by Robert Scott
Detective Parfitt asked Gerard if there had been smoke detectors in the house, and where they were located. Gerard replied that there were two, one by the doorway between the living room and dining room, and the second at the end of the hallway by Patty’s room. He added that several days before the fire, Mrs. McDonnell asked him to purchase new batteries for the smoke detectors. Gerard added that he didn’t know if she had ever installed them. As Gerard spoke about the smoke detectors, he became more emotional.
Toward the end of the interview, Lane gave Gerard his business card and told him if he thought of anything else to give him a call. Gerard’s response to this was so unusual that even years later Lane recalled in exact detail what had occurred.
Lane Youmans said, “At that point Gerard grew silent, sat in his chair, legs spread apart, leaning somewhat forward, staring at the floor. His forearms were resting on his knees, and he was holding my business card between his thumb and forefinger in the center of the card, slowing turning the card by pushing the corners of it downward with his left index finger. He stopped talking, so we stopped talking and just watched him. The three of us sat quietly in the break room, Gerard staring at the floor in an almost catatonic state, while Detective Parfitt and I sat there studying him. After around five minutes I asked Gerard if there was something he wanted to tell us. He didn’t look up, just stared at the floor and then slowly replied, ‘No.’”
The interview was over. Gerard silently rose and walked out the door without saying another word. After Gerard was gone, the detectives discussed his strange behavior. They finally concluded it was due to grief or feelings of guilt for not having put the batteries in the smoke detectors himself. After all, Parfitt was good at his job, and by all indications it looked as if the fire had been accidental. Parfitt had taken some photos of the scene, and those pointed to “accidental status” as well. But Gerard’s behavior had been so bizarre at the end of the interview that the detectives began looking more closely into the house fire. Both of them got a “hinky” feeling about David Gerard.
Since Patty Rodriguez had suffered some kind of head injury, either before or after death, the detectives returned to the remnants of her bedroom to try and find out why. Lane Youmans shot some photos of her room and the attic area directly above her bed. They then searched the area around Patty’s bed and found a piece of burned two-by-six lumber that was about eighteen inches in length. The ceiling had burned through, and it appeared that the piece of lumber had fallen from the ceiling and had struck her on the head. She might have risen from bed and was either hit in the head by that lumber, or it occurred a short time later as she was trying to escape. Her legs were over the side of the bed, with her feet almost touching the floor. Patty was on her back, and her hands were up by her head. Her arms had been bent at the elbows—as if in the process of moving, she became incapacitated by smoke and fell back on the bed. It could have been at that point that the board from the ceiling fell down and hit Patty in the head.
The detectives went through the remnants of the house and looked at every aspect of it. They noted that the roof area over Patty’s room was partially collapsed, and the roof was completely gone over the front room and kitchen area. For the first time Lane took notes about the woodstove, which now jutted out of the rubble of the front room. The boys had been sleeping in the front room near the stove and may have been the first to succumb to its smoke, or overcome by a blast of superheated air, as Dr. Selove conjectured.
Lane went and spoke with Dr. Selove again about the injury to Patty’s head. Dr. Selove described it as having been caused by either someone swinging a heavy object, which hit her in the head, or being struck by a falling piece of lumber, end first. Of course, that seemed the most logical explanation to Lane at the time. It was only later, after Frankie Cochran had been hit in the side of the head by a hammer swung by David Gerard, that other deadly scenarios would occur to him.
Brian McDonnell also began to have his doubts about what had occurred to his mother, his sister and her two boys. It was mainly from David Gerard’s strange behavior after the fire, but also the way he was with Patty before the fire. Brian said that Gerard was very jealous if she even spoke to another man. It didn’t matter if she’d known the man for years, and they were just friends.
Brian said, “There was a get-together one time at my mom’s house, and everybody was joking and having a good time. But Gerard just kind of sat in the background, glowering about something. He wasn’t participating. He seemed to be angry about something. I didn’t particularly like him even then.”
Detective Parfitt continued to work on the case for a while longer to try and tie up loose ends. He was able to identify who Steve Stoken was, but Parfitt was unable to locate Stoken. As for “Mike,” whom Gerard had mentioned, Parfitt was not able to identify that person at all. After a while, the Rodriguez/McDonnell fire was put on the back burner and the case files stuffed into a cardboard box and placed on a shelf near Detective Parfitt’s desk.
Lane Youmans, however, was still uneasy about the whole episode. Even though everything pointed to an accidental fire, caused by a faulty woodstove and the lack of batteries in the smoke alarms, there was something just not right about the whole thing. Especially David Gerard’s unorthodox behavior while being interviewed. Lane said later, “Detective Parfitt was the department expert when it came to fire investigation. He was the expert because he had some training. We had access to fire investigation expert Richard Carman, who was one of the best fire investigators around. But he charged several thousand dollars when he investigated a fire. He had been used on several fire scenes by the department, but not this one. I always felt that a fire where four people died should have been thoroughly investigated, and to hell with the cost. I knew death scenes, and could read them and reconstruct what happened. Unfortunately, I didn’t know fire scenes. I hadn’t had the training about what to recognize, what to look for. It all just looked like burned wood to me.
