by Ann Rule
Seattle Police detectives Gene Birkeland and Doug Fritschy and officers Mike Crist, Jim Devine, and Sergeant Gerald Taylor joined the cops already waiting.
The blue Toyota moved frequently from one parking spot to another, settling for a time near an apartment building and then moving on to a tavern. At one point it drove away from the area entirely and, with a police tail, circled a plush residential area and then came back to what Seattleites call the Wallingford District.
This time the Toyota stayed in one spot. Don Nelson placed two of his deputies—Don Slack and Dick Taylor—on the roof of an automotive shop where they had a bird’s-eye view of the area, and the other police personnel found spots where they could watch the activity in the blue car but still be out of sight.
The watching policemen tensed as a tall man wearing fatigues and makeup left Sara Talbot’s car, but he only walked back and forth, peered around buildings, and then came back to her car.
He repeated his forays several times during the two hours the officers waited. They were at an impasse. They tensed each time the man got out to prowl the quiet residential streets and alleyways. They couldn’t arrest him; there was no reason to. He had committed no crime.
The minutes ticked by, and Nelson reminded everyone by police radio that the hit was supposed to take place at 9:30 P.M. “We decided to confront the man,” Nelson recalled. “But that’s when he crossed the street and was momentarily out of our view.”
Suddenly, at a few minutes after nine, LeClerk left the car again, and things began to happen fast. Once the hit man could no longer see her, Sara Talbot pulled slowly along the street craning her neck until she spotted an Everett officer she knew. “Now!” she mouthed frantically. “The time is now!”
The officer spun around and headed for LeClerk. Mike Crist, a Seattle patrolman, had decided at almost the same instant that they had waited long enough. The men felt as if they were moving through molasses as they ran to catch up with LeClerk.
And then they heard a sound that made their hearts convulse. Before they could reach the tall man in disguise, a single shot echoed in the chill November night. Almost immediately they heard a man’s voice screaming, “Help me! Somebody help me!”
Crist dropped to one knee at the exit to the alley where LeClerk had disappeared. Holding his .38 Police Special in both hands, Crist leveled the weapon and pointed it at a tall figure running toward him. Six more shots rang out as Slack and Taylor on the garage roof fired at the fleeing gunman. He slowed but didn’t stop.
The man in fatigues was visible to Mike Crist in the yellow glow of a streetlight now. He whirled toward Crist, prepared to shoot it out with him, but Crist never wavered. “Drop your weapon,” he ordered, aiming at the gunman’s heart.
There were a few tense moments, and then Crist heard the clatter of a gun hitting the pavement. He had not had to fire his weapon. Slack’s and Taylor’s shots had struck the suspect.
The man, presumed to be Bennett LeClerk, was already wounded in the side of his neck and bleeding profusely. It was difficult to tell if he was seriously injured, but he was still on his feet. He was handcuffed and placed in a police unit to wait for paramedics, as the detectives who had pursued him and the Seattle officers rushed into the alley to check on the man who had screamed.
The target of the assassination plot lay in the alley, terribly wounded. He was conscious, though. He gave his name as Art Stahl. Stahl gasped that he had just walked out of a class on reflexology at the Acadia Health Center. He was in critical condition from a bullet that had pierced his chest at the midpoint of the breastbone and passed through his body, missing his spinal cord by a fraction of an inch. Seattle Fire Department Medic One paramedics rushed to stabilize his condition. When they tore open his shirt, they saw that the shot that hit him was a near-contact wound: the shooter had been standing less than a foot away from Stahl when he fired.
Before they could begin work, however, they had to shoo off members of Stahl’s reflexology class, who had removed his shoes and were applying pressure to his feet in an area that they insisted would help heal his chest wound.
The scene was chaos. The gunman was bleeding more heavily than his victim, but Bennett LeClerk was in no danger. Police bullets had merely torn away some of the soft fleshy part of his neck. As a Medic One rig raced Art Stahl to the ER at Harborview Hospital, Sara Talbot sat in her car trembling. She had attempted to pull away from the scene before LeClerk could run back to her car, and Seattle police had arrested her as an accomplice.
