by Robert Scott
Q: Why did you drink the blood?
A: First kill. For strength. For protection. I painted a tree and the earth on my chest.
Q: Why did you need protection?
A: Because I didn’t want her to get up again. I told her, “You’re dead. I killed you.” But she would sit up again. I was trying to get her to stop moving. With the knife I finally got her to stop moving.
For his heinous crime Ray Baca was found guilty of first-degree murder. Lane noted one important fact about his own participation in the trial. He said later, “In the past there would be more than one officer who had been in charge of a murder scene. Not this time. When the defense attorney asked me on the stand who was in charge of the Barsic crime scene, I simply answered, ‘I was. It was my responsibility to make the decisions concerning what was done.’ I knew that in closing arguments he was going to try and point out to the jury that no one was actually in charge of the crime scene. That, of course, didn’t work for him, and it kind of took the wind out of his sails. He didn’t even mention it in closing.”
As things would prove later, this aspect of one law enforcement officer in charge of a murder scene would help paint David Gerard into a corner. His defense attorney on two different cases could not come back and say that either no one, or too many officers, had been in charge of a crime scene.
In the long run, none of what happened to Virginia Barsic would lead back to the murder of Elaine McCollum on the Weyco Haul Road. In fact, it would have two diametrically opposed consequences—one good and one bad. The bad consequence was that it took away all the resources that might have looked into the McCollum murder for a greater length of time in 1991. On the flip side the Barsic crime scene helped the GHSO detectives hone their skills. And they were going to need all of those for the McCollum murder, and one more that had not yet occurred. Steward Menefee always wanted as much evidence as possible before he went to trial. And the detectives were going to need every bit, no matter how small, when it came to anything concerning David Gerard.
The Virginia Barsic murder may not have led to the Elaine McCollum murder, but just around the bend was another set of murders that would lead directly back to McCollum’s death. What made these murders so hard to link back to McCollum was that they occurred in a very different manner. MO and location would not be the common denominator. What would be was a link to one man: David Allen Gerard.
7
UP IN FLAMES
February 15, 1995
A logging trucker was driving his rig down East Hoquiam Road around 4:45 A.M. on February 15, 1995, when he glanced over to the side of the road and was stunned. Smoke and flames were erupting from a house beside the road, and the driver grabbed a .22 pistol he had in the cab of his vehicle, stepped outside and fired several shots into the air to alert anyone inside the house and neighbors as well.
Ernie Shumate, who lived with his family right next door to the burning house, was having a restless night, with bad dreams. Things that occurred within his dreams, and noise from outside the house, blended into unreality. The gunshots were real, however, and Ernie sprang out of bed to witness his neighbor’s home filled with flames and smoke. Ernie knew that sixty-six-year-old Patricia McDonnell lived there, and so did Patricia’s thirty-four year old daughter Patty Rodriguez and Patty’s two sons, Matthew, eight, and Joshua, six. There was also some guy named David who lived in the house part-time. He was Patty’s boyfriend. Or at least sometimes boyfriend. David seemed to be a lot more attached to her than she was to him.
Ernie threw on some clothes, rushed next door and saw that the fire was too intense near the front of the house for him to enter. So he moved to a side entrance, a sliding glass door, and managed to get it open. Poking his head inside, Ernie yelled for the residents to wake up and escape, but he heard no reply. Not even the two dogs in the house made any noise, and Ernie heard no smoke alarms going off. Ernie was soon pushed back by the smoke and flames.
Rick Doyle, who lived across the street from the McDonnell residence, also rushed to the house. Just like Ernie Shumate, Doyle was pushed back by the intense heat and flames. He had to stand helplessly outside the house and watch it burn.
Ernie Shumate later told a Daily World reporter, “We knew they were in there, and we knew there wasn’t anything we could do. Most of the house was already on fire.”
Volunteer firefighters from Wishkah Fire District 10 arrived on the scene within fourteen minutes of Ernie calling it in. By the time they arrived, the house was fully engulfed in flames. It took seventeen firefighters to battle the blaze, and by the time they finally had the fire beaten down, all the occupants were found to be dead inside the house. It was one of the worst fires in Grays Harbor history.
