by Burl Barer
Kim and Gail had known each other for thirteen years and were best friends. “Since we are very close, we talk to each other about everything,” said Kim to detectives. “Gail and I went to the movies last night. It started at five after ten and we were back at my place about midnight. She went right home. I didn’t hear from her again until eight-thirty this morning when she phoned me, and said that she couldn’t find her daughter Roxanne. I then came right over.”
“Kim and I went out looking and calling for Roxanne,” recalled Shawn Angilley. “I never stopped looking for her and handing out flyers until eight-thirty P.M.”
“Roxanne Doll was kidnapped out of her bed between the time Tim Iffrig fell asleep on the couch and when Gail Doll got home from the movies,” said Herndon. “But with everyone intoxicated or asleep at the time, it was initially difficult to put all the pieces together.
“It was more than an hour or so after Gail and Tim returned from the campsite,” Herndon recalled, “and Richard Clark still hadn’t shown up. I waited around the victim residence until approximately six P.M. because I wanted to speak to him and any other witnesses who had been involved with the family prior to the disappearance.
“After Clark failed to show, I contacted the station and asked to check computer records for any information on a Richard Clark. According to the father, Tim Iffrig, Richard Clark had just gotten out of jail recently. I was able to narrow down the list of Richard Clarks to three possibilities—in other words, three guys named Richard Clark showed up in our database. Based on prior information obtained from Tim Iffrig, I determined that this Richard Clark’s last known address was on Lombard Street.”
It was 6:00 P.M. when Detectives Kiser and Herndon left the victim’s residence and drove seven miles to Richard Clark’s last-known address on Lombard. “We took Tim Iffrig and his brother, William D’alexander, along with us, since we were going to drive back up to the campsite to check for any possible evidence or signs of the victim.”
Iffrig, highly upset, couldn’t recall the campsite’s exact location, but his brother, William D’alexander, said he could lead the detectives to it with no problem at all.
“First I contacted Carol Clark at her home on Lombard,” reported Herndon, “and asked if Richard Clark still lived there at that residence. According to her, Richard did stay there on occasion, but he had not been there on that day. Carol Clark stated that Richard might be at his father’s house in Marysville, Washington. I gave her my card and pager number and instructed her to have Richard call me as soon as possible.”
The entourage of Herndon, Kiser, Iffrig, and D’alexander headed for the campsite, stopping along the way at the George Clark residence in Marysville, Washington.
“If you’re looking for Richard, you just missed him,” said George Clark Sr. “He was here earlier, but I don’t know if we’ll be hearing from him anytime soon.” Herndon provided his pager number. “Please have Richard call me as soon as possible,” asked the detective, and George Clark promised to do so.
Herndon radioed the police station and asked for an all vehicles registered report. “I soon learned that Mr. Clark’s van was a 1978 Dodge with Washington State plates. I advised dispatch to put an attempt to locate on this vehicle, adding that I needed to speak to Mr. Clark and the occupants regarding Roxanne Doll’s disappearance.”
Thanks to D’alexander, the Red Bridge/Coal Creek campground site used by Iffrig, Clark, and party was easily found. “It could be best described,” recalled Herndon, “as an undeveloped, unauthorized campsite along the main highway. We checked the area with flashlights and could not locate any pertinent evidence, or Roxanne Doll. At that time, there were no other campers in the area, although Iffrig stated that another party of two had been camping near their campsite.”
The other party to which Iffrig referred was that of Bruce Hawkins. “I saw this Dodge Van—sort of tan or rust in color—pull into my camp. The driver was a white male with slightly curly, shoulder-length light-colored hair. He was wearing wire glasses,” said Hawkins, describing Richard Clark. “There was another guy who said he was the missing girl’s uncle,” he continued. “He had long hair in back, short on the sides, and a Fu Manchu mustache. The fellow, who might have been the girl’s father, since I saw the sheriff drive off with him, had long, dark hair. He was slim, but looked in shape. Then there was a woman, a large woman with a loud voice. She talked real loud. And then there was a Native American Indian, who, I believe, had some top teeth missing.
