by Ann Rule
Joey had a difficult time getting along with others, but he could not cause much trouble in solitary confinement, and he spent so much time in forced solitude that he earned time off for good behavior. On May 24, 2011, Joey Pedersen was released from the Oregon state prison.
A fellow convict, paroled shortly before Joey, was involved in cage fighting, a particularly violent sport of mixed martial arts, with no holds barred. It sounded exciting to Joey. It was something he’d always wanted to try. Joey’s ex-con friend coached him, and Joey competed in three bouts and lost all three. He shrugged it off, saying, “You’re supposed to train for six months before a bout, and I only trained for two weeks.”
* * *
DeeDee and her daughters were unaware of Joey’s activities and did not realize he was planning a visit. They couldn’t have known that Red’s son was filled with rage.
As September drew to a close that year, the vine maples’ leaves were edged with the brilliant orange that would soon turn them into solid flames.
Susan and Lori Jane were both struck with a premonition that something bad was about to happen. The title of the classic Ray Bradbury novel came to mind: Something Wicked This Way Comes.
The sisters found themselves quoting the words of the ominous title to each other in the following days as they felt the cold shadow of foreboding. Neither could pinpoint just what it was that worried them, but they were compelled to make frequent welfare checks on members of their family, especially on their mother.
Susan and Lori Jane took turns checking on her, calling her every day.
September had always been a bad time for their family, and it seemed most of the deaths of those close to them happened in that month. Maybe that was why they were so jumpy. The sisters remembered one particularly bad September when they had lost a cousin in a horrific way. As far as they were concerned, it was murder, but no one was ever held accountable for the death of Timothy Hartley York.
Tim was only twenty when the tragedy happened. It was September 26, 1984, and Tim was standing near a bonfire when another youth foolishly threw a can of gasoline onto the fire. Tim sustained serious injuries in the resulting explosion, and he died soon afterward.
Lori and Susan hoped that their fear was caused by nothing more than bad memories of past tragedies. Still, they felt something was not quite right in their mother’s world. They knew that she and Red were struggling with financial difficulties. But it seemed that something more might be bothering her.
DeeDee’s sister sensed it, too. Bubbles and DeeDee met for lunch in early September 2011. Aunt Bubbles would later tell her nieces that something was obviously troubling DeeDee. But whatever it was, DeeDee kept it to herself.
Then one day, out of the blue, Joey Pedersen showed up on his father’s doorstep. He brought his girlfriend along, and DeeDee welcomed them warmly.
Joey had his father’s fiery red hair, cropped close to his skull. He looked like the stereotypical ex-con, tough and covered with tattoos. Holly Ann Grigsby, twenty-four, stood about five foot four and was slightly underweight and plain.
She barely responded to DeeDee’s attempts to make friendly conversation. While she knew that Joey’s past was less than pristine, it is unlikely that DeeDee was aware that Holly had been in and out of Oregon prisons for the past five years and that her rap sheet included five felony convictions.
If DeeDee was startled by Joey’s tattoos or put off by Holly’s glum demeanor, she didn’t mention it to anyone.
She was a good sport, and she went along with Red when he took Holly and Joey to a shooting range near Arlington, Washington, on Friday, September 23.
She may have put on a cheerful face, but shooting guns was not DeeDee’s idea of a good time. The employees at Norpoint Shooting Center noticed that DeeDee did not seem excited to be there.
After briefly firing a gun at the target—a silhouette of an upper torso—DeeDee put down her weapon and went to sit outside, where she flipped through magazines as she waited for the others to finish.
The foursome was at the range for just half an hour, and employees were glad to see them go. Their presence made them uncomfortable.
Joey frightened them. His tattoos spoke volumes about his mind-set. Covering his neck and creeping up onto his face, the ink marked him as an angry racist: SWP. It stood for Supreme White Power.
Holly, too, made people uneasy. She was too quiet, a gloomy kind of quiet, as if something dark smoldered inside her. Holly participated in the shooting but barely spoke a word to those with her or to the employees at the range.
Employees at the gun range were unaware that the young couple had both been convicted of felonies and that they were not allowed to handle guns. Joey and Holly had signed the standard liability waiver with the names Josh Spencer and Melissa Wright.
The guns belonged to Red, and he and DeeDee signed their real names to the waivers. They had nothing to hide, certainly no criminal records. And there was no reason for them to think that the two young people shooting beside them were plotting something evil.
As usual, DeeDee was a gracious hostess. She cooked and cleaned and did her best to make their guests comfortable in her mobile home, which was a little crowded with Joey and Holly sharing the space with them.
DeeDee was more than four decades older than Holly, and she was as vivacious as the younger woman was introverted. On the surface, it appeared the two had nothing in common. But though they did not know it, DeeDee and her sullen female houseguest did have something in common.
Holly Grigsby had been molested as a child, just as DeeDee had been violated. Both Holly and DeeDee had been around age seven when their mothers married men who preyed upon their children.
Holly had been just a year old, her sister three, when her parents split. Her mother would marry twice more over the next few years.