“No,” the Everett detectives said. “She’s with us. She’s a police informant.” Her handcuffs were removed, and she waited to give a statement.
Bennett LeClerk was taken to the Wallingford Precinct for questioning, complaining all the while about his wound. Deputy Dick Taylor informed him of his rights under Miranda, and he admitted orally that he had shot a man named Art because he was “trying to help a friend solve a problem. The best solution was to shoot the person causing the problem.”
LeClerk said he had been offered $1,000 to do the shooting, but he hadn’t taken it.
“Who asked you to do it?” Taylor asked.
“I can’t tell you,” LeClerk said. And he refused to put any statement in writing. He said he couldn’t answer any more questions because he could feel his throat swelling closed on the inside and he was having trouble breathing.
All questioning stopped—for the moment—and LeClerk too was transported to Group Health Hospital.
The mysterious hit had occurred in the city of Seattle. Seattle homicide detectives Sergeant Bruce Edmonds, Benny DePalmo, and Duane Homan were about to embark on one of the strangest investigations of their careers, and they were starting from scratch.
They retrieved and bagged LeClerk’s clothing from the hospital. They found a clump of artificial hair from the beard in his pants pocket, two black leather gloves, a black “Jawa” stick, two rounds of .38 bird shot, and a paper napkin. The napkin was covered with notes and doodles. Among the doodles was a swastika, which—given the crime—was not surprising.
The paper napkin had come from the cocktail lounge of the Holiday Inn in Everett, and on it was written all the vital information a hired killer might need to identify Art Stahl: “52, Art and Rose, L.D. Dogs, $3,000 5[.minute]9 150.”
On the lower half of the napkin was even more information that indicated that Bennett LeClerk knew exactly where to find his target: “Tuesdays only—Nov. 26, Acadia Health Center, 7–9 p.m. 1220 N. 45th, OTV-940, Black 2-door Dart 70, Bounty Tavern (next to the health center).”
The Seattle detectives knew already that Bennett LeClerk hadn’t known Art Stahl even well enough to recognize him by sight. Witnesses who had walked from his reflexology class with him said that the gunman had walked up to him and asked, “Are you Art?” When Stahl said yes the stranger pulled the trigger. The first shot mis-fired, but the shooter instantly fired again, and Art Stahl fell to the ground and began to scream.
Stahl, who was fighting for his life in the hospital’s critical care unit, could not be questioned. His estranged wife, Rose, was home when she was notified that he had been wounded. She told detectives later at the hospital that she was shocked and at a loss to explain the shooting. Yes, they’d been having marital difficulties, but violence had never been involved. She said they had been seeing a counselor and their friend Nancy Brooks, a registered nurse, was also helping them.
As soon as Rose Stahl got word that Art was in the hospital and might be dying, she called Nancy, who rushed over to baby-sit for the Stahls’ little boys. She would spend the night at the Stahl home so that Rose could stay at the hospital with Art.
Detectives Benny DePalmo and Duane Homan asked Rose if she knew anyone named Bennett LeClerk, and she shook her head.
“Does your friend Nancy know him?”
“I don’t know…. I don’t think so. She’s never mentioned him.”
Several seemingly unrelated events occurred the next day, Nove
mber 6, while Art Stahl remained in the ICU.
Claire Noonan called Nancy Brooks and asked her if she knew anything about Bennett’s shooting some man named “Stowe.”
“No,” Nancy replied.
“Have you seen Bennett lately?”
“Not for a long, long time, Claire,” Nancy said, adding that she had no idea what Bennett had been doing and she knew nothing of a man named Stowe being shot. Although her friend from California had misunderstood Stahl’s name, Nancy certainly had heard of the shooting, but she didn’t admit that to Bennett LeClerk’s mother.
At this point the Seattle police were working without a number of pieces of vital information. They knew that their victim was a University of Washington instructor, that he had been having trouble in his marriage, and that he had been shot by someone who was apparently a stranger to him. They did not know yet that Art Stahl was worth almost a million dollars.