“Anyway,” explained Hawkins, “these folks showed up at my site and they pissed my dogs off, and started saying stuff like ‘Don’t mess with me or I’ll kick your ass.’ I grabbed my two very large dogs and I told them to leave. The uncle and I did have a brief scuffle. I did indulge in about half a fifth of Black Velvet at this time,” Hawkins acknowledged, “and that’s about all.”
The detectives returned Iffrig and D’alexander to Iffrig’s residence. “Tim was understandably an emotional wreck, as any father would be. He was terribly distraught over the disappearance of his little girl. Of course, everyone at his house was very emotional. Gail Doll, completely drained and exhausted, was out cold on the couch.”
On their way back to the police station, Detectives Kiser and Herndon learned that Richard Clark and his aunt Vicki Smith drove to the police station in Everett, where they spoke briefly with Lieutenant Peter Hegge.
“Before going to the police station, Richard drove Jimmy Miller and his girlfriend, Lisa, back to the house,” said Vicki. “I went in the house, but then I said to Richard that I wanted to go into town with him. All my stuff and Tim’s stuff was still in the van.”
“Vicki Smith was heavily intoxicated at that time,” recalled Lieutenant Hegge. “She smelled of alcohol; her eyes were watery; she had trouble walking, and also had the odor of wood smoke, which I attributed to the camping experience. Clark did not seem to be intoxicated.”
Hegge told Clark and Smith that detectives were at the Doll-Iffrig residence interviewing everyone who might have information relevant to the search for Doll. He asked Smith and Clark to go to the Doll-Iffrig house and talk to the detectives. Clark agreed to drive Smith and himself there.
Clark drove by the Doll-Iffrig house, but he didn’t stop. Vicki Smith personally didn’t want to go there. “I figured I would just be in the way,” she said. “When Richard saw all the cops there, he just kept driving.” Richard Mathew Clark never arrived at the Iffrig residence. After leaving the police station, Richard drove his alcoholically altered aunt Vicki to Carol’s house on Lombard. Vicki Smith and he stayed, she said, about four hours.
Vicki told detectives that Richard Clark later gave her a ride to Aaron’s Restaurant in Everett. “He just left me there in the cocktail lounge. I don’t know where he went or what he did after he left me at Aaron’s,” said Vicki. “I walked to my daughter’s house after the bar closed, and I didn’t see Richard again until Sunday.”
“I think the next time Gail Doll saw Richard Clark,” commented Detective Herndon, “was when he was on trial for murdering her child.”
Chapter 5
Vicki Smith’s recollections of April 1 are both somewhat accurate and moderately befogged. It is true that she and Richard stayed at Aunt Carol’s until late in the evening, but prior to attending Aaron’s, the slightly sloshed Smith/Clark duo’s destination was the Sports Center. It was there that Clark and his aunt Vicki encountered Richard’s longtime associate and occasional criminal cohort, Michael Jaaskela.
“Richard Clark and I are old pals,” Jaaskela said. Years of friendly association with Richard Clark provided Jaaskela with a plethora of pleasant memories. “We’ve done crime together; we’ve drank together; we’ve done drugs together. And without getting myself in trouble, we robbed a rental place out in Marysville, and we took a cherry picker and a bunch of tools and other shit.
“We done lots of crime,” he said, “lots of bad stuff, lots of drugs, lots of drinking, yes. We partied to
gether many of years—many a times. As for Richard being a big drinker, he’s a real hard-core alcoholic. He also does cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana, LSD, and basically about everything.
“I seen him the night after the abduction of Roxanne Doll,” he recalled. “Yes, I seen him at the Sports Center, downtown Everett. I know it was Saturday night, April first, because my lady has the receipt that we got money. I loaned him money that night and I have a receipt that says the second, that was seven minutes after midnight, so it would be Sunday, so I know it was Saturday night that I saw him.”
Despite his acknowledged intoxication, Jaaskela’s recollection was remarkably clear. “The Sports Center was closing, so it must have been at least ten or ten-thirty, thereabouts. I know the time because the bartender took a half hour to get me a beer. I was sitting there and I asked Kevin for another beer, but he wouldn’t serve me because I was already drunk. I ordered a beer and it took about a half hour before he would give it to me.”
