by Ann Rule
In March 1971, Jackie got married in Yakima. The groom, Blake Simons,* was only seventeen, and Jackie was eighteen—one year and nine months older than he was. Seven and a half months later, in October 1971, she had a son, Buddy,* who was born in the Modesto, California, area.
Though online Stanislaus County, California, records indicate the baby was born in October, later records give his birthdate as November. Which of these dates is correct, and whether or not the discrepancy is a clerical error or deliberate, is unknown.
Jackie claimed she married and divorced at least four different men over the next decade. She told an acquaintance that one of these marriages ended dramatically when she walked in on her husband in bed with a man.
Most of Jackie’s husbands were in her life so fleetingly that some of her family members don’t remember even meeting them.
One of her relatives remembers that Harold Lee Schut appeared on the scene in the early 1970s, and he stayed around longer than any of the others. He went by “Lee” and was about eight years older than she was. At some point, they, too, divorced, but it is unclear exactly when that happened.
Some people wondered if her marriages were all legal or if maybe, at times, they overlapped—though there is no proof that Jackie is a bigamist.
Margaret Jacobs,* a woman who was friendly with Jackie in the 1980s, describes her as plump, with a perpetual bad perm. She didn’t take much care with her appearance, wore no makeup, and her upper lip needed a waxing. Her mustache was clearly visible in bright light. Few people were rude enough to mention it to her, so maybe she thought they didn’t notice.
Her clothing—though casual—was of the highest quality. She usually dressed in jeans with T-shirts and sweatshirts from the best stores.
By 1980, Jackie was twenty-seven years old and claimed she had given birth to three children: Buddy, Dana Rose, and Deanna. Deanna was born in 1976, when Jackie was allegedly married to her third husband, Rick Morely.* Buddy and Dana Rose went by the last name of Simons, and Deanna went by Morely.
Dana Rose was told she was born in 1973, and that Jackie’s first husband is her father, but she has doubts about this.
“I’m not sure who I am,” she admits. “I don’t look like anyone in my family.”
Is it possible that Jackie did not give birth to Dana Rose, and that she stole her from her real mother, as Dana Rose suspects? Or is this just wishful thinking on Dana Rose’s part?
When Dana Rose first told me about her life, I was shocked to hear of the unimaginable ways that she was betrayed by the person who should have loved and cared for her more than anyone else. I can understand that it would be a relief for her to learn that Jackie is not, in fact, her biological mother, and that somewhere out there her real mother is still looking for her. But as of this writing, no DNA tests have been done to verify Dana Rose’s relationship to Jackie.
Jackie’s friend Margaret says the lack of resemblance between Jackie and the girls was so noticeable that she had once commented on it. “I told the girls, ‘You guys must look like your dad because you don’t look anything like your mom.’ ”
With the grab bag of genetics, of course, there is no telling what a child is going to look like. Sometimes kids look nothing like their biological parents.
Margaret was a casual acquaintance who met Jackie in a bar, and she had occasion to visit Jackie’s home a few times. It was a small rental on North 24th Street in Yakima.
Margaret remembers that whenever she saw Dana Rose and Deanna, they were dirty, and their clothing was rumpled and their hair uncombed. “They didn’t have many toys, and the ones they had were the cheap kind that break easily,” says Margaret.
Though the carpet was stained, the house was pretty well kept and filled with the expensive items Jackie bought for herself. Margaret assumed Jackie was divorced, because she never saw a husband or heard her speak of one. At that time, Jackie went by the last name Morely—Deanna’s father’s last name. At least, that’s the name that Jackie gave to Margaret. Jackie didn’t have a job but managed to travel quite a bit, and Margaret wondered how she could afford it.
She also loved to play bingo, and she played it every chance she got. Sometimes she had people over to play poker and drink, and Dana Rose remembers seeing stacks of plastic chips on the kitchen table.
“Jackie liked to party, and she brought people she met in bars back to the house,” Margaret recalls.
Dana Rose and Deanna appeared very uncomfortable whenever Jackie brought strangers home. They hung back, afraid to make eye contact or speak to visitors.
