by Robert Scott
The common theme of these stories concerned Elaine having heard that Todd had gone to a tavern in Montesano from Aberdeen. For whatever reason, she wanted to meet him there. Not having a ride, she actively began searching for one to Montesano. It was quite possible that Elaine climbed into a white sedan or pickup truck in front of the Smoke Shop in Aberdeen around the time that Karen Luther had spoken to her on the street. What wasn’t known was whether she had ever made it to Montesano, and was on her way back to Aberdeen when murdered, or she had never made it there at all.
5
VICTIMOLOGY
To try and get into the background and mind-set of Elaine McCollum, Lane Youmans wrote up what he termed a “victimology report.” Lane stated in it: Elaine “Brooke” McCollum lived in Aberdeen with her boyfriend, David Simmons. Mr. Simmons was a heroin addict and was not employed. Brooke McCollum was also not employed but was seeking employment. McCollum has been described as a very caring person who was trying to get her boyfriend off of heroin. Her parents lived in Aberdeen, and she kept in close contact with them. She also had a brother who lived in the Seattle area and she often sent him taped audio letters. She had no children or pets and was a relatively organized person. She kept a clean house, her purse was organized to include envelopes containing various sums of cash and the envelopes were labeled with the names of various places where she owed money.
McCollum had a driver’s license but did not have a vehicle, nor did David Simmons. McCollum would frequently hitchhike if she had to go farther than the downtown Aberdeen area, which was about three blocks from her residence. McCollum has been described as a “bar person,” and would spend most of her time with friends in the local bars. On the evening of February 5, 1991, McCollum walked downtown and went to several of the local bars while her boyfriend, Dave Simmons, stayed home. While McCollum was in the downtown area, she met up with Todd Bigelow and another male. They went to several taverns while riding in Mr. Bigelow’s car. At one point McCollum apparently got separated from Todd Bigelow. She and the other male, Fred Jarmin, split up and she attempted to find Mr. Bigelow, but was unsuccessful. Mr. Bigelow went to a friend’s house where he passed out in the evening hours. His car has been examined and he has been questioned, but he has a solid alibi for that night.
McCollum was last seen leaving the Smoke Shop Café and Lounge at 10:30 PM. She walked out to the curb where a white sedan and brown pickup truck pulled up to the curb. The witness believed that McCollum got into one of the vehicles, but did not know which one. McCollum’s body was found the next morning around 6 AM, lying on the Weyco Haul Road. Her purse containing money was still with her. Her pants were off and turned inside out and she had been run over by a vehicle approximately three times. Just east of the body site, there were indications that McCollum had been running westbound down the road toward Aberdeen and the vehicle was pursuing her.
There is no indication that Elaine McCollum was a prostitute, nor any indication that she was unfaithful to her boyfriend. The last person to see Elaine McCollum alive was a person of questionable credibility, a woman named Karen. Karen stated that McCollum had just scored some dope for her boyfriend and then got into a vehicle. Although David Simmons said that in the past, McCollum had done this, he stated that she would not have done that on the evening before she was murdered. She knew he was trying to go cold turkey off of heroin. It is unknown why Elaine Brooke McCollum would willingly get into a person’s car in the downtown Aberdeen area unless it was someone she knew. She did not need a ride to go home, since she was only a few blocks from there when last seen.
The detectives also began checking out a lot of rumors that someone in the Grays Harbor’s Hispanic community had killed Elaine. It was no secret that many people in the area’s drug culture did not like the Hispanics in the area, and blamed them for every unsolved crime that came down the pike. Lane Youmans noted, “There were lots of stories about gangs of Mexican males raping women, killing people because of drug debts and things like that. While we were aware of some incidents involving young Mexican men, underage girls and alcohol, I knew a lot of the rumors were just talk. Besides, Elaine McCollum’s murder didn’t feel like a group thing. Plus, when you have a group of any race involved in a crime like this, chances are good that one of them would have taken the money in her purse. And chances are good that at least one person would talk to others about the crime, but so far, no one was talking.