“I could find the obvious signs of arson, like pour patterns where a flammable liquid was poured on the floor and ignited. But it takes an expert to read the subtle changes in the charring on wood. Detective Parfitt had gone on the scene while the firefighters were still there, and concluded that the origin of the fire was the woodstove, while everything around it had been reduced to ashes. The theory was the stove was the cause, and Gerard supported that theory with his information about the creosote. More should have been done, but hindsight is always perfect. No photographs were taken of the inside of the stove pipes, or the interior of the woodstove, or even the smoke detectors. The red flags either weren’t there, or we just didn’t see them.”
There may have been no red flags concerning David Gerard at the moment, but there would be plenty as time moved inexorably on toward his assault on Frankie Cochran. And there would emerge a photographic clue right in plain sight, which was not obvious unless you knew where to look. The photo had been shot by a news photographer outside Patty Rodriguez’s house. It was only much later that Lane would look at that photo and say, “Wow!”
Unfortunately, in the meantime, before that happened, another woman would be murdered under mysterious circumstances a year after the Rodriguez/McDonnell fire. And this woman’s body would turn up on the Weyco Haul Road, not far from where Elaine McCollum’s body had been found. Not unlike Elaine, this woman, too, would suffer horrendous injuries before dying. She would be butchered in what could be termed a blood frenzy.
8
BLOOD FRENZY ON THE WEYCO HAUL ROAD
Lane Youmans awoke on the morning of August 3, 1996, and got ready for work at the Montesano sheriff’s headquarters as usual. His morning routine was suddenly broken by a phone call he received. Another woman’s body had just been found on the Weyco Haul Road. Lane said later, “I shuddered and thought, ‘Oh shit! Not again!’”
The woman’s body had initially been spotted by a Weyerhauser employee heading to work. Before any deputies could shut off the Weyc
o Haul Road, someone spotted two men in a truck slowly driving down the road. When officers found these men, they were questioned and said that they had been looking for deer. Their story was checked out, and eventually they were eliminated as suspects.
Lane dressed quickly and hurried to the scene, where he found a cluster of officers already gathered a half mile from the west end of the road. They were all standing near a woman’s body. Lane walked up toward the body, which was on the south side of the gravel road, with her head pointing to the west. She was a white female, lying on her back and fully clothed. Her face and chest were saturated with blood. Lane began jotting down notes of what he saw at the scene:
The temperature is in the low 50s; the sky is partially cloudy. The sky to the west is lit up from the lights of Cosmopolis and Aberdeen. There are machinery sounds coming from the Weyerhauser sawmill, and no other sounds are detected.
The body is next to a hillside that is approximately 45 degrees in angle. On the south side, there is high grass, several trees and then a steep embankment down to Blue Slough Road. It is possible that the victim tried leaving the scene. The suspect got out of a vehicle and tried to find her on foot, leaving his shoe prints along the north side of the road. He got back in the vehicle and accelerated quickly, spinning out his tire.
Only one of the victim’s shoes is dirty and there is no grass found on them, indicating she did not try to run into the woods. The dirt on the one shoe is from when a knife attack occurred and she fell to the ground. At that point, the victim was possibly struck on the right side of her head with a blunt object, possibly knocking her senseless or unconscious. The suspect then used a knife when she was on the ground, and she may have been in a sitting position. There are no defensive wounds on her hands, but there is blood on both of them, indicating that when the attacker used the knife on her throat, she was alive and conscious. She grabbed her throat, getting blood on her hands, and she may have rubbed her hands on her pant legs, leaving a blood stain there. That stain has voids in it, indicating the jeans were wrinkled, possibly when she was in a sitting position.
The victim then lay face down and was bleeding profusely from the throat injury. The suspect began stabbing her on various spots on her back. There are a group of stab wounds around her shoulders, several on her lower back and buttocks. It would have been difficult to see her if she was lying alongside the road, and the suspect’s headlights were probably on, illuminating the scene.
She was rolled over and dragged approximately two feet west, and was lying on her back when the suspect began stabbing her in the face, chest and vaginal area. These wounds are mostly post mortem, and were possibly done to make sure the victim was dead. The victim had a purse slung across her body so that the purse was under her left arm. The suspect took the knife and cut the two straps next to the purse, leaving two cut marks in the soil to an approximate depth of of an inch.
There is no indication of a vehicle accelerating rapidly from this area. It appears the suspect drove normally from the location after obtaining the purse. There were a number of Kleenex-type tissues on the road just west of the body and a partial piece of Maalox wrapper, indicating the possibility that the suspect opened the purse and looked through it, pulling these items out in the process.
It didn’t take a long time to process this scene, since there were few physical items attached to it. Lane collected all the relevant items on the road, placed the victim in a body bag, then turned her over to a vehicle that would take her to Coleman’s Mortuary.
