by Ann Rule
That should have been the end of this story. But it wasn’t.
On May 26, 1998, twenty years—less a week and a day—since Kit Spencer and Rose Fairless were assaulted in faraway Washington State, Rivenburgh, now forty-six, lived in Marlboro, New York, in Ulster County about halfway between New York City and Albany.
One of his neighbors, Jeffery Hurd, forty-three, was newly married, and he had a very prestigious career as a research physicist at IBM.
As usual, Hurd went for a walk in the woods shortly before eight on that Tuesday evening. It was a soft spring night, still warm, and the air was redolent of honeysuckle and roses. But he hadn’t returned to his home by full sunset, or for hours afterward. His worried wife asked neighbors for help in finding him.
Sadly, they did locate Jeffery Hurd. By 11:45 P.M., New York State troopers responded to their call for help. The “man down” report listed a location at the end of Reservoir Road in a very remote area of Marlboro.
Hurd was dead. He had suffered several fatal gunshot wounds. They appeared to have come from a relatively large-caliber weapon, and ballistics experts for the New York State Police identified the projectiles removed from Hurd as being from a .38-caliber revolver.
The state police investigators spoke to nearby residents, including Mark Rivenburgh, and asked them what they might have heard or seen during the evening, and what their own activities had been. Hurd’s murder was entered in their reports as an “unwitnessed crime,” except, of course, by Hurd’s killer.
If they hadn’t actually seen the murder happen, the investigators hoped that one or more of the victim’s neighbors might have seen or heard something that would help them locate possible suspects.
The concerned neighbors all agreed to voluntarily accompany the detectives back to the state police barracks for further questioning.
It was shortly after 1 A.M. when Mark was led to an interview room. He was not a suspect at this point—no more than any of the residents who lived near Reservoir Road. He wasn’t handcuffed, frisked, or accused of any crime. He was free to move around freely in between questioning.
When he was asked about how he’d spent the early part of the evening, Mark recalled that he’d left home to go to the store around twenty minutes after seven. When he got there, he realized that he had lost his wallet.
“I went to my mom’s to look,” he said, “and then to my job—but I didn’t find it. I finally went back home. That’s when I heard that Jeffery Hurd was missing.”
It was close to 3:30 A.M. on May 27 when Rivenburgh admitted to the state police detectives that he owned several rifles. This was, of course, in violation of his parole, and he knew it. Still, he agreed to sign a written statement agreeing that he did own those rifles. As a federal parolee, he nodded as he listened to his rights under Miranda, and he stated he was quite familiar with the warnings and understood them.
With his background of violence, Mark Rivenburgh was a natural suspect. That was a given. However, he didn’t appear nervous about being questioned. He didn’t ask to leave the interview room, although he would later claim on an appeal that he had been subjected to “custodial interrogation” without ever being read his Miranda rights.
The New York police detectives questioned him off and on until 6:30 A.M. At that time they asked him if he would tell them again about his lost wallet. They had noticed that he had bulges in his pants pockets, and they wondered if one of them held his wallet.
Agreeably, Mark Rivenburgh emptied his pockets. There was no wallet, but he was carrying a pouch of .38-caliber bullets, something considerably more incriminating than a lie about his wallet.
At this point he was arrested. To be sure he understood, the interviewers once again read the Miranda warnings. He said he understood he could stop questioning, he could call an attorney, and that anything he said from this point on might be used against him in any court procedure. The New York State troopers searched him more thoroughly. As they frisked him, they felt a hard lump in the small of his back. When they lifted his shirt, they uncovered a loaded .38-caliber handgun strapped to the back of his waistband.
It was somewhat unnerving for them to realize he had been armed and carrying about forty rounds of ammunition all the time they were questioning him.
Mark Rivenburgh admitted that he’d purchased the gun several years earlier, but he said he had no choice.
“It goes everywhere with me,” he said firmly.
“How about your wallet?”
“That was a lie. I didn’t lose it.”
When they lifted the cuffs of his trousers, the state police interrogators saw that the onetime Ranger’s socks had partially dried dark stains on them. Criminalists later identified those as blood that had the exact DNA pattern of Jeffery Hurd.
The bullets removed from Hurd’s body proved to have been fired from the .38-caliber revolver that Mark Rivenburgh always carried. There was no question that Rivenburgh had shot his neighbor, probably in cold blood.
But why? What was his motivation to kill Jeffery Hurd? Whether it was true or only Rivenburgh’s imagination, he had been voluble as he complained to neighbors—as he now told state police detectives—that he resented Hurd. He claimed that the physicist had taken certain items from his house without any authorization to do so.
Most physicists earn well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. It seemed unlikely that a man who had such a well-paying and respected job as Hurd would have any need or motive to steal from Rivenburgh.
This time, Mark Rivenburgh did not remain free on bail. He was held in the Ulster County Jail in Kingston, awaiting trial for the murder of Jeffery Hurd.
There were many delays. Almost a year later, on the first weekend in May 1999, Rivenburgh was three days away from his pretrial hearing. Everything seemed normal as he strolled out into “the Yard” at the county jail, just as he always did for his weekly one-hour exercise session. He carried a wooden “sit-up” board that some inmates put up against the twelve-foot concrete walls to make that exercise tougher as they worked to maintain “washboard abs.”
