by Robert Scott
Finally, in conclusion, Lane wrote, I believe that Patty Rodriguez told Gerard to get things out of her house and left him at 10:30 PM. He went out drinking like he told us, and arrived back in Aberdeen at 4 AM, drunk and angry. I do not believe his friends drove his rig back to Hoquiam because he’s admitted to us that he always drives drunk.
I believe he drove to Patty’s house and went in through a back door. Everyone would have been asleep and the dogs wouldn’t bark because they knew him. I believe Gerard went to Patty’s bedroom and confronted her. She started to get up and he struck her with an object, fracturing her skull. Her mother must have heard the commotion and got up from the recliner to investigate. Gerard confronted her in the dining room. I believe it was Patricia McDonnell who screamed and Gerard struck her in the head. If the boys woke up, they were probably too scared to move. Gerard probably struck them as they lay on the floor.
He knew he had to cover up the crime, so he decided to burn down the house. He was aware of the previous problems they had with the stove pipe. He dismantled the smoke detectors so the next-door neighbors would not be alerted. He may have merely set fire to the paper and wood that was probably sitting next to the stove, and then returned to his home. Instead of going to the house the next morning to get his belongings as Patty told him to do, he drove to a friend’s house in Montesano and they told him about the fire.
David Gerard gets revenge when he believes he has been wronged by a woman. His revenge involves violence against the woman. Patricia McDonnell, Matthew Rodriguez and Joshua Rodriguez were witnesses to his violence against Patty, and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gerard must be made to answer for these four deaths.
Then Lane signed the document, Respectfully, Detective Lane Youmans.
It wasn’t long before Aberdeen’s Daily World got wind of this, and they began backing up Lane Youmans’s contentions. In the article DEADLY FIRE MAY HAVE BEEN MURDER, the newspaper reiterated many of the points Lane had made against David Gerard. They also sent a reporter to interview Pearl Payne and Brian McDonnell. Pearl told the reporter, “I feel more strongly every day that he (David Gerard) is guilty. I didn’t like him. He was very aloof and wouldn’t look you in the eye.”
Brian McDonnell spoke of being a firefighter and about the situation as well. He said, “The story Gerard told the investigators about the creosote was an outright lie. Sometimes the stove would burn so hot, it glowed red, burning out the creosote. And the batteries in the smoke detector? I had just tested them. That’s what’s always bugged me. Why didn’t they wake up?”
Even Lane Youmans was quoted in the newspaper. He told the reporter, “I kept my thoughts to myself for a while about all of this. I didn’t even tell my wife. I could have been wrong, so I wanted to see if I could exclude David Gerard as a suspect. For several months I kept my suspicions bottled up and used my spare time reviewing this case. It’s very improbable that Patty Rodriguez was killed by a falling beam. But I don’t have someone who will say definitively it was caused by one thing or another.”
The newspaper also spoke with two friends of David Gerard’s, who had stuck by him through thick and thin. These were Paul and Paula Dean, of Hoquiam, who knew Gerard since he was a boy. They said he was a nice boy, but somewhat slow. The Deans spoke of themselves as Christians, and said that they still wrote to Gerard in prison, despite the fact that he had admitted to attempted murder on Frankie Cochran and was suspected of actual murders against other women.
Paul Dean told the reporter, “We’ve never mistrusted him. He’s always been good to us and we never had a reason to be afraid of David. I feel sorry for the people he caused harm to. But I hold no ill feelings toward David. We’re Christians, and we believe in forgiving one another. We’ve never asked David if he’s done any of those things. That’s between him and God.”
Ironically, Paul Dean was an assistant fire chief in Hoquiam.
Then the reporter spoke with the one person who mattered most in all of this—County Prosecutor Steward Menefee. Menefee said, “He (Gerard) is not like the Green River Killer Gary Ridgway or the BTK Killer. They both stood in court and gave detailed descriptions of what happened. What we get from Mr. Gerard is that you can have him nailed nine ways to Sunday with the facts of a case and he just sits there and says, ‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.’ He’s like a serial suspect. Is Gerard responsible for every unsolved crime he’s a suspect in? Probably not. But I can’t put it past him. So we wait and hope something breaks.”
