by Robert Scott
The young man punched Linda in the face very hard. Then he told her she was coming with him, whether she wanted to or not. He may have punched her so hard—she blacked out for a moment. Whatever the case, they were soon on their way west and north to his residence in the small town of Cottonwood. It was almost an hour drive there from Chico.
Once again, there would be a later debate of just where he took her first. He would speak at some point of taking her to his house, where he raped her. At least that was one later version. He may have just driven her into the countryside and raped her in his vehicle as he had done with some others. Even he couldn’t remember for sure as time passed.
One thing was certain: Like a beacon, the Igo dump drew him back once again, even though it was more than fifteen miles away down a twisting narrow road from his residence. It was the early-morning hours by then and very dark in the vicinity.
Once he had her in that hellish location, he would speak of another thing that may have transpired. He forced her to disrobe and to lie down on a towel that he had swiped from a Motel 6. Then he orally copulated her and had intercourse. This may have been the second sexual assault of the night, but even his memory of this would be very sketchy later.
Once he was through, he dragged Linda over and pulled away some trash from where Pam Moore’s body was located. It was a ghoulish sight by now because of the heat and insects. Pam’s body was already partially mummified from the heat.
Linda begged for her life, but all of it fell on deaf ears. She cried, “Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!” The man pulled out a .22-caliber pistol or .22 rifle. Then he shot her in the neck.
Linda screamed, and the next bullet ripped through her open mouth and out the back of her head. She fell to the ground, dead.
When he was sure she was dead, he dragged her body over near that of Pam Moore’s body, and covered them both with trash. Then he looked around, almost in a daze. All of it was becoming more and more surreal, and he wasn’t even sure if all of this was really happening or if it was some nightmare of his own devising. His grasp on reality was reaching the breaking point.
Paul Slavik awoke around six in the morning of August 9 and was surprised to see that Linda had not returned home. She had never done anything like that before. He became worried and phoned Linda’s mother, Twyla, who just happened to work for the Oroville Police Department (OPD).
Just like Annette Edwards, Linda Slavik’s friends and family had no idea what had happened to her. Twyla told a reporter, “No one saw her leave. I don’t believe she did anything like this willingly.”
Paul added that he and Linda weren’t having any marital problems. Besides, Linda had a nine-year-old child to take care of, and she was a responsible person.
Sara Pierson was questioned. She said that she’d last seen Linda in the tavern when she had gone outside to talk to some friends and then left with them for a while. When Sara came back in, Linda was gone. Sara looked around for her. When she could not be found, Sara drove back to Oroville alone. She figured that Linda had gotten a ride home with someone else.
Linda was described as being five feet four inches tall, weighed 125 pounds, with shoulder-length brown hair and blue eyes. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses, a white knit top and blue jeans when last seen.
A very short article about Linda appeared in the Oroville Mercury Register on August 14, 1978. The headline was OROVILLE WOMAN MISSING and it noted that the police departments in Oroville and Chico were seeking information about her. A new item was included in the article: Sara Pierson said that Linda’s purse was also missing.
The next day a photo of Linda appeared in the newspaper. She was wearing glasses and smiled at the camera. Once again the pertinent details about her were given and was accompanied by a request for anyone with information to contact the police. Despite so many people having been at Madison Bear Garden on the night in question, no one could recall Linda getting into any person’s car. However, one man who had been there thought he had seen her go out the back entrance with a bearded man.
All the urges were like a steamroller now for the young man. Sex with his girlfriend, Darlene, wasn’t enough, nor was sex with another girl he’d picked up on the side. She was named Lori, and she was only fifteen-years old. He liked them young, but even Lori couldn’t satisfy him when he was in such a state. He liked sex rough and he liked to see the terror in his victims’ eyes.
Lori would later say that he never abused her in any way. They did get into arguments, but that’s as far as things went, as far as she was concerned. What she didn’t know was the double life he was leading.
Even more than that, the “incidents” seemed to occur when he was angry. And he was angry a lot lately. Nothing seemed to be going right in his life, and it had not done so for a long time.
When the man and Lori went to a movie theater in Redding on August 13, they had an argument. He dropped Lori off near her house, instead of going to the movies, and the young man was angry once again. It was at times like these that the urges were at their worst.
He drove back to the small town of Cottonwood, where he lived, south of Redding, and was heading home. By chance he spotted eleven-year-old Annette Selix. He knew her and she knew him. They were neighbors in the quiet small town.
Annette had a bagful of groceries and was on her way home. It was 9:30 P.M. The man offered her a ride. Because she knew him, she accepted. In fact, Annette knew that the bearded young man was twenty-three-year-old Darrell Keith Rich. What she didn’t know was that in the last two-and-a-half months, he had raped numerous women and girls, and had murdered three of them.
Chapter 8
Young Darrell
Born in 1955, Darrell was not initially a member of the Rich family. He was adopted at the age of two days by Dean and Lillie Rich, of Cottonwood, California. Darrell was involved in his first automobile accident at the age of one and a half, when the car he was riding in overturned in a ditch. He was not badly hurt in that accident, but accidents and trauma would become a big part of his life.
