by Ann Rule
She was having a really bad day, and then the sky opened up and hail bounced on the road and on her. A hitchhiker ran up behind her and offered her a jacket he had in his orange backpack. She accepted it thankfully. He was a little taller than she was, and he looked like a lot of hitchhikers: brown curly hair, mustache, beard, and glasses.
She wasn’t afraid of him.
The pair bent their heads and started trotting toward shelter as the hail continued to pelt them.
At that point, another Good Samaritan came along. The driver of a blue Honda Civic stopped and waved at them to get in. They didn’t hesitate, and still Margie felt safe, more so when she settled in the backseat and realized she recognized the driver. She didn’t actually know him or even his name, but he had worked at Metalcraft, too, on the day shift as she did. That had been during the fall months of 1979. He was a “grinder.”
She asked him to drop her off at the next phone booth they came to, and he nodded. She noticed that his car was only a year or so old, but it was dirty and filled with trash: fast-food containers, old newspapers, cigarette butts.
They soon came to a phone booth by a Catholic school, and Margie got out. The driver said he would take the hitchhiker on the few miles to King City, his destination.
Margie called her mother, who wasn’t home, and a male friend who didn’t answer, either. She was out of change, so she walked a little farther to a gas station, got change, and tried calling her mom and more friends. Nobody was home. She gave up, crossed the highway, and started walking back toward her car. Even if it wouldn’t start, she wasn’t that far from her apartment.
The hail had stopped, but it was raining hard when she saw the blue Honda approaching from the south. The hitchhiker was no longer in the car, and the driver pulled over in front of her and offered her a ride again.
She’d seen him at Metalcraft, and he’d let her out readily at the phone booth twenty minutes earlier. He seemed safe. She got in, telling him she hadn’t been able to reach anyone to pick her up.
He didn’t talk much, but he told her he’d give her a ride home.
“He asked me where I lived,” Margie recalled. “And I told him. I told him where to turn into my driveway, but he went right past it. As soon as he went past it, he said, ‘Oh—well, I’ll turn around and come back.’ But he never did, and I kept telling him to turn off on streets, so he could go back, but I thought he was just going around the whole street to take me back. And he never said any words after that.”
Margie realized that she didn’t know him at all. He was a stranger, and he had no intention of taking her home.
“Then he asked me if I was smart,” Margie continued. “And I said I tried to be. Then he pulled out this switchblade, and he said, ‘Then you’ll do what I want you to do.’ ”
She thought the knife was a switchblade; it was black and shiny and about eight inches long. It had been right there underneath his seat.
Margie told him she was pregnant, and begged him not to hurt her.
“Well, then you think about your baby,” he sneered, “and you’ll do as I tell you to.”
They were heading away from her apartment now—toward Tigard and Tualatin, and onto an overpass over the I-5 freeway toward Lake Oswego, and then back again onto the freeway. The driver demanded that Margie fellate him, and she complied. She wanted to live, and she would do what she had to do.
He asked if she could “stomach it” if he ejaculated into her mouth, and she said no, and he said she didn’t have to.
That was odd, because he had been so mean before.
Now she felt the car turn again, and she saw that they were about to head northeast on Highway 205 toward Oregon City. She asked him where they were going, and he told her he was looking for a place where he could take her off the side of the road where no one could see them. He gave her strict instructions: she was to get out of the car on the driver’s side and hold his hand as if they were a couple.
They had barely left the off-ramp on a winding road with sharp turns when he pulled over. She followed his instructions, noting that he had hidden the long knife under his sweater. He pulled her up the hill into a grove of trees.
She was trying to remember everything about him so she could tell the police later. He was medium height, chubby, clean-shaven, and wore blue jeans, the gray pullover sweater, and black work boots.
Her memory was as clear as ice. She thought of everything she could, to get through the sexual attack that began too far above the freeway for anyone in the cars below to see. He made her take off her brown turtleneck T-shirt, her orange sweater, blue jeans, and blue high-heeled sandals, and then her bra and panties. She wished devoutly that she had worn her Nikes—she would be able to run so much better if she got the chance.
