by Ann Rule
Joey Pedersen was full of bravado in the spring of 2012 when Oregonian reporter Lynne Terry asked him about the possibility of the death penalty.
“How do you not kill a Joey Pedersen?” Pedersen asked, referring to himself in the third person. “I want to get the show on the road. If they’re going to kill me, get the rope out already.”
Pedersen had admitted many times to committing the four murders. But he had not been consistent. In October 2011, in court in Everett, Washington, both Pedersen and Grigsby entered pleas of not guilty for the murders of Red and DeeDee. Even when Pedersen displayed a cavalier attitude about the prospect of his own death, his attorneys fought for him.
Snohomish County prosecutor Mark Roe had his work cut out for him, and he carefully plotted his strategy. It was decided that Grigsby and Pedersen would be tried separately, with Pedersen facing charges first.
The question of capital punishment weighed on Roe, and he did not take it lightly. He was no stranger to the issues of the death penalty. He had been on the team that prosecuted James Homer Elledge, a janitor at a Lynnwood, Washington, church. Convicted of murder in 1975 and in and out of prison until he murdered Eloise Fitzner, forty-seven, in the church basement in 1998, his conscience haunted him, and he begged to be executed. Elledge got his wish; he was executed in Walla Walla by lethal injection on the morning of August 28, 2001.
When prison guard Jayme Biendl, thirty-four, was slain in the prison chapel in Monroe, Washington, in January 2011, it was Mark Roe who prosecuted killer Byron Scherf and made the decision to seek the death penalty. Scherf, fifty-two, was a convicted rapist, serving life in prison without the possibility of parole, when he ambushed and strangled the female guard he outweighed by one hundred pounds.
It took jurors less than three hours to decide that Scherf should die. It had taken them less than half an hour to convict him.
Would jurors be so quick to condemn Joey Pedersen to death? Roe didn’t think so. While the veteran prosecutor believed that the death penalty was an appropriate punishment for the heartless murders, he knew that the mitigating circumstances in the Snohomish case could tilt the decision in favor of the defense.
Roe was concerned with the allegations of abuse that Joey said he and his sister had suffered at the hands of their father. In a statement released on March 12, 2012, Roe said:
The police investigation revealed that many years ago when his children were young, the late David Pedersen engaged in child abuse. Significant, credible evidence exists that he engaged in multiple acts of child sexual abuse, victimizing his own children, and others. The defendant has repeatedly confessed to killing his father, and cited some of that abuse as a reason why. Whether that was his true, sole or only motivation is less certain, but what is certain is that any jury considering his fate would first hear hours, days or perhaps weeks of testimony on the subject, some of it from the actual victims of the abuse.
Neither my senior attorneys, I, nor members of the investigation team believe that with what a jury would hear, there is any reasonable chance of them unanimously returning with a verdict of death for this defendant. As such, I will not seek a death sentence I believe we cannot realistically achieve, despite my feeling that such a sentence would be justified.
Mark Roe had carefully considered the feelings of Red and DeeDee’s family and had met with them four times before making his decision. He addressed this in his statement:
I told surviving family and friends my decision at our most recent meeting last Tuesday. They were disappointed, but I believe understand my decision and my reasons for it. Since the public also has the right to know why I decided not to seek the death penalty for this defendant, I am issuing this press release. The family and friends of the victims have already had an opportunity to review it.
In the statement, Roe also stressed that DeeDee Pedersen had absolutely no guilt in Red’s past actions:
By all accounts, Leslie Pedersen was an incredibly lovely person who hadn’t harmed anyone in her entire life. She was not married to David Pedersen in his younger years, when he was raising the defendant and the defendant’s sister, and was therefore in no position to either know about, or prevent the decades-ago activities of her husband, which this murder investigation brought to light. Leslie Pedersen was not even in David Pedersen’s life at the time.
Roe addressed the fact that Red Pedersen had apparently not committed any crimes in recent years:
Nothing can justify this defendant’s actions, and in fairness to the late David Pedersen, it should be noted that no evidence has come to light of any recent wrongdoing by him.
