Samples claimed he had taken this note to Fran, who had refused to kill him, and this refusal had triggered his killing of her. It was a remarkable note, and we’ll come back to it later in the case.
Police and psychologists who interviewed Samples that night and in the following days said that he was oriented, knew who he was and where he was, knew right from wrong, and knew enough to ask for a lawyer. There seemed to be no evidence of psychosis as the basis for the crime. There was clear premeditation and thought involved in the crime: Samples had left the house, gone to his car, taken a fish filleting knife, and come back with the intent to kill both women. Diane even believed she had heard him coming down the block after her as she struggled to reach the neighbor’s home. He was arraigned and charged with one count of murder and another of attempted murder.
During the pretrial period, Samples and his attorney reviewed their options and Samples weighed the issues very methodically, even putting them down in rows and columns on a piece of paper later obtained by the prosecution. His very deliberate actions in this regard show that his mind was working rationally at that time. Samples faced three choices. He could plead not guilty, stand trial, and risk having Diane Ross take the stand and testify to very damaging things about him. If he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, Diane could still be called to testify, and her story might outweigh his contention (supported by the note of “Mon. Dec. 8th”) that he had not been in his right mind when he committed the murder. Samples and his attorney seriously considered the insanity defense for a time, and unearthed his diary and other evidence of his long-standing preoccupation with disembowelment for use in such a defense. The “Mon. Dec. 8th” note was also going to play a large role in that defense: It could be construed to show, more than premeditation, clear mental instability. (In my view, the note was actually too well composed and thought out to reflect real instability—it was the creation of a semitrained psychologist, working hard at creating an alibi.) The third option, which Samples eventually embraced, was essentially a plea bargain. He pleaded guilty to murdering Fran, in exchange for the charge of attempted murder of Diane Ross being dropped; this meant she would never be able to testify against him. In return, Samples received the maximum sentence available in the state of Oregon, fifteen years to life; with good time and a little luck, he figured, he might be out of jail in seven or eight years.
After Samples pleaded guilty, was sentenced, and began serving his time, the media lost interest in his case. Diane Ross recovered and moved to California, and Fran’s daughter was raised by other members of her family. The prosecutor’s office later admitted that because of the guilty plea, the prosecution had not looked extensively into Samples’s background. Some evidence had been gathered, however. The note of December 8 referred to a lifelong fantasy of disembowelment by a beautiful naked woman, and this had indeed been a recurring theme in Samples’s life for some time. At age five, he slept in a bed between his mother and his pregnant aunt. The aunt had a hemorrhage and lost of a lot of blood in the bed before miscarrying; the idea of spilling out internal organs seems to date back to this time. Later in childhood, he was stimulated by seeing an ant on his belly and felt that he wanted the ant to bore a hole through him. At the age of thirteen, playing Russian roulette, he accidentally shot himself in the abdomen. In a journal entry made after his experiences in Vietnam, he wrote that this was the fulfillment of a fantasy dating back to childhood, a “gushing compulsion to feel steel in his guts.” Initially, the fantasy had been of his own murder, committed by an “Amazon” woman “spearing” him during the sex act. Fran Steffens had been a relatively large and tall woman. He told a psychiatrist that his activities in his youth included (in the words of the psychiatrist’s later report) “pricking himself with pins or knives while enjoying these fantasies, which he found added to his erotic stimulation.” Later, the fantasy included killing the woman. He had actually written out his intended MO in a threatening letter to a former lover, well before the murder of Fran Steffens. This letter had many linguistic similarities to his “Dec. 8” note. It warned her that when she was in bed with a new partner he would “erupt from the bowls [sic] of darkness to open with razor knife his taught [sic] throat.” The letter goes on to explain in excruciating detail how Samples was going to disembowel both his former girlfriend and her new lover, sadistically torture them, and partake in their sexual act so that semen, blood, and other bodily fluids would all intermingle in orgasm and death. It would be the greatest sexual experience any of them had ever had, and it would be their last, himself included. After he had fatally wounded them, he also planned to turn the knife on his own gut, so that they would be “mutually dead together.”
From an initial look into Samples’s background, a picture emerged of a smart man, in the top 5 percent on the intelligence scales, a Stanford University scholarship student who had received his degree in psychology in 1964, then gone into the Army. He claimed to have served in Vietnam as a “forward observer,” calling in artillery strikes against Viet Cong positions. He came back to find life in America had drastically changed, enough so, he later said, to dash his idealism. After his Vietnam service in 1966 to 1967, he had become a drifter, with his own drug and alcohol problems. He was a bartender here, a social worker there, unemployed for a long stretch of time, moving from town to town, steadily north and west. He was evidently unable to hold a steady job until he translated his own problems into an ability to talk to people about these addictions, and won a counseling position for college students and teenagers in the area near Salem. Friends and colleagues considered him a good counselor, and he had many allies in the social-work community. In light of his background, many people would have concluded that the murder Samples committed was an isolated, bizarre event, perhaps induced by drugs—an aberration. Most people who knew him casually, however, saw only the surface and had no access to his depths or insight into understanding the complexities of his character.
