Without Pity

by Ann Rule

  Surprisingly, Nick Kyreacos hadn’t seemed too apprehensive, but he’d warned the boy, “If anything happens, you just call the police and then drive my car home and tell my wife.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Just do what I say,” Nick had said.

  It was almost right at 6 P.M. as he told this witness to stay behind the Cadillac dealership so he would be out of sight. Although the battery-operated walkie-talkies had worked earlier, the teenager wasn’t able to get a response from Nick as he strode toward the dealership. Nick was still close enough to hear a shout so the boy said he’d called out, “Nick! Nick! I can’t hear nothing!”

  But Kyreacos kept on walking, and the boy paced behind the building as he had been told. A short time later, he heard sounds like a car backfiring. “I thought that was what it was,” he said. “We were pretty close to the freeway entrance on Pike.”

  Back in the days of film noir, there were a number of detective movies that were filmed from the viewpoint of a man about to die. In 1946, there was even an eerie imaginative movie starring Robert Montgomery called The Lady in the Lake in which the camera was focused as if it were, indeed, the eyes of the main character.

  On the night of November 20, the real story would be played out through the voice of a dead man and the ears of those who ministered to him.

  When the medical examiner’s investigators Lombardini and Ryan wheeled the gurney carrying Nick Kyreacos’s body into the morgue—at the time a shadowy edifice located on Queen Anne Hill—they went about what seemed a routine procedure.

  It was anything but.

  On the morgue scale, the body weighed 170 pounds and measured 5 feet 6 inches. As Nick Kyreacos’s clothing was removed, a battered and spent slug tumbled out. The investigators were quite sure that it was the .45 bullet that had pierced his forehead, going through his brain and exiting four inches behind his right ear. Finally it had become entangled in his jacket. They also found a small black pistol, loaded with blanks, in his pants pocket.

  But that wasn’t the most startling thing they found. Medical examiners occasionally discover all manner of secrets that the suddenly dead can no longer hide—men wearing women’s underwear, men and women who have lived as the opposite sex, thick rolls of money secreted in shoes, socks and belts, wigs, glass eyes, penile implants, foreign objects inserted in the body during kinky sex acts. Fortunately, the dead can no longer be embarrassed and secrets discovered in the morgue are kept there.

  Now, Lombardini and Ryan were amazed to see that the shooting victim had a tape recorder nestled in the small of his back. There was a wire, almost shredded now, leading to a dented round microphone clipped to Nick Kyreacos’s tee-shirt. Recording devices were bulky and awkward three decades ago; the “state of the art” then was far from the minuscule mikes and recorders available today. This tape recorder was the size of a hard-cover book and not that easy to hide.

  The M.E.’s investigators stared at it for a full minute, tempted to listen to the tape, and then Lombardini muttered, “The detectives at the shooting site probably have no idea about this. We need to tell them pronto—we can’t take a chance of messing this up or breaking the tape.”

  They immediately notified Sergeant Bruce Edmonds and his men, who had returned to homicide headquarters. Even though it was very late, they were still working on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building, sorting out the evidence they’d collected in the alley.

  It was 2:40 A.M. when Edmonds and George Marberg arrived at the morgue. They tried to rewind the sixty-minute tape but, anticlimactically, found its four batteries were dead. The detectives rushed to an all-night drugstore and purchased new batteries, racing back to the medical examiner’s office.

  Finally, the four investigators—two from the morgue and two from the police department—watched as the tape rewound to its beginning. They pushed PLAY and held their breath, wondering if anything caught in the tape would be meaningful to the shooting investigation.

  Detective George Marberg would eventually listen to the tape a dozen times. “It still sends chills up my spine,” he remarked later.

  The tape began with Nick Kyreacos identifying himself, his voice sounding upbeat and cheerful, as if he was enjoying whatever adventure he was about to undertake. He was talking to someone else, someone with a young male voice.

  “We are now recording. Stay around the general area. I’ll just talk a little bit. When I say ‘Out,’ don’t talk anymore.”