Joey Pedersen pled guilty to two counts of aggravated first-degree murder for the deaths of his father and stepmother.
At his sentencing in mid-March 2012, he called Roe a coward for not pursuing the death penalty against him.
His anger toward the prosecutor, at least one reporter speculated, might have been because he did not want to be in the general population at the prison and had hoped for a more comfortable cell on death row.
Joey’s sister did not attend the sentencing, but she wrote a statement that was read by a victims’ advocate. It said that she thought her brother’s actions were vile and asked the judge to show no leniency. She said she feared her brother and believed that if he were ever freed, he would harm others. Gloria stressed that despite the abuse that she and her brother had suffered at the hands of their father, it did not justify murder.
Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Linda Krese sentenced Pedersen to life in prison without parole.
He would not face the death penalty for the Washington State murders, but there was still the possibility that he could face the death penalty in Oregon and California courtrooms.
And what of Holly Grigsby? Could she face death for her cold-blooded murders?
Prosecutor Mark Roe mentioned Grigsby in the statement he had released about his decision not to seek death for Pedersen:
As for the co-defendant, I expect to receive a mitigation package from the defense shortly, and my announcement about whether I will seek the death penalty will be made after a separate review and consultation process.
Grigsby still faced a possible death sentence in California, Oregon, and Washington.
* * *
While more than thirteen hundred men have been executed in the United States since 1976, the legal execution of females in the nation is rare by comparison, with fifty-three receiving irrevocable death sentences since 1900. As of this writing, sixty-one women wait on death row in the United States, while more than three thousand condemned men await the same sentence.
Still, when a crime is heinous enough, jurors might not spare a female the same punishment they would mete out to a man. Holly Grigsby had confessed to horrific murders, and she was a viable candidate for the death penalty.
While Washington and Oregon have no history of female executions, California has put to death four women in the gas chamber, beginning with Juanita “The Duchess” Spinelli at San Quentin. Spinelli, her boyfriend, and two other men—all gang members—drowned nineteen-year-old Robert Sherrard to prevent him from squealing on them about another murder they had committed.
Spinelli had hoped that Governor Culbert Olson, perhaps filled with the spirit of the season, would grant her a Thanksgiving Day stay of execution. He had granted her a reprieve before. But there was no word from Governor Olson. Juanita Spinelli was executed the day after Thanksgiving, on November 20, 1941. She was fifty-two years old.
Southern belle Louise Peete was the next female to earn a spot on California’s infamous roster of female executions. She was convicted of murdering two people, twenty-four years apart. In May 1920, she shot Jacob Denton, a wealthy Los Angeles widower who had lost his wife and child to the influenza epidemic. Louise thought he was ripe for the picking, but he easily resisted her.
When Denton mysteriously disappeared, Louise had a perfectly logical explanation for his absence. She told everyone that he’d had a
n argument with an angry Spanish woman who had hacked off his arm with a sword and that he was so embarrassed by his missing limb that he had gone into hiding. Oddly, few questioned her story, and Louise had a wonderful time throwing parties at her victim’s home, where he was buried in the basement.
Denton was hidden beneath the ton of dirt that Louise had ordered the Denton caretaker to dump there. She explained that the dirt was for the mushroom garden she planned to plant in the basement.
Denton was eventually found when police, acting on a tip from Louise’s lawyer, unearthed him. He had no missing limbs, but he did have a bullet in his neck.
Louise Peete served eighteen years in prison for Denton’s murder.
In order to qualify for parole, she needed a job, but prospective employers were understandably wary of her violent past. Margaret Rose Logan, a kind middle-aged woman, took pity on her and hired her as a housekeeper for her Pacific Palisades, California, home.
In 1944, after a dispute over a forged check, Louise shot and killed Logan, burying her in the backyard beneath a row of flowerpots. She got away with the murder for several months, forging Logan’s signature on the parole reports.
