by Ann Rule
“So I headed cross-country until I came to Silver Lake and I broke into a cabin there. I changed from my Ranger camo gear into some olive-colored trousers and a blue sweatshirt I found inside.
“Food wasn’t much of a problem,” he bragged. “I knew which berries and roots to eat, and there were some supplies in the cabin.”
“Did the dogs get close to you?” someone asked. “Were you concerned about them?”
Mark Rivenburgh shook his head. “Nope. There were enough streams I could wade through, and they lost my scent.”
As Rivenburgh appeared at the army Ranger headquarters where Colonel Downing waited, he suddenly seemed extremely worried. Still he insisted that was because he’d been AWOL, and he didn’t want to be brought up on charges about that—he wanted to keep on being a Ranger.
“You have much more serious charges to worry about than being AWOL,” Downing informed him. “They want you for rape.”
Rivenburgh appeared shocked at that. He categorically denied that he had raped anyone.
“The only thing I’m guilty of is being away from my duty here,” he insisted. “I know I should have reported in.”
Colonel Downing and Special Agent Rudy didn’t believe him, not unless he’d suffered a psychotic blackout, and that was an excuse for committing crimes that suspects used so often that it had little merit. Moreover, there were living victims and other witnesses who placed him where Kit Spencer and Rose Fairless had been terrorized.
Rose and Kit picked Rivenburgh’s picture out of a photo lay-down and they also identified him in a lineup. As much as they wanted to forget him, they had tried to remember everything they could about him. They had no doubt he was the man who raped them. They told investigators that they recognized his voice and his New York accent. He had the army crew cut and the chipped teeth that both of them felt as he forced his kisses on them.
Mark Rivenburgh was arrested and charged with two counts of rape and one of robbery. He was allowed to remain free on fifteen-thousand-dollars bail until trial.
But the story of the stalking army Ranger was far from over.
* * *
Some thirty miles north of Fort Lewis, detectives in the Port of Seattle Police Department read follow-up reports on Mark Rivenburgh with great interest.
Chief Neil Moloney’s department had been investigating a series of frightening incidents involving women employees at the Sea-Tac Airport, on Old Highway 99, located halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. Between February and May, flight attendants and women who worked at the counters for a number of airlines had grown increasingly afraid. Their jobs meant that they often had to walk through parking areas at all hours of the day and night. And several of them had been accosted, molested, threatened, or sexually attacked. Although they tried to walk to their cars in pairs, that wasn’t always possible.
On March 20, 1978, the investigation took on an urgency. Joyce Lee Sparks Kennedy O’Keefe, forty-five, worked as a ticket agent at the Pan Am desk and she was unfailingly on time for work. Some fellow employees reported that Joyce didn’t show up at all for her 2:30 P.M. shift. Others recall that she worked that first day of spring, and left at 2:30. It’s most likely that she ended her workday in mid-afternoon. Whichever it was, Joyce disappeared completely in the misty rain. That was less than three months before the mountain stalker attacked.
When relatives and friends became worried that she didn’t answer her phone or her door, Port of Seattle police officers searched the many levels of the Sea-Tac parking garage. They located her car. Its doors were unlocked and her purse and keys were lying on the front seat. There was no sign of a struggle, and the car started immediately when they tried the key.
Joyce had red hair and bright blue eyes, and she was petite at five feet, three inches and 130 pounds. She usually wore glasses and they were not found in her car. The last coworkers to see her recalled she was wearing a red blouse and tan slacks. She had on an expensive gold ring set with diamonds and featuring the engraving “Love.”
Joyce Kennedy was an attractive, well-adjusted woman who family and friends insisted would never disappear voluntarily. Although her marriage was strained, she cared too much about her family, and especially her mother, Virginia Beach Sparks, who had been widowed a decade before. And Joyce had four children: Mark, Sherry, Michele, and Matthew. She would never have left them voluntarily. Coworkers said Joyce worried about their problems a lot.