Mark Rivenburgh was in excellent physical shape. Even though he was forty-seven, he prided himself on staying in “Ranger condition.” At 10:45 that particular Saturday morning, however, he had another use for the board. Before corrections officers could stop him, he used it to get up and over the wall in less than a minute.
Even the many layers of razor wire didn’t slow him down. His next hurdle was an eighteen-foot jump off a roof. He could hear guards shouting at him to stop, but he leapt anyway. Encountering two corrections officers on the ground, he fought with them briefly before he managed to break free again.
A pond lay ahead of him, and he plunged in, swimming strongly for the other side. But the officers could swim as well as he could and the water chase began. They caught up with Rivenburgh on the other side.
Finally, he gave up.
On top of the other crimes he was charged with, the former Ranger now faced charges of first-degree escape, and he was forbidden to leave his cell—except, of course, to attend his trial for murder.
Although his lawyer warned him against testifying—as the majority of defense attorneys do—Mark Rivenburgh insisted on taking the witness stand. He told the jury that he had good reason to carry a gun because a certain underground group had threatened him and made him fear for his life. It was possible he was attempting to raise questions about his sanity under the M’Naghten Rule. If that was the case, it didn’t work.
There had been a paucity of physical evidence in the crimes against Kit Spencer and Rose Fairless in 1978. There were no DNA matches then, but this time the prosecution team was armed with both DNA evidence and ballistics results that could not be explained away.
On Thursday, June 24, 1999, an Ulster County jury deliberated for only four hours before they signaled that they had reached a verdict in the murder trial of Mark Rivenburgh for the shooting of Jeffery Hurd. They found him guilty of second-degree
murder, third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, and several other charges, not the least of which was first-degree escape. He was sentenced to consecutive terms of twenty-five years to life on the murder charge and seven years on the weapons charge. That meant thirty-two years in prison.
Mark Rivenburgh would be almost eighty years old before he might be considered for parole.
He appealed his conviction in 2003, and on November 13, the Supreme Court of New York, Appellate Division, concurred with the lower court. They did, however, find some merit in Rivenburgh’s objection to the Ulster County Court’s allowing a state police trooper to testify about a series of unsolved crimes—rapes and robberies—in an adjacent county. Although the jury didn’t know about his sexual crimes in Washington State, there was, the Supreme Court said, a possible inference by the state that Rivenburgh was a prime suspect in those more recent cases.
Perhaps he was. Perhaps there was another sexual stalker who used MOs so similar to Rivenburgh’s 1978 assaults.
At any rate, his appeal of the conviction for Jeffery Hurd’s murder was denied.
Mark Rivenburgh remains in prison as this is written. He is now sixty years old. One has to wonder why a young soldier, chosen among the “cream of the crop,” veered so far off what he seemed to be. His superiors deemed him an outstanding army Ranger, but he threw it all away in his obsession with sexual and murderous violence.
* * *
TERROR ON A MOUNTAIN TRAIL
* * *
Mark Leslie Rivenburgh, twenty-nine, an army Ranger whose commanders found him exceptionally proficient and dedicated. This is a booking photo after he was arrested for sexually attacking two young female hikers on Washington State’s Mount Rainier. (Police file)
Mark Leslie Rivenburgh at sixty. After his release from prison on sexual offense charges, he reoffended, this time committing murder. (Prison file)
All the entrances to Mount Rainier National Park were blocked in an attempt to trap a wanted sex offender inside the park. (Police file)
NO ONE KNOWS
WHERE WENDY IS
I wrote another case that involved the military complex that stretches south from Tacoma, Washington. It is very different from the Mark Rivenburgh cases, and far more likely to break our hearts. Still, this is a cautionary tale that every parent or caregiver should read. We don’t always know the people who live or spend time in close proximity to us. And, too often, we trust someone we shouldn’t.
Until October 2010, Fort Lewis, McChord Air Force Base, and Madigan Military Hospital were separate entities, but it was inevitable that they would one day merge. They have become one of twelve joint bases in the world, known now as JBLM (Joint Base Lewis-McChord).
This joint base is a community unto itself, the second-largest military installation in the country, with dozens of divisions, each with its own specifications and duties. As with every huge military base, businesses have proliferated nearby. Along Interstate 5, the freeway that runs from the Canadian border to Tijuana, Mexico, there are massage parlors, taverns, tawdry nightspots, dry cleaners for uniforms, trailer parks, loan and check-cashing companies, and myriad other enterprises abounding there, all anxious to help servicemen spend their paychecks. Neon signs flash for twenty-four hours a day, luring them in.
For many service families, however, the military bases are as homey as any street in the Midwest. Family housing neighborhoods stretch out, row upon row of almost identical houses. They can be pretty basic, but residents grow gardens and add special touches that make their houses distinctive. As rank escalates, the homes become bigger, and farther apart. Majors, colonels, and up are allotted sumptuous Colonials with spreading lawns.
