by Robert Scott
Huffman recalled a somewhat different set of incidents at Muddy Waters than Margaret Jimenez’s recollection. Nora remembered Patty phoning the place where Gerard worked in Westport at a restaurant and telling him to come and get his clothes. In essence, she was telling him that they were through. A while later, while Nora, Patty and Margaret were at Muddy Waters, Gerard came into the tavern in a very angry mood. He and Patty argued, and then, according to Huffman, David slammed his fist down on the table and shouted at Patty, “You killed my baby!”
Gerard and Patty went outside and continued yelling at each other, until Patty stalked off to her Chevy Blazer. Patty pulled items of David’s clothing out of the Blazer and threw them at him, saying that they were finished. Huffman recalled that both she and Jimenez were outside and witnessed this. Huffman also recalled David telling Patty, “This isn’t over yet!”
After Gerard left, Patty gave Nora a hug and said that she had to go, because she had to work at the weather station the following day. Margaret Jimenez climbed into the vehicle and Patty drove her home. After they were gone, Nora went to the Smoke Shop Restaurant and suddenly had an urge to phone Patty later that night. She did so, and got no answer. Whether Patty and the others were already dead at that point was hard to determine. It wasn’t until the next morning that Margaret Jimenez phoned Nora and informed her about the fatal fire.
Huffman told Lane that she had worked at many taverns around Aberdeen over the years, and she knew David Gerard very well. She said she never liked him and that he was a blowhard and a braggart. Lane learned that Nora Huffman had worked at the Smoke Shop Restaurant at one time, and he showed her photos of Elaine McCollum and Carol Leighton. Lane’s ears really perked up when Nora told him that she knew Elaine, and that she had seen Elaine and Gerard together at various times. Huffman also said, “That other woman, (Carol), she sometimes worked as a prostitute in downtown Aberdeen.”
Nora added that a few months after the fire in 1995, she and a friend were eating at the Red Barn Restaurant when David Gerard and a young woman walked into the place. David introduced the young woman as his girlfriend. Approximately five months later, Huffman said, she saw this same woman in the Aberdeen area, and the woman had a black eye. Asked what had happened, the woman said, “I ran into David’s fist when I broke up with him.” Just who this young woman was, Nora didn’t know.
Nora told Lane, “He’s always been immature and couldn’t handle rejection. He’s also very jealous and tried to control the women in his life. And he was a racist. There was one time that Patty and I met a black man at the Smoke Shop. The man was working for an oil company in the area, and he was a nice guy. We all became friends. We also became friends with the man’s wife. When he finished his job here and was moving back to the East Coast, Patty and I exchanged phone numbers with him. Patty and I were at her place on East Hoquiam Road one night when the man called, wishing us a happy holiday. David was present at the time. As soon as he realized who we were talking to, he started yelling at us, ‘Nigger lovers!’ Patty’s mom was so angry at this, she told him to get his coat and get out. David then called Patty’s mom a ‘fucking bitch’ and left.”
Nora related one last curious incident. Several months after the fire, Gerard contacted her and asked if she wanted to go out to the burned remains of the McDonnell house and pick some flowers with him. She refused. She said he gave her the creeps.
Lane Youmans contacted Dr. Selove, and despite having done hundreds of autopsies by that time, Selove was still bothered by the injury to Patty Rodriguez’s head. There was just something about it that didn’t seem right. Dr. Selove told Lane that he could not say with a degree of scientific certainty whether Patty had received the injury to her head by a falling timber or from a blow to the head by a blunt object.
After the visit to Dr. Selove, Lane Youmans contacted a man he knew and respected for his forensic anthropological work, Dr. John Lundy. Dr. Lundy taught at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and also worked with the Oregon State Medical Examiner’s Office. Lane sent Dr. Lundy close-up photos of Patty Rodriguez’s skull injury and photos of the piece of fallen burned wood from the attic. Dr. Lundy looked these over and later contacted Lane, saying that there was no way the fallen piece of wood caused the fracture. The fact that Patty had been lying on a mattress, and the fact that it was only six feet from the ceiling to the mattress, made it impossible for a piece of wood that size to strike with enough force to cause the ring fracture on Patty’s skull. Dr. Lundy went on to say that the fracture was more consistent with a blow from a wrench or hammer, and that he would be willing to testify to that at a trial.