Though Jackie was approaching thirty, she liked to hang out with teens, and she invited them to the house and gave them alcohol. “It was kind of like Jackie was stuck, like she was still a teenager herself,” says Margaret. “And sometimes Dana Rose seemed more mature than Jackie.”
Dana Rose was very protective of her little sister, and she was cooking meals before she turned ten.
One day Margaret found herself alone in the kitchen with Dana Rose. The little girl looked at her sadly and said, “I don’t like my mom.”
Margaret could understand that, because from what she’d witnessed, Jackie was not very nice to the girls. “She was cold and distant, and she had a bad temper.”
One night the girls forgot to clean up the kitchen after a meal, and Jackie blew up. “She was scary,” Margaret says with a shudder. “Her eyes bulged, her face turned red, she threw things, and she yelled. I knew that the kids were going to get in big trouble after I left.”
When she wasn’t angry at the kids, Jackie seemed oblivious to them. Margaret describes her as being in her own little bubble. She appeared to have other things on her mind, and one night as they were having drinks, she startled Margaret by asking her, “Would you ever kill someone?”
“No!” Margaret replied.
“I have,” said Jackie. “But it was necessary.”
Margaret stared at her, taken aback by the casual way Jackie had brought up such a dark topic.
Jackie did not appear emotional about it. It was as if she was genuinely curious about whether or not Margaret was capable of killing—as if she was wondering if it was a normal thing to do.
Margaret was too stunned to ask for details about what Jackie had just confessed to, and the conversation drifted to another subject. Years later, when Margaret read about Jackie in the news, she thought back to that strange conversation and Jackie’s offhand confession.
Margaret had not hesitated to say “no” when Jackie asked her if she would kill. And Jackie had not seemed ashamed when she admitted that she had.
* * *
It is particularly painful for victims and their families when violence goes unpunished. While Colonel Turchin was not punished for the hate he unleashed upon Athens in 1862, the proverbial wheels of justice were just beginning to spin in the Clemons case—though in the spring of 1984, no one knew it yet.
Bernard Dale Oldham, a career criminal whose crimes never made the front page, would soon bust the investigation wide open. Whether or not he leaked information to save his own skin or because he had a hint of conscience is a moot point.
The probe would cover horrific crimes that involved at least five states, left at least three children motherless, and wreaked immeasurable heartbreak.
Oldham was never implicated in the murder of Geneva Clemons. But he knew something. If he had not come forward and shared information with Yakima detective Bob Regimbal, events would have unfolded very differently.
Bernard Oldham was no Boy Scout. Far from it. He was a criminal with a lengthy rap sheet.
Bernard was born in Tulare, California, on September 19, 1939, to Nellie and Ordie Oldham. His mother, who was Nellie Marie Creekmore before she married Ordie, was eighteen when Bernard was born.
Baby Bernard suffered a terrible loss when he was nine months old: Nellie died. She was just nineteen years old. While infants don’t know much, they do know who their mothers are, and the sudden ab
sence of her loving arms must have impacted the baby boy. His mama was suddenly gone, and she no longer held him close when he wailed for her.
He might have taken a different path if he’d had a mother to guide him, though a mother’s love is not necessarily a deterrent to a life of crime. There are any number of criminals who grew up with nurturing mothers, and plenty of law-abiding citizens who were orphans.
For whatever reason, Bernard Oldham started breaking the law at a young age. On August 15, 1959, the Centralia Daily Chronicle reported that a state patrolman, Charles Werner, arrested Bernard in a stolen car. The Yakima teen was with two other juveniles who were out joyriding after stealing the car from Portland, Oregon.
At the time, Bernard was also wanted for forgery, and Officer Werner apprehended him shortly before midnight in the Centralia, Washington, area on that Friday night and deposited him in the Lewis County Jail.
About three years later, on November 12, 1962, the Seattle Daily News reported that three fugitives, all from Yakima County, had escaped from the Washington State Reformatory prison “honor farm” and were apprehended in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bernard Dale Oldham and his two accomplices were captured by police responding to a burglar alarm at a building-supply firm.