But there are facilities that make off-duty life better for all men and women serving our country. There are theaters, swimming pools, the BX, and other commissaries, medical facilities—everything a family needs right on the bases. The honky-tonks along the freeway are a world apart, shut off by miles of fences along the freeway.
And the joint base is almost impossible to enter for someone who has no business there. Guards man gates at all times, and visitors have to have more than adequate identification.
JBLM is “good duty,” and military families who live there take advantage of the Northwest’s many recreational opportunities, including camping, hiking, skiing, sledding, and deepwater fishing on the Pacific Ocean down in Grays Harbor County.
It has always been so, and on Saturday, July 10, 1976, a staff sergeant took his family out on a strawberry-picking expedition. He had spent the earlier part of the day working on a picnic table in the backyard of the duplex where they lived, a project that excited his nine-year-old stepdaughter, Wendy Ann Smith, and her six-year-old brother. It seems almost impossible to realize that Wendy would be forty-five years old today. If only she hadn’t trusted someone. If only she could have seen behind his friendly smile. But nine-year-olds aren’t especially skilled at detecting evil.
The sun was low in the sky at eight that evening when the berry-picking group returned to the duplex. The children were tired and dirty after their hours playing between the strawberry rows, and Wendy’s mother went immediately to run a bath for the youngsters. As the water splattered into the tub, she remembered that she’d left her favorite blue sweater in the car. She asked Wendy to run out and get it.
“While you’re out there, honey,” she added, “get the litter bag and empty it.”
Wendy skipped off to the van. She retrieved her mother’s sweater and emptied the car trash bag into a garbage can outside the duplex. Wendy’s aunt, visiting from Arizona, was watching the beautiful blond child. But Wendy didn’t come in the house. Instead, her aunt saw Wendy look up as if she recognized someone, someone just out of the aunt’s range of vision.
In a moment, Wendy had dashed out of sight.
It was a normal thing, and there was nothing to be concerned about. Wendy would surely come in for her bath in a little while.
“It was just like she had seen someone she knew. I thought she had run off to tell the kids about the berries she’d picked,” the aunt would recall later.
She could see the blue sweater on the ground between the carport and the back door of the house. It was probably going to get dirty, and she wondered why Wendy had dropped it so carelessly. She’d have to speak to her about that when she ran back in.
But Wendy didn’t come in. Wendy never came back at all.
As full dark descended, her family was uneasy but still believed she must be at one of her friends’ homes. They phoned all of them, and she wasn’t at any of the neighboring houses. As the hours passed, Wendy’s parents were frightened. Wendy was an obedient little girl, and she knew the boundaries of her play area. She knew she was always supposed to be inside the house after dark, and that, if she was ever delayed, she was to call home.
Her family members began to knock on nearby doors, but no one remembered seeing Wendy during the evening. It didn’t seem possible that she could have vanished so quickly right in front of her aunt’s eyes, yet she was gone.
The fact that Wendy was an exceptionally beautiful child could not be denied; they tried to fight down their fear that she had been abducted by a sexual offender whose perverted fantasies were directed toward little girls, but it wasn’t easy. They had warned Wendy hundreds of times that she must never get into a stranger’s car, but now they wondered if she’d forgotten. If someone had enticed her with candy or perhaps the promise of a pet, she might have gone with them. She loved animals, and she was, after all, just a little girl.
Long before midnight, Wendy’s stepfather called the base’s Office of Special Investigations and asked for help. OSI investigators went immediately to the family’s residence. Her parents described the clothing Wendy was wearing: baby blue knit pants, and a dark flowered shirt. She was four feet tall, and weighed just sixty-five pounds, and she had long blond-brown hair and brown eyes.
Asked if she might have run away, Wendy’s parents
shook their heads. They stressed that she was a happy child.
“We had a wonderful day,” her stepfather said. “Nothing happened that would have upset her or given her the idea to run away. She was here, she was happy, and then she was gone.”
By morning, the whole base knew that a child was missing. While other mothers in the military complex kept their children within eyesight, they checked their own areas, looking for Wendy. They searched storage sheds, discarded appliances, anything that might hide a small girl.
Volunteers, under the direction of the Tacoma Explorer Scouts’ Search and Rescue Unit, marked off an area within a three-mile radius of Wendy’s home. After sniffing some of the clothing she’d worn the day before and her hairbrush, bloodhounds tracked Wendy’s scent to a playfield near the duplex and then they lost it. That might mean she had gotten into a car.
Two hundred searchers combed every inch of the huge circle, and yet they didn’t find one trace of the missing child. Although it seemed unlikely that Wendy would have wandered toward the three lakes in the region so late in the evening, scuba divers searched each one. They were thankful they didn’t find her there.
Each of the nine hundred houses on the air force base was checked in a methodically coordinated plan. Yet Wendy was in none of them, and no one had seen her.
By Monday, the base commander, Colonel Robert H. Campbell, told the press that “an abduction by car has got to be pretty high in our consideration.”
But who could have taken Wendy away in a car? Why hadn’t she screamed for help? Had someone been watching the pretty blond child for a long time, and had that person been waiting for her to come home after the strawberry picking?