by Ann Rule
They walked through the apartment, aware of their own footsteps, half-holding their breaths against the stale odor. There was a jumble of papers on the dining room table. Among them, O’Leary found a card from an attorney in North Plainfield, New Jersey. On the back, someone had jotted down a man’s name and a Bainbridge Island, Washington, address.
The living room was sparsely furnished, although it was cluttered with papers, clothes, bags and boxes. There was a single, uncomfortable-looking chair with an ottoman in the living room, and two black-and-white television sets. There was a bookcase, but there were no books or magazines, no newspapers—nothing to keep the man who lived in the apartment up with current events. On one of the bookcase shelves, Gene Ramirez located a gun holder for an AMT .38 caliber pistol, a holster for a derringer, and a cigar box that held nine live rounds for a .38 caliber weapon.
The detectives photographed the room and the items of interest with a digital camera, and moved on to the bedroom.
There was no bed; rather, they found a blow-up mattress of the sort that campers sometimes carry on hiking trips. It was leaning against the south wall of the bedroom. A jerry-rigged screen made of a blanket hanging on a wire covered the north bedroom wall. When they moved the air bed and pulled the blanket aside, they saw that the walls were covered with photographs of naked or half-naked women. They looked up at the ceiling and found that it, too, was covered with nude photographs. When the doors were closed, there were more naked women on the other two walls; most of the shots appeared to have been torn from Penthouse, Playboy, or similar men’s magazines; they weren’t overtly salacious, but more the kind of thing that a teenage boy might collect.
“When he went to bed,” Nordlund said, “He had his own gallery of women to stare at anywhere he looked.”
“Yeah,” O’Leary said. “He could choose his date for the night.”
In the corner of the bedroom, they found both Beta and VHS video recorders and a stack of pornographic video tapes. It looked as if Cool had been rerecording the Beta tapes onto the VHS machine. The man, who had apparently communicated with no one in the real world, had led a rich fantasy life behind the door to his apartment.
Thong underwear, like that the dead man tagged “Whiskey Doe” had worn, but in garish patterns of animal prints and exotic colors, was scattered in the bedroom. “I wonder if he posed in that mirror?” O’Leary mused.
All of Cool’s windows were covered, some with aluminum foil and some with dark green plastic garbage bags so that no natural light could get in and, perhaps most particularly, to prevent anyone from looking into his world.
The mediciney smell was explained when the investigators checked the bathroom. They had seen a number of containers of drugstore items in the living room, but nothing like the proliferation of bottles, jars, boxes and vials of nonprescription vitamins, pain-killers, herbal remedies, sports rubs, patent medicines, skin tonic, mens’ cologne, hair dressing, and lotions that littered the counters and the sink and were jammed into the bathroom cabinets. The sink was too full to use, and to accommodate the overflow of products, Cool had fashioned a box that fit in the shower and he’d piled more of the stuff in there. The containers in the medicine cabinet had been there so long that their bottoms had rusted to the shelves. Most of the tops were also rusted or dried shut. This looked more like the bathroom of a very old man than it did that of an athletic-looking man in his early forties.
They found two pellet guns, and several knives—both hunting knives and switchblades. The man who had lived here seemed prepared to protect his bleak lodgings.
The kitchen was pretty much what they expected; dirty dishes and accumulated boxes covered the counter tops and filled the sink. The refrigerator’s contents looked as if no one had really made a home here. The crowded shelves had the remainders of take-out dinners from a supermarket deli—fast food, half-eaten and moldering. There were many tiny bottles of alcoholic beverages, the kind that airlines serve. The oven and stove were filthy, covered with baked-on grease.
Only the refrigerator gave a clue about the man who had lived here. He had left notes to himself, anchored with magnets, some of which must have made sense only to him.
Who was Silas Cool? Or, rather, who had he been? Where had he worked, and with whom had he spent his time? Did anyone else know about this musty, pornography-filled apartment where he had apparently lived for almost fourteen years?