The Seattle Homicide Unit commander, Captain Herb Swindler, received an anonymous call at home that day, however, that filled in a lot of the blank spots. “Stahl’s worth a bundle,” the voice said. “Nancy Brooks may know something about all of this.”
Detectives Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo learned that Art Stahl was out of surgery and awake. He was alert but clearly very frightened. He asked them if the police guard outside his hospital room could be kept there indefinitely. He didn’t say who he was afraid of, and the detectives got the idea that he didn’t really know. “I don’t know who to trust,” he said quietly, “but I have confidence in you two. I want to give you something. Hand me my trousers, would you?”
DePalmo got Stahl’s trousers from the closet, and the injured man fished in his pocket until he came up with a key ring. He took a small key off the ring and handed it to the detective. “Here, this is for my desk drawer in my office at the university. I have a private journal that I’ve been keeping there for a year. Get it and read it. Maybe you’ll get an idea of why this happened.”
They retrieved Stahl’s journal from his office and sat down to see if it held any clues to the shooting. As they read the running record of a loveless marriage, the two homicide investigators sympathized with Art Stahl. He’d had good reason to move out of his house. But even though Rose Stahl had threatened Art with a butcher knife, she wasn’t a viable suspect. They could definitely place her at home in Bellevue miles away across a floating bridge from the alley where the shooting occurred.
Rose had a motive for wanting her estranged husband dead; the investigators checked and found that Stahl was wealthy, that his $780,000 plus was tied up in a trust, and that if he died before his will was finalized, Rose would become the beneficiary of the trust.
By November 13 Art Stahl was recovering well, although he still wanted a police guard twenty-four hours a day. Homan and DePalmo couldn’t really blame him. They had attempted to learn more about his bleak marriage from the couples’ friend Nancy Brooks. But she told them she had been in still another automobile accident, which had aggravated her already delicate spine. “I just can’t come into Seattle to talk with you,” she said. “Could you come here? And I know you won’t mind, but I’d feel better if my attorney was present while you were here.”
Homan and DePalmo had no problem with that, although it seemed a little peculiar that Nancy Brooks would take such a precaution when she was only an outside witness—someone they hoped knew both Art and Rose Stahl well enough to throw a little light on their investigation.
The two detectives drove to the Brookses’ comfortable Bellevue home. They found Nancy to be a tall, somewhat fragile-looking woman, who seemed bemused by the news of Art Stahl’s shooting. She told them she knew Bennett LeClerk but did not mention any recent contact with him.
“Did LeClerk know Rose Stahl?” DePalmo asked.
Nancy Brooks shook her head. She didn’t think that he knew Rose, but said it was possible because they all raised dogs. “Rose and I raise poodles, but Bennett has German shepherds. I suppose she might have met him at a dog show or something.”
Nancy Brooks seemed slightly ill at ease when she spoke about LeClerk, but the detectives could not be certain why; it was almost as if she feared him. But this was a shocking situation, and the woman before them seemed refined and unused to violence. Nancy volunteered that she had last seen Bennett in Everett sometime around the latter part of October. She had gone there to “counsel” him because he was upset, but she hadn’t mentioned the visit to her husband.
“Why not?” Homan asked.
“My husband’s an engineer,” she said, wryly, “and he thinks like one.”
While that remark might have gone over the heads of anyone outside the Seattle area, Homan and DePalmo understood. “Boeing engineer jokes” were always making the rounds. The jokes ridiculed engineers for having no imagination and showing no emotion, for wearing pocket protectors full of pens, and for thinking only in mathematical terms.
Homan and DePalmo wondered about the relationship between Nancy Brooks and Bennett LeClerk, and they discussed it as they drove back to town. Were they lovers? It hardly seemed possible. Nancy was eleven or twelve years older than Bennett and had known him since he was a kid. She seemed like the complete housewife, modestly dressed to the point of being prim; it was almost impossible to picture her in a love nest with a man as flamboyant and peculiar as Bennett LeClerk. No, Nancy appeared to be the kind of woman who was always trying to help people—listening to their problems, offering solutions.