Lane Youmans next contacted Ernie Shumate, who had lived next door to the McDonnell residence that burned. Shumate had told Detective Parfitt in 1995 that he had been awakened by the sounds of gunshots in the early-morning hours of February 15, 1995, and saw that the McDonnell house was on fire. The man who had fired the gun turned out to be an individual who had been driving on East Hoquiam Road that morning and had fired his pistol as an alarm when he saw the McDonnell house ablaze.
As Lane Youmans began interviewing Ernie Shumate, Ernie said, “I’m glad you’re investigating this case. This is something I’ve never told anyone else. I went to bed that night and I was awakened by a woman’s scream. It was a single scream and it stopped by the time I was fully awake. I lay there, wondering if I had really heard it or was only dreaming. After a few minutes I drifted back to sleep.”
It was only after this “scream,” and his drifting back to sleep, that Ernie heard the gunshots. Because of his drifting into sleep, he couldn’t say how much time had elapsed between the woman’s scream and the gunshots. All he knew was that after he heard the gunshots, he fully awoke to see the next-door house on fire. Ernie quickly jumped out of bed and raced to see flames coming from the living room and front porch of the McDonnell home.
Ernie once again told of flames being everywhere in the living room. Ernie ran around to the side of the house to a sliding door that opened to the dining room. He slid the door open and stepped inside. The room was full of smoke, clear down to within a foot of the floor. Ernie yelled to the people inside the home, but there was no response. The only sound was the crackling fire. Because of the intense smoke and heat, Ernie did not go into the house beyond that point.
Lane asked Ernie if he had heard any smoke detectors going off. Ernie responded there were no sounds like that. He also never heard any dogs barking. This was strange to him, because when he was first awakened by the gunshots, there were only flames in the front part of the house, away from where the dogs’ bodies were found. Other parts of the house had not been greatly affected by the fire at that point.
A thought suddenly came to Lane. “Who the hell knows where smoke detector alarms are in someone else’s home? Why would Gerard know those locations when he marked them on Detective Parfitt’s diagram in 1995, unless he had looked for them to disable them? Gerard hadn’t lived in that house on a steady basis. He had only been there a short period of time. He might have been aware of the location of one smoke alarm. But not all of them,” he recounted.
Lane also shared how he thought, “If the fire created a blast of superheated air, then how was Patricia McDonnell able to get out of her recliner and hobble twenty feet before collapsing in the dining room? How did Ernie Shumate open the sliding door and not be engulfed by flames when the fire received fresh air from the open door? How were the dogs able to make it from the living room to the laundry room, near the back door? The sound of the smoke detector near Patty’s room should have still been sounding when Ernie Shumate opened the sliding door. If it was a slow accumulation of smoke, why, then, didn’t the dogs alert everyone in the house? There were just too many questions for this to have been an accidental fire.”
Lane e-mailed fire investigator Richard Carman and told him that even though Detective Parfitt and the local fire chief had ruled it an accidental fire, he still had problems believing tha
t was the case. Carman agreed to meet Lane and discuss the situation. Carman usually charged thousands of dollars for his work, but there was something about the deaths of those four people that bothered him as well. He told Lane that he would look at these disturbing matters for free.
Lane and Deputy Steve Smith, who became the GHSO fire investigator after Detective Parfitt retired, drove to Carman’s home about an hour and a half away from Aberdeen. They all sat down at Carman’s dining-room table, and Lane laid out his documents and photos concerning the McDonnell house fire. Lane told Carman about the heated argument between Patty Rodriguez and David Gerard, just hours before the fatal fire.