One day, an alert corrections officer compared the new parole reports with the older ones and noticed that Logan’s signature had changed dramatically. The parole board immediately suspected that Louise had been forging her employer’s signature. They investigated and found that Logan hadn’t been seen for a long time. It didn’t take long for authorities to find her body. Louise was again convicted of murder, but this time, she did not get parole.
Louise Peete walked into the San Quentin gas chamber with a smile on her face at 10:03 A.M. on April 11, 1947. Though she appeared calm on the surface, her hands were visibly trembling. She was pronounced dead at 10:13 A.M.
Next on the list was Barbara Graham, whose life, crimes, and execution were the inspiration for a 1958 film starring Susan Hayward as the killer, I Want to Live! Hayward won an Academy Award for her performance as the glamorous Barbara Graham, who was convicted of strangling a sixty-four-year-old disabled widow, Mabel Monahan, in Burbank, California, during a robbery. Graham was executed on June 3, 1955.
It was seven years before another California murderess’s crime was considered heinous enough for her to face the death penalty. At age fifty-four, Elizabeth Ann Duncan hired two men to strangle her pregnant daughter-in-law. Olga Kupczyk Duncan was thirty years old, seven months pregnant, and the unfortunate competitor for the affection of Elizabeth’s lover, the older woman’s very own son. The incestuous relationship that resulted in the tragic murder made for sensational newspaper headlines. Duncan was executed in San Quentin on August 8, 1962.
Would Holly Grigsby go down in crime history next to Juanita Spinelli, Louise Peete, Barbara Graham, and Elizabeth Duncan? Was the young mother even aware of the crimes of the four infamous women who had preceded her—the killers who received the state’s harshest penalty for spilling blood on California soil? Probably not.
But Holly was most certainly aware that she could face the death penalty. And that was enough to send the Grim Reaper slithering through anyone’s nightmares.
There was still the question of whether or not Holly had done the actual killing of DeeDee Pedersen. Joey claimed that it was he and not Holly who murdered the defenseless grandmother. But Holly had already admitted many times that she was the one who stabbed DeeDee.
In fact, in October 2011, Holly had told a reporter that she had killed DeeDee because Joey adhered to white-supremacist protocol. White supremacists, she explained, believe that men should not murder women.
Any reasonable person would have regretted her words once faced with the specter of the death penalty. No longer in a drug-induced fog, Holly had nothing but time on her hands—time to contemplate her depressing future and possible court-mandated death.
In May 2012, Mark Roe announced that he would not seek the death penalty for Holly Grigsby for DeeDee Pedersen’s murder.
Grigsby’s crimes, Roe said, “almost defy description.” Still, prior to the recent murders, Holly had no violent history, a factor that might sway jurors.
Instead of the death penalty, Roe planned to seek life in prison for Holly Grigsby. But just weeks after his decision, federal prosecutors stepped in to take over the case.
Now, both Joey Pedersen’s and Holly Grigsby’s fates would be decided by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
Before the question of the death penalty was settled in the federal case, Joey Pedersen made what some might consider a suicidal move. He asked to be his own attorney and represent himself against the federal charges. In a January 2014 U.S. District Court hearing in Portland, Oregon, Pedersen stood before Senior U.S. District Judge Ancer Haggerty.
Asked if he understood the seriousness of the charges, Pedersen replied, “I understand them.”
The judge asked if Pedersen realized that if he were to be found guilty on counts three, four, five, eleven, or twelve, he could face the death penalty.
“I understand,” Pedersen said.
Judge Haggerty pointed out that Joey’s attorneys—Renee Manes and Richard Wolf—had worked very hard on the case and were “top notch.”
Pedersen was not dissuaded as Haggerty explained to him that he would have limited access to legal materials and court filings and that he would also have little control over witnesses.
Haggerty asked if he had ever represented himself before, and Pedersen replied that he had represented himself in a trial when he was charged with assault in Malheur County. He was referring to the attack on the prison guard with a hot iron. That trial ended with three extra years being added to his existing sentence.
