A Fever In The Heart

by Rule, Ann

  There were some plywood sheets, wood chips, a tire, and a steel cable in the bed of Bryson’s truck. Some dark stains were visible along the bottom edges of the plywood, and they noted that some of the wood chips were discolored too. There was another dark splotch in the center of the bench seat in the cab. Oregon State Police Criminalists Bonnie Garthus and Ray Grimsbo processed the truck. The stains were human blood. They found a human hair caught in the tailgate and another on the rear bumper.

  It suddenly became important to know more about Dexter Bryson’s movements on February 9 and detectives asked him to give them a statement. If he had been seen by other witnesses working in the mechanic’s office at the time Vicki disappeared, someone else could have used his truck to stash her body temporarily.

  According to his statement, however, Bryson had left work before five on the day Vicki vanished. He said he had gone to see his mother at Alston’s Corners five miles away. She had offered to split a load of Presto Logs with him. He said he had picked up his half and his brother had helped him load them into the pickup. Just then, it had begun to rain. He said he had rushed to get home before the sawdust logs disintegrated. He lived, he said, in a mobile home parked on a Christmas tree farm.

  Dexter Bryson had a remarkably precise memory of his movements on the night Vicki Brown disappeared. About six, he continued, he had stopped at a little grocery store to get gas and a six-pack of beer. Then he had driven his pickup to a shed next to his trailer, stacked the logs, and washed out the truck bed to get rid of any wood chips.

  Bryson said that he was married and living with his wife, but they worked different shifts. She worked the swing shift at a grocery store across the bridge in Longview, Washington, so he had reheated some chili for his supper.

  “What did you do after that?” a detective asked.

  “I watched television and shaved. Then I saw that my clock had stopped, and I called my mother to ask the time. It was seven thirty exactly!’ Bryson had also asked what his share of the cost of the Presto Logs was.

  At “exactly eight fifteen,” he had called his mother again. He said he was concerned because a white Chevrolet truck had pulled in in back of his trailer and someone had jiggled his doorknob. He said he had been alarmed because he had been “hassled” before. He lived in a very isolated area and there was no one nearby to help in case of trouble.

  He asked that his brother come over to back him up. His brother had come over, but the truck was gone by the time he got there. Then the two had driven into Rainier to call on Bryson’s best friend, Rex Simcox*. It was about nine then, Bryson said, and his friend wasn’t home. Then, as it happened, they had driven by the bus barn. Bryson said he had been concerned because he noticed that the double doors into the mechanics’ office were not securely closed. He had gone in and looked around for any sign of vandalism. He said he had called his boss, Myron Wicks, to tell him about the open doors. Wicks had told him not to worry—just to lock everything up. Bryson had checked for signs that anyone had been inside and found nothing amiss, so he said he had locked the doors securely and left.

  “I told my brother then,” Bryson said, “that I thought I’d seen Vicki’s green Mazda still parked there.”

  Bryson said he had thought something was funny. He and his brother had driven back to Simcox’s house and found him home this time. He asked Rex if he had seen the open door to the shop, and Rex said he hadn’t. Nor had he noticed that Vicki’s car was still there.

  Dexter Bryson was either a most conscientious employee or he was a little paranoid. He said he had brought a gun—a .44 Magnum—to work with him the day after Vicki vanished. He was nervous because Vicki had disappeared, the double doors had been open, and because someone in a white truck had tried to get into his mobile home.

  “Why do you think you need protection?” he was asked, and he shrugged. It wasn’t because he had any information about Vicki’s disappearance, he insisted, it was just that so many unexplainable things had happened on Tuesday night.

  Bryson was released from questioning after he gave his consent to have his mobile home on Fern Hill Road searched. The Oregon state police investigators and criminalists headed for the mobile home on the Christmas tree farm. Bonnie Garthus noticed that Bryson had what appeared to be fresh blood on his thumb, but when she asked him about it, he said it was from his own bloody nose. She took scrapings from his fingernails. They were dirty but that would be expected on a bus mechanic’s hands.

