by Rule, Ann
Carl Harp lost his job in the shoe department when a female employee complained that he was writing her obscene letters. He feigned amazement; he had only been trying to “create a relationship” with her.
While James Ruzicka was out of circulation and temporarily out of the headlines, Washington State was jolted by a terrifying sniper attack along one of its freeways.
May 14, 1973, was a Monday, a wonderfully sunny spring day in Bellevue, Washington; drivers could finally roll their windows down without fear of being blasted in the face with rain.
Interstate 405 freeway runs along the east side of Lake Washington from Renton on the south to Mountlake Terrace beyond its north shore. It has always been a tremendously busy freeway, day or night; workers in the Renton Boeing plant clog 405 during morning and afternoon rush hours.
But at three in the afternoon as he headed back to his office, Abraham Saltzman, fifty-four, who sold houses for a living, was enjoying relatively light traffic. He had gone out as a favor to give another realtor a jump start when his battery went dead. Abe, a short man with a bald head and a heart of gold, had a wife, daughter, a sister, and brother who loved him, and he had a list of former clients who swore by him. He was the kind of realtor who would rather let a commission go by than sell the wrong house to the right people.
Now, the middle-aged realtor drove his dark Plymouth Fury skillfully beneath the 520 overpass. As his sedan emerged into the bright sun, Abe Saltzman’s world exploded. A bullet he neither saw nor heard ended his life. He died at once, his hands on the wheel; his car veered sharply to the left, across traffic lanes, into a ditch and then hit the grassy embankment.
At the same time, John Mott, another motorist, was driving with his left elbow on the doorjamb of his car. He heard nothing—just felt a flash of white-hot pain. His head whipped to the left and his mind numbed with shock as he saw that his elbow was virtually gone. Somehow, he managed to get his car stopped.
Other motorists heard ping-ping-pings against their cars. Only luck saved them from taking the bullets.
Someone was standing high up on the hill that looked down on the freeway—someone who was methodically aiming and firing with a bolt-action rifle.
In the space of a few minutes, that section of 405 was alive with emergency vehicles, Washington State troopers, Bellevue police detectives, and paramedics who tried to calm the wounded and the terrified. Some motorists, stunned, had simply stopped their cars on the freeway. Some had hit the accelerator and raced past danger.
John Mott was treated and rushed to Overlake Hospital. A young man in his early twenties, he would never again be able to fully extend his left arm, but at least he was alive.
Abe Saltzman was not. There was no rush to remove him from his vehicle, no longer any need to hurry.
Investigators figured the angle of fire and headed up the hill. They didn’t know if the man with the rifle was still there or not; he could have had them fixed in his gun-sight as they climbed the steep bank. They found the place where he had stood; the grass and weeds stomped almost flat. With a metal detector, they found the brass casings ejected by a .308 bolt-action rifle.
The rifle itself was gone. So was the shooter.
There is a special kind of venom toward society that inspires someone to shoot anonymously and erratically at cars full of strangers. The shooter—male or female—could have killed mothers, babies, entire families. As it was, those who escaped with only bullet holes in their cars were grateful for their lives.
It could have been so much worse. But that didn’t help Abe Saltzman’s family, or the dozens of people who called him friend.
The man—and it was a man—who had fired the rifle had made it safely away from the brushy area above I-405. He smiled as he found a good hiding place and wrapped the .303 bolt-action rifle in oiled plastic to keep it in good working order. He might need it again.
On June 21,1973, a little over five weeks later and some twenty miles northeast of the sniper shooting scene, two female camp counselors met a stranger on the trail. The young women, Lia* and Brook*, both twenty-one, were counselors at a religious camp for children near May’s Creek Falls in the isolated wilderness in the Snoqualmie National Forest. In keeping with their religious beliefs, both were virgins, something of a rarity in the sexually permissive seventies; they intended to stay chaste until marriage.
