, and he was buying more, but she didn’t ask him about it.”

  Even though they hadn’t told anyone about what happened, Gerda and Curt Goss had lived a life of quiet dread ever since.

  “During the last two and a half years—ever since it happened,” Curt Goss told Patterson, “we’ve had threats from Don Majors on the phone. And strangers have called. My mom and I have feared for our lives. I still do, but I think it’s time that I told about this and I think he should be kept in prison.”

  Curt Goss said that he’d suspected Majors had dark secrets when he was living in their home.

  “He changed the lock on the bedroom door and he used it for his ‘office.’ I could hear him typing in there. He got a lot of letters every time he went to the post office box in George. He told me he was writing a book—but I’d seen some of those magazines with the pictures in them.”

  “Have you had any contact with him since he went to prison?” Patterson asked.

  “Yeah. He wrote me from jail. They were dirty, filthy, obscene letters like the stuff they had in those bondage magazines. I don’t know why he wrote to me like that. He just seemed to like to write about it.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police once he was in jail?”

  “Because we received a phone call from a man who said he’d been in jail with Don and he said he could arrange a deal to take care of us. We were always frightened. We just burned the letters because they were too filthy to keep.”

  Oddly, though the case of Frank Monohan’s disappearance and murder had been worked principally by Chief Deputy Bill Patterson in Chelan County and Detective Bud Jelberg in Seattle, this new information showed that Monohan had actually been killed in King County. Patterson forwarded all the information he had to the King County Sheriff’s Office, and Detective Mike Gillis took over the case.

  Gillis and Detective Sergeant Harlan Bollinger talked to the teenage eyewitness and elicited the same information he’d given to Bill Patterson. He rode with them, po
inting out the spot on the outskirts of Auburn where Monohan had been shot, and then leading them along the route to Blewett Pass where the body was dumped.

  “Just when did you tell your mother that you’d been with Majors when he shot Frank Monohan?” Gillis asked.

  “Not until the first time Detective Patterson came to talk to her. I told her then, and she started to cry. But we were so scared of him, afraid he’d come back and get us.”

  With the information that Bill Patterson had uncovered on Donald Kennedy Majors and the eyewitness he now had to Frank Monohan’s death, King County deputy prosecutor Greg Canova brought charges of first-degree murder against Majors.

  In the summer of 1978, Majors was allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder. When he did so, there were many sighs of relief from nervous swingers all over America who now would not have to testify about their secret sex lives in open court.

  Don Majors served two consecutive life sentences, where he no longer had access to a typewriter.

  Frank Monohan’s fate might serve as a deterrent to those would-be swingers who advertise in a whole new way in this twenty-first century, searching for “love” partners. With the Internet, it’s easier to do now, and anyone online has to cope with dozens of unwelcome messages from pornographers and willing sex partners.

  A shocking example of the danger of the Internet occurred shortly after I wrote the first draft of this book. A serial-killer suspect, Phillip Markoff, was arrested on charges of murder and robbery after finding his targets on Craigslist. Known as the “Craigslist Killer,” Markoff was a promising medical student in New England and engaged to be married. Although the charges against him have yet to go to trial, Markoff appears to have another—secret—life, marked by gambling addiction and crimes of violence against women.

  How Don Majors would have loved the Internet with its constant opportunities to find easy victims. If he is still alive, he would be nearly ninety years old now, and probably no longer a threat to anyone.

  Don Majors is far past his career as a vicious con artist and killer, but there are others who fill his shoes. Your next e-mail might well be a message from another opportunist not unlike Majors.

  Although he never turned down an opportunity for sensual pleasure, Majors’s main goal was always to see how much he could milk from the unwary men who answered the phony ads he placed. The number of victims he robbed, beat, or killed probably won’t ever be known.

  Chief Deputy Bill Patterson did find out that he gained entry into the homes of lawyers, doctors, teachers, and businessmen, all people whose choice of friends—apart from the sexual lure he introduced to them—would never have included Donald Kennedy Majors. But invite him to their homes they did, and he kept their names, their addresses, their pictures, all neatly cataloged against the day he wanted more from them than changing partners.

  This is a cautionary tale. Most who read it will have no interest in what Donald Majors was offering in his “sure thing” racket, but the world is full of all manner of con games. Our trust should be given thoughtfully and only after we have time to evaluate those we meet.

  How long Donald Majors would have continued in his wicked ways is an impossible question to answer. But sadistic sociopaths don’t change—not as long as they are physically able to carry our their plans. Or until they are locked up. Or they die.

  Majors didn’t realize he was coming up against the best detectives in Seattle, King County, Chelan County, and the FBI. Nor could he have known that Chelan County’s Bill Patterson would never quit until he saw Majors convicted for the cowardly murder he thought he’d gotten away with.

  Most sociopaths will only break your heart, steal your money, or take your job. Sadistic sociopaths will kill you without blinking an eye.

  RUN AS FAST AS YOU CAN

  Seattle is a paradise for athletes of all kinds—skiers, boaters and sailors, and, of course, joggers. The Emerald City is located in a spot in Washington State where both the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Mountains are only a little more than an hour away, and King County is rife with parks, trails, and quiet roads where traffic is light and the air is fresh and clean.