The loquacious inebriant downed his beer and was preparing to stumble toward the door when his old pal Richard “Animal” Clark came in. “He had his aunt Vicki with him,” recalled Jaaskela. “They were told that they couldn’t order a drink ’cause the place was closing.
“The three of us proceeded to go down to the Aaron’s Restaurant and Lounge so we could have some drinks down there. It was me, Richard, and Vicki, and we probably got there between ten-thirty and quarter to eleven. We stayed long enough for two drinks,” explained Jaaskela. Realizing not everyone conceptualizes time in relation to alcohol consumption, he added, “About half an hour is approximately enough for two drinks.
“Actually, to be precise,” he clarified, “I had one drink, Richard had a beer and a straight shot of tequila, and Vicki had a beer, two rum and Cokes, I think. I’m pretty sure. I had a rum and Coke myself.”
Richard Clark and Mike Jaaskela left Aaron’s together. “We were walking by the First Interstate Bank and I asked Richard, ‘Should you be leaving your aunt alone?’ I asked if she had any money, and he said she did. I asked him if she had a hundred, you know, he said no. I said, ‘Well, she have two hundred?’ He said no. I said, ‘Well, does she have three hundred?’ And he said yeah, she has about three hundred dollars, and I said, ‘Well, you’re leaving her with some guy down at the bar that you know that could peel her for all her money’. I said she’s about three-sheets-to-the-wind drunk, she’s literally plastered. And I said, ‘Well, why don’t we go back and peel her for her three hundred dollars? Let’s scam her or steal her three hundred dollars.’”
Richard’s response, Jaaskela reported, was uncharacteristically conservative. “He seemed really distant or something. He didn’t want to do it. That struck me strange because other times he would have took it. Boom! He would jump at the chance to rip somebody off for three hundred dollars, you know.”
Perhaps the prospect of peeling his beloved Aunt Vicki violated Clark’s moral code. “Oh no, that wasn’t it,” said Jaaskela. “He don’t have one of those. Anyway, I kept on trying to get him to come back and try to go get Aunt Vicki. Why leave her there with three hundred dollars? I stopped him about three times to make sure that he didn’t want to go back.”
The main reason for Richard Clark’s reluctance, Jaaskela believed, was Clark’s increased paranoia of the Everett police. “He said he was just afraid the police might get him or pull him over. He was really paranoid at this point about the police pulling him over. He’s never been paranoid before about being pulled over, you know, because he don’t have a driver’s license, he don’t have no insurance. He had nothin’ to worry about anyway, but he just didn’t want to see the police. He didn’t want to see the police, period, at all.
“Now, by this time, he was really buzzed. He was pretty well drunk. He was legally drunk,” asserted Jaaskela. “From that point, we kept on walking down to his aunt Carol’s house and we got in his van and he chopped up some crystal meth and shared it with me.
“I don’t remember what he used to chop it up. It was pretty dark. I do remember that little dog whining and whimpering soon as I got in the van. I do remember the dog just whining and wouldn’t shut up the whole time and everything, and Richard picked it up. Like the dog was really freaked out or something. I mean, I don’t know what was wrong with it, it just kept on whining and whining the whole twenty minutes I was in the van. That dog was freaked out about something. I don’t know. The dog just kept on whining and whining. It was happy to see Richard, but when Richard picked it up, the little black puppy was still whining.”
Clark and Jaaskela each snorted a line of meth. “Yes, we did. We both did a line, but maybe close to a half gram of crystal meth. I did a line and he did a way much bigger line. He said that when we were previously at the Sports Center that he had been up the night before doing crystal meth then too. You know, he had not just been up that day; you know, he was up since at least six Friday morning.”
The average person, according to Jaaskela, will stay awake for twenty-four to thirty hours after snorting a line of meth. “You just don’t go to sleep.” Finished snorting meth, Clark and Jaaskela then went to the Buzz Inn Tavern in search of Jasskela’s friend Mike. “I had a pitcher of beer, and then me and Richard went over to my house to get some money. My ol’ lady only had twenty dollars on her, and Richard wanted to borrow a twenty, but I needed some money too. So my girlfriend, Angela Caudle, took Richard, her, and the van up to the bank.”
