by Ann Rule
The witness said that he felt Ron Baker might try to kill the man who had cuckolded him. Fonis called the Alaska State Troopers and urged them to be on the lookout for Baker and keep a protective surveillance on Cal Samuelson, who was supposed to be serving as head cook on the crab boat. “We’ve got a homicide down here and Baker is the chief suspect. We can’t locate him,” Fonis advised, “and we think he may be headed up there.”
A short while later, Fonis received a call from the chief of police of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, who said he knew Cal well and that the man was presently on the boat. “We can monitor all incoming flights from the lower forty-eight and we’ll be able to spot Baker if he does come up here.”
Whether Sue Ann Baker had been interested in Cal Samuelson or not is a moot point. During the weeks before she died, she seemed to be agonizing over ending her marriage. She feared her husband, yet she hesitated about filing a divorce action. Friends had advised her to move out, stay with a girlfriend, and get a restraining order. And she said she would, that she’d had enough of the marriage, yet she hesitated; she had loved Baker, and maybe she still did.
She was not a chaser. Sue Ann had talked to several platonic male friends about her marital problems. One in particular, Benny Larson,* a very large man, recalled that she’d begged him twice to come home with her because she was afraid.
“She wanted me to sleep on her couch—but I told her that would just make things worse because he wouldn’t understand.”
Larson recalled one evening when he’d gone to Sue Ann’s apartment to watch TV and to keep her company because she was frightened.
“I went over there on the twenty-fourth of October, but as soon as I got there, Ron and a friend of his showed up. He was really hot when he saw me. He came walking up when I was knocking on the door—she’d called me because she thought he was coming over. He kept pounding on the door and yelling, ‘Open up the goddammed door or I’m going to bust it in!’ and she finally did.”
Larson agreed to stand by in case there was trouble, but to stay out of the argument so that they wouldn’t provoke Baker’s anger further.
“I guess he wanted to get his things out of there, and he went in and slammed the door behind him. We could hear them wrestling around, but then Ron let us in and he seemed to have cooled down a little bit. Sue was crying, and I stayed with her awhile after they left. She told me, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ and I just told her to run—get out of there and find another place where he couldn’t find her. She said he told her that if he couldn’t have her, no other man would, either. I left after about an hour and she was still saying that she wasn’t going to move, that she wanted to stay in her own place. . . .
“I saw her on Friday the twenty-eighth at the Rendezvous . . . and then I left to go elk hunting and I never saw her again.”
Detective Fonis talked to Sue Ann’s lawyer. The lawyer said that Sue Ann had come to him a week or so before she was killed and talked to him about a restraining order. He had advised her that he’d need to know where Baker was living so that it could be served, and she had promised she would try to find an address where her estranged husband might be located.
“I saw the marks on her throat—two huge bruises, like finger marks. She was supposed to come into the office this week and start divorce proceedings,” the lawyer said.
Sue Ann Baker had been walking a tragic tightrope yet, oddly, she apparently had made one last effort at reconciliation with Ron Baker. On the Saturday night before she was killed, she had invited Ron over for a steak dinner. Ron had told a close friend that he planned to go over there and act like a “reasonable person—not a jealous husband or anything. Maybe we could just get along if I can act civilized.”
Apparently, the evening had gone all right because Ron told the friend the next day that they hadn’t fought, that they’d just sat and talked and eaten the steaks.
At that point, Sue Ann had twenty-four hours to live.
* * *
What had gone wrong? By Sunday evening, at the bowling league game, the victim was so frightened of her husband that she’d begged friends to stay with them, claiming she feared being alone with him. Yet she had been alone with him. And by morning she was dead, her lung pierced with one deadly thrust that caused massive hemorrhaging and was so deep it extended into her liver. She might have lived three or four minutes after the attack. No more.
An odd sidelight of the autopsy exam was evidence that Sue Ann had engaged in intercourse shortly before her death; there were still intact sperm in her vaginal vault when she was found.
Love. And then death.
The teletype on the arrest warrant of Ron Baker had thus far failed to produce any results. He had not flown to Alaska to finish off the man he blamed for the breakup of his marriage, nor had he been seen in his usual haunts. Detectives Fonis and Fowler wondered if the suspect might be dead himself, a suicide whose body had not yet been discovered.
A floor-by-floor check of the vast parking lot at Sea-Tac Airport had not turned up any sign of Baker’s green Buick, indicating that he probably hadn’t flown out of the area. When the investigators learned that Baker had friends in Kitsap County, just across Puget Sound from Seattle, a special alert was sent to law enforcement departments there.
On November 2, Gary Fowler and Ted Fonis received a call from deputy Pat Jones of the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Department. He advised them that he and Poulsbo police chief Robert “Rick” Weatherill had arrested Ron Baker in Poulsbo. Arrangements were made for the arresting officers to meet with the Seattle detectives in the Winslow, Washington, city hall.