Chief Neil Moloney divided the massive airport into grids and assigned his officers to search every inch of it. All to no avail. No one they talked to recalled seeing or hearing anything unusual on March 20. It would seem that the missing woman had left the airport complex in someone else’s vehicle, or that she—or her body—was hidden someplace within its confines.
And yet, from that day to this, no one has seen Joyce Kennedy. The siege at Sea-Tac continued. On April 4, Ginger LeMay,* a slender twenty-year-old woman who worked at a catering company, Servair Incorporated, which was located on the Sea-Tac grounds, left work at about 10:45 P.M. As usual, she headed toward her parked car. She wasn’t particularly afraid; the airport never really sleeps and giant jets were taking off regularly, while vehicles arrive constantly to deposit or pick up passengers. There were other people around, although their number diminished as she moved out of the brightly lit area.
Tired and eager to get home, she was lost in thought. She slowly became aware of a utility van that was keeping pace with her. The male driver suddenly pulled up alongside her and stopped.
“Miss? Miss—would you stop a moment?” The driver’s voice was polite as he called to her.
She walked a little closer to the van, figuring that he needed directions.
“We’ve got an emergency going on here,” he explained. “There’s a hijacking going on right now and I’ve been sent to move people into a safer area. Hop in and I’ll see you’re taken to a spot where you’ll be out of danger.”
The young, dark-haired man seemed in earnest and Ginger Lemay believed him. But once she was inside the van, she realized to her horror that the hijacking story had been only a ruse to get her into the vehicle. The driver didn’t seem to be taking her anywhere except to an isolated area of the airport.
She reached for the door handle, but she couldn’t unlock the passenger door. Once they were in a really dark area, her abductor stopped, set the brake, and began to tear at her clothing. Ginger, filled with the adrenaline of fear, fought back with all of her strength.
Finally, she was able to break away from him. She ran as fast as she could to a lighted area. She told Port of Seattle officers that the stranger had been Caucasian, probably in his twenties, and that he had very short hair and well-developed muscles. She wasn’t sure if she could identify him because the interior of his van was almost pitch-dark when he began to attack her.
The unsettling assaults on young women continued. On May 8, Bren Forsell,* a twenty-eight-year-old flight attendant, was heading for her car in the multitiered parking building adjoining the main airport structures when she heard footsteps behind her. When she got off the elevator, there were no other drivers retrieving their cars. Now she was all alone—except for the man whose footsteps behind her were growing closer and closer.
Before Bren could run, he was on her, his breath hot against her neck. She wasn’t going down without a fight, and the spunky flight attendant pulled away from him and kicked her assailant hard where it would do the most damage. As he grunted, bent over with pain, Bren, too, escaped.
All the women who had been approached and/or attacked by the “Sea-Tac Stalker” had given very similar descriptions of the dangerous stranger, and when the Port of Seattle detectives learned about the double rapes in the Mount Rainier National Park, they saw a number of similarities to their cases.
Furthermore, as they checked out airline manifestoes, they discovered that Mark Rivenburgh had passed through Sea-Tac on the very day that Ginger LeMay was abducted.
On July 31, Por
t of Seattle detectives arrested Mark Rivenburgh and charged him with first-degree kidnapping, second-degree assault, and second-degree attempted rape in the case of Ginger LeMay on April 4, when the would-be rapist was playing “Good Samaritan” in the fake hijack scheme. Bail was set at twenty thousand dollars and he was scheduled to go on trial on those charges in September.
But the prosecution case against Rivenburgh did not run smoothly. The day before the trial was to begin, charges were dropped against him. Army authorities said that the times didn’t mesh. Although Rivenburgh flew into Sea-Tac on April 4, their records showed that he arrived at the airport a few hours after Ginger LeMay was assaulted. According to their records, the Ranger had been training in Georgia at a special survival school for some weeks prior to April 4.
Possibly. And possibly not.
The charges from the dual attacks on Rose Fairless and Kit Spencer on Mount Rainier remained, however. On September 25, Mark Rivenburgh went on trial in U.S. district court judge Jack E. Tanner’s packed courtroom in Tacoma.