On another visit to Oregon, during which I was also going to interview several other murderers in the state’s prison system, I decided to try to see Samples. He came readily to the interview, a balding, thin man nearing forty, with wire-rimmed glasses and an intelligent gaze, a thoughtful and soft-spoken man. He worked in the psychology section of the prison as a clerk, and was a willing worker, participating in such experimental programs as biofeedback to teach inmates how to deal with aggressive feelings. I made my pitch and asked him for an interview that would help fill out the fifty-seven-page questionnaire that we were then using as the basis for our statistical analysis of the lives of murderers. He said no. Samples explained that he did not see himself as being the same sort of person as the serial killers and mass murderers whom I had been interviewing, and therefore did not want to be included in the program. He did talk to me unofficially for about an hour, during which he said that he was studying as well as working in the psychological section of the prison and planned after he was paroled to get his Ph.D. in psychology. He wondered whether, having completed his doctorate, he could get a job with the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. Incredulous, I told him that the FBI would probably not agree to hire anyone with a prison record. I felt that in talking to me at all, Samples was merely stroking his own ego and fighting boredom. Since he hadn’t agreed to participate in the interview program, there was no pledge of confidentiality given; I took no notes and did not run a tape recorder.
I thought that was the finale of my involvement with Samples. From the pictures of the crime scene and other materials I’d seen, the experts I’d talked to, and my brief brush with Samples, it was clear to me that he was a classic sadistic sexual psychopath. He had refused to consider himself as such or to be lumped into a category with the others, but he displayed all the signs of such killers, from the quiet demeanor to the long history of fantasy that drove the murder he committed. In our terms, it was a “mixed” case, which showed dynamics of both the organized and disorganized killer. The crime scene was d
isorganized because of the gross disembowelment, the mutilation of the body, the blood smearing, and the lack of sexual assault. Samples had been organized in his planning of the murder, however; with a calculating mind, he had gone back to the car to get the filleting knife, and then had tried to kill both women. After the murder, he had had the presence of mind to remove his jacket and clean up the crime scene. At the time of the murder, he was a person locked into a sexual fantasy involving violent behavior. Through the presence of drugs and alcohol, he was in the mood to realize his fantasy and had the opportunity, because both women were vulnerable. I thought it even more likely that Samples had written the “Mon. Dec. 8” note after, not before, the murder, in an attempt to provide himself with ammunition for a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. It was the act of a man who thought ahead, possibly not at the moment of his destructive act but certainly in the hours after it, when the realization hit him that Diane had gotten away and that she would certainly be able to identify him.
* * *
The next I heard about Duane Samples, in early 1981, was that Governor Vic Atiyeh of Oregon had commuted his sentence and that he was expected to be released shortly from the Oregon prison system. Samples had actually begun the application for commutation in 1979, and I had been unaware of that at the time I tried to interview him. His concealment in this matter had also caused turmoil in the Marion County District Attorney’s office. When the request for commutation was first made, there had been some notification to then District Attorney Gary Gortmaker, who had not responded; that first request had been turned down by the governor, but a second request had been made and granted. In the interim, Chris Van Dyke, son of actor Dick Van Dyke, had taken over as Marion County District Attorney, and he and his assistant Sarah McMillen had gotten into the act; McCoy had given them my name as a person who could possibly help reverse the commutation. Local Silverton authorities had been alarmed when the commutation had gone through, and they had made their strong protest known to the county attorney’s office. Van Dyke had become outraged that the governor would have made such a commutation without allowing the prosecutor’s office an occasion to present a recommendation against Samples’s release. McMillen wanted to know whether I could come out and testify with the prosecution against letting Samples out of prison. I agreed that he should not be released, and told her that I might be able to testify but that a request for me to do so would have to go through proper channels. Had Samples previously agreed to take part in the Criminal Personality Research Project, I would have disqualified myself, but since he hadn’t, I was available if the Bureau chose to allow me to go. Shortly, Chris Van Dyke sent a letter of request to Director Webster, and eventually an arrangement was made that would permit me to travel to Oregon to testify.
Samples had asked for a commutation based on two factors, his own rehabilitation and the notion that he had been mentally ill at the time of his crime but that psychiatry only just recently had begun to understand and recognize the disease he had had in 1975, so a proper defense had not been available to him at that time. As for his rehabilitation, many people who spoke with him concluded that he had put his crime behind him and had been a model prisoner. He displayed all the correct behavior of a properly rehabilitated man: He wept when discussing the murder, said that it was a terrible thing, and argued that he could now control his aggression and would never commit such an act again. In the United States, Samples’s defenders argued, we do not judge people before crimes are committed. Therefore, Samples should not be prejudged as to any future crimes, and he should be given a chance to redeem his life.