According to Holly’s relatives, she was a happy, helpful child, but she began to rebel around the age of thirteen when she got involved with drugs. The next years were chaotic, and Holly lived with her father, Fred, for a time while she tried to get off of heroin and meth.
Fred wanted to help the troubled teen, but Holly was out of control. She made some feeble attempts, but she lost the battle with her addictions. Her father was upset when he discovered she’d been doing drugs in his bathroom.
One night, she came home yelling racial slurs. Fred had had enough. The police were called, and Holly was told she was not allowed to return to her father’s home.
Fred would later tell a reporter that it broke his heart to send his daughter away. “It was terrible,” he said. “It’s a hard thing to tell your child.”
Miraculously, Holly seemed to pull herself together. She attended Parkrose High School in Portland, Oregon, and graduated in 2005. She was the first one in her family to earn a high school diploma, and her family was proud of her.
An uncle helped her rent an apartment, and Holly got a secondhand truck. She worked two jobs, and she seemed determined to make something of herself.
But a few months after graduation, Holly was in trouble again. She was arrested for trying to steal a trailer. She stood in the Multnomah County Courthouse in October 2005 as Judge Kathleen Dailey sentenced her to eighteen months’ probation and offered prophetic words of warning. “I worry for you, Miss Grigsby,” Judge Dailey said. “If you don’t get a handle on this, your life will just go down the toilet.”
The judge’s words apparently had little impact on Holly. In January 2006, shortly before her nineteenth birthday, she once again faced charges in Multnomah County Court, this time for two Class C felonies: identity theft and unauthorized use of an automobile.
Holly told Judge Michael McShane that her boyfriend (who was also her stepbrother) was violent and that he beat her if she refused to steal for him to get money for drugs.
Judge McShane sentenced Holly to thirteen months in prison and told her, “The one thing I don’t want you to do is go back with crappy men.”
The
judge may have zeroed in on Holly’s most salient problem. According to her family and friends, her fatal flaw was her taste in men. She found “bad boys” attractive, and she was easily influenced by them.
Holly would collect a total of five felonies over the next several years. The friends she met in prison further entrenched her already twisted perspective on the world.
She had a swastika tattoo on her right ankle, and during one prison sentence, she bonded with Sandee,* the only other female there with the same offensive image branded on her flesh. The two Caucasian girls with their Nazi tattoos stuck together, set apart from the rest of the prison population as they flaunted their unpopular philosophies.
Sandee had been thoroughly programmed to believe her race was superior, and she took Holly under her wing, reciting the same lines that she had been fed about white power. Holly wholeheartedly embraced the hate.
When she was released from prison in 2007, Holly soon hooked up with Mick Buttram,* nineteen years her senior. Both were in treatment for drug addiction. They quickly moved in together, and before long, they were both addicted to heroin.
Holly and Mick were married in November 2008, but their life was anything but stable. Holly ended up back in prison, serving twenty-six months for ID theft, forgery, and theft. She was also pregnant. Her baby boy was born while she was incarcerated, and the state of Oregon swiftly took custody of him.
Released from prison in 2010, Holly went directly into a drug-treatment program. By spring 2011, she had kicked her heroin habit and was thrilled to have her little boy back. Holly and Mick moved into a southeast Portland apartment, and she devoted herself to their toddler. She read stories to her son, who was by then two and a half. She wrote poems in her spare time and helped support her small son by working in a pretzel shop in a Portland area mall. Her boss recalled that she was doing a good job there.
And then she met Joey Pedersen. He was the “baddest” of all the bad boys she had ever known. For her, this was the perfect man.
The two met through a mutual friend, and Holly was intrigued by the redheaded man who shared her controversial beliefs. He was passionately anti-Semitic and not hesitant to voice his hatred for people of color. Holly found his prejudice a sign of masculinity and confidence.
She told her husband, Mick, that she thought he would like Joey Pedersen. Holly introduced them, and Mick attended some of Joey’s cage-fighting matches.
Before long, the young mother fell under Joey Pedersen’s spell. Holly and her husband broke up over Labor Day weekend in 2011. Labor Day fell on Monday, September 5. It was unseasonably warm in Portland, with temperatures creeping to nearly ninety degrees.
Summer would be over in less than three weeks, the days inevitably turning gray and drizzly, but Holly did not look back. Joey had become her whole world, and she would follow him anyplace. Mick Buttram would one day tell an Oregonian reporter that his estranged wife had “painted a happy picture” of what her life with Joey would be like.
Some close to Holly believed that she was attracted to Joey partially because of the fact that he was clean and sober. Ironically, Joey neither drank nor took drugs.
Still, they refused to believe she would abandon her son and were sure she would come back for him. They found her heedless and foolish, but they expected she would find life with Joey nowhere near as idyllic as she expected.
No one could have guessed that before the month was over, Joey Pedersen and Holly Grigsby would dominate national news headlines.
* * *
On Saturday morning, September 24, 2011, Lori Jane got a phone call from her mother. “Come on over,” DeeDee said happily. “I want you to meet Red’s son. Joey and his girlfriend, Holly, are here.”