The handsome Ranger, dressed in a brown suit with a brown and orange checked shirt, clutched Francie O’Brien’s hand as he entered the courtroom. Francie still believed every word Mark said, and she gave him a hug and a kiss before she found a seat in the gallery.
But Francie didn’t stay there long. The bailiff tapped her on the shoulder and told she would have to leave. She was on the defense’s witness list, and she wasn’t allowed in the courtroom until after she testified. Francie sat outside her fiancé’s trial, reading a paperback book and chain-smoking.
She had stuck by Mark since he was arrested, and she told reporters that she would remain loyal to him. “I have faith in my fiancé,” she said proudly. “I know he is innocent.”
She vowed that she would marry him as soon as he was cleared of the charges against him. She simply could not imagine that Mark would harm a woman, much less rape her. The army appeared to agree with her. Rivenburgh had remained on duty at Fort Lewis until his trial.
Kit Spencer and Rose Fairless each took the witness stand for the prosecution, although it was clear they were frightened. Their voices wavered and they kept their eyes tightly shut as they related the details of the violent sexual attack on the Rampart Ridge Trail. Mark Rivenburgh sat calmly at the defense table as they identified him as the sadist who had tormented them.
Kit told the jurors that she and Rose had submitted to his demand for bizarre sex acts only because they were convinced he would kill them if they refused.
FBI agent Richard Rudy and the park rangers testified about their encounters with the defendant after the attack. The park rangers said they had found a pair of olive, army-issue socks partially burned at the Paradise River Campgrounds after Rivenburgh’s arrest. They believed that these were the socks the rapist had worn over his shoes as he crept up on his victims.
To counter that, however, Captain Richard McCreight and Colonel Downing testified that army Rangers were not trained to wear socks over their shoes.
“They don’t need to do that. They can move without making a sound without taking such precautions,” Downing said.
“Our men are not trained to burn their gear,” Mc-Creight added. “They are instructed to bury anything that might give them away.”
Mark Rivenburgh’s sergeant, the man he’d sought out after he escaped from the park, testified for the defense, too. Kit Spencer and Rose Fairless had identified a Gerber Mark II hunting knife as the weapon Rivenburgh used to threaten them into submission, but the sergeant disagreed.
“He didn’t have that knife with him,” the sergeant declared. “It was at our house all the time. He left it with us when he went to Georgia in March for training.”
Was this all a case of faulty identification? Francie O’Brien thought so. “Mark is a gentle man who could never have done what he was accused of,” she said passionately. “It is absolutely impossible that he could have done it.”
Defense attorney John Henry Browne was in his early thirties at Mark Rivenburgh’s trial, at the beginning of a career that would one day make him one of the most recognizable criminal defense attorneys in America. He questioned Francie gently.
“Do you and the defendant have an adequate sexual relationship?”
“Yes,” she murmured, bowing her head in embarrassment.
Would the jury feel that a man with a fulfilling sex life was immune from aberrant sexual lust? A layman might. Browne hoped so. But anyone familiar with the peculiar compulsions of a rapist would find Francie’s testimony unconvincing. Many rapists have enviable sex lives with willing women—and still they do force sexual perversions on other women. And the man who raped Kit and Rose had told them he was doing it “for kicks.”
On September 28, the tall Ranger took the stand in his own defense. His version of the incidents in the park after the attacks was bizarre, to say the least. He admitted that he had come across FBI agents and park rangers on three occasions, and run from them because “their unprofessional manner” had caused him to fear for his life.
“After Alan Showalter gave me a ride to the park, I hiked cross-country,” Mark Rivenburgh explained to the jurors. “And I camped in a clearing near the Paradise River Campgrounds. That night—the third night—I hiked down to the lodge at Longmire to eat, but the restaurant was closed. I stopped to look at the stars. And then these two park rangers flashed a light in my face as I was crossing the parking lot.