Samples’s rehabilitation claims were of the usual sort. What was unusual was his innovative assertion that the murder of Fran Steffens had been a direct result of his suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and that therefore he had not been responsible for that murder. This particular mental disorder had not been recognized by psychiatry in 1975, when the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders had been the standard reference, and so hadn’t then been available for his defense. Part of what Samples said was true. All he could have found in the 1975 edition was something called “transient situational disturbance,” sometimes observed in veterans, a disturbance that had to do with sleeplessness, inability to hold a job, irritability, and sexual problems as a result of stress from a variety of sources, one of which was the stress associated with being in combat. In 1980, the third edition, known as DSM-III, had been published, and in it, “transient situational disturbance” had been upgraded from a rainstorm to a typhoon; that is, there were a few paragraphs about PTSD. Most of the description made reference to stress that was other than war-related; nonetheless, the definition was there. This was the straw at which Samples grasped. His experiences in Vietnam, Samples claimed, had left him shattered, and, after years of torment, had tragically surfaced in his murder of Fran Steffens. With counseling in prison, Samples now felt he had conquered this disorder that had once pushed him to snuff out a life. He hadn’t been responsible for the murder in 1975, he contended, because of his PTSD, but now he had triumphed over the post-traumatic stress, and, moreover, he was rehabilitated, and so should be set free.
Two psychologists supported Samples’s claim. One was in private practice and was receiving Veterans Administration funds to see Samples in prison on a regular basis; the second was an academic who had extensively studied veterans suffering from what was just becoming recognized as post-Vietnam stress syndrome. Lawyers who spend their time working for business corporations know enough to stay out of a complex criminal case, though they have a degree that says they are capable of handling one; frankly, I thought these mental-health professionals in the Samples case were similarly out of their depth. For example, the vast majority of the cases of PTSD that dealt with post-Vietnam stress had to do with veterans who couldn’t hold a job, had sexual problems in their marriages, couldn’t sleep at night, and had other similar complaints. To my knowledge, there were no other cases at that time in which PTSD was extended beyond these rather ordinary complaints to cover the disemboweling of two women. I did not doubt that Samples might well be suffering from some sort of stress as a result of his having been in combat in Vietnam; but the fantasies that had directed him to kill one woman and nearly kill the second had begun well before his Vietnam experiences, and were the controlling aspect of his motivation to murder. PTSD aftershocks usually occur within weeks or months after a precipitating traumatic event. Samples’s murders had been committed ten years after he returned from Vietnam.
High in the pantheon of Samples’s arguments for commutation was his contention that while in Vietnam, he had watched two fellow officers die rather horribly, of disemboweling wounds; Samples even remembered their names, Hugh Hanna and Randy Ingrahm. Their deaths had scarred him mentally, he said. According to the academician’s report, Samples watched Ingrahm, a “close friend literally being shredded by a claymore land mine”; he recalled “placing the bleeding parts of his body into a basket for Medevac and seeing the blood run out of the basket as it was lifted up into the helicopter.” Samples also avowed that he was a war hero, decorated for bravery in Vietnam, but that in his dreams he now saw his medals as being “the color of dried blood.”
While in prison, Samples had married a woman who worked for a prominent advertising and public relations firm that was well connected in political circles in Oregon, and she had helped push for commutation. I thought it a bit out of character for Governor Atiyeh to have turned down the request the first time but to have agreed the second time to commute the sentence. Atiyeh was a former businessman and state legislator known to be very much on the side of law enforcement, and publicly so. An antique gun collector, Atiyeh would later pose for an advertisement for the National Rifle Association, which included a statement that said, in part, “As a governor, I’m concerned with crime protection and Oregon’s penal system. And like other NRA members, I want guns to be used safely and
legally. We believe strict punishment is the best solution to crime with a gun.” In his several years as governor, a hundred commutation requests had crossed his desk; he denied all but four, and the other three were virtually without controversy; one of these, for example, was of a wife who had killed the husband who had abused her for a decade. Well, perhaps the governor had been given bad advice about Samples, or had decided that releasing Samples would be a gesture of goodwill toward the community of Vietnam veterans, who had not been well treated by the public at the time of their return from the service but who were being hailed in retrospect as heroes by incoming President Ronald Reagan.
I had some time before I was expected to go to Oregon, and in the interim I did some digging. As a reserve officer in the Army’s CID, as well as being an FBI agent, I not only had access to Army records but also the experience to know how to evaluate those records. I asked the Army to check and see whether officers by the name of Hanna and Ingrahm had been killed in 1966 or 1967, and obtained a copy of Samples’s discharge form, a DD 214; everyone who is discharged from the services gets a copy of their own 214, and it shows their service record, including all medals and citations. Samples’s 214 showed no medals for bravery. Another document in those records were special orders addressed to Hanna that covered many topics, among them ones that mentioned Samples’s name and in another paragraph also mentioned a Randy Ingrahm. The Army further informed me that while men with the names of Hanna and Ingrahm had been wounded in that time period, neither had died; nor were there dead officers with names that were somewhat similar but spelled differently.
Interestingly, the two mental-health professionals who were willing to testify on Samples’s behalf appear not to have researched his claims about his war service to the point where they could have better determined whether or not the patient was telling the truth. I thought it likely, though, that Samples had requested and received his army documents. He conducted an extensive correspondence from prison, for instance, managing to win a monthly disability check based on his stressful experiences in Vietnam—that was why the VA sent a private practice psychologist to see him on a regular basis. To obtain that stipend, he would have had to cite his records.
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