Her captor wanted romance, and he insisted she French-kiss him and respond to him. But she was terrified and filled with revulsion, and she couldn’t respond. He was unable to enter her because her vagina was absolutely dry. He asked her to perform oral sodomy on him again, and she obeyed.
When nothing worked, he masturbated to ejaculation.
Margie felt a glimmer of hope when he told her to get dressed. He was going to let her go!
She bent over to put her shoes on, and he held out his hand to help her up. She grasped it, and suddenly he was behind her, holding her throat in an arm lock. Then his hands were grasping both sides of her neck, and she saw black clouds descending on her.
Margie passed out. She didn’t remember anything until she came to, feeling as if she were suffocating in the dark. She first thought she was dreaming. But, finally, she realized that her sweater was wrapped around her head. She tried to pull it off with her right hand, but she couldn’t feel her right hand at all. She used her left hand, although it felt terribly weak.
“It took five minutes for me to get my sweater down from over my head,” Margie said. “And then I tried sitting up, but I was too weak.”
At that point, she saw her right hand and realized it was slashed, her wrist cut almost halfway through.
The man who had hurt her was gone, but he had pulled her into a blackberry thicket, virtually hiding her.
Margie knew she had to get help before she bled to death. She tried to move her legs and discovered she could not feel her left leg. She took off her shoes. “I knew I had to walk out of there, and I tried to stand, but I couldn’t,” she said.
She couldn’t use her right hand, and she couldn’t feel her left leg—but she began to crawl out of the trees and brambles that hid her. Because of her injured right hand, she scuttled on her shoulder on that side in a crablike movement. She made it to the top of the grassy bank, and when she couldn’t crawl anymore, she rolled.
“I kept that up until I could get where the grass was cut down and people could see me. And I kept waving to them, and about fifteen or twenty cars went by before someone finally stopped,” Margie said. “By then I couldn’t wave anymore; I was just laying [sic] on the ground. I couldn’t move anymore.”
The Tualatin Valley Fire Department responded to the 911 call, and EMTs found Margie barely conscious and bleeding profusely. She was rushed to Meridian Park Hospital in Tualatin, where she was admitted in critical condition. Oregon State Trooper Les Frank went directly to the hospital. Dr. Michael McCleskey told him that the victim had bruises and swelling in her neck, a stab wound at the base of her skull on the rear right side, deep lacerations—including tendons and nerves—in her right wrist, and deep cuts to the nerves and tendons of her left ankle.
When she arrived, she had virtually no blood-pressure readings and had lost one-third to one-half of the blood in her body. She would need surgery to get blood to her right hand and her left leg, and there would be nerve damage to repair later. For the moment, they had to stabilize her condition before they could operate.
Amazingly, she was now conscious and quite lucid, and Trooper Frank could interview her. A Clackamas County deputy—Robert W. Smith—happened to pass b
y where she had waited for an ambulance, and had spoken briefly to her. Margie wanted to be sure that the police knew who had raped, stabbed, and strangled her. She had gasped out details to Smith, too.
She told Frank that her attacker was a short, heavy white male with close-cut dark brown hair. He was in his thirties and driving a new-model two-door blue Honda Civic.
The best news of all for the Oregon State investigator was Margie Hunter’s absolute belief that her rapist had worked at Metalcraft, where she worked. She was positive.
Dwain Lee Little had made a huge mistake when he chose Margie Hunter as a victim. She said they had even talked about working there. He could have simply taken her home, but he must have planned to kill her all along, knowing that she could identify him.
One thing Margie commented on was that her captor seemed to have “no feelings at all.” He didn’t care about her baby, her life, about anything but what he wanted. Trying to get through to him was like pleading with a robot.