In December 1966, The Oregonian reported that “transient” Bernard Oldham pled guilty to receiving and concealing stolen property. (He had earlier been charged with burglary in the same incident.) He was given eighteen months in the Oregon State Pen.
Oldham’s small-time crimes usually warranted just a half-inch column, tucked in somewhere between the funny pages and the classified ads of the daily news. In truth, he had connections to dangerous criminals, but he had somehow escaped serious scrutiny by law enforcement. It may be that he had no blood on his hands, or perhaps he was crafty at avoiding detection. Bernard Oldham seemed to always be on the periphery of the headline crimes.
On May 30, 1974, The Seattle Times reported that thirty-four-year-old Bernard Oldham had been arrested for lewd conduct for his behavior at the Bear Cave tavern, a sleazy topless bar frequented by bikers on Seattle’s East Marginal Way. Oldham was the Bear Cave’s bartender/manager, and the bar was regularly raided by police, resulting in multiple arrests and violations on several occasions.
The Bear Cave tavern is at the center of one of Seattle’s most complex cold cases. Bar owner Frank L. Hinkley, age forty-five, and his girlfriend, Barbara Rosenfield, forty-two, were found shot to death in the bar at 2 A.M. on November 3, 1975. The two had gone to high school together and had recently reunited. Each had children, and when their romance ignited, the couple and their kids moved into a posh home with a swimming pool—a rare luxury in the state of Washington.
The Bear Cave had recently lost its liquor license, and detectives found evidence that at least three people had been sitting together and drinking sodas when the violence erupted.
The bar had been locked from the outside, and investigators concluded the killer was likely someone close to the victims who had access to the Bear Cave’s keys. Allegedly only two other people besides Hinkley had sets of keys, and Hinkley’s keys were still in his pocket.
At least seven others associated with Hinkley died under suspicious circumstances in a four-year span—including a twenty-two-year-old dancer, Linda Faye Nickles, a nice girl who had gotten on the wrong path. She had a family who loved her, and she tried to hide her lifestyle from her mother, who was devastated when Linda vanished from the Bear Cave in May 1975 while taking a break. Linda was last seen walking out of the bar with a man in his forties, who was balding but let his white hair grow long in the back.
Linda’s remains were found beneath tree roots at Blewett Pass the following May. Investigators suspect the hapless girl had seen something she shouldn’t have, and she was killed as a result.
In 2006, detectives finally arrested a suspect in the Hinkley and Rosenfield murders. James B. Braman, like Bernard Oldham, was a manager at the Bear Cave and had a set of keys. Not only that, Braman’s former roommate claimed he had confessed the murders to him many years earlier.
To the great relief of Hinkley’s and Rosenfield’s families, it looked like there would finally be answers to the decades-old murder mystery.
But before he could be tried for the double homicide, Braman died from a methadone overdose. Braman had been released on a half million dollars’ bail, two weeks after his arrest, and four days later, he was dead. He was taking methadone for liver cancer, and some say the fatal dose was suicide, while others think it was coerced by someone else involved in the crimes.
When pressured to confess, Braman, age fifty-six, had allegedly told detectives others were involved and cried, “They’ll kill me!”
Many of those entangled in the murders and suspicious accidents associated with the Bear Cave are long dead. The building itself was long ago demolished.
Detectives and suspects alike are now dust in the wind, and the answers to the long-ago questions are as elusive as last summer’s dandelion fluff.
Investigators have tried to find a connection between the Bear Cave tavern murders and the September 6, 1975, murder of the owner of the Wagon Wheel restaurant near Yakima, Washington—which happens to be Bernard Oldham’s hometown, though there is no proof he was in any way involved in that homicide.
Everett “Fritz” Fretland was found shot to death, with five bullets in his back, inside the Wagon Wheel only two months before the Bear Cave shootings. Fretland, who owned three restaurants in the Yakima area, was the father of a young son.