The obituary for Elaine McCollum in the Aberdeen Daily World was as short as her life had been. It spoke of her being born in Aberdeen and graduating from Aberdeen High School. It spoke of her love for animals and listed a few of her family members and David Simmons. She had spent nearly her entire life in Grays Harbor County and rarely traveled out of the county. Her entire life span had run thirty-three years.
Before her nervous breakdown in her early twenties, Elaine had gone to high school in the area. She hadn’t been in any student clubs or organizations in her freshman and junior years, but by her senior year that had changed. She seemed to blossom that year and was in the Leaderette club. This club assisted in plays put on at the school, concerts and basketball games. Elaine was also in the Spanish club and the pep club. In a photograph showing her in the Leaderettes, Elaine is smiling and appears to be enjoying herself. It may have been one of the happiest times in her short life.
There was very little news in the Daily World about the murder, except for an article about how the Washington State Patrol had used a high-tech device to help in the investigation. The newspaper wrote about how the experts from the state patrol in Seattle went out to the Weyco Haul Road with their Total Station Measuring System, and the article told about how the operators could produce a precise diagram of the crime scene in a fraction of the time compared to older methods. The device was so new, it had barely been used for a year at other crime and accident scenes. For its day it was very high-tech.
The newspaper went on to report that GHSO detectives were still scouring the crime scene area for bits of evidence. Lane Youmans was quoted as saying that a vehicle may have been used in the murder, but he would not elaborate on this. (By this point Lane knew that it had been a vehicle that had killed Elaine, but he decided not to release any more information about that at the present time.) And then there was one other important sentence in the article. The article related: Slowing the department down is a homicide trial in Grays Harbor Superior Court this week. Several sheriff’s investigators are testifying, which left the office with a smaller contingent of investigators. Lane had been one of those investigators called away from the Elaine McCollum crime scene to testify at court.
The homicide that was drawing away so many GHSO investigators concerned a Cambodian immigrant named Kly Bun Meas, who had allegedly killed another Cambodian immigrant. In fact, Meas had allegedly taken a pendant from the dead man, which his girlfriend saw, and Meas supposedly confessed to her, “Look, I killed this man.” While the victim, Uan Teng, had been fishing near Elma, he had been shot twice in the head. Teng apparently had had money stolen from him and the gold pendant. A few days later, Meas gave his girlfriend and friends some large amounts of cash. They all wondered where he had suddenly gotten the money. Meas worked sometimes at odd jobs and fighting forest fires, but more often than not, he was unemployed and had little cash on hand.
Lane Youmans and the other detectives had spoken to various people concerning the murder, and one of them was Gabriel Espinoza. He had seen a blue pickup truck pass him by twice while he was at his house on the day of the crime. Espinoza lived less than a mile from the murder scene, and Meas drove a blue pickup truck. Even Meas’s neighbor said that he had loaned Meas a rifle a few days before the murder.
In his closing arguments County Prosecutor Steward Menefee told the jurors, “The one thing that ties this case up was literally a stone around the defendant’s neck, that pendant. Because any way you cut it, that pendant makes the case.” In the end it was a pretty open-and-shut case, and the
jury found Kly Meas guilty of first-degree murder.
All of this had one detrimental effect, however, as the newspaper article had noted. It took key investigators away from the Elaine McCollum crime scene, early in its inception, which is often a critical time in the collection of evidence and information.
By February 11, 1991, there was an article in the Daily World headlined: DETECTIVES SEEK HELP IN TRACING LAST HOURS OF MURDERED WOMAN. Lane was quoted as saying that the public’s input in piecing together the last hours that Elaine had spent in Aberdeen could help the investigation. Among the questions were both how and why Elaine had either been walking on or been transported to the Weyco Haul Road in the middle of the night. A few people reported a woman hitchhiking in the south Aberdeen and Cosmopolis areas on the night in question, but whether the woman matched the description of Elaine McCollum couldn’t be determined. Lane stated that it was known that Elaine had been at the Time Out Tavern early in the evening on February 5. The Time Out Tavern, along with the Smoke Shop, was one of Elaine’s main hangouts in town. It was also a place that Todd Bigelow knew well.