Lane Youmans said later, “We worked the scene until two P.M., and by then, it was hot and I was tired. There was little evidence to collect, and I felt that we had collected everything worthwhile. I planned on driving west to Aberdeen to get something to eat, but something told me that I should drive east to the end of the Weyco Haul Road just to see if there was anything else to collect.”
The detectives had the Weyco Haul Road sealed off during the early-morning hours, but Weyerhauser wanted the road reopened as soon as possible for their logging trucks. For that reason Lane decided his lunch could wait. About two-tenths of a mile from the murder scene, over a rise in the road, Lane saw several items lying in the roadway. He stopped his vehicle and checked them out, discovering the items were a used condom, a condom wrapper and seven paper napkins. The condom still contained liquid semen and none of the items had gravel or dust on them.
Just as he had done at scene one, Lane began taking notations about scene two. He wrote: At this location the suspect’s vehicle parked in a location where the road dips down so that it would not be immediately visible to vehicles traveling east on the haul road, but anyone in the vehicle could see the headlights shining over their top. They could also detect vehicles approaching from the east as the headlights would shine off the trees. It appears as though the vehicle began to pull off to the south side of the haul road, and then proceeded a short distance where it was turned around, and driven back to the same location and stopped in the middle of the road.
A condom wrapper, condom and napkins at that spot indicates that the suspect and victim had sex there. They most likely had sex in the vehicle and then the suspect dropped the condom, condom wrapper and used napkins out the driver’s side window. Just west of that location, there is one mark in the middle of the road where a tire spun out which is west of the condom. This indicates the possibility that the vehicle is a front wheel drive vehicle.
The width of that mark is approximately seven inches, although there is no discernible tire track. The tire track found along the south side of the road is about 5¼ inches wide. On some branches by a downed tree next to the tire track, there was some used motor oil on the branch, indicating that when the vehicle drove over the branch, the oil pan came in contact with the limb which is about eight inches off the ground. It’s very possibly an older car, a smaller sedan with narrow tires approximately 13” or 14”.
There are approximately nine shoe prints found along the north side of the Weyco Haul Road just east of the condom. The shoe prints are 33” apart and consist primarily of the sole and toe portions of the shoe. The shoe print consists of bars that are about 1½ inches in length and triangles are present. The shoe prints appear to be heading west. Directly south of the condom there is some brush that has been beaten down, as though someone had entered the blackberries and other briars for about three to four feet and then backed out.
Between Scene #2 and Scene #1, the body recovery site, the north side of the haul road is a steep bank leading down to the Blue Slough Road, and there is thick brush between the two roads. On the south side of the road, there are mostly steep hills and one dead-end logging road just west of the condom location. With the amount of light present, you can only see a few feet off either side of the road. Visibility is next to nothing when you enter the brush.
Lane photographed and collected those items and made a plaster cast of a tire track he found along the south side of the road close to where the items were. There was an apparent acceleration mark in the gravel next to the condom, but not enough details to make a cast in that area. Unlike the McCollum crime scene, there was not much in the way of tire tracks on the roadway.
Lane later learned that the plaster cast he had made was of a common Sanyo tire brand, and it might have been left there at any time. But the condom and paper napkins were of better evidentiary value. From the liquid nature of the semen in the condom, and the lack of dirt and gravel on the napkins, it was clear they had not been there very long. He was sure they had been dropped there during the previous night and were part of the murder scene farther down the road. There was no other litter or items where he found the condom and napkins. Also, the body of the woman had not been there long, and it was apparent she had been killed sometime during the previous night. Probably sometime between the time the Weyerhauser trucks quit operating on the road the previous day and the early-morning hours when they started again.
Detectives checking the area found a st
olen car from Seattle down an embankment on Blue Slough Road, about two miles from the crime scene on the Weyco Haul Road. It appeared that the driver had tried to make a turn on the narrow road and the vehicle had slipped down the embankment. When he couldn’t get it unstuck, the person just abandoned it there. The interior of that vehicle had been cut up with a sharp knife. Whether the knifing of the car and the knifing of the woman had anything in common, the detectives couldn’t tell at present.
The stolen vehicle was impounded and processed by Detectives Gary Parfitt and Matt Organ. The trash inside the vehicle was collected and then processed in Lane’s lab. The car was also dusted for fingerprints that were sent to the Washington State Patrol Identification Section in Olympia to be run through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). Later it was determined that several fingerprints on the outside of the vehicle matched Deputy Tim Laur’s. He had initially found the vehicle. Several other prints were run through AFIS but came back with no matching identification. The prints were also checked against the tow truck driver and the owner of the vehicle, with negative results. Even though McDonald’s napkins were found in the vehicle, there was just not enough evidence to say that they belonged to the murdered woman’s crime scene or not. McDonald’s napkins were a pretty common item in that area. When the detectives left the crime scene, they still had no idea who the victim was, or if she was a local woman.