Still, there had to be some connection. No matter how they tried to reconstruct the events leading up to the shooting, Nancy Brooks was the link—seemingly the only link—between Bennett LeClerk and Art Stahl. The two men had not known each other even by sight, but Nancy knew both of them well.
It would be almost four months later before Bennett LeClerk was ready to give a full statement about the shooting on November 5. His story was so incredible that it was difficult to believe him, and yet it was the only explanation that made any sense.
Bennett LeClerk said he had known Nancy Brooks for many years, ever since he was a teenager in California. When he moved to Washington and learned that she and her husband lived within thirty miles of him, he had reestablished his friendship with her, and she had become his confidante.
LeClerk told police that Nancy had called him in late October 1974 and asked to meet him in the cocktail lounge of the Holiday Inn in Everett. There Nancy told him how worried she was about a “terrible” situation in her friend Rose’s home: Rose’s husband was a sadist, a child-beater, and an abuser. This was about the worst thing that Bennett LeClerk could imagine, he said. He himself had a blank space of several years in his memory of his early childhood because he had been physically abused by a stepfather. He deplored the thought that anyone could harm a child, and Nancy was telling him that this guy named Art was making his and Rose’s children’s lives hell.
“I asked her,” LeClerk said, “if divorce wouldn’t be the answer to saving the children from this guy, but Nancy said it wouldn’t be good enough.”
Nancy Brooks was asking him to kill Art so that her friend and the children wouldn’t have to be afraid any longer.
“I told her I’d think it over,” LeClerk said.
On Halloween, LeClerk and Nancy Brooks had had a second meeting at the Holiday Inn, this time in the parking lot. She seemed distraught and told him that the situation in Rose’s home was “deteriorating rapidly” and that he must do “it” as soon as possible. The children were suffering terribly.
He didn’t feel comfortable sitting in the hotel parking lot discussing murder, LeClerk said, so he drove Nancy to his own home, where they talked for about two hours, weighing the pros and cons of blasting Art off the face of the earth. There were two little boys in Art and Rose’s family, Nancy said—babies really—as well as some older children. Their father made them suffer, she said, very much as Bennett had suffered when he was a child.
LeClerk said Nancy promised to pay him $1,00
0 if he killed Art, but he said he wouldn’t take money from her; the money should come from Rose. “She shouldn’t be un-involved emotionally or morally,” he told Nancy. After all, they would be doing it for her and her children.
Nancy had convinced him, finally, that someone had to kill Art—and soon. “I told her I would do it,” Bennett said, “probably [the] next Tuesday.”
He then asked the woman who had been like an aunt to him, “But what if I get caught?”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she reportedly said. “Then I would have to deny everything.”
She showed him some small pictures of Art so he would know what his target looked like—but she took them back, LeClerk said.
LeClerk said he had then figured that if he wasn’t caught in the first ten minutes after the shooting, he would be home free. Police would not be able to connect him to Art, any more than they could connect two strangers passing on a busy street. He didn’t even want to know Art’s last name.
Bennett just knew he had to kill him. It had to be done to save the children.
The detectives realized that if their prisoner was telling the truth, Nancy Brooks had been an integral part of this murder for hire. Quite possibly she was the instigator. She was the sole connection between LeClerk and Stahl; she was the only one who knew exactly which buttons to push in the complex mind of Bennett LeClerk; she knew all about his childhood; and she knew that he lost it when he heard about kids being abused.
Once he had agreed to do what Nancy Brooks asked, LeClerk said he began planning. He needed Sara Talbot to drive him to the address Nancy had given him—the place where Art went every Tuesday night. Sara’s car wasn’t nearly as recognizable as his own fleet of flashy cars. “I planned to find Art’s car and clip the ignition wires so he couldn’t drive away from that health center,” he told the detectives.
He spent Tuesday morning, November 5, looking at houses “because I planned to go into the real estate business with Sara,” he explained. “I ate lunch with her. Later I had supper—what little I managed to get down.”