Dr. McCleskey categorized Margie’s wounds as “devastating.” They had to get blood to her wrist and her ankle. Along with Drs. Tongue and Barnhouse, the surgeons isolated the severed tendons of both extremities, along with the damaged nerves. Her injuries were full of dirt and grass, and these were all painstakingly irrigated until they were clean; antibiotics were given to prevent infection if possible.
After resection of all the tendons of her wrist, and their grateful discovery that her radial artery was intact, the doctors felt the repair was “most satisfactory,” and they wrapped her wrist in a short arm cast.
Next, they turned to Margie’s ankle. There they found only two severed tendons, including the Achilles tendon—which was probably what had prevented her from standing or walking when she came back to consciousness in the bushes.
The surgeons put a cast on Margie’s leg and moved on to the two-inch-deep neck wound. Fortunately, it wasn’t as dangerous as the deeper slashes in her arm and leg. It was closed with sutures.
It took eight hours of surgery to perform the first procedures on Margie Hunter’s knife wounds. She came through the operations well, and was upgraded from “critical” to “serious” condition.
Margie’s pregnancy was intact; indeed, when she was well enough to have a pelvic exam, she learned that she was really twelve weeks pregnant—almost three months. Whether she would be able to maintain her pregnancy was still iffy. She had been choked, beaten, and cut to the bone, and had lost so much blood. And there was the shock factor to be considered, too.
Only time would tell.
While Margie Hunter was in surgery, law enforcement officers in the Tigard-Tualatin area looked for a new blue Honda, and detectives planned to contact Metalcraft in the morning to see if they could find the names of former employees who had worked as grinders, and matched the description Margie had given. Workers’ parole status might or might not be known to the company.
It turned out that that wouldn’t be necessary. An Oregon state trooper had pulled over a blue Honda recently on a routine traffic violation. When he heard the bulletin broadcast to all police agencies, he realized the description matched the car and the driver he had stopped earlier. He’d recognized the driver instantly: Dwain Lee Little, who had become infamous and familiar in the minds of many Oregon officers. After his last parole, he had moved to the Tigard area.
Dwain had had the same parole officer for years, a man who had started out with great hopes for him. The PO confirmed that Dwain had worked for Metalcraft during the fall and winter of 1979. He promised to obtain a mug shot of Little to include in a photo laydown when—and if—Margie Hunter was well enough to look at it.
At 8:00 p.m. an Oregon state trooper spotted the blue Honda, and Dwain Little was arrested on a charge of attempted homicide.
A search warrant for his home was executed, and investigators seized six knives, several items of men’s clothing, and a handwritten log of his activities. A subsequent search produced ten thousand rounds of .22 ammunition.
His parole officer said Dwain Little had been on his latest parole for three years and one month without any serious problems. He had seemed to be an average citizen and was consistently employed at the Sweetheart Corporation until July of 1979, when he quit his job there because he couldn’t get along with a new supervisor. Next, he moved to Idaho to work in a steel factory with his brother-in-law, but that relationship deteriorated after two months, and he came back to Oregon—and Metalcraft. Little was laid off because he sustained a hand injury that required surgery. He had been unemployed for five months.
His wife, Linda, had given birth to their first child—a son—only five weeks before his vicious attack on Margie Hunter.
“Most facets of their everyday life,” Dwain’s parole officer said, “were being met in an appropriate manner.”
Or seemed to be.
Dwain Lee Little hadn’t spent much of his adult life outside prison walls, and his joblessness and having a baby to care for might have caused him to disintegrate into violence once again, although that explanation was certainly no excuse for what he had done to Margie Hunter.
Dwain was thirty-one now, and he still didn’t know who he was; he knew only what he wanted, and, as always, he had seized it. He was a mad dog behind a smiling face, a walking, breathing time bomb. Even though he had gone back to prison before for having a deadly weapon in his possession, he had apparently been unable to give up guns and knives. What on earth was he intending to do with ten thousand bullets?
It made the investigators shudder to think of it.
Even his heretofore trusting parole officer recommended that his parole should be revoked at once.