  If the state investigators had hoped to find Vicki Brown in Bryson’s trailer, they were disappointed. However, they noted things that only increased their suspicions. In the bedroom Dexter Bryson and his wife shared, they found dress boots with splatters of blood on them. In the spare bedroom, they found a black vinyl motorcycle jacket. (It had been recently washed, yet lab tests would show that it had been soaked inside and out with human blood.)

  While the search went on, the state police saw that Bryson was attempting to push something out of sight in his bedroom. When they checked, they found a pair of black leather gloves soaked inside with blood and with a hair similar to the one they had found on his truck. Bryson looked at the gloves and said he had never seen them before. He said that he always marked his gloves inside and these had no marks.

  Bonnie Garthus had found a holster in the bedroom and asked where the gun was that fit it. Bryson walked over to a plastic box that sat on the kitchen counter near the sink and pulled out a .22 Ruger. Investigator Winterfeld stepped forward quickly and took it from him. There appeared to be blood on the exterior muzzle. The Ruger would join a growing cache of possible evidence slated for crime lab tests.

  Dexter Bryson had become a prime suspect—but in what crime? Kidnapping? Assault with intent to do bodily harm? Murder? There was no victim. Someone’s blood had stained Bryson’s clothes and his truck—but whose? The case was not as simple legally as common sense made it appear.

  All the authorities could do was place Bryson under constant surveillance while they continued their investigation on many different levels. The search team still worked against time to find Vicki Brown. No one said what they were all thinking. They were looking for a body now.

  Regular duty hours meant nothing. Officers from every department in Columbia County donated unpaid overtime. They searched 127 square miles of forests, fields, water, and land in Columbia County and used 7,023 man-hours.

  Detectives weighed the variables they had to work with.

  Only three people had had keys to the bus barn. One was Dexter Bryson, and the other two were the twin brothers: Byron and Myron Wicks. Myron Wicks was a middle-aged man with a family and it had been Myron who took Vicki Brown’s daughter to her grandmother the night Vicki vanished. As a matter of course, both twin brothers were asked about their whereabouts on the night in question. Each of them had a sound alibi; many people had seen them elsewhere at the critical time.

  Myron Wicks, however, admitted ruefully that he was one of the men in Vicki’s black book. He said they had had a brief affair. His wife knew about it and had already forgiven him. With astounding frankness, he said he had only had sex with Vicki once. He had tried twice more, he said.

  “What do you mean you tried?”

  “I couldn’t get it up,” he confessed with a shrug.

  The investigators looked at each other. The man had to be telling the truth; no man is going to lie and say he is impotent. It would have been more realistic if he had lied in the other direction. This man wasn’t boasting—he was being honest.

  Yes, Myron Wicks said he would testify to the “affair” in court if it came to that, although he hoped it wouldn’t.

  Vicki Brown’s close confidantes said that she had one man whom she really wanted, but he was far away from Rainier. He was in Alaska. The rest of Vicki’s suitors had merely filled her time while she waited for him. Reportedly, none of the men she dated expected anything more. Detectives didn’t uncover even one rumor that any of Vicki’s casual dates had
been jealous.

  There had, however, been a disturbing incident the previous November. One evening while Vicki was out, someone had broken into her house. The intruder, who was never caught, had entered through a broken window. Once inside, he (they assumed it was a “he”) had pawed through Vicki’s negligees, bras, and panties. He had also snooped through her personal diary and papers. Nothing was missing except two bras and a pair of panties. A bottle of beer had been taken from her refrigerator, emptied, and thrown into the toilet bowl.

  Odd. Frightening? An underwear thief is usually a man with some sexual aberration, a step beyond the window peeper. Laymen consider voyeurs, exposers, and those who collect undergarments—fetishists—among the most harmless of sexual offenders. Experts in sexual deviation know these offenders often escalate their fantasies to a point where they include rape—and even murder.

  To prove probable cause to bring charges against Dexter Bryson, District Attorney Marty Sells had to first establish that the person injured in the bus barn had been Vicki Brown. It seemed obvious, but it had to be proven absolutely. Although the Oregon State Police crime lab had found enough blood to type for a dozen victims, there was a problem. When the investigators checked, they could not find Vicki Brown’s blood type on file anywhere. The doctor who had delivered her daughter had noted only that her blood was RH negative but had neglected to jot down the type. For some reason, none of the medical procedures she had undergone had required blood-typing.