Lane emphasized how after the fire the boys and Patricia McDonnell had been found with no soot in their lungs. Lane also told about Patty Rodriguez with the ring fracture to her skull and having a level of 89 percent carbon monoxide in her blood. Lane recounted, “As I described things, I could see wrinkles forming on Carman’s forehead, and he started asking me questions about the boyfriend. Like, did he have trouble with the law before? Then he asked questions about the house. As I told him more details, he said the conclusion about the fire originating from the stove was wrong.
“After I laid out the whole story, Carman said, ‘I can’t believe a man would kill four people and start a fire, just because his girlfriend broke up with him.’ At that point I jumped in and said, ‘Let me tell you about David Gerard!’”
For the next hour Lane told Carman about Elaine McCollum, Carol Leighton and Frankie Cochran. Lane also noticed that the wrinkles on Carman’s forehead started disappearing bit by bit. At the end of Lane’s tale about David Gerard, Carman said, “Well, there you go. Now it makes sense.”
Carman added that he would look into the matter unofficially, and then decide if he should do so officially at some later point. Carman also wanted to talk to a colleague about this, and Patty Rodriguez’s brother as well, since Brian McDonnell was a volunteer firefighter and knew about the McDonnell residence.
Lane realized there would be fallout from this trip to see Carman. There would be some in the GHSO who would not look kindly if the official conclusion of death in 1995 for four people had to be changed from “accidental” to at least “undetermined,” which could set the stage for “murder” later on. Lane said, “The fact that we would probably end up looking bad for not getting it right in 1995 was something I could live with. If you mess up one time, or miss something, then you learn from your mistakes. You get it right the next time.”
Fallout or not, Lane Youmans went ahead with a disposition report to GHSO entitled “Officer’s Opinion and Recommendation.” It was to be sent not only upward in GHSO, but to County Prosecutor Steward Menefee. The report started out by stating, The case against David Gerard for the deaths of Patricia McDonnell, Patricia Rodriguez, Matthew Rodriguez and Joshua Rodriguez is largely circumstantial. There is no fingerprint or DNA evidence. But given the circumstances, one could conclude that Gerard was responsible for the deaths of the four individuals.
The report then went on to list Gerard’s supposed alibi for the night in question. Gerard had, of course, said that he went barhopping with Steve Stoken and some individual named Mike. They supposedly went to the Pioneer in Montesano, the Tyee in Olympia and the Red Barn in Grand Mound. Lane wrote, Steve Stoken told me he has never been to the Pioneer in Montesano. He knew Gerard, but he did not recall this incident. I traveled the route as Gerard described. Allowing one hour for breakfast, he would have returned home at 4 AM. This still left 45 minutes for him to travel the eight miles to the Rodriguez residence. In his alibi, he described making a loop, just like his alibi for the Frankie Cochran assault. And, of course, everyone knew that David Gerard had been lying about driving the Loop on the Cochran case.
As far as motive went, Lane wrote in part: Gerard stated that his last contact with Patty Rodriguez resulted in a “little spat.” Two witnesses at that meeting at Muddy Waters told me that Patty Rodriguez told Gerard to get his belongings out of her residence.
Gerard wanted to marry Patty Rodriguez, but she told friends that she wanted nothing more to do with him. He went to the location after the fire to search for the remains of a ring he had given her. Patty had told friends that Gerard tried to give her a ring, but she refused. This type of rejection set him off before when Frankie Cochran broke up with him.
As to the cause of the fire, Lane wrote: It was concluded early on in the investigation that the fire was caused by the wood stove and that the fire was accidental. I believe this conclusion was reached too quickly and that the scene should have been more thoroughly investigated, although we had nothing pointing to foul play. No samples were taken, as well as an insufficient number of photographs to thoroughly document the scene.
Sergio Rodriguez initially installed the wood stove with an improper stovepipe that caused the wood in the ceiling to char. He replaced the pipe with an insulated type pipe around 1993. Brian McDonnell, who was a firefighter, told me that his mother was very concerned about the wood stove and would get the fire roaring every night in order to burn out any creosote buildup. This is inconsistent with Gerard’s statement to us in 1995 in which he stated you could hit the stovepipe and cause the creosote to fall.