More than three decades later, a former Wagon Wheel employee, Gary Isaacs, was found guilty of first-degree murder in November 2007. He insisted he was innocent, and when asked about the victim, Isaacs told reporters, he was devastated because “I loved that guy!”
Detectives suspected the murder was a hired hit, masterminded by another Wagon Wheel employee, Richard Sanders, who is unable to defend himself because he was murdered in 1989.
Whether or not Bernard Oldham was in any way involved in the murders at the Bear Cave or the Wagon Wheel is unknown.
The Bear Cave was implicated in counterfeiting, prostitution, and drug dealing—and one close associate had ties in the car sales industry, an industry that Bernard moved on to not long after he finished his stint at the Bear Cave.
In fact, Oldham would use this car dealership as the front for a Yakima prostitution ring—one that catered to the lowest of the low: pedophiles.
Bernard Oldham’s friend and partner in crime looked like a typical dowdy housewife. At first glance, no one would suspect she was dangerous. But the mother of three was, in fact, far more dangerous than Bernard.
By the time Bernard met her, Jackie was married to Harold Lee Schut. Bernard was a dozen years older than Jackie, but they had things in common. The three Yakima residents were interested in making money, and they were not picky about how they made it as long as it didn’t involve hard, honest work.
Neither Bernard nor the Schuts cared if children were damaged by their get-rich-quick schemes. In fact, Jackie sacrificed her own little girls, Dana Rose and Deanna. She often left them with “Uncle Bernie” so that he could babysit while she went to play bingo.
Bernard parked a large metal shipping container behind the dealership. It was about the size of a small trailer, windowless, and furnished with a filthy mattress.
Dirty old men paid a fee to watch Dana Rose and Deanna put on shows in the cold, dimly lit metal box.
When I talked with Dana Rose about these nightmarish memories from her childhood, she told me it felt as if she were talking about someone else’s life rather than her own. Though she remembers parts of her past in excruciating detail, she has distanced herself from the emotion that went along with being a sexually abused child. It’s not easy for her to revisit these memories, but she hopes that by telling her story, it will help children who were trapped the way she once was.
When she speaks of Bernard Oldham, she refers to him as “that
old man.” He wasn’t really that old. He was in his forties, but that must have seemed quite elderly to a little girl. In her child’s mind, she probably heard his name, Oldham, as “old man.”
Because she was so young when the abuse started, some of the details of the shows Dana Rose performed in are hazy.
“At first,” she recalls, “we put on our shows in the back room of the old man’s business. I remember that we had to do something with toothbrushes that Jackie taught us. We were just supposed to do sexy little dances and be nice to the men who paid to see our show.”
Dana Rose remembers that “Uncle Bernie” was “very rich,” and she thought he owned the car dealership where she and her sister were forced to perform. Sometimes, she recalls, “that old man” got a cheap motel room where the little girls were forced to entertain the customers.
There were other girls about Dana Rose’s age that also performed in the shows. Melody* and Krista* were the daughters of Frank* and Ginger Wynters,* and Dana Rose often saw them in the trailer behind the car lot where the perverts gathered.
The children were told that they had to do a good job, because there were important people watching them. If they did well, their parents would make lots of money and the girls would be rewarded.
“Bernie rewarded me with cigarettes,” says Dana Rose. “He taught me to smoke when I was eight.”
The child’s addiction to nicotine was just one more thing that Bernie could use to control her.
Bernie was sadistic, and “he liked to hurt little girls,” says Dana Rose. Sometimes he violated her with objects, and once when she was about eight years old, he used a glass soda bottle with a long neck. “It broke inside of me,” she remembers.
When Dana Rose shrieked with pain, Bernie told her that was her punishment for not cleaning her room.
Jackie, too, violated Dana Rose with objects. “She sometimes used a hairbrush, and she would set up cameras first to take photos of it—both stills and videos.”
Once, while the Schuts lived in a trailer park, one of Jackie’s pals from the pedophile ring crawled through the window of Dana Rose’s room. “He held a knife to my throat,” says Dana Rose. He forced the little girl to perform a sex act as he threatened her life.