Lane was sure that there was enough circumstantial evidence already on David Gerard for the murders of Patricia McDonnell, Patty Rodriguez, Matthew Rodriguez and Joshua Rodriguez. But he wasn’t the one who could bring them to trial. Only the county prosecutor could do that.
After speaking with the reporter for the Aberdeen Daily News, Lane Youmans went back and looked at a photo they had run in the newspaper right after the fire in 1995. He said later, “It hit me like a brick! In the photo I could plainly see where tires on Patty’s vehicle were flat. These were tires farthest away from the fire. The tires of her vehicle closer to the house were not flat. I began to believe that Gerard had gone there in the early-morning hours, after a night of drinking, and flattened Patty’s tires by slashing them. Just as he had done on two occasions with another ex-girlfriend when he was pissed off at her. After slashing Patty’s tires, Gerard must have decided to up the ante by going into the house and confronting Patty. In Brian McDonnell’s theory of what happened, Brian suspected that David went into the house and woke Patty up and they had an argument. Gerard became so incensed, that he struck Patty in the head with some hard object. Maybe a hammer. Mrs. McDonnell heard the ruckus, went to investigate, and then tried to flee. McDonnell believed that Gerard caught her before she got to the door, and it was Mrs. McDonnell’s scream that Ernie Shumate heard. David killed Mrs. McDonnell right in front of the boys. They were too afraid to even move at that point, and David killed them, too.”
Theories and speculations were all well and good, but they were not making County Prosecutor Menefee move any closer to bringing David Gerard to trial for the murders of those four people. And yet, all of this wasn’t for nothing. In the end the official ruling on the house fire was moved from “accidental” to “cause unknown.” And as far as Lane Youmans was concerned, that was one step closer to murder charges. One thing Lane had was lots and lots of patience, and a bulldog tenacity at unearthing more facts. And as time went on, he devoted all his spare time to nailing David Gerard for the one murder that had more facts than any other, as far as his participation: the Carol Leighton murder.
20
PAINTED INTO A CORNER
Lane Youmans was right about one thing—it was going to be a long, tiring process to get the McDonnell house fire charged as an act of murder against David Allen Gerard. And it was going to be an uphill battle on the Elaine McCollum case as well. The best possibility of getting David Gerard charged with murder was with the Carol Leighton case. There was plenty of physical evidence that tied him to Leighton, unlike some of the other cases. And there was plenty of circumstantial evidence as well.
Up until 2003, the things Lane Youmans and other detectives had done were not revealed to the general public as far as the Leighton case was concerned. But in that year things began to change. GHSO started letting reporters at the Daily World have more information about the Elaine McCollum and Carol Leighton cases, and exactly who they thought was responsible. Journalist Lisa Curdy reported that DNA hits have warmed up two cold homicides in Grays Harbor, including one that dates back twelve years. DNA samples from several men were recovered from the bodies of Elaine “Brooke” McCollum and Carol Leighton. But only one person’s DNA, David Allen Gerard, was found on both of them.
GHSO told Curdy that Gerard knew both women, and that he was now the prime suspect in both cases. Curdy began researching how the long DNA trail had eventually led to only one suspect in the two murders. She discovered that in the
1970s, the array of various crime labs in Washington State were organized under the umbrella of the state patrol to insure uniform standards of testing. By the 1990s, there were seven Washington State Patrol Labs, the nearest one to GHSO being in Olympia. Even then, it could take up to twelve months for DNA testing to be completed on any particular case.
Curdy learned that detectives had picked up hair strands, blood and other DNA-laden material from the McCollum and Leighton crime scenes and sent them to the lab. And over the years the testing techniques had become better and better. The first DNA testing at Olympia was restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP), and it could determine that one in 2 million people could have been the contributor. As George Johnson, of the Olympia Crime Lab, explained, “RFLP testing was very good. But the problem with RFLP was that it required large samples. Something between the size of a nickel and a quarter.”