When Angela Caudle mentioned a ride to the Safeway store, Clark thought she said “south Everett”—the area in which the Doll-Iffrig residence was located. “He said no, and seemed really wigged out about it,” recalled Jaaskela. “There was no way that he could go to south Everett. He didn’t indicate why or, or any reason, you know, why he couldn’t go to south Everett. He was trippin’ out or he seemed weird about it, apparently, whatever you want to call it. He made that point clear, you know. He was not giving a ride to south Everett.”
At approximately ten minutes before midnight, Richard Clark drove the five to seven minutes required to get back to the First Interstate Bank. “And five minutes to get back,” Jaaskela said. “The bank receipt said, like, seven minutes after twelve on Sunday morning.”
Twenty bucks was lent to Richard Clark, he returned Angela home, and Jaaskela and he drove back to the Buzz Inn. The object of the exercise was for the three men to go in together on some cocaine.
“My friend Mike was playing a game of pool, and we sat there twenty minutes, and Richard seemed all nervous. He wanted Mike to hurry up because he wanted to go eat, and he wanted to hurry up and go, and we just wanted Mike to hurry up, hurry, hurry, hurry, period. You know, just kept on saying, ‘Hurry ’em up, hurry ’em up, hurry ’em up. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ I don’t know why he was in such a hurry,” said Jaaskela. “It seemed really strange that he was in a hurry. Hurry to go somewhere. But he was going nowhere. He was waitin’ for his cocaine.”
The three men—Clark, Jaaskela, and Mike—all went in on a half gram of cocaine that they purchased from a friend at the Buzz Inn. The three men went out to Clark’s van. Mike got in front with Richard, and Jaaskela climbed into the back of the van.
“It was then, when I got in the back of the van, that I got hit by the smell—it almost turned my stomach. It wasn’t the smell of dog poop, or dog pee, or dirty socks,” he said. “It was kind of like urine, except a hell of a lot stronger and real sick-sort-of smelling. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it was bad—really bad. It smelled like fuckin’ death back there.”
Wincing from the noxious odor, Jaaskela tried to make himself comfortable. “I sat down on some kind of plastic material back there. It was a tarp or a tent, I guess.” Even though the van was dark, the lights from the Buzz Inn parking lot provided sufficient illumination for Jaaskela to see what he described as a blue or gray plastic tarp.
The three men went to Mike’s house, and down to the basement to do the rest of the cocaine and met
h. “We all shared,” remarked Jaaskela proudly. “We didn’t say much of anything, just sat there and talked about Mike’s mom and dad coming downstairs and busting us up and calling Hawaii Five-O on us—the cops. So we took out of there and went upstairs, we got in Richard’s van and went back to the Buzz Inn.”
Jaaskela and Mike exited the van. “By the time we turned around, Richard was gone,” said an irked Jaaskela. “He hadn’t said anything to me or Mike about going anywhere, but he sure was in a hurry.” Clark ditched his friends outside the Buzz Inn between 1:30 and 1:45 A.M., leaving them to walk home.
Such behavior was uncharacteristic for Clark, according to Jaaskela. “But the whole night he wasn’t like himself at all. He was way different—distant, quiet—not at all like he usually is. As a rule, he’s real jabber-jaws. You can’t get Richard to shut up. Ya know, yak yak yak. All the time, flappin’ his jaws.”
Saturday night, April 1, Richard Mathew Clark was markedly different. “Dead quiet. Like he wasn’t there. Weird.” Looking back on his former friend’s demeanor, Jaaskela was most troubled by Clark’s complete silence on the topic of Roxanne Doll.
“He said nothing about the missing child, Roxanne Doll,” recalled Jaaskela. “He said nothing of having been camping with Roxanne’s father, or that he even knew the girl and the family. He never said nothing about the little girl being missing or anything. He didn’t tell me that he had gone camping the previous night with a friend named Tim, or nothing.”
Clark’s silence, especially regarding the missing Roxanne Doll, preyed heavily on Jaaskela’s mind. “Everybody knew that little girl was missing—it was on the news and everybody was talking about it. And Richard, who knew the girl and the family and all that, didn’t say a single word about it all the time we were together.