On this Thursday afternoon, the counselors had been given some time off and decided to go for a hike along a forest trail. It was the first day of summer and the longest day of the year, which meant, in Washington, that it would be light until ten P.M.
But it was only three when Brook and Lia were startled to see a man who was apparently camping near the trail. He was of medium height, blond, and wore glasses. From all appearances, he must have been in the woods for a long time. They nodded and said “Hi,” as they headed up toward the trail head where they had parked their car.
They were even more startled a little later when they saw the same man ahead of them on the trail. They couldn’t understand how he had managed to get so far ahead. He hadn’t passed them; apparently he knew the woods so well that he had taken a shortcut. He seemed harmless enough, though, and made idle conversation as he walked along with them. But some sixth sense made them uneasy. They exchanged glances, each girl letting the other know silently that she was nervous.
When they got to the parking lot, Brook’s eagerness to find her car keys was obvious. She rummaged around in her backpack, willing the keys to be there. And then, quietly but firmly, the man said, “Hold it.”
Lia and Brook turned around as if they already knew what was going to happen. The man held a revolver in his hand, and he gestured toward a steep bank off the parking lot. “Go down there,” he said.
“Don’t hurt us,” Brook said. “We’ll do whatever you want.” “Don’t kill us,” Lia echoed. “She means it. Tell us what to do.” The stranger ordered them to walk over to a tree. They did as he told them. “Now take your clothes off,” he said. “You can leave your shoes on.”
He used Lia’s belt, looping it tightly around her neck and the tree itself so that she could not move without choking. He told Brook to lie on the ground near the tree.
There was little question now about what he was going to do. They prayed silently that he wouldn’t kill them as they watched him take off his shirt and unzip his pants. And then he orally sodomized one of the counselors and raped the other.
They were so far from help that they knew it wouldn’t do them any good to scream, and so they used their powers of reasoning. They told him he wasn’t a bad person—that he just needed help. Lia offered him a copy of the New Testament, saying, “Jesus can help you more than we ever could.”
The rapist backed away, shaking his head, almost as if the Bible frightened him. They were sure he was going to shoot them. Instead, he turned around and disappeared into the woods.
Lia and Brook drove back to camp and immediately called the Snohomish County Sheriff’s office. They made excellent witnesses; they could describe the man perfectly. They remembered every one of his tattoos, his T-shirt, the way his blond hair flopped across his forehead. He was back in the woods, but he was going to have to come out at some point. The sheriff’s department made sure that every law enforcement officer in the county, every state trooper, and every city patrolman working along Highway 2 had his description.
Mark Ericks, then a deputy marshal in the tiny hamlet of Gold Bar, Washington, in the foothills of the Snoqualmie Mountain Range, was patrolling along Highway 2 when he saw a hitchhiker just west of town.
Ericks felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He knew who that hitchhiker was. “You couldn’t miss him,” he remembered. “He had the T-shirt, the tattoos. He was the guy.”
The young deputy marshal whipped his car around and headed back. The blond man with the glasses knew he had been spotted. “He started pulling his gun to shoot me,” Ericks recalled. “But I already had my gun on him a
nd I’d made up my mind I was going to shoot.”
For seconds that seemed like hours, the two men looked at each other, and then the hitchhiker threw his gun down. It was a .36 caliber Navy percussion pistol, an unusual gun that was a cap and ball replica, but it was fully capable of firing, and it was loaded. The prisoner said he used it only for target practice. A search of his belongings also produced several joints of marijuana. And his name. Carl Lowell Harp.
Interviewed in the Snohomish County Jail, Harp vehemently denied that he had raped the camp counselors. He remembered meeting two girls at the May’s Creek Falls, but said they were mistaken in thinking he had been a threat to them. “I was cleaning my gun at my campsite and it was lying on the ground when they walked by.”
Harp said it was the women who had talked to him, asking questions about the area. Yes, he had walked a short ways with them along the trail, talking. If they had been raped, he insisted he wasn’t the man who had done it. “I did see a guy farther up the trail that day—he looked a lot like me, you know-height, weight, coloring, even had glasses. He’s your rapist, not me.”