Both print and television news station reporters were soon on the scene, and Ernie Shumate told them that at around 1:00 A.M., he had picked up his children from a dance and had noticed that lights were still on in the McDonnell residence next door. McDonnell had recently injured her knee and was sleeping on a reclining chair in the front room. Shumate said that the boys often slept on the living-room floor near a woodstove. In fact, firefighters found the boys’ bodies on the floor, and McDonnell’s body twenty feet away from the recliner, as if she might have made an attempt at escape and been overcome by flames or smoke. Patty Rodriguez’s body was found sprawled across a bed in a back bedroom.
After a preliminary observation of the scene, Fire Chief Bill Knannline said there was no indication that the fire was anything besides accidental. He surmised the fire might have smoldered for quite a while near the woodstove before engulfing the whole house. The woodstove appeared to be the point of origin.
Friends of the victims began to surround the house in stunned silence after the fire. All that remained were smoldering ruins and two vehicles in the driveway. In fact, the fire had been so hot, it had scorched those vehicles. A friend of McDonnell’s, Marsha Peterson, was returning from Seattle when she heard on her car radio about a fire near Hoquiam. No name was given about who owned the house, but Peterson had one name run through her head as she listened to the news report: Pat.
When Peterson got to the scene, she joined the others in silence, staring at the burned house. Peterson later told a reporter that she had asked McDonnell to go on the trip to Seattle with her, but the woman had remained home instead to take care of her grandsons. It had cost her, her life.
Peterson told the reporter that some logs that were visible in the front yard were for McDonnell, who was going to make a new flower bed with them. Now that flower bed would never be constructed. The whole scene was surreal to Peterson. It seemed impossible that all her friends inside were dead.
Rick Doyle, who had tried saving the victims, as Ernie Shumate had, said, “It was tough. A helpless feeling.” As he held his two daughters, one who was in the same kindergarten class as Joshua Rodriguez, Doyle talked to reporters about how suddenly a tragedy could occur. Doyle comforted his daughters, knowing that the loss of their friends, the boys next door, was going to hit them especially hard.
Clay Micheau, a family friend who had actually lived in the house for a while, said that the burned house contained smoke alarms, and they had worked only weeks previously when they went off while Patricia McDonnell was cooking. Clay had actually been there at the time. The Daily World reported, It’s not known if the smoke detectors now did not work, or simply failed to wake the family.
Patricia McDonnell had lived in that house most of her life, and had raised two boys and two girls there, one of them being Patty. Patricia knew almost everyone in the neighborhood, and when her husband was alive, they had hosted barbecues and square dances. Everyone in the neighborhood liked the McDonnells for their open nature and friendly ways. They had seen Patricia often working in the garden in front of the house.
Patty Rodriguez, meanwhile, had been recently divorced and living in Arizona with her two boys, until they all returned to the area, only four months previously. When Patty’s ex-husb
and, Sergio Rodriguez, of Aberdeen, was contacted about the tragedy, he was understandably distraught. In a telephone interview with a reporter, Sergio could barely speak, he was so overwhelmed. “What can I say?” he declared. “There are no words to say.” And then he added, “Patty and her mom were wonderful people. We always got along, even after the divorce.” Sergio had been glad when Patty and the boys had moved back to the area, after living in Arizona. Sergio had stayed in the Grays Harbor area while Patty and the boys had been away, and he especially missed the boys.
The last time he had seen his boys was only a few days previously. Sergio had visited the home on East Hoquiam Road and said of Patty and the boys, “It was fine, then. They were fine.”
Early Saturday morning a neighbor of the McDonnell residence had phoned Sergio and told him about the fire. That person hopefully asked if the boys had been spending the night with Sergio. They, of course, had not done so. When Sergio rushed to the scene, he was in time to see the firefighters still battling the blaze. But all hopes that those who were inside had survived was gone.