Lori Jane drove the short distance to DeeDee’s trailer, where she met her mother’s houseguests. She was instantly taken aback by Joey’s tattoos. His arms were sleeved with ink from his wrists to his shoulders. She tried to suppress her shock as she took in the large tattoo of the letters SWP across the front of his neck, a wheel-like design on one cheek, and a tattoo of Adolf Hitler on his abdomen.
Lori was fairly sure that all of her new stepbrother’s tattoos were linked to white supremacy. She didn’t think her mother was savvy enough to recognize what they represented, and Lori didn’t comment on them. But to herself, she thought that Joey Pedersen looked every inch the ex-convict he was.
Despite his appearance, Joey was polite and friendly. He got up off the couch the moment Lori stepped into the room, and he greeted her with a smile.
Holly Grigsby sat in a corner, obviously listening carefully to Lori Jane and Joey’s conversation but not participating. She wore a sullen expression. Maybe she was bored, perhaps angry at Joey for dragging her along to see his family. It was impossible to tell.
Lori Jane was surprised when she heard that DeeDee had accompanied Red and their visitors to a gun range the day before. Her mother hated guns. Why on earth would she agree to go to the gun range?
But then, Lori Jane thought she knew the answer to that. Her mother wanted to please Red. She would do whatever was necessary to keep her marriage intact.
Lori Jane and her sister, Susan, continued to dig into the backgrounds of their mother’s houseguests, and what they found didn’t alleviate their concerns. They learned that Joey was a member of a truly violent gang and that Holly was still married to another man and had a young son. They were shocked to find that Joey was most certainly a devout white supremacist with a criminal history leading back to his teenage years.
What a mess of snakes their mother had become entangled in! Could they extricate her from it?
On Sunday, September 25, Red went to a friend’s house to watch the Seahawks football game on TV. He brought Joey and Holly with him, but DeeDee decided to stay home. She said she was not feeling well.
On Monday, the 26th, Susan had a phone call from her mother, and they talked for a long time. DeeDee asked about the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and Susan filled her in on all the latest news. DeeDee was in the middle of asking how Lori was doing when her tone suddenly changed. Hurriedly, DeeDee said, “Gotta go.” The phone went dead.
Susan stared at the phone in her hand, perplexed. Should she call her mother back or wait for her to call? She decided to wait.
But there were no more calls.
Later, Susan phoned Lori to see if she had spoken with their mother since her abrupt good-bye. But Lori hadn’t heard from her, either. The sisters took turns calling Red and DeeDee, and they grew more anxious as a day passed and then another without a word from either one of them.
They considered asking the Everett police to make a “check on the welfare of ” the elderly couple but decided not to embarrass them. Red would be angry, and their mother would be humiliated.
Lori and Susan drove by the mobile home but saw nothing suspicious, other than that the lights were out. DeeDee’s daughters called her several times a day, and when there was no answer, they figured that the older couple were probably shopping or visiting friends and had not yet figured out how to set up the new answering machine.
It was still September, their family’s unlucky month, and neither Lori nor Susan could find many more simple reasons for why their mother hadn’t gotten in touch with them.
On the morning of September 28, the sisters talked to each other, and when they learned that neither had heard a word from their mother, Lori decided she had better go by the mobile home to make sure everything was okay.
At the same time, she dreaded it. DeeDee had never been gone so long without letting her or Susan know where she was. Lori was afraid of what she might find.
But then she rationalized again that with Joey and Holly visiting, they probably were all going on day trips that extended far into the evening. It was no wonder Lori couldn’t catch them at home.
Lori’s neighbor called her on that strange and horrible day in September and asked if Lori could take her and her dog to the vet’s, and she sai
d she would. She felt relieved at the delay. What was it that she was afraid to find? She wouldn’t allow her mind to go there.
After Lori dropped off her friend, she drove toward her mother’s place. She turned slowly onto the lane where her mother’s mobile home was located on 84th Street.
“I saw that their car wasn’t there, and my heart sank,” Lori Jane recalled. “I tried the back door, and it opened easily. It wasn’t locked. I called out her name, and she didn’t answer. I noticed that the bedroom door was closed. I opened it just a little, and I could see Mom sleeping under a comforter. But there were no sheets on the bed, and I could smell the blood. I could see her elbow, and I called her name, but she didn’t answer—and then I knew she wasn’t asleep.”
Even in her shock, Lori Jane knew her mother’s bedroom was now a crime scene and that she should not touch anything.
Numb, she picked up the phone and called 911. It seemed only five minutes or so passed before Everett police squad cars pulled into her mother’s driveway, followed by an unmarked car from a detective unit.
Frostie, DeeDee’s dog, had run into the master bedroom when Lori opened the door, and he refused to leave his mistress’s side. The police helped corral the small dog.
In a daze, Lori barely heard the officer’s questions.
“She was single . . . married?” a male voice kept repeating.
“She’s married,” Lori finally managed to answer. “To Red Pedersen.”
“Think he did this?”
“Red? No! Red would have died protecting my mother. He’s an ex-marine.”
And suddenly, Lori realized that was true. Red would have given his life to save her mother. He might call her demeaning names and tease her, but he loved her.
But where was he? The patrolmen searched every inch of the mobile home. Red was not there. Both he and his car—a 2010 Jeep—were gone.