Silas Cool was dead, quite probably by his own hand. Seeing the .38 caliber bullets and the gun box, the three detectives suspected that he had also killed Mark McLaughlin, and attempted to take a bus load of thirty-three strangers down into the depths of the Lake Washington Ship Canal with him.
* * *
It was very late. After a last check with the hospitals to query the condition of the survivors, John Nordlund, Steve O’Leary and Gene Ramirez signed out of Homicide for the night. Tomorrow, they would hope to find someone who had actually interacted with Silas Cool—someone who might explain what forces had driven him. The man had lived in Seattle for at least thirteen years. Somebody had to know him.
“It was strange,” Steve O’Leary would recall. “Usually, we get lots of calls after something like this from people who have something to share with us. Not one person from his neighborhood ever called us about Silas Cool—not one clerk at the supermarket to say she had rung up his groceries, nobody who knew him from the Laundromat, no one who talked with him on the corner. No neighbors. No one who should have been at least tangentially close to him. It was almost as if he had existed in a vacuum. An invisible man.”
By Saturday morning, the reality of the bus tragedy had begun to sink in. Miraculously, there had been no more deaths although many of the survivors were still in critical condition. When the bus was lifted by cranes, the worst fears of the rescue teams didn’t come true; there was no one underneath. Those who had literally walked away from the bus to nowhere caught themselves wondering if it had all been a nightmare. But the headlines on the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blazed that it really had happened. Color photographs of the destroyed sections of the articulated bus took up half a page. It rested there so close to the apartment house, so close to the giant Troll who lived under the Aurora Bridge, the wreckage like two sides of a giant triangle, its accordioned midsection stretched and torn.
Still, it had landed on the ground amidst the last browning leaves of autumn and not in the deep water beneath the bridge. The ruined hulk would be lifted onto a truck and taken to the bus garage where it would be treated as a crime scene by Seattle detectives.
The postmortem examination on the body of Silas Cool was performed by King County Assistant Medical Examiner Dan Straathof shortly after 7 A.M. on Saturday. The body still wore the yellow identification band around the right wrist reading “Whiskey Doe.” It was simply an accident that he had happened to get the “Whiskey” label from the paramedics. There were so many “Does” at the accident scene that they all had to get names that went with letters of the alphabet. There was no odor of alcohol about his body. The triage team who had moved swiftly through the accident scene locating victims and evaluating their condition and had placed a strip of white adhesive tape on his right chest that read “13.” As it turned out, he had, indeed, been unlucky 13.
Silas Cool weighed 198 pounds and measured just under six feet—although earlier descriptions had listed him as several inches taller. His hair was brown with thick swatches of gray, he was clean-shaven with clipped sideburns, and his teeth were in good repair. His body was clean and well-kept. He looked for all the world like a normal man in his early forties, who was in good shape and good health, but who had been in a very bad accident.
Silas Cool had suffered numerous wounds, commensurate with that accident; the question was whether they had occurred before or after his fatal gunshot wound. His spinal column was fractured at the C-6 level due to a blunt force injury. Had he lived, he might well have been paralyzed to some extent. Ot
her passengers had suffered similar injuries; it was what happened to a body if it fell from a great height.
Cool had bitten through his tongue, and his lungs and liver had hemorrhages from impact wounds. There were multiple abrasions and contusions. He had probably been brain-dead, but technically alive, as the bus fell to earth.
But Dr. Straathof determined that Silas Cool had not perished because he was in a bus that tore through a guardrail and plunged several stories to the ground. The fatal wound was the gunshot wound. That point of entry was just above his right ear. The skin around the wound had the familiar “stellate” tears that come with a contact gunshot as the skin itself is drawn momentarily into the gun barrel by the gases there, torn, and released. The bullet’s path was one of massive destruction through the brain itself, exiting near the top of the head. Any signs of life thereafter would have been mostly reflexive as the body struggled to live. That would explain the agonal gasps noted by the rescuers who struggled to free him from the bottom of a pile of people who had been thrown onto the bus steps.