Perhaps the most ironic circumstance in this tragedy was that Patricia McDonnell’s son, Patty’s brother Brian McDonnell, was a volunteer firefighter in the area. He spoke of his sister Patty as a loving mother, and Joshua as a spitting image of her. Growing up, he and Patty had been great friends, and Brian spoke about how she always stood her ground and stuck up for herself. She was outgoing, funny and a quick learner.
Brian declared, “The house was one where the kids were usually roller-skating up and down the hallway. There were dogs barking, and I was those boys’ rough-and-tumble uncle. They were typical boys, full of energy.”
What made the fire in the McDonnell home seem so accidental in nature, even to Brian, was that on the same day, fires claimed a total of sixteen children and five adults nationwide. Beside the four on Hoquiam Road, one adult and six children had died in a fire in Burbank, Illinois. Even with smoke alarms blaring, they had not survived the blaze. That same day in Moorhead, Minnesota, a woman and her six children perished in a house fire. And in Columbus, Ohio, three family members—an adult and two kids—died in a blaze. All these fires made the fire in the McDonnell household seem like no more than a tragic and deadly accident. An accident that could occur in any home that had a woodstove or faulty heater.
And if that wasn’t enough, a few days later in Grays Harbor County, another fire nearly took the life of a woman and her sixteen-year-old son, near Aberdeen. Karen Tuffery and her son, Brandon, clad only in pajamas, escaped from their mobile home. As they stood outside in the cold air, the mobile home quickly burned to the ground. The mobile home had not been hooked up to electricity, and a woodstove acted as a heater, while kerosene lanterns were used for lighting.
It had been a near escape for Karen and Brandon. Karen had awakened to glimpse a strange red glow on the ceiling of her bedroom. She opened the bedroom door to see fire and smoke down the hallway near Brandon’s room. Karen ran outside to Brandon’s window and screamed for him to wake up. He awakened, and tried escaping through the hallway, but the smoke and fire were too intense. So he grabbed a chair in his room, smashed the bedroom window and tumbled out that way. Both Karen and Brandon considered how lucky they were, in comparison to what had happened at the McDonnell household. Their near escape reinforced the scenario that Patricia McDonnell, Patty Rodriguez and her two sons had perished in a tragic accident.
Out of routine procedure, GHSO detective Gary Parfitt began investigating the house fire, and Lane Youmans attended the autopsies of Patty Rodriguez, Patricia McDonnell, Joshua and Matthew Rodriguez. In some ways Detective Parfitt’s route to becoming a GHSO detective was just as colorful as that of Lane Youmans’s. Parfitt had been in the U.S. Marine Corps and was stationed all over the world. After the Marine Corps he decided to join GHSO. There was just one big obstacle to overcome. He was forty-eight years old and going into the police academy with some guys twenty-five years younger than he was. Nonetheless, Parfitt started working out at a local park and climbing over walls there, which he knew would be his toughest challenge. It all paid off. Parfitt came in fourth in his class that graduated from the academy.
When Detective Parfitt looked at the fire situation, Mrs. McDonnell and the boys had been badly burned from the fire. The boys had been found on the floor of the living room near the woodstove, where Detective Parfitt believed the fire had originated. Patricia McDonnell was found on the floor of the dining room next to the living room, several feet away from a sliding glass door. She had possibly been trying to escape, but was overcome by the fire. Patty Rodriguez was discovered in bed in a back bedroom, the farthest room from the living room, which was the supposed point of origin of the fire. There were some signs of burning on her body, but the body was intact.
Dr. Daniel Selove performed the autopsies and determined that Patty had died from smoke inhalation. She had also sustained a fracture on the right side of her skull from what was believed to have been falling debris, possibly from the ceiling. Patricia McDonnell and the boys had no soot in their throats, which normally occurs when someone inhales smoke from a fire. Dr. Selove believed the lack of soot could have occurred from a blast of superheated air, which might have killed them. He also found that Mrs. McDonnell had a bad heart, which might have been a factor in her death. Perhaps she had been overcome by a heart attack while trying to reach safety.
What was intriguing from Detective Parfitt’s point of view was that Patty Rodriguez had supposedly broken up with her boyfriend the night before she and the others died in the fire. Her boyfriend’s name was David Gerard.