  And the joggers run—some to rid themselves of pounds accumulated over the years, some to improve their heart and lung capacity, and some for the sheer joy of it. It would seem that there could be no healthier choice for young, middle-aged, and even elderly joggers. Yes, it would seem so, but that wasn’t true in the late summer of 1978.

  Running the popular trails in Seattle’s verdant Seward Park became as dangerous as free-fall skydiving or hang gliding. Someone was watching and waiting in the dense thickets of fir, maple, and madrona trees of the vast park that edges the western shore of Lake Washington, someone consumed with thoughts of violence and killing.

  Most people think of Seattle as being cloudy and rainy, but that isn’t true in July and August. Temperatures rise into the nineties then, and a hundred-degree day isn’t unheard of. Before the heat of these summer days becomes oppressive, many joggers choose to switch their workouts to early morning hours. With so many runners showing up at Seward Park before most people have breakfast, lone female joggers felt perfectly safe. Penny DeLeo, thirty-three, had been part of the “morning crew”—as some runners called themselves—for two months, and she felt no fear at all as she ran along paths that often seemed like tunnels through the trees.

  If Penny DeLeo was aware of the murder of a young girl in the park the previous winter, she had forgotten about it. Although the homicide death of seventeen-year-old Joyce Gaunt on February 17 had gone unsolved, it hadn’t even been mentioned in the local media for several months.

  Everything had been “normal” in the park for so long that the specter of death was the last thing on Penny DeLeo’s mind as she scribbled a hurried note to her young son at 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday, August 8.

  “I’ve gone running,” she wrote. “Will be back soon. You may watch TV until I get home. Love, Mom.”

  Then Penny kissed her husband good-bye as he hurried out the front door to catch a bus to work. Shortly after that, she backed her new metallic brown Toyota Celica out of their garage, and drove to Seward Park.

  Penny wore a T-shirt, blue and white shorts, and green running shoes—her usual exercise attire. There was nothing unusual about this morning. She expected to be home to fix breakfast for her son within an hour, probably before he even woke up.

  But this morning was to be different—earthshakingly different. Nothing in their lives would ever be the same again.

  Penny DeLeo didn’t return from the park all day. Her son watched television for a while, and then he got dressed and went out to play with his friends. He was curious about where his mother might be, but he was too young to be aware of the dangers of the world.

  Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Penny’s husband came home from work and found that she was nowhere in their house. He asked his eight-year-old son where his mother was, and was stunned when the boy said he hadn’t seen her all day.

  Her car was gone, the beds were unmade, and the kitchen counter was a mess of crumbs and peanut-butter smears where the boy had made himself sandwiches.

  DeLeo felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck as a sensation of absolute dread crept over him. Where was Penny? A check with her friends netted no information. No one had heard from her all day. He called Seattle police and reported his wife as a missing person, stressing that Penny had never left home before, and that it was unthinkable that she would leave their son unsupervised all day. Patrolman Dennis Falk drove to the DeLeos’ home and talked to her worried husband.

  Falk jotted down a description of the Toyota and its license number—IYR-544. He then drove slowly through all the parking areas in Seward Park and found no sign of the vehicle.

  Next, he proceeded to parking areas along the beach. The hydroplane races, a big draw for thousands of people who attend Seattle’s Seafair, had taken place only a few days before on Lake Washington. Falk checked al
l the possible places to park from Seward Park to some distance north of the Stan Sayre hydroplane pits.

  And he didn’t find a metallic brown Celica. He drove the loop road near Lake Washington where Penny DeLeo always ran, and then perused the area around the bathhouse where her husband said she normally stopped for a drink of water after her run.

  But Penny DeLeo was gone. It didn’t seem possible that someone could disappear from that park, which was alive with people from dawn to long after dusk on such a beautiful summer’s day—but, somehow, she had. Her agonized family spent a sleepless night, waiting for a phone call, anything that would let them know she was all right.

  The police couldn’t take an official missing report until Penny had been gone for at least twenty-four hours. Most adults leave of their own accord, for their own reasons, and come back when they feel like it. But from the beginning Dennis Falk had a “hinky” feeling about Penny—an intuitive cop’s slang for something that isn’t right, even when they can’t say why. And the feeling wouldn’t go away.

  Shortly before 10:00 the next morning, a bird-watcher tracked an osprey in Seward Park with his binoculars. Edging deeper into the woods, well beyond the trail he’d been on, the man spied what he thought was a pile of clothes. Moving closer, he was stunned to see the almost nude body of a woman lying prone on a carpet of leaves.

  Forgetting completely about the habits of water birds, the man ran to a phone. Seattle Police patrol officers, Tact Squad members, and handlers with their K-9 dogs responded within minutes to the “found-body” alert.

  The officers confirmed that there was a woman’s corpse in the park. They cordoned the area off with yellow crime scene tape while they waited for detectives from the homicide unit to arrive.

  And then, incredibly, the activity in the park escalated. A man ran up to them, shouting, “Someone just tried to rape my wife!”

  The officers quickly determined that the would-be rape victim was safe at the moment—if hysterical. They obtained a description of the suspect in that attack. Since it had just occurred, they figured he was still in the park.