Going back to forensic fluids that might help implicate or eliminate suspects, the detectives obtained blood samples from David Simmons, Todd Bigelow and Fred Jarmin, a friend of Elaine’s who had been with her during her final hours on February 5 while she had been looking for Todd Bigelow.
Lane Youmans could have sent the blood samples to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab in Seattle, but at that time, all that lab was doing was ABO blood typing. This was very early in the new forensic science of DNA testing, and the only national lab doing vital forensic work at the time was the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. In 1991, there was a huge backlog of DNA requests from law enforcement around the nation. Nonetheless, Lane determined the best results might occur if he did send the blood samples to the FBI Laboratory, and he did so, knowing there would be a long wait until the results came back.
Detectives Doug Smythe and Bill Stocks, meanwhile, checked out David Simmons’s alibi. They discovered that he didn’t have a vehicle, so any vehicles he did have access to were put on a rack and their undercarriage examined for evidence related to the murder. No evidence from those vehicles indicated that they had been at the murder scene.
The relationship between David and Elaine was looked into, and although it may not have been the best in the world, it was apparent that they did care for each other. There was one very outrageous remark on David’s part, however, at one point. Elaine had told a counselor at Evergreen Counseling Center that David had once said to her, “If I find you’re cheating on me, I’ll cut you from clit to forehead.” Despite this remark, though, there were never any indications of domestic violence between David and Elaine. He might have uttered those words when he was high.
All indications also pointed to David Simmons having been home on the evening when Elaine went missing, and that he was indeed trying to go cold turkey from heroin. He took the phone off the hook and went to bed. His story, more or less, held up.
Even though Lane tried to set up a polygraph exam of David Simmons, it was never done. Around that time Detectives Smythe and Stocks were busy checking out the Hispanic gang angle, which went nowhere. Perhaps they thought there were some good leads there, but the time spent on that did have consequences. Lane wanted them to go and photograph David Simmons and Elaine McCollum’s residence. By the time the detectives got around to doing so, David had cleaned out the residence and moved to another location. Lane heaved a large sigh. He had taken twelve hundred photos of the crime scene on the Weyco Haul Road, autopsy and other evidence, but there would never be relevant photos of the Simmons/McCollum residence. As Lane Youmans said later, “What’s done was done, and you live with it and move on. I can’t think of a murder case I’ve worked on, that there was something I would have liked to have done over.”
Lane went to Sheriff Dennis Morrisette to contact the county commissioners and request a $2,000 reward for information on the murder of Elaine McCollum, which was approved. GHSO also posted notices in the region’s newspaper, the Daily World, with some more information about the case, and asking the residents for help.
The Daily World ran a few more stories about the murder on the Weyco Haul Road and the reward as well. Despite these steps, though, the only tips that came in were about Hispanic gang members and the Todd Bigelow angle. Lane recalled, “No one got drunk and bragged about it. No one snitched on someone else to get out of a jam. There were no useful tips. Soon the tips dried up and the case went cold. The only evidence we had that belonged to the suspect were the plaster molds of the tire tracks.”
The tires were identified from the molds as being Les Schwab Classic Premium tires, which had only been on the market since October 1990. About sixty thousand of these had been sold in western Washington State, and there were 213 people who had purchased the Classic Premium tires at the Aberdeen Les Schwab store.
Lane assigned Detective Stocks and Detective Smythe to make a list of customers who had bought those tires in Aberdeen, and check the people out as far as criminal records went. The list was broken down alphabetically, by city and tire size. Detective Stocks also obtained a list of vehicles from the University of Michigan, based on tire size and wheel base. Due to the fact that the tire tracks were left on a gravel road, exact measurement wasn’t possible. But the detectives were able to narrow down the possible vehicles that could have left the tire tread marks on the Weyco Haul Road to fifty types. This was based upon certain vehicles able to use Les Schwab Classic Premium tires.