Shortly before noon, lieutenant Ernie Bisset, sergeant Craig VandePutte, and detective Dick Sanford boarded a ferry from Seattle headed for Winslow. Ron Baker was seated in Chief Weatherill’s patrol car, his face haggard and his eyes red-rimmed from either lack of sleep or tears. Or both. Sanford advised him of his rights. The suspect showed no surprise at his arrest. He said he didn’t want to make any statements.
Their trip back to Seattle was delayed when they missed the ferry, and they waited on the dock for the next passage.
“Do you understand why you’ve been arrested?” VandePutte asked Baker.
“Yes, for a murder. Of my wife.”
When they asked Baker if he had any questions, the big man’s shoulders suddenly began to heave as sobs racked his body.
“I’ve got to tell you what happened,” he said, crying. “That’s the only way anybody will know the truth.”
“You’re sure you want to make a statement?”
“I have to,” Baker said, haltingly, “or else nobody will know what happened. I want to tell you. I want to tell you now. What do you want me to tell you?”
“What is it that you want to tell us?” VandePutte asked quietly.
“It all happened so fast. I really don’t know how it happened.”
“Did you mean to murder your wife?”
“Yes, but it all happened so quickly. I don’t know what the reason was. I just did it.”
“Had you had a fight with your wife about the divorce?”
“No. It just happened. We weren’t arguing. We were just sitting there yakking.”
“Did anything trigger you to kill her?”
“No. It just happened.”
VandePutte told Ron Baker that the detectives had done a good deal of investigating and had uncovered Baker’s personal problems. “Did the trouble with Sue Ann began before you left for your job in Alaska?”
“Before that. My marriage was going sour. I didn’t want to go up north but I felt like I had to. I knew it was all over before I went. I knew when I came back that I wouldn’t have anything.”
Asked about his mental state, Baker said, “I went to Alaska as one person—and I came back another. I was really completely changed. I got off the plane in Alaska and I was walking down the dock to the boat and I had the feeling I wasn’t there—that the wind was blowing right through me. When I c
ame home again, I knew everything would be over,” Baker added again.
Ron Baker’s recollection of the actual killing was blurry. He knew he’d stabbed Sue Ann with the knife but he continued to insist that it had happened so fast that he couldn’t believe it himself. He couldn’t remember what had happened just after she died.
“We were both drinking MacNaughton’s whiskey during that day, but I’m not sure if I was drunk. My adrenaline was pumping so bad I don’t think the liquor affected me much.”
“What time was Sue Ann killed?” VandePutte asked.
“I don’t know. Since I went to Alaska, time doesn’t mean anything to me. I have no concept of time.”
He’d remained with the body of his wife for about an hour after she died, and then he went out for a few hours, returning to sleep on the couch in the living room while Sue Ann lay dead in the master bedroom. He’d wiped up the blood from the coffee table and cleaned the apartment a little. Baker did recall that he’d gone to the Tie-Up Tavern after the murder and played pool with his friend.
On Monday morning, Halloween, he’d called in sick for Sue Ann to the Rendezvous, and then gone back to the Tie-Up for a while. Later he worked on his car, and then left the apartment.
“Did you feel any emotion about what you’d done?”
“No. I am a highly emotional person but I didn’t feel anything when I killed Sue Ann. Nothing at all. I still don’t have any emotions.”
Ron Baker said he’d thought some of suicide after his wife died. “I did consider it for a long time, but I didn’t do anything about it. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“Why did you kill your wife?” VandePutte asked again.
“I don’t know. It just happened. It just happened—”
Baker said that he knew about the man who had been seeing his wife—the senior cook on the crab boat—but he insisted that her alleged infidelity had nothing to do with the murder.
“Where have you been since you left her place?” Ted Fonis asked.
“Just riding back and forth on the ferry. I was really tired, but I couldn’t sleep. I expected to be arrested because I went back to the island where I’m well-known. I would have turned myself in eventually.”
* * *
Keith William “Ron” Baker was booked into jail on homicide charges. On January 27, 1978, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to ten years minimum in prison and twenty years maximum for the murder of his wife.
And so the troubled marriage of the lovely bartender and the man who loved her beyond all reason was over. She had ignored the warnings of dozens of friends in the vain hope that she and Ron might be able to find some friendly solution, but she had gambled her life on the losing side.
Perhaps there was no way out except the deadly scene played out on the eve of Halloween.
* * *
THE MAN WHO LOVED TOO MUCH
* * *
Sue Ann Baker was a popular bartender in a Seattle cocktail lounge. The staff there grew worried when she didn’t show up for work on Halloween. Nor did she come to the Halloween party that she had organized and promised to supervise that evening. (Police file)
Seattle police homicide detective Dick Sanford worked with fellow detective Gary Fowler to find the suspect who had killed Sue Ann and then laid her out like a dead princess under a coverlet of roses in her bed. (Ann Rule)
Ted Fonis was one of the team of Seattle Police Department detectives who investigated the murder of Sue Ann Baker. (Ann Rule)
The man who claimed to love Sue Ann, but lived to regret mightily what he had done to her. (Police file)
TERROR ON A
MOUNTAIN TRAIL
Among all the violent crimes against persons, the crime of rape is proliferating faster than any other; every nine minutes, somewhere in the United States, another woman is raped. And that statistic covers only reported rapes. Crime statistic experts estimate that only one-fifth to one-third of rapes are ever reported. Embarrassment, fear of reprisal, shock, and myriad other reasons can prevent women from coming forward to give statements about what has happened to them. It takes a brave woman to file charges and agree to appear in court to testify against her sexual assailant when she has dreaded ever being in the same room with him again. But when she does, she is helping to protect other women who might be the next terrorized victims.