  Dexter Bryson had Type O blood, RH positive. The blood in the bus barn, his pickup, his jacket, his gloves, and on a shovel found in a search of Bryson’s property, was all Type O.

  District Attorney Sells feared that the blood found at the crime scene and on Bryson’s clothing would be useless if extensive tests were not done at once and so he asked that the crime lab proceed with the tests.

  The O blood was broken down to its enzyme components. It had DCc and E factors. The small “c” factor indicated that the person who had lost that blood was RH negative—just as Vicki Brown had been.

  Dexter Bryson’s blood broke down to DC, with no small “c” or big “E” factors. None of the blood found could have come from his body.

  The next step in proving who had been attacked in the bus barn was to retrieve some hair from Vicki’s brush and rollers and compare it microscopically with the hairs found matted in blood on the bus fender, the tailgate of Bryson’s truck, and inside the bloody gloves in his trailer. The crime lab technicians found thirty points of microscopic similarity in class and characteristics with the comparison hairs. Although hair cannot be considered as individual as a fingerprint, or DNA matches (not yet in use at the time), thirty points of similarity made it very likely that the hair found stuck in dried blood was Vicki Brown’s.

  Vicki’s dentist examined the bridge found in her bus stall. “It’s Vicki’s,” he said firmly. “It’s what we call a cantilevered bridge. Until she came in, I hadn’t seen one in ten years: They aren’t done anymore because they put too much strain on adjacent teeth. That’s why she came in. I had to modify it with a drill and affix tabs to make it fit better. There were all kinds of x rays. I still have them.”

  The dentist’s drill fit perfectly into the holes in the bridge.

  There were no fingerprints to check. They had found only smudged marks along the inside of the bus barn. Criminalist Bonnie Garthus said they had been left by someone wearing blood-soaked gloves.

  The investigators looked into Dexter Bryson’s background. He had no criminal record at all. He had graduated from high school and then served in the Marines. He was 5′ 10″ tall and weighed 170 pounds. Vicki, at almost the same height, even thirty pounds lighter, would probably have given him a good fight if he had tried to grab her in the bus barn.

  Although Bryson was married, he had not confined his attentions to his wife. The investigators learned that he had had a couple of girlfriends. One was rumored to have married and moved away. The other was still in town.

  Witnesses described Dexter Bryson’s demeanor at his job the day after Vicki vanished as out of character. He had shown up very early, long before he was due to check in. When someone asked him why he was there so early, he had answered, “Oh, one of the drivers might not come in. I might have to fill in for them …”

  His thumb had been black-and-blue. He had explained that away by saying a “giant Presto log” had fallen on it. He was in so much pain from it that he couldn’t pull the handbrake on a bus or change a tire. Packing his .44 Magnum for protection, Bryson had later tried to convince fellow workers that Vicki had been kidnapped, saying with conviction, “She was snatched.”

  One of the other women bus drivers, who was initially suspicious that Vicki had simply taken off on a fling, had said to Bryson, “Wouldn’t it be nice to live like that—a free life?”

  Bryson had snapped, “No!” curtly to her comment, startling the woman with his vehemence.

  Like all small towns, Rainier, Oregon, was rife with rumors and Dexter Bryson’s name was at the top of the murder suspect list for some residents. Others were convinced a homicidal maniac was loose. Special guards were posted at the bus barn and on the school buses to allay the fears of worried parents.

  Someone who believed that the bus mechanic was responsible for Vicki Brown’s disappearance painted “Bryson’s a Killer” on the street in front of the school. Bryson himself painted it out. Then he spray painted a whole wall of the bus barn where there had been bloodstains.