Detective Smythe and Detective Stocks prioritized the list of customers’ vehicles based on the list from the University of Michigan. They contacted a number of customers on the list, and were able to exclude them one by one. Even though the name David Gerard, of Montesano, came up, it was not the same David Gerard connected to Frankie Cochran in later years. In fact, it was another individual who had nothing to do with Frankie’s attempted murder or the murders of women on the Weyco Haul Road.
The David Gerard who was connected to Frankie was not checked out at the time. This may have been because all he had listed was a post office box (POB) with no notation of his actual physical address. In fact, over the years this David Gerard had a habit of only using POBs as a mailing address. It made it hard to keep track of his whereabouts at any particular time. This was exacerbated by the fact that he moved around so often. He would move around from place to place almost on a yearly basis. In the last ten years this Gerard had lived at ten different locations.
When the DNA results concerning Elaine McCollum finally came back from the FBI Laboratory, their report indicated that David Simmons was one contributor to semen found on the vaginal swab. This was not a huge surprise, since Simmons was Elaine’s live-in boyfriend at the time. There was a second unidentified contributor of semen as well. Just who this person was did not show up in any database.
As the case progressed, David Simmons was ruled out as Elaine McCollum’s killer. Some individual was still out there who had ruthlessly run over Elaine McCollum, backed up over her as she lay on the road, then drove over her again to make sure she was dead.
If the Uan Teng murder trial wasn’t enough to retard further progress on the Elaine McCollum case, Lane Youmans and the other GHSO detectives had another murder trial on their hands that soon took up a lot of their time as well. This related to a woman named Robin Rose, who had moved up to Washington State from Arcata, California. She had fallen in love with a man named David Coleman in Grays Harbor County. One day in 1990, Coleman contacted GHSO and said that Robin was missing. Deputy John Olsen went to Coleman’s residence and took a report. According to Coleman, Robin had gotten up, kissed him good-bye and said that she was going out to shop. He stated that he drove across the Olympic Peninsula, took the ferry and visited friends in Tacoma. From Tacoma, Coleman said, he called her twice, but he only got the answering machine. Coleman said that when he returned that evening, Robin’s Ford
Explorer was in the driveway and her keys for the Explorer were on a hook in the kitchen. Coleman stated that he looked around and saw that her sleeping bag, a .22 rifle and all of her pain medications were missing.
Deputy Olsen had Coleman write out a statement, which he did. But then Coleman crumpled up the page he had just written and threw it into a wastepaper basket. Olsen thought this was odd. In fact, Olsen thought it was so odd, that when Coleman wasn’t looking, Olsen snatched the crumpled-up piece of paper from the wastepaper basket and put it into his pocket. Coleman wrote another statement and gave it to Olsen. When Deputy Olsen left, he compared the two statements, and there were several differences between the two.
A missing persons report was made and Lane Youmans was sent to investigate and contact David Coleman. Lane said later, “I spent several days sitting with Coleman, drinking coffee with him and talking about Robin. I didn’t take notes, as I didn’t want to arouse his suspicion. I wanted to befriend him and gain his confidence. As soon as I would leave, I would park down the road and furiously write down all he had told me.
“David said that he suspected California marijuana dealers, who Robin had dealt with in the past, had come up to Hoquiam and kidnapped Robin, and possibly killed her. He said he became scared they might return and he was now sleeping on the couch, armed with a shotgun.
“During one of the visits, I asked if I could search the residence and he said okay. He didn’t seem to be upset or concerned about this. David’s mother had come up from California to stay with him. She had cleaned the kitchen and had found a spent twenty-two casing. I did a cursory search, but nothing really looked suspicious. In their bedroom Robin had lined all of her shoes along one wall. Several of the shoes had been kicked or moved, while the rest were neatly lined up. In the dirty clothes hamper I found a pair of sweatpants with fresh mud on the knees.