Judge Haggerty granted Pedersen’s request, but he offered him this caveat: “I think it is unwise to try to represent yourself. A trained lawyer can represent you better than you can represent yourself.”
Less than two months after Pedersen’s win to represent himself, he changed his mind, and Manes and Wolf were back on his case.
Meanwhile, those in the Joey Pedersen and Holly Grigsby camps had been sweating it out, waiting for Holder to announce his decision about the death penalty.
In February 2014, Holder announced that he had decided against seeking the death penalty for both Pedersen and Grigsby. The process leading to the decision was confidential, U.S. Justice Department authorities said, and the public would not be privy to the reasons.
Cody Myers’s mother, Susan, was not upset by Holder’s decision. “Cody would not have wanted them to get the death penalty,” she said. And neither did she. “This may sound crazy,” she said. “but I can’t muster up hatred and anger” toward either Joey or Holly.
Susan blames the justice system more than she blames Pedersen and Grigsby. It was while they were incarcerated that they learned to hate.
While she has no hate in her heart, her grief is excruciating. “There are times when I just want to die, but I have other children, so I can’t give up,” Susan says.
There are photographs of Cody all over Susan’s house, and while she glances at them, she does not allow her eyes to linger. “I never allow myself to look him in the eye, because I will fall apart,” she confides.
Susan is admittedly very private and normally keeps her emotions to herself, but she takes some comfort in sharing Cody’s story. She wants people to know about the young Christian man with forgiveness in his heart.
Cody cared about people and went out of his way to help them. If he had lived and pursued his plans to become a missionary, he would have touched many lives.
A pastor who knew Cody talks about him in his sermons to children, and that makes Susan “beyond proud. It’s one of the things that help me get by,” she says. “Kids have come to know Christ because of Cody.”
* * *
Besides Holly Grigsby, Joey Pedersen had drawn others into his murderous project. As a convicted felon, Joey wasn’t allowed to purchase a gun on his own. But he had mesmerized
other members of his circle.
He had a Svengali quality about him, and the psychiatric panel could attest to that—although they weren’t taken in by his charm. He had been out of prison less than two months when he had begun looking for someone who would buy a gun for him.
Max Lewis,* twenty-eight, and his wife, Cacee,* thirty-two, were only too happy to purchase a Hi-Point Model C-9 9mm Luger pistol for Joey. Cacee lied to a licensed firearms dealer when she said the gun was for her own protection. She knew full well that it was intended for a convicted felon.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a federal indictment against the Springfield, Oregon, couple in mid-June 2013. Max and Cacee Lewis faced federal counts of conspiracy, straw purchase of a firearm, unlawful disposition of a firearm, and accessory after the fact and misprision of a felony (concealing a felony or failure to report a felony).
Like Joey, Max was a mixed-martial-arts fighter, and he was already incarcerated for unrelated charges at the time of the indictment. Cacee was accused of purchasing the gun in July 2011.
When U.S. attorney Amanda Marshall announced the indictment, she said that the Lewis couple could face a fine of $250,000 and prison sentences of three to fifteen years.
While Pedersen expressed no guilt over the deaths of the four murder victims, he was concerned about Max and Cacee. They were his friends, and now they were in deep trouble for doing him a favor.
He couldn’t save Holly Grigsby from her imminent long sentence, but he said he was sorry for all the pain he had caused to those who helped him.
Just as he had tried to get Holly off the hook for her part in the crimes, he tried to help the Lewises. As it turned out, Joey ended up with an unexpected and powerful bargaining chip, and it was practically handed to him on a silver platter by the very people who were trying to punish him.
Prosecutors Jane Shoemaker and Hannah Horsley had sterling reputations and were working long hours to bring justice to the victims of the Pedersen hate crimes. They had always had good experiences working with law enforcement, and they were shocked when they learned that one of the detectives they counted on was accused of mishandling evidence.