Darrell Rich was a clean-cut young man when he played basketball on
the Cottonwood High School team. (Yearbook photo)
Darrell always tried to please his parents, but his father was somewhat distant and his mother domineering. She took care of other people’s children in the home to earn money for the household. Lillie spent a lot more time with them than with Darrell. As time went on, he resented all the attention the other children were given and the lack of it that he received.
Despite all of this, Darrell was helpful around the household and soon had a sister, Sharon, who was also adopted. Early on, Darrell had trouble in school. He was kept back in first grade a year, and he resented that—on top of his home situation, which was chaotic. His parents often argued right in front of him, and Darrell had few friends in school. He was moody and angry, and a school counselor stated at one point, “Without treatment he may become violent.”
Darrell also seemed to be accident-prone and was a victim of just plain bad luck. He got asthma by the second grade and fell off a horse in the third grade. He received some substantial injuries.
Darrell later said he was upset at mealtimes because his parents argued a lot then. One thing Darrell did not do was take out his anger on the other children whom his mother watched during day care. Darrell was kind to them when he felt like interacting with them, although he preferred to remain alone in his room most of the time. When he did interact with the younger kids, he gave them rides on a go-cart device that he’d constructed.
Darrell could also be brave. When a young boy named Jamie and another child fell into a local canal, they started drifting downstream. Darrell jumped in and saved their lives. It was the one bright shining moment in Darrell’s life.
A less noble part of Darrell’s life emerged later. When he was fourteen, he took a local girl into a barn on the property and told her to take off her clothes. This would only come out much later i
n court documents. Darrell’s mother did find a girl’s bra and panties in the barn after this incident.
Darrell’s parents divorced when he was fifteen and it made him even more moody and troubled. Darrell initially moved with his mother down to Southern California, but he did no better in school there. His grades only got worse, and he was characterized by a counselor as “antisocial.”
Darrell did not spend long in Southern California. He moved back up to Cottonwood and lived with his father and stepmom, helping his father do ornamental ironwork. Darrell’s grades were not improving, and he enrolled in a continuation school.
By this point he did have a girlfriend—a girl named Mary P. They often argued and fought. When she broke up with him, Darrell was despondent. He felt that no one loved him, not even his parents.
After the breakup with Mary, Darrell went out into the woods with a gun, ostensibly to go hunting. Instead, he aimed the gun at his chest and pulled the trigger. He was wounded in the suicide attempt, but he did not receive a life-threatening injury. The psychological scars, however, were more profound. And then in 1973, Darrell turned eighteen.
The year 1973 was not a good one for Darrell. He was living with his father in the Cottonwood area and was very despondent about life in general. Perhaps he had been drinking or just felt at the end of his rope. For whatever reason he shot over the top of a sheriff ’s office deputy’s vehicle while the officer was inside it. It was a miracle that the officer didn’t shoot back and kill Darrell.
Instead, Darrell was arrested and asked why he had acted in such an unprovoked manner. Darrell said he was suicidal and hoped the officer would shoot back and kill him. Darrell was then given a psychological evaluation. It was judged that he needed counseling.
Darrell did see psychologist Marcy DaCosta for a while. She wrote in one report: He was very depressed and had a hunger for affection and reassurance. He was very sensitive to rejection.
DaCosta’s diagnosis of Darrell: He has an explosive personality or passive-aggressive personality type. Unfortunately for his future and those around him, Darrell did not keep up his meetings with DaCosta. She later wrote, Had he done so, I would have probably diagnosed antisocial behavior on his part. She felt that he needed ongoing counseling. She was more than likely right. Less than a month later, Darrell was in a lot more trouble.
Around 1:30 A.M. on August 16, 1973, nineteen-year-old Kathleen Webb and twenty-year-old Mark Steele were driving through Lake Redding Park. Kathleen was a student at Shasta College, and Mark was the driver of her 1969 Volkswagen Beetle that night. They drove near the baseball fields in the park. As they did so, a vehicle pulled up on their right.
Darrell Rich lived in Cottonwood for most of his life. It had a historic old
western downtown area. (Author photo)
Kathleen recalled, “We thought we recognized the car at first, but it wasn’t anyone that we knew. There were young guys in the car, and the driver, who had brown hair and a moustache, asked us if we knew Chris. Mark said, ‘I don’t know. Chris who?’
“The guy answered with a last name that we didn’t know. Mark said, ‘I never heard of him.’
“A guy in the rear seat said, ‘How about letting us borrow your chick?’ ”
(Mark would remember it as “How about letting us ball your chick?”)
“Mark said, ‘Screw you!’ ”
Kathleen continued, “We started to drive off, and the driver of that car sped up and rammed us on the passenger-side door. We took off and got to one point where we were sliding on the road, and that car hit us again. Then they backed up and got out of the car. There were four guys. We took off as best we could, with our fender dragging on the wheel. We went toward the Elks Club, because that was the way our car ended up.” (It had been completely spun around). “I was scared to death, screaming and near tears.
“Mark drove as fast as he could, hoping to avoid meeting them again. We went straight to the police station and they did not follow us. I had seen the license plate number of that car and remembered it. It was a sedan and sort of purple-looking in the dark under the lights.” (Actually, it was brown.) “This happened around one forty-five A.M.”