Detectives weren’t about to buy that convenient explanation.
What surprised the Snohomish County investigators and Bellevue Police and the Washington State Patrol, however, was that Carl Harp had had a very good reason to be camping out in the woods. When the news of his arrest on rape charges hit the media, Harp’s ex-wife came forward with shocking information. She led authorities to a .308 bolt-action rifle that belonged to him.
Tests on the weapon, which was perfectly oiled and ready to fire, proved that it was the same gun that had been used by the “Bellevue Sniper.”
Carl Lowell Harp aka Troy Asin aka T. Asian aka Carroll Lowell Trimble, who had once been a little boy nobody wanted, was paying the world back—both individually and collectively.
The odd story of two men from such similar dysfunctional backgrounds seemed to be winding down. Both halves of “Troy Asin” were now behind bars.
James Ruzicka was convicted in Oregon on rape charges involving the thirteen-year-old. He received a ten-year sentence. He then went on trial in Seattle in August 1975, on charges of first-degree murder in the deaths of Penny Haddenham and Nancy Kinghammer.
King County Senior Deputy Prosecutors Jon Noll and Ron Clark had a powerful battery of physical and circumstantial evidence to present to the jury in Judge Horton Smith’s courtroom. There was the fishing knife, the moldering white draperies that had served as Nancy Kinghammer’s shroud, the towels—all taken from Ruzicka’s former wife’s house—all identified by her in court. And there was devastating testimony from a cellmate of Ruzicka’s during his stay in jail.
The witness recalled a conversation with the defendant when Ruzicka bragged of raping and killing two girls. The defendant had told him, he testified, that he liked to “collect” knives. Ruzicka had said that he had hung one of his victims from a tree after he raped her, and that he had lost his knife at that scene. But, according to the witness, Ruzicka had not been concerned about the knife because it had tape on the handle and he knew no fingerprints could be gleaned from tape.
Ruzicka himself did not testify. He sat quietly throughout the trial twisting a gold ring on one finger. He was considerably discomfited by the presence of one of his former victims in the courtroom. Nina Temple, the pretty store clerk whose jaw he had broken when he had tried to strangle her two and a half years before, sat in the gallery section, listening to every word of testimony. Ruzicka’s defense counsel cried “Foul” at the girl’s presence and asked to have her barred from the courtroom. However, Judge Horton Smith ruled she had the right to stay.
It took the jury only four hours to find James Ruzicka guilty on two counts of first-degree murder.
After his conviction, Ruzicka granted an extensive interview to a Seattle reporter. Chain-smoking, he commented that no one really knew him as a person, that he was actually shy and lonely. He said he had placed ads in underground publications seeking pen pals. He said he was currently corresponding with nineteen women and sixteen men. He readily admitted that he was a sexual psychopath and had difficulty relating to women, yet he hoped one day to marry again and have children. He had met a blind woman, a woman who loved him devotedly, and she was a faithful presence in the courtroom for all his legal proceedings. “She’s very nice,” he said. “I felt the least I could do, out of respect for her, is learn Braille.”
James Ruzicka continued to see himself in a rosy light that had little to do with reality. He said he was positive that even if he were to be released immediately, he would not be dangerous. “I wouldn’t rape anyone,” he said. “I’d try to get into some kind of treatment program. I want help.”
He denied adamantly that he killed either Penny Haddenham or Nancy Kinghammer. He claimed that the thirteen-year-old girl rape victim in Oregon was a willing participant. “There was no knife.”
The tragic fact remained that James Ruzicka had been granted an opportunity for help—given counseling, understanding, trust, freedom—in the sexual offenders program. And he walked away from it. Fifteen days later, Nancy Kinghammer died a horrible death and her body was cast aside on a junk heap. Twenty-one days later, Penny Haddenham was raped and hung from a tree like an abandoned rag doll.