If there is a classic gunshot suicide pattern, Silas Cool’s wound fit the criteria. It would probably be impossible to know just when Cool shot himself. But it would have to have been just after he shot Mark McLaughlin. He could not have done it after the bus crashed to the ground; he had been beneath a pile of passengers, his arms pinned.
In an attempt to answer at least some questions, a blood screen was done for alcohol, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, PCP, marijuana, methadone, propoxaphene, benzodiazapene and barbiturates—in short, all the possible drug groups that might have an effect on the central nervous system. Every single test came back negative. The only thing that Silas Cool’s blood tested positive for was caffeine. Cool might have collected tiny airplane bottles of liquor, but he had not drunk from them the day of the accident. There would be no easy explanations for the tragedy on the bus.
This man had been in the peak of physical condition when he died. He had no ailments. Despite the fast-food diet in his refrigerator, he still had only very minor streaks of atheroma (fatty deposits) on his coronary arteries. All things being equal, he probably would have lived to be a hundred.
The postmortem examination of bus driver Mark McLaughlin’s body yielded some sadly ironic truths. He had been struck twice by .38 bullets. The wound that looked the most dangerous from the outside wasn’t; that bullet had entered his right abdomen and passed through soft tissue behind his vital organs, ending benignly in his thigh. It was the bullet fired into his upper right arm that had killed him. And that was because it went completely through McLaughlin’s arm, exited, and reentered his right chest. That wound track was through the seventh intercostal space, through his liver, through the transverse colon, and then, tragically, it had pierced the aorta—the major artery of the body. Seconds later, already hemorrhaging fatally, he had been catapulted through the bus windshield to the roof of the apartment house.
Mark McLaughlin had had no chance at all to live. Like the man who shot him, the bus driver was in good shape when he was shot, his arteries clear and healthy, his heart valves unmarked by anything more than minor fatty deposits. He had been somewhat overweight, but he was in excellent condition. He, too, would probably have lived to a ripe old age if he hadn’t been the victim of Silas Cool’s inscrutable rage.
At noon on Saturday, Gene Ramirez started searching over the Internet for any relatives Silas Cool might have had. He checked Plainfield, New Jersey. That was where the lawyer’s card was from, and Cool had told the Lynnwood officer that he was from New Jersey. Ramirez found a listing for a couple named Cool living in Plainfield, and copied down the phone number of Daniel and Ena Cool. It was possible they were Silas Cool’s parents, or perhaps his aunt and uncle. He gave the number to Kathy Taylor in the M.E.’s office for possible notification of next-of-kin. Twenty minutes later, she called Ramirez back. The Cools in Plainfield were, indeed, the parents of Silas Garfield Cool. She had told them that their son was dead, and it had, of course, been devastating for them. They were expecting a call from the homicide detectives who might explain to them what had happened to their son.
Steve O’Leary placed a call to Daniel Cool. This was one of the most difficult parts of being a homicide detective, but he had to find out as much as he could about Silas Cool. The elderly man was both upset and baffled when O’Leary told Daniel Cool that the detectives believed that his son had caused the bus crash. Cool said he had never known Silas to own any firearms. It was absolutely incomprehensible to him that Silas could have deliberately hurt anyone. That just wasn’t like his boy.
“Where does Silas work?” O’Leary asked.
“He can’t—couldn’t—work,” Cool replied. “He has had a serious back problem for many years.”
Silas had played golf in high school, his father said, but somehow he had injured his back and it had plagued him ever since. But no, he hadn’t seen a doctor about it in many years as far as the elder Cool knew.
As tactfully as he could, O’Leary asked if Silas had been under psychiatric care. His father said he never had, as far as he knew. “We knew he was a loner,” Cool said, but they had never thought Silas had any real problems.
His father said that Silas had worked until about 1987 or 1988 for King County in Seattle in the King County Building and Land Use Department. He had an associate degree in civil engineering from Middlesex County College in New Jersey.