The next generation of DNA testing was known as polymerase chain reaction (PCR). PCR could use much smaller samples, down to the size of a pencil point. The drawback was, it could only say that the sample came from one person in twenty thousand.
Then in 1999, short tandem repeats (STR) made a great leap forward in DNA testing. It could isolate the DNA from a subject to one in 1 quadrillion. There weren’t that many people on planet Earth. The DNA used in STR testing linked back to one person, and one person alone. And STR did not need as large samples as RFLP had. STR DNA testing became a very useful tool for law enforcement around the nation after 1999.
By the year 2000, all felons in Washington State had to have their DNA put into a database. In Washington State, that added up to 35,000 people. And one of those individuals was David Allen Gerard because of his attack upon Frankie Cochran.
Over the years Lane and the other detectives had taken some evidence out of storage on the McCollum and Leighton cases and sent that evidence to the WSP Crime Lab to be tested. But it wasn’t until Gerard assaulted Frankie Cochran, was arrested and convicted as a felon, that his DNA went into the state’s database. And by then, the very sensitive and specific STR testing was in use.
There was only one fly in the ointment to all of this. Both Elaine and Carol had other men’s DNA on and in their bodies: Elaine because of her boyfriend, David Simmons, and Carol because of her prostitution activities with some unknown john besides David Gerard. No matter how sure that Lane and the other detectives were that Gerard was their man in the McCollum and Leighton murders, everything had to run through one person before it ever went to trail—County Prosecutor Steward Menefee.
Menefee spoke with Lisa Curdy on this very matter, and he told her, “DNA places someone at the crime scene, but it doesn’t tell you that someone did something. That person’s DNA could have been there for hours, days or even weeks. Before deciding what to do with the case, we need someone to come forward with information that links Gerard to the women before they were killed.”
And there was the crunch. People could put David Gerard around these women weeks or even days before they were murdered, but no one could place him with them on the nights they actually were murdered. Karen Luther never saw what vehicle Elaine McCollum had climbed into at the Smoke Shop on February 5, 1991. And no one saw Carol Leighton with David Gerard on August 2, 1996.
Lane Youmans and the other detectives were frustrated. They were sure they had plenty of circumstantial evidence to tie David Gerard to the murders of Elaine and Carol. The odds that his semen should have been connected to Elaine and Carol when their bodies were found on the Weyco Haul Road, years apart, seemed just too big a coincidence to explain away by mere happenstance. But County Prosecutor Menefee stood by his guns. He didn’t have to convince the detectives that David Gerard was the killer, he had to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
In August 2004, that bridge was finally crossed. Undersheriff Rick Scott told journalist David Wilkins, of the Daily World, “After we got the DNA hit to Gerard, we met with the prosecutor’s office and began to reevaluate the investigation and what we needed to do to tie up the loose ends. It wasn’t really anything new. We went over the witness statements, police reports and timelines. We saw some places where people needed to be reinterviewed, and issues addressed that could be a cause for concern when charges were filed, in order to make for a more tightly woven case.”
Undersheriff Scott went on to say that they knew Gerard had a history of violence with women. Frankie Cochran was living proof of that. Scott also touched upon the rape of Julie in 1997, by David Gerard, without mentioning Julie’s full name. Then Scott added that at present the county prosecutor’s office would only be going after Gerard for the murder of Carol Leighton. Rick Scott related about Elaine’s case, “There are some obstacles there that are more difficult to address.” Undersheriff Scott did not amplify what the obstacles were.
Steward Menefee was a county prosecutor who liked to have as much concrete evidence as possible before taking a case to trial, and by August 2004, he had plenty in the case against David Gerard concerning Carol Leighton. In a motion and declaration to the court, Menefee particularly stressed the DNA connection between David Gerard and Carol Leighton. Menefee wrote that semen had been found in Carol’s vaginal and anal areas during the autopsy. Semen was also found in a condom located a short distance down the road from where her body was discovered. Menefee stated that DNA from these sources was collected and put into a data bank, but no hits came back as to their donor before Gerard’s attack on Frankie Cochran.