  His efforts did not impede the investigation. The vital sections of the wall had already been cut out and sent to one of the leading criminalists in America—one of the foremost authorities on the patterns that blood can make after it leaves the body. He was Herbert L. McDonnell, adjunct professor in criminalistics at Elmira College and Corning Community College in New York State. McDonnell is the director of the Lab of Forensic Sciences and has an MS degree in chemistry. Over the years, among the hundreds of cases he worked on were the Dr. Sam Sheppard case and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. (One day, he would testify in the O.J. Simpson trial.)

  Both the barn beam with the blood spray pattern on it and the Ruger found in Bryson’s kitchen had been sent to McDonnell and he was analyzing them as the investigation continued three thousand miles away.

  Dexter Bryson had no idea of how closely he was being watched. If he had begun to feel that he was home free, he had not reckoned with the combined forces of the Oregon State Police, the Columbia County Sheriff’s office, and District Attorney Marty Sells. The organized search for Vicki was suspended after a month, but the hidden investigation continued unabated.

  One of the most interesting pieces of information detectives discovered was that Dexter Bryson had been obsessed with Vicki Brown. There had been nothing he wouldn’t do to gain her approval. He had fixed her stove and made repairs on her house—all for free. On the very day she disappeared, he had fixed her car. For all of his efforts, he had received nothing more than a smile and a thank you.

  Marty Sells figured that Bryson must have been disappointed and frustrated, perhaps even angry that Vicki had no interest in sleeping with him. Sells had confirmation of his suppositions when the probe led to one of Bryson’s former lovers, a girl who had married and moved away to Mississippi, and was now the nineteen-year-old wife of an airman. She gave a statement to police that it had been Dexter Bryson who had broken into Vicki’s house in November. She said he had found her diary and read about the other men who had enjoyed Vicki’s favors. Bryson, who had done so much for her, had always been rejected. He had been enraged to find he had been such a patsy.

  “He gave me two bras and a pair of panties he took from her house,” the girl said. “I still have them. He said he broke in because he wanted her to suffer. He was angry because he’d fixed things for her and she rejected him.”

  Detectives found it hard to contain their elation. Here was the motivation the investigators had looked for all alon
g. Dexter Bryson’s ex-girlfriend agreed to mail Vicki’s stolen lingerie to Oregon.

  When Vicki’s small daughter viewed the bikini panties mailed from the East Coast, she cried, “Oh, you’ve found my mom.”

  She identified the panties by the strawberry pattern on them. “They’re my mom’s,” she said, nodding vigorously.

  “Hers are pink and her friend has the same kind, only the strawberries are orange on hers.”

  It all fit. Dexter Bryson had probably been seething over his latest rejection. Now, the investigators knew that he had fixed Vicki’s car on the afternoon of the ninth. He had probably decided to take what he considered his right. If Vicki had not submitted willingly, and they doubted that she would have, then Bryson must have attempted to force her.

  It was easy to imagine him as he waited in the darkened bus barn. He would have known Vicki was due in from her run at 6:30. All the other drivers would have come and gone by that time. When Vicki alighted from her bus, unaware, Bryson would have had the upper hand. Or maybe he had expected it would be easier to subdue her than it was. She might well have put up more of a fight than he had foreseen. Struggling and kicking, the pair must have scuffled through the empty barn. That would account for the sounds the girl smoking on the balcony had heard.

  And the one gunshot—the sound heard by the teacher a few minutes later—would have ended the fight. And then Vicki Brown, dead, would have had to be disposed of as rapidly as possible.

  The bloody smudges on the wall could be explained. Vicki’s killer would have had to drag her inert body, or lift her in a fireman’s carry over his shoulder. They believed that someone had moved her body along the length of the barn, swabbing the walls with streaks of blood as he went. In his panic to avoid detection, it wasn’t likely that he would have noticed that Vicki’s dental bridge had fallen out.

  If Dexter Bryson had planned to put Vicki in his pickup truck, he must have been appalled when he had found it blocked in by the student’s van. He had had to break the wing window and release the brake. He must have cut himself—that would account for all the blood in the van, and maybe his bruised thumb. Then Bryson would have had to get into the van and steer it while it coasted far enough so that he could move his truck. Had he realized that someone saw him in the van? Probably not. In his panic to hide the body of his victim, he had undoubtedly been totally focused on getting away from the high school.