  The tape caught sounds of traffic, car tires on wet pavement, horns honking far away, someone coughing. Kyreacos spoke again, “Can you hear me?”

  There was no answer.

  “Can you hear me?” There was still no response. It must have been at this point that the walkie-talkie signals between Kyreacos and the boy were blocked by buildings.

  Kyreacos kept talking anyway, obviously intent upon commemorating what was happening, perhaps still trying to contact his witness. “I’m approaching—time by my watch is six nineteen. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Girl coming down the street, going south. Waiting on the corner. Girl did not come down here.

  “There appears to be an Indian woman coming down the street, wearing a raincoat. Walks very masculine. A little short lady. No one’s approached. No one coming near. I’m walking slowly up toward the alley now. Someone is peering at me from the hotel across the street from the car place. Man in orange coveralls coming up street. Car slowing down. No sign of anyone. Everything looks normal.”

  The tape counter read five and a half minutes. It sounded as if Nick Kyreacos wasn’t sure who had summoned him to the alley but that he had powerful motivation to be where he was, suspicious and feeling the need for evidence of whatever might be said. It was almost as if he expected someone wearing a disguise—perhaps a man dressed as a woman?

  “Walking in the upper part of the alley now,” his voice continued, a new nervous tautness apparent.

  Suddenly, another voice cut in. “Hold it, Nick!”

  There were sounds of a chase, feet thudding and sliding, and heavy breathing. Kyreacos sounded surprised. “Hey! Cop chasing me. Stan Tappan—”

  A shot rang out, a sharp crack on the tape. “Hold it!” a male voice called from some distance. And then the second male voice was closer to the tape recorder again. “OK, Nick—back around here.”

  Edmonds and Marberg exchanged glances. They recognized the new voice. It was Stan Tappan.

  “What’s the deal?” Kyreacos asked.

  “You know what the deal is. I’ll tell you one thing, baby. You have…had it.”

  “You got a charge?”

  “We’ll get a charge.”

  “If you wanted me, why didn’t you come and see me?”

  “Because—I’ll tell you why—”

  Without warning, four or five shots sounded on the tape, and the men listening jumped as if a gun were firing right there in the morgue. Kyreacos’s voice was no longer deep, but the high-pitched scream of a creature in agony.

  “Don’t!” he cried out. “Ahhhhh…Ahhhh…Ahhh! Don’t! God! Tappan, don’t. You’re wrong, man. You’re wrong. Don’t. Please, don’t—”

  Five seconds ticked by. There was another shot, muffled. It sounded almost like a champagne cork popping.

  The silence on the tape was palpable. No more screams. No more pleading from Kyreacos. And then there were two more shots, five seconds apart.

  The tape ran on, recording emptiness. A minute. Two minutes. George Marberg looked at his watch, unconsciously timing the tape whirring without sound. None of them moved. Was it over?

  No. There were more voices on the tape, but now it was as if the investigators were listening through the dead man’s ears.

  A different male voice spoke: “We’ve already called the police. This guy is dead. He got shot right in the top of the head. You don’t think he’s still alive? Don’t touch him.”

  Sirens caterwauled through the night, growing closer and
closer.

  Another voice: “They’re taking some guy to the hospital. Is an aid car coming?”

  “One of our officers?” The policeman speaking sounded shocked.

  “Yeah.”

  There was a new sound, air whooshing into the body’s throat. And then a crackling, and they realized that it was paramedic George Barnes who had tried to “bag” the victim with his own breath and was now pulling Kyreacos’s jacket open, brushing the microphone—all unaware.

  “Yeah,” Barnes’s voice said to someone. “He’s got one right in the chest.”

  A young officer’s voice: “OK, Sarge—I got a .45 over here. The fucker is cocked and ready to go.”

  Sergeant: “Leave it right where it is.”

  Steadily, accurately, the mindless tape rolled on, recording shouts, sirens, police calls coming in to the squad cars blocking the shooting site. The man was dead, but the device on his body continued to record his surroundings until the hour of blank tape ran out and the batteries faded. It had gone with him to the morgue and then stopped.