As soon as they got to the Redding Police Department, both of them gave reports to an officer about what had just occurred. Mark Steele wrote that he had been driving his girlfriend’s Volkswagen, and most of his recollections jibed with those of Kathleen.
From the information, Officer Lynch wrote up a report about the incident and noted it as a “245 PC—Assault.” Helping him greatly was the fact that Kathleen had noted the license plate number of a four-door Dodge. And as far as damage went, Lynch wrote, Major damage to right side of 1969 Volkswagen Sedan.
Officer Lynch discovered that the license plate number that Kathleen had given him was related to a vehicle owned by Lillie Ellen Rich, of Cottonwood. And that vehicle was a 1966 Dodge four-door sedan.
Officer Lynch handed this case over to Sergeant J. C. Dilley, who looked into Shasta County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) records concerning any young male who had the last name of Rich and resided in the area. What came back was the name Darrell Rich, of Cottonwood, who had been arrested recently, on July 31, 1973, for an assault on a police officer. Darrell lived on Gas Point Road in Cottonwood.
Noting that the place where Darrell lived and the address on the Dodge’s registration form were the same, Sergeant Dilley went over to the SCSO to get a booking photo of Darrell. Dilley put the photo on a lineup board with five other males who looked somewhat similar to Darrell. Dilley then went to Kathleen Webb’s home and showed her the lineup board. She could not pick out any of the men shown there.
Sergeant Dilley then went to the place where Mark Steele lived and showed him the same photo lineup. Mark picked out photo number three of possibly being the person who had been driving the car that rammed them. The person in photo number three was Darrell Rich.
Around 1:00 P.M. that same day, Sergeant Dilley contacted Deputy Sheriff Bradd McDannald at the Standard Station on Gas Point Road in Cottonwood. From there they both proceeded to the Rich residence and noted a 1966 Dodge parked in the driveway. It had fresh damage on the left side of the vehicle, on the front.
Walking up to the house, they contacted Darrell’s mom, Lillie, and she told them that Darrell was currently working at Rich’s welding company in Anderson. Sergeant Dilley explained the circumstances to Lillie and asked her if Darrell had been driving her car in the early-morning hours. She replied that Darrell had taken that car at around eight o’clock on the previous night and said he was going to a friend’s house. The friend in question was a boy named Russ. She thought Darrell wouldn’t spend very long there, but he stayed out quite late and didn’t get home until around 2:30 A.M.
Sergeant Dilley asked about the fresh damage on the Dodge, and she agreed that it had occurred when Darrell had taken the car out the previous night. Dilley asked if she had inquired where he had been during his drive, and she said she had not done so. At that, Sergeant Dilley told Lillie that the car was evidence in a case and was going to be impounded.
Don Davis Towing was called. While the officers were waiting, Lillie came outside and told them she had called Darrell at work and had explained what was happening. A short time after two in the afternoon, Darrell arrived at the house and Sergeant Dilley advised him of his Miranda rights. Apparently, Darrell waived his rights not to speak to the officers. Darrell told them that he had indeed driven the Dodge on the previous night and had taken it to Redding.
Darrell said he drove to his friend Russ’s house, but he only stayed there for about five minutes. He said he then went to an area near a service station in Redding because he knew a girl who lived somewhere around there. He could not locate her residence, so he went to the Bank of America parking lot in Redding, on California Street.
While he was parked there, deciding what to do next, Darrell said, “Some guy I didn’t know asked if he could borrow the car to go and get some ciga
rettes. I let him do it, and he was gone about an hour and a half. I think this was about ten-thirty or eleven P.M. The car wasn’t damaged when I had it, but I didn’t notice if it was damaged when the kid brought it back. I then came back to Cottonwood and goofed around the Cottonwood Inn for a while.”
Sergeant Dilley inquired what time he thought it was when he let “the kid” borrow the car. Darrell said that was after 9:00 P.M. He described the person as being eighteen or nineteen years old, five-ten and about 180 pounds. He was husky, with black hair and sideburns.
Sergeant Dilley then asked what time he had returned home. Before Darrell answered, Lillie spoke up and said, “He got home about two-thirty A.M.” Darrell was surprised by this comment and replied, “I didn’t think it was that late.”
Sergeant Dilley explained to Darrell about the incident and why he and Deputy Sheriff McDannald were there. Then Dilley said, “There was a report of that license plate number being at Lake Redding Park at around one-thirty to two A.M.” To this, Darrell retorted with an odd comment: “Well, if it was there, I must have been, too.”
Sergeant Dilley asked Darrell if he knew anyone who lived up in Redding in that area. Darrell said he knew a guy named Chris. To this, Sergeant Dilley read the reports from Kathleen Webb and Mark Steele about a driver of the Dodge asking about a guy named Chris. All Darrell had to say to that was “Oh.”
The Dodge was towed to Redding and a Redding Police Department identification officer looked it over. Paint samples were taken for a cross match to Webb’s Volkswagen, and the Dodge was dusted for fingerprints.