The first person to spot the fire saw that it was coming from the living room, as well as a firebox on the front porch. The door between these two locations was a solid core wood door with a small window. I do not believe that the fire could have gotten to the wood box in the early stages of the fire.
This left the implication that David Gerard had set fire to these two locations in order to make the house burn down more quickly and cover up his murders.
Lane also addressed the issue of smoke detectors: Brian McDonnell told me that he had changed the batteries in the smoke detectors in the week or so before the fire. He also tested the detectors to assure that they were working properly. David Gerard knew the location of the smoke detectors and pointed them out to Detective Parfitt. I find it very interesting that Gerard would notice the location of the smoke detectors in a house he did not own.
Ernie Shumate was able to gain entry into the residence through the sliding glass door in the dining room area. The residence was full of smoke but the flames had not reached that point. Shumate did not hear a smoke detector going off, even though one of the smoke detectors was at the far end of the house next to Patty’s room.
Detective Parfitt describes in his report that, “the battery and an exterior metal part of a smoke detector was located on the floor in the hallway adjacent to Patricia Rodriguez’s bedroom.” No photographs were taken of the smoke detector and it was not seized.
What Lane was getting at here was that he believed that Gerard had removed the batteries from both smoke detectors before starting the blaze.
In the next section, detailing sequence of events, Lane Youmans wrote of Ernie Shumate’s home being only thirty feet from the McDonnell residence. It was close enough that he heard the door in the McDonnell home shut sometime around one o’clock on the night of the fire. Shumate spoke of a single female’s scream sometime in the early-morning hours. Shumate later told Lane that he could not remember if the scream was minutes or hours before he heard the gunshot and saw the McDonnell house on fire. He had drifted back to sleep, not knowing if the scream was real or only in a dream. Lane, of course, believed it was Patty Rodriguez screaming just before David Gerard hit her in the head with a hard object, possibly a hammer.
Lane noted that if the fire had originated in the stove, the house would have filled up with toxic smoke. However, it was Patty Rodriguez in the back bedroom whose lungs had filled up with smoke, not Patricia McDonnell or the boys. Lane noted: Patty Rodriguez had abundant soot in her airways and a pink change to the blood and muscle tissue, which is consistent with the inhalation of combustible products. No soot was observed in the airways of Joshua Rodriguez, Matthew Rodriguez and Patricia McDonnell. Dr. Selove summarized in his report that the boys were either
dead before the fire began or that they inhaled super-heated air, which caused their deaths without leaving any soot. Dr. Selove summarized in his report that Patricia McDonnell had died at the early stages of the fire due to her heart condition, and that she died as a result of thermal burns. This does not explain how she was able to get out of a recliner and travel a distance of approximately twenty feet without inhaling any soot. The skulls of all three victims sustained extreme fire damage and it could not be determined if they had sustained any injuries prior to the fire.
Lane also noted that as the smoke built up in the room, the first person to be affected should have been Patricia McDonnell, and the second would have been the dogs. Yet, Mrs. McDonnell and the dogs were able to travel some distance before collapsing. Lane wrote, This is inconsistent with being exposed to super-heated gases.
Lane also noted the post fire behavior of David Gerard, and wrote that Gerard later told Frankie Cochran that it was Patty Rodriguez’s uncle who had set the fire and gone to prison for it. But Patty did not have an uncle. Lane also spoke of Gerard’s bizarre behavior at Pearl Payne’s house after the fire and his going back to the McDonnell residence to search for the ring that he had bought for Patty. It was also noted that Patty always wore a brown onyx ring. This was missing when her body was found. Lane conjectured that Gerard had taken the ring off Patty’s finger after he had killed her, and before he started the fire. Items were also missing from the bodies and crime scenes of Elaine McCollum and Carol Leighton.