Detective Parfitt asked Lane to contact Gerard and arrange for him to come to the sheriff’s office for an interview. Lane phoned Gerard at his friend Polly Miller’s house and spoke with him. (The same Polly Miller who later wondered why David Gerard had called her in 1999 just to say that he was in the town of Forks, when, in actuality, he had just beaten Frankie Cochran with a hammer.)
Lane identified himself and told Gerard that the sheriff’s office was investigating a house fire on East Hoquiam Road. Lane asked Gerard if he would come down to the sheriff’s office in Montesano, since he and other detectives were talking with family and friends of the deceased. Lane said later, “I was stunned when he answered, ‘No, I don’t want to.’ I asked him why not, and all he would say was because he didn’t want to. He would not explain further.”
Talking with Gerard was like talking to a recalcitrant child who did not want to do something an adult asked him to do. The child’s one and only response would be “No, I don’t want to!”
After his conversation with Gerard, Lane Youmans hung up the phone and told Detective Parfitt what had just occurred. It was such an odd response from Gerard that they both hopped into Parfitt’s vehicle and drove four miles to the Miller residence on Wynoochee Valley Road.
Once they arrived there, the two detectives went up and knocked on the door. David Gerard answered the door and stepped outside to talk with them. It was late in the evening and the trio stood outside in the cool air, talking. Gerard expanded upon his earlier refusal to come down to the sheriff’s office by saying he didn’t like cops. The detectives explained that they were talking to a lot of people, and not picking on him, just because he was Patty’s ex-boyfriend. One thing they really wanted to know was when was the last time Gerard had seen the victims alive, especially Patty. The detectives added that Gerard wasn’t under arrest, and that he could follow them to the sheriff’s office, where everyone might be more comfortable. He could leave that office at any time.
Hearing that said, Gerard seemed to change his mood, and he agreed to meet the detectives back at the office in Montesano. Once the detectives got there, Gerard arrived a short time later, and they all went into a break room in the complex. They sat down, and Lane took notes as Detective Parfitt began the interview. Asked about the evening prior to the fire, Gerard said that he and Patty Rodriguez had been at Muddy Waters, a
cocktail lounge in south Aberdeen with two of Patty’s friends. It was at that location, Gerard said, that he and Patty had a “little spat.” Gerard added that he soon left and went to the Pioneer Cocktail Lounge, about fifteen miles away in Montesano, with a person named Steve Stoken and someone Gerard only knew by the name of Mike. Gerard said that he never knew Mike’s last name.
All three drank for a while there, and then they went to the Tyee Lounge in Olympia, according to Gerard, which was thirty miles farther down the road. After drinking at the lounge for a while, they all went to the Red Barn Restaurant in Grand Mound, where they ate breakfast around 2:00 A.M. After breakfast they drove back to the Muddy Waters Lounge, where one man drove Gerard’s truck back to his brother’s place at the Kimberly Apartments in Hoquiam. Gerard said that he was in no shape to drive the truck, and that’s why the other guy had done it. Gerard said he couldn’t recall if Steve or Mike had driven him home.
Gerard added that he had slept for a few hours after a night of drinking, took a shower, then headed to the Millers’ house outside of Montesano. It was there, Gerard said, that he first learned about the house fire at the Rodriguez/McDonnell residence. The Millers were absolutely shocked when Gerard showed up at their door. They had heard about the fire on the morning news and had assumed that Gerard had perished in the fire as well. It was like a ghost suddenly appearing at their door.
Both detectives noted that Gerard seemed calm as he spoke about where he had been and what he had been doing on the night of February 14 and early morning of February 15. Neither detective was confrontational, since Detective Parfitt had already examined the burned house and surmised that the fire had been accidental in nature. Parfitt agreed with the others that it had probably been caused by a faulty woodstove used for heating. Detective Parfitt asked Gerard about the woodstove, and Gerard said the family had been having problems with it. Gerard described the stove as being so clogged with creosote that you could hit it with your hand and hear the sound of soot breaking free and falling down the pipe.