Then after May 1999, when David Gerard was convicted and sentenced for the attempted murder of Frankie Cochran, his DNA data was placed in the Washington State DNA data bank. A hit came back from the condom to Gerard, and further testing got a hit to Gerard from the vaginal and anal swabs connected to Carol. Menefee went on to say that advances in DNA technology had allowed a swab from Carol’s mouth to be analyzed. And Gerard’s DNA was consistent with a swab of Carol’s mouth.
Menefee cited the Pierce County sting operation when Gerard had been busted for soliciting prostitution. And by his own admission, Gerard had spoken of another incident in Pierce County where a prostitute had supposedly stolen his wallet and stabbed him with a small knife. Menefee noted that Carol’s body had been on the Weyco Haul Road for four to six hours before being discovered. This was consistent with the amount of time the used condom had been on that same road, only two-tenths of a mile from her body. And in that condom was semen from David Gerard.
Because of all this information, Menefee wrote, There is probable cause to believe the defendant intentionally killed Carol Leighton by stabbing and cutting her numerous times. A judge agreed that there was enough evidence for the case to proceed toward trial, and a charge of first-degree murder was made against David Gerard.
Reporter Wilkins spoke with County Prosecutor Menefee again, and Menefee told him that under the circumstances he filed charges against Gerard because the “case is as tight as it can possibly be. We have run down all of the available leads, given the time factors involved. We have checked and rechecked the physical evidence to the extent that we can, and that meant we had to make a decision on the case. Based on the facts, we felt we had enough evidence to file charges against Mr. Gerard.”
Menefee went on to say that if convicted, Gerard might spend the rest of his life in prison. But even with Washington’s three strikes law, he probably wouldn’t qualify for an automatic life term. And Menefee agreed with Rick Scott that additional barriers in the McCollum case made it more difficult to prosecute, if Gerard was ever brought up on charges in that murder.
Meanwhile, Lane Youmans told Wilkins he had a sense of relief when he knew that charges had finally been brought against David Gerard for the murder of Carol Leighton. Lane had been gathering evidence against Gerard on this case for five years, ever since he had the epiphany after Gerard’s attack upon Frankie Cochran at the milking shed. Lane added, “I haven’t told the families yet. At least there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, although this is
just the beginning, and there’s a long way to go.”
A court appearance was the first step in the long journey, and it occurred on August 19, 2004, at the courthouse in Montesano. Wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, a belly chain, leg irons and handcuffs, Gerard was led into the courtroom to face superior court judge Mark McCauley. County Prosecutor Menefee filed second-degree murder charges against Gerard, and Judge McCauley asked Gerard if he understood the charges. Gerard gave a slight shrug and answered, “Oh, I guess so.”
Judge McCauley assigned David Hatch as Gerard’s defense attorney. When he was out of the courtroom, reporter David Wilkins asked County Prosecutor Menefee if he was also going to press charges against Gerard for the murder of Elaine McCollum. Menefee answered, “That case is still open and under review. Just like in the Leighton case, we got a hit on the DNA, but that was just the beginning. The DNA gave us a direction. We’ve been running down witnesses from ten years or more ago and getting their recollections. That being said, we still have to meet certain standards for filing a case.”
On August 30, 2004, David Gerard pled not guilty in a brief court appearance at superior court. His attorney, David Hatch, then moved that the matter should move forward for trial, and the judge agreed.
In the following months, both the defense and prosecution were hunting down various witnesses and getting their case in order. In fact, all through October and into November, Hatch was following different avenues in gathering information. On October 7, Hatch spent seven and a half hours in a conference with Gerard. The next day Hatch spent eight hours reviewing discovery documents and researching case law on DNA evidence. By the next week, Hatch was reviewing more discovery documents and photos as well. On October 22, Hatch drove out to the Weyco Haul Road and took notes and photos of the condom drop area and the spot where Carol’s body had been found. By the third week of November, Hatch had spent fifty hours reviewing different aspects of David Gerard’s case.