  Edmonds and Marberg were shocked at what they’d heard. Even as dozens of police officers still gathered at Virginia Mason to show support for Stan Tappan and his wife, displaying the camaraderie and concern that binds police officers, the two homicide detectives who had heard the damning tape knew that things were not at all what they seemed.

  There was no question that Tappan knew Kyreacos better than he had said. Tappan had chased the waiter, and as much as they hated to accept it, it appeared that he had deliberately shot him. It was all there on tape. It would take ballistics tests and a lot more questioning to find out what the real connection had been between the two men.

  Detective Sergeant Ivan Beeson assigned two of his day-crew—Don Strunk and Dick Reed—as the prime investigators in Stan Tappan’s shooting of Nick Kyreacos. They had been afraid that this might happen. It wasn’t a matter of a conflict of interest—they were much too professional for that—but neither had ever found the main suspect in an inexplicable murder to be an old friend. Don Strunk and Dick Reed listened to the tape and their faces went white. It was clear that Tappan didn’t know that the whole shooting had been recorded, and they couldn’t tell him so until they had taken his full statement.

  According to Stan Tappan’s first brief statement to the patrol officers, it was Kyreacos who brought the .45 to the alley. When Sergeant Beeson, Reed, and Strunk went to the hospital to talk with Tappan, he was recuperating from plastic surgery on his injured hand and assured them that he would be able to use it again, well enough to shoot a gun accurately.

  They asked him to go back over the shooting, and Stan Tappan reiterated that it was Kyreacos who had had the .45. He said he had been forced to defend himself against a convicted criminal who had a lot more firepower than he did.

  Only they knew that wasn’t true. They had already talked to a detective who was once Tappan’s patrol partner. Although he and Tappan had ridden as partners together for two years, the man was troubled. He told Dick Reed that Stan had been extremely apprehensive about Nick Kyreacos. “He said Nick threatened both him and Branko Ellich—and then Ellich was ambushed and shot. He said he was really afraid of Nick.”

  Apparently, Stan Tappan had seemed so afraid that he met his old partner in the police garage on November 13 and told him that Kyreacos was hanging around his off-duty job at the mortgage company, and he needed a gun more powerful than a .38.

  “I loaned him a gun that used to belong to my brother—a .45. He said he’d give it back to me.”

  Frank Lee was the Seattle Police Department’s ballistics expert. He attempted to find the history of the .45, but found it was virtually untraceable. All he could be sure of was that it was a government model 1911 semiautomatic pistol. The bullet casings found at the scene had been manufactured in 1931 and 1967. The .45 was clearly used as what police call a “drop gun,” a weapon that can be deliberately left at a shooting scene to confuse an investigation. It cannot be traced either by manufacture or ownership.

  Seattle police regulations at the time forbade personnel from carrying a weapon more powerful than a .38.

  King County Medical Examiner Patrick Besant-Matthews performed the six-hour postmortem examination of Nick Kyreacos’s body. Besant-Matthews once shocked a courtroom during a homicide trial when he explained that he had honed his knowledge of the damage done by different caliber guns by actually shooting at corpses, as well as pigs.

  However he had learned, he was expert at identifying the etiology of gunshot wounds. Kyreacos had been shot many times. He had a through-and-through wound in his left forearm, a wound to the front of his chest caused by a bullet that entered near the left nipple, coursed through the third rib, and ended in his right lung.

  “That was fired from above,” Besant-Matthews commented, “and it would have been rapidly fatal unless he had immediate care.”

  The forehead wound had been instantly fatal, and Kyreacos could not have spoken a word after that. There was no question that both of the fatal wounds had been caused by the .45.

  But Stan Tappan had said that the .45 belonged to Kyreacos—not to him. Dick Reed and Don Strunk visited Tappan again in his hospital room. He was glad to see them, but he looked a little disconcerted when their sergeant, Ivan Beeson, walked into the room behind them. The faces of all three were grim and they didn’t respond to his welcoming smile.