“I had a .25-caliber automatic pistol with me, and I was worried because I knew that guns were not allowed in the park. So I kept my hand inside my shirt so the gun wouldn’t show. I asked them for directions to Paradise. But they backed off,” he testified. “It seemed like they didn’t want to talk to me.”
Assistant U.S. attorney Bob Westinghouse cross-examined Rivenburgh aggressively.
“Didn’t you really go to the Longmire parking lot that night to see if the heat was on you?”
“Walk into the middle of the plaza like that?” the defendant replied indignantly. “Of course not!”
Mark Rivenburgh said that he’d seen his friend Alan Showalter give him the “danger” signal the next day. “He looked scared. I figured the park rangers were going to snag me for camping in a nondesignated area.”
The defendant next described FBI agent Richard Rudy as being “nervous” and “out of control” when he pulled his gun. “I was afraid I was going to be shot,” Rivenburgh said gravely.
“He said he was the FBI and he wanted to talk about some hikers—but not there. I called him obscenities and told him we’d discuss whatever it was right there. I told him to put that fucking gun away.”
Rivenburgh said that neither the park rangers nor the FBI agent would tell him what they wanted with him. “They came on too strong, too fast, and tried to push me against a rock wall. I said, ‘You guys are fucking crazy!’ ”
According to his testimony, the defendant was clearly the victim of police abuse. “I was threatened with being shot, and, yes, I swore at them and took off into the woods.
“I wanted to get to the park headquarters for professional help. At that point, I thought that something must have happened at the park, a murder or something.”
That was a curious non sequitur. Mark Rivenburgh evidently assumed the jury would believe that he continually dodged the lawmen who wanted to talk to him because he was an innocent, rational man, a man afraid for his life.
He did not appear to sense the effect his string of obscenities and his odd story of hiding out in the woods was having on the jury. He apparently expected sympathy; he was getting just the opposite. Nor did it apparently seem strange to him that he had chosen to be a fugitive on the mountain for a week because he thought he’d be punished for camping in a nondesignated area.
If he thought he was swaying the jury panel to his side, he was wrong.
Mark Rivenburgh’s two rape victims had identified him, and his testimony and actions had only accentuated that this was a man fi
lled with lies.
The jurors deliberated only a short time before they found Rivenburgh guilty of rape and robbery. He was sentenced later to up to twenty years in federal prison.
The investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Joyce Lee Sparks Kennedy O’Keefe from Sea-Tac Airport continues to this day, more than three decades later, as does the probe into the many attempted rapes in the spring of 1978.
Joyce’s parents are deceased. Her first husband, John Kennedy, died in 1990, and her estranged widower, John Thomas O’Keefe, passed away in 2010. Joyce’s son Mark Kennedy died on Valentine’s Day 2008, at the age of fifty-three. Her granddaughter, Tia Kennedy, posted photos of a young Joyce on the Internet a few years ago.
“Joyce Lee Kennedy is my grandmother on my Mom’s side,” Tia posted. “I never got to meet her because she went missing two years before I was born. Please join me as I embark on a journey into the history of my Grandmother Joyce’s life, disappearance, and, hopefully, solving her case.”
So Joyce Kennedy is not forgotten. Descendants she never knew still care about her and long to learn what her fate was. Was she another of Mark Rivenburgh’s victims? That may well be something that can never be proved. Still, I have been able to write the conclusions of many cases of the seventies that were unsolved when I first covered them.
Perhaps Joyce’s story will be one of them. I hope so. But her abductor may not turn out to be Rivenburgh. Some of those closely connected to her case believe that it was her last husband who had a motive to want her gone. They had an extremely contentious relationship. Until her remains are found, it is impossible to determine whether she died at the hands of a stranger—or someone she knew.
* * *
Army Ranger Mark Rivenburgh had everything on his side when he encountered two vulnerable victims on the densely wooded trail in Mount Rainier National Park; he was trained to stalk, to kill, and to cover up his tracks. He got his “kicks” but the diligent work of the FBI and the Mount Rainier park rangers made him the quarry in the end.