by Ann Rule
Roger always had an excuse why Cheri should stay in his condo, and in no time at all Cheri realized that she was trapped. He told her that if she wanted to keep her job, she would have to live with him and his wife. Cheri’s enthusiasm for the scam run at the Exotica began to fade after a week or so. She didn’t want the job any longer, and she didn’t want to live with the Pomarleaus. There was no big money for her—Roger took it all. She had a boyfriend whom she never got to see. Roger kept filling her head with promises, but she didn’t feel it was necessary to be so devoted to her new career that she had to spend twenty-four hours a day either dancing or living in Roger’s condominium.
Cheri Schak was a captive. Roger wouldn’t let her leave. And she couldn’t get away from him at work, or sneak out of his condo. Soon, he began to knock her around, and then he choked her.
“I have ‘committed’ you to other people,” he told her obscurely. “If you leave, it might mean my life.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant, but then he spelled it out: She would have to sleep with strangers whenever Roger ordered her to.
Later, vice detectives differed somewhat in their opinion of Cheri’s situation—when they had encountered her in the Exotica, she seemed cheerful enough as she danced in the window in a nearly transparent blouse. Roger hadn’t been on the premises, or so it appeared. If that was true, she could have left whenever she wanted to. But then Roger Pomarleau often hid so that he could observe what was going on. Cheri never knew where he was, but she often felt as if she was being watched.
Cheri hated the ménage à trois that Roger demanded with her and his wife. Sometime during the night of September 28, she made her move. Cheri rose from the bed she shared with Mr. and Mrs. Pomarleau and went to the kitchen. There, she found a butcher knife, and walked back to the dimly lit bedroom. According to Cheri, an argument followed.
When the “argument” was over, Roger Pomarleau lay naked on his back on the plush carpet of his bedroom. He was dead, covered with blood from sixteen stab wounds. Two of them had punctured his heart. His young wife ran screaming to the neighbors for help. She also had sixteen stab wounds, but they were not to vital organs, and she eventually recovered.
Cheri Schak suffered cuts to her hands and legs, but was able to flag down a passing truck driver. She was about to leave the scene when a neighbor pulled her out of the truck cab and held her for police.
Charged with second-degree murder and first-degree assault, Cheri’s story in court was bolstered by the testimony of a rather unlikely witness: the first Mrs. Pomarleau, who said that Roger had beaten her two or three times a week when she lived with him before their marriage. “He slapped me regularly when I lived with him in 1976,” she said. She testified that he had also abused her sexually and burned her with a curling iron.
“I reported him to the police,” she told the jury. “And they charged him with rape and extortion, but Roger turned on the charm and promised he would go straight if I would marry him. I married him in Idaho that July, and as soon as I did, he forced me back to work as a dancer. I signed an affidavit saying that my reports to the police were false and that he never forced me to give him money, that all the sex was voluntary, and that he never burned me with the curling iron.”
The ex-Mrs. Pomarleau testified that her first complaint to police had been true all along; she had suffered painful and humiliating attacks at her husband’s hands. Once he had persuaded her to drop her charges against him, she realized she had been duped into signing the affidavit just so that he could avoid prosecution.
Roger Pomarleau’s sudden demise left a big hole in the operation of the Exotica, but the crew pulled themselves together and the girls in the window remained a regular sight along Pike Street for a while.
Even though homicide detectives wondered whether it was really necessary for Cheri Schak to stab a man sixteen times in self-defense, and to stab his teenage wife the same number of times during the escape, her jury looked at tiny Cheri Schak and found her innocent of the charges: innocent by reason of self-defense.
With that trial over, the last sidelight on the story of Ayala’s beating of Arden Lee was over. The Exotica “dance school” lasted a few years, and then quietly shut down.
There is no shortage of gullible teenagers who fall under the spell of pimps, but as high-priced condo buildings proliferated in the downtown sections of the Emerald City, Pike Street gradually ceased to be the hot spot for prostitution in Seattle. It didn’t go away, however. It never goes away. In the Seattle area, sex for money moved to Aurora Avenue North and south to the highway that runs by the Seattle-Tacoma Airport—where both became a prime hunting ground for the perversely sadistic murderer known in infamy as the Green River Killer.
And with that, a whole new chapter of horror began.
The Runaway and the Soldier
Not all murders are plotted and designed in a sociopath’s mind. Some killers could never have imagined that they were capable of killing another human being. And yet their victims are just as dead as those bodies left behind in the wake of a serial killer. I like to