It is certainly wise for all women to be aware of the threat of sexual attack. It can happen anywhere: in their own homes, on the street, in a crowded shopping mall—even in a school or in the sanctuary of a church. For two Washington State women, it happened in the peaceful sylvan setting of Mount Rainier National Park.
* * *
Mount Rainier is much beloved by tourists and native Washingtonians alike. Fifty miles southeast of Seattle, its 14,410-foot snowy peak suddenly rises almost magically against bright blue sky. It can be seen on clear days for miles and miles in every direction, its majestic height crowned with glistening white. Locals smile as they tell each other, “The mountain is out today!”
Mount Rainier looks like the cover of a calendar, so perfect. But it can be both welcoming and cruel. Its endless swaths of sunny meadows dotted with wildflowers—daisies, rhododendrons, lupines, and columbines—end suddenly in the deep shadows of evergreen forests. Winter snow piles up and sparkles when the daylight hits the drifts, but there are also bleak, rocky stretches, covered with ice and crisscrossed with crevasses of unfathomable depth.
No one knows exactly how many climbers have fallen to their deaths when ice bridges collapsed beneath them and they plunged down into those chasms, so far that no one could save them. They rest there forever, on the mountain that drew them almost hypnotically to take a chance. Expert mountain climbers and neophytes alike have set out to experience the wonder of Mount Rainier only to have sudden storms come out of nowhere to blanket higher elevations with wind and ice. These whiteouts catch them unaware. Those who know what they are doing are equipped to wait out the storm and survive. Those who are unprepared often don’t make it.
Sometimes a pervading fog envelops Mount Rainier and hikers can see no more than three feet in any direction. When the storms and fog come, the safest place is inside the rustic lodges, next to roaring fireplaces.
There are other elements to fear on a mountain as high as Mount Rainier. There, creatures often hide along the trails: bears, cougars, wolves, and, most dangerous of all, human predators.
* * *
On June 3, 1978, the bleakness and danger of winter storms when the sun sets at 3 P.M. were far away. It was a brilliant late spring day when two young women set out for a hike along the Rampart Ridge Trail. Filtered sunlight etched dappled shadows on the vegetation along the pathway. Their own voices were the only sounds.
The women had no thought of danger. They were familiar with the trail, experienced hikers who had all the gear they needed for any eventuality—or so they thought. They planned to climb the path through the woods until they came to the high meadows rampant with spring flowers. They would share a picnic lunch there, and then return to their car near the lodge long before dark. The longest day of the year was just a little over two weeks away and in the Northwest at that time of year it doesn’t get dark until almost 10 P.M.
They were all alone. Yet, on a day like this was, they could expect to meet other hikers who had set out from Longmire Lodge and exchange greetings with them—the easy camaraderie of hikers.
Kit Spencer* was twenty-eight and worked as an economist in Seattle; her companion, Rose Fairless,* also twenty-eight, was a law student from Tacoma. They were highly competent, intelligent women. Neither would have walked along certain streets in Tacoma or Seattle at night—but this was Mount Rainier National Park and it was broad daylight.
They laughed and talked as they headed up the trail from Longmire Lodge to Paradise Lodge farther up the mountain, their voices cutting through the serene silence around them.
Kit and Rose heard footsteps
thudding up the trail behind them and wondered momentarily at the energy of the person approaching. The recommended technique for trail hiking is based on steady walking. But the person behind them seemed to be in a tearing hurry.
Suddenly Rose let out a surprised yelp. A hand had reached out from nowhere and grabbed her arm. As both women turned to look behind them, they gasped to see a tall, apparition-like figure dressed in military camouflage clothing. They couldn’t see his face because it was covered with a green ski mask, leaving only his eyes and mouth visible.
Oddly, the man wore socks over his shoes. Each of them wondered briefly if this was some kind of bad joke.
Then they saw the gun. It appeared to be a small-caliber weapon, but he was waving it at them menacingly.
“I’m going to rob you!” the man rasped. He forced them to walk in front of him into a secluded clearing about four hundred feet off the trail.
“How much money do you have?” the masked stranger asked.
“None. I don’t have any,” Kit answered.
“Wait. Here—I’ve got about thirty dollars,” Rose said quietly. “Take it.”
The man pocketed the cash, but he didn’t leave, and he quickly blocked their way so they couldn’t return to the trail.