Their parents successfully sued the state of Washington for allowing James Ruzicka a second chance and an unsupervised leave from the sexual offenders program. The Haddenhams and Kinghammers gave a large portion of the proceeds of their suit to the Families and Friends of Victims of Violent Crime and Missing Persons. Families and Friends had helped them survive emotionally when they lost their daughters.
Ruzicka’s self-serving version of his life and crimes, which appeared in Seattle papers, omitted a great deal. Chuck Wright, a veteran of the Washington State Department of Corrections and an expert on human sexuality, did the presentence report on Ruzicka. The convicted rapist-killer was more expansive in discussing his activities with Wright than he was with local reporters.
Chuck Wright found James Ruzicka a fascinating study in denial. Ruzicka listed fourteen former employers on his questionnaire, but said he had never worked for any of them long enough to get a social security number. He said he was “definitely” not a criminal, although he admitted to using many more aliases than “Troy J. Asin.”
“I think I’m getting screwed,” Ruzicka insisted. “I didn’t get a fair trial. I am determined to get out, get a job, and settle down. I want to get married.”
James Ruzicka was attempting to portray himself as just an ordinary guy. But he was striving to con the wrong man. Wright knew that Ruzicka had demonstrated a bizarre and precise MO in his sexual attacks. Beyond the use of a knife held against his victims’ throats and his ruse about his “wounded brother,” he usually removed one of the victim’s shoes. He had bragged to fellow inmates that he was a necrophile who revisited the bodies of the girls he had killed.
Assuming that Wright’s nonjudgmental facade indicated approval, James Ruzicka bragged that he had had “sexual contacts” with at least three hundred different women. He was vehement that he had never had any homosexual encounters beyond his molestation of his younger brother.
As far as other crimes went, Ruzicka admitted a thousand shoplifting episodes, a hundred burglaries—all unsolved.
He said that knives had always been important to him. He had needed to have a knife under his pillow when he was a child—or he couldn’t sleep.
For Chuck Wright, who had evaluated countless convicted felons, James Ruzicka was one in a thousand, dangerous beyond reckoning. Wright sought to find some treatment which, while it might not change Ruzicka’s mindset, might at least protect future victims.
“I brought up the question of the possibility of his being castrated,” Wright recalled. “He appeared to be very angry and stated, ‘They can try. If they do that, I’ll do myself in. I’d rather rot in prison.’ I informed him there was a process in which an individual can be
chemically castrated and that it was reversible … I informed him that we would probably be recommending that he serve two life sentences to run consecutively, and that he be chemically castrated. He seemed quite calm at that time.”
On September 30, 1975, Judge Smith ordered Ruzicka to first serve his sentence in Oregon and then to begin serving two consecutive life sentences in the killings of Penny Haddenham and Nancy Kinghammer.
“I just do not believe this court should operate a bargain basement for murder—allowing two murders to go for the price of one,” Smith commented. He said that when Ruzicka arrived at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, he would be placed among the one hundred most dangerous criminals, for whom maximum security was paramount to all other considerations.
Consulting psychologist Dr. John Berberich had found Ruzicka “extremely dangerous and untreatable” and, like Chuck Wright, he thought that castration might be wise.
Chuck Wright had fought hard to have chemical castration considered in James Ruzicka’s case, mindful of Ruzicka’s history of escape. “Ruzicka is like a lot of cons,” Wright recalled. “He always denies everything. I can’t emphasize enough that if this man ever gets on the street, he will kill someone. He is very devious and life means nothing to him. He lied to us from the time he walked in the door to the time he left.”
At this writing, James Ruzicka is still locked up in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. He is now forty-six years old. There was massive publicity at the time of his sentencing in the midseventies. However, other murderers have supplanted his image in the minds of the public and it is important that the memory of his crimes remain fresh. Although it is extremely doubtful that James Ruzicka will walk the streets again until he is an old man, it is not impossible.