  The homicide investigators dreaded what they had to do next.

  “Stan,” Dick Reed said, “I hate to do this but I have to tell you that Kyreacos had a tape recorder on him. The whole shooting is on tape. We’ve listened to it.”

  It was clear from the look on Stan Tappan’s face that he’d been caught completely off guard. He was, if anything, more shocked than his fellow detectives had been when they listened to Kyreacos’s tape. He said nothing as he digested this information. Up until this moment, it had been his word against that of a man with a long reputation of breaking the law. Tappan had been a hero, a good cop who had suffered grievous wounds in a gun battle with a punk.

  “You’re under arrest, Stan,” Reed said. “The charge is murder in the first degree. You have the right to—”

  “I know. I know. I know that by heart.”

  Reed finished the Miranda warning anyway, and then put a handcuff on Tappan’s uninjured right hand. He was transported at once to the infirmary at the King County jail in the upper floors of the courthouse. He was right across the street from his old office in the Burglary Unit of police headquarters, but his whole world had changed.

  Dick Reed and several other homicide detectives went out for stiff drinks after their shift ended, but liquor didn’t help the sick feeling they had. Arresting a fellow officer is a terrible thing to have to do—but Reed had had no choice.

  Chief of Police George Tielsch dismissed Stan Tappan from the department. His career as a police officer was probably over, even if he should be acquitted of the charges against him.

  In a case that was already complicated enough, the FBI entered for a time. Although it seemed ludicrous, Tappan’s attorneys asserted that his civil rights had been violated. In Washington State, it is illegal to tape-record someone without his or her permission. If indeed Tappan had deliberately shot Nick Kyreacos and Kyreacos had recorded his own murder without informing Tappan that he was being taped, the defense team maintained, the former detective had been deprived of his civil rights.

  Soon enough, that argument was tossed out, although the defense attorneys would bring it up again at trial. For Dick Reed and Don Strunk, the investigation was far from over. They sought anyone who might have been a witness to the shooting, and they looked for the mysterious woman who had twice called Kyreacos at the restaurant, the last time a few hours before he died.

  They didn’t find the woman, but they did find Arthur Glidden,* a young construction worker who had been on his way to attend classes at Seattle Community College shortly after six on the night of Novemb
er 30. He had stopped for a red light at Pike and Boren streets and he’d glanced idly at two men on the sidewalk. Something about their body language caught his interest.

  “The tall man in the dark raincoat looked like he was holding a gun on the small guy,” Glidden told Reed and Strunk. “And then they disappeared into the alley. I was curious enough that I circled the block twice. The second time around, I heard gunshots. Now, I had to see what had happened and I circled back one more time. This time, I saw the guy in the dark raincoat kind of staggering or weaving out of the alley. I stopped my car then, and went over to some cops who had just arrived.”

  Glidden was haunted by the face of the small man. “He looked right at me when he was being led around the corner. I recognized him lying there on the ground.”

  The witness was something of a gun buff himself, and he said he owned both a .45 and a .38. He was positive that the tall man had been holding a .45, with a six-inch barrel against the short man’s arm.

  There was another eyewitness, an elderly woman who lived on the third floor of the apartment house that abutted the alley. “I was watching the six o’clock news,” she recalled. “I thought the shots were on the news—and then I realized they were outside. I pulled my curtains back a little and peeked out. The man in the black raincoat had the smaller man’s right arm in his left hand. There was some ‘object’ in his right hand too.”

  “Could you see what it was?” Reed asked.

  “I’m not sure. I guess I looked away for a few moments, and then I heard more shots—maybe four or five. When I looked again, I saw the man in the raincoat limping into the parking lot at the mortgage company.”

  As they made their way door to door around the shooting site, the detective team found a number of witnesses who had heard the shots: the woman courier for the message company, the manager of the Cadillac dealership, and medical personnel from the detox center who had rushed out to help the wounded men. But none of them had actually viewed the scene during the few moments when shots were fired. They had only heard the gunfire echo in the alley.