But then Silas’s back had just become too painful for him to work full-time. He had wanted to move back to New Jersey, but his dad said he had talked him out of that. It was arranged for his parents to send him $650 a month until he found something that he could work at. O’Leary learned that Daniel Cool’s sister, who was in her nineties, had also helped Silas out for two decades—ultimately sending him over $30,000 in Certificates of Deposit. Somehow, the years had stretched, and ten years later his parents were still sending Silas monthly checks.
Steve O’Leary let the old man go to try and deal with the loss of his only child. They would have more talks as the detective tried to form a more complete picture of what Silas Garfield Cool had been like.
The next phone call into Homicide was from the Medical Examiner’s Office. Herman Liebelt, sixty-nine, had died of his injuries. Like Silas Cool, Liebelt had found his way to Seattle from the East Coast. Beyond that, they were so different. Liebelt, the one-time saxophone-playing bandleader, sailor in the Korean War, purchasing agent, had begun life in Amsterdam, N.Y. His last years were spent reading everything from popular fiction to deep philosophical works. He had lived on the shoe-string that many seniors do, but he’d been a happy man with friends and myriad interests. He had found joy in little things and in new friends, and now he was gone. His painful injuries were too severe for a man nearly seventy to survive.
In the early afternoon of Saturday, November 28, two men who worked at the Union Gospel Mission in Seattle arrived at the Homicide unit. Bill Wippel and Peter Davis said they had heard the name “Silas Cool” on the news. Finally, someone had recognized him and wanted to talk about how they had known him. They asked to see a picture of the man known as Silas Cool, and Nordlund and O’Leary showed them the booking photo taken in 1994 after a shoplifting arrest.
They recognized Cool. He was one of those who had come to the mission to eat a meal now and then. “He’s eaten with us several times,” Wippel said. “At least twice this past month. He never caused any trouble, was very neat and clean, and polite to our staff.”
Still, Wippel and Davis had known Silas Cool only on a very surface level. He must have been hungry; simple arithmetic would substantiate that. His folks sent Cool $650 a month; his rent was $475. That left him $175 a month for food, utilities, clothing, and transportation. They found no record of any Certificates of Deposits in Cool’s name. He had spent it all, maybe on his scores of medications. “Those Union Gospel meals must have helped him out,” O’Leary commented.
Records at the mission, which h
ad helped thousands of homeless and down-on-their-luck people in Seattle for many years, showed that Silas Cool had filled out meal tickets on October 20 and November 20; he had attended chapel, but he had never spent a night in the mission.
“I remember him,” Wippel said, “because the guy stood out in the crowd. He was clean-cut, handsome. He didn’t look like a street person. He kept to himself, didn’t talk to anyone. I do know I looked him in the eye and made contact with him, and he smiled. He gave no indication that he was a violent person.”
The mission staff knew that the people who came to them for food and lodging often guarded their past from prying eyes, and they never pressed. Wippel and Davis knew nothing at all about Silas Cool’s world outside the food lines, but he had always seemed as though he could have made a success of life. He looked like success.
In reality, Silas Cool, either unwilling or unable to work, had lived his life close to the bone. On Monday, the homicide investigators checked with the State Department of Public Assistance to see if Cool had received benefits of any kind, and they found he didn’t get any Social Security payments for being disabled, or any state Labor and Industry benefits.
Steve O’Leary talked in more detail with Daniel Cool, Silas’s father and, with his permission, took a taperecorded statement.
Silas Cool’s early life had been anything but average. Daniel Cool’s career as an accountant for a petroleum company had taken him all over the world. He had met and married Ena, four years younger than he and a native of South Africa. Silas was born in Palenbang, Sumatra, Indonesia, in 1954. They had moved to Pakistan when Silas was a very small boy. Finally, they had come back to the U.S., settling in North Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1960, when Silas was five years old. He was their only son, their only child. They were nearly old enough to be grandparents when he was born.