Dwain Little was held in the Washington County Jail for only a week; in the interests of public safety, he was set to be transported to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem on June 9. Corrections officer Clarence Hedrick and Virginia Wolff of the Washington County warrants division accompanied one female and two male prisoners—including Little—in a van headed south on the I-5 freeway. Dwain Little and the other male prisoner were chained together with leg irons, and they each wore handcuffs attached to a belly chain.
They hadn’t gotten more than twenty miles on their forty-five-mile trip when Dwain said the jail nurse had given him a diuretic pill that caused water to build up in his system.
“I have to go every few minutes,” he said, as he begged Hedrick to pull into the next rest stop.
Hedrick refused. At that point, Dwain became hysterical and threatened to urinate in his clothes and all over the van.
Hedrick wasn’t happy, but he stopped at the rest stop just south of the Tualatin River. He explained the radio system to Ms. Wolff, and told her to call for help if anything untoward should happen, gave her their exact location, and then locked the van doors so no one could get in or out while he was in the restroom with the two male prisoners.
When they were inside the restroom, Dwain Little said he was getting sick and his bowels were loose. He wanted the chain around his waist removed. Using the extra set of handcuffs from his own belt, Hedrick handcuffed Dwain’s left hand to the bar in the handicapped stall, and then removed Little’s right hand from his belly chain, allowing him to defecate. When he was finished, Hedrick put the right cuff back on Little’s belly chain.
Hedrick moved to unhook his left handcuff, but suddenly Dwain Little wrenched free of it and kicked Hedrick in the groin, and a struggle ensued. If both inmates had turned on the corrections officer, he might well have been a dead man—but the other prisoner chose to help Hedrick instead of Little.
Hedrick had Dwain around the neck and then in a hair-hold against the wall, and the helpful prisoner removed Hedrick’s extra handcuffs and snapped them around both Little’s wrists.
Dwain Little looked at the other prisoner and hissed, “You’re dead …” They didn’t doubt he meant the threat, and the convict who had saved Hedrick’s life was soon housed in protective custody.
Little’s fu
tile escape attempt may have been his last hurrah. He was now charged with attempted murder, first-degree rape, first-degree sodomy, and first-degree kidnapping. He initially pleaded not guilty to all the charges. Under a plea agreement, the sodomy charge was dropped.
On November 11, 1980, he was sentenced to twenty years for attempted murder, twenty years for rape, twenty years for kidnapping; each had a ten-year mandatory minimum. His terms would be served consecutively. The earliest he could be released would be in thirty years, when he would be over sixty years old.
As he pronounced sentence, Judge Ashmanskas said, “I find the case here are crimes involving great violence, bodily harm, extreme cruelty, or callousness. I do believe Mr. Little is dangerous, by whatever criteria, whatever formulas they may invoke; I find that he is an unusual risk to the safety of the public—based upon his psychiatric evaluations … I also find this to be supported by the nature of these particular offenses as well as his prior criminal history. Two victims are enough, Mr. Little, and I am not going to chance a third victim.”
But were there only two victims? Orla Fay, yes. Margie Hunter, yes. But deputies and troopers looked closely now at the still unsolved Cowden case.
Dwain Lee Little had long been the prime suspect in the deaths of Richard, Belinda, David, and Melissa Cowden on Labor Day weekend, six years earlier. He was out on parole at that time and living with his parents in Ruch, Oregon—eighteen miles downstream on the Applegate River. He was found carrying a .22-caliber pistol a few months later and returned to prison. The California tourists had seen two men and a woman who resembled the Littles in the Cowdens’ campsite area after their family disappeared. Even their description of the strange trio’s pickup truck matched the one Stone and Pearl owned. An old miner who lived in a cabin farther up Sturgis Fork Creek said that the Little family had stopped at his place on Monday morning, the day after the Cowdens disappeared. The Littles had even signed a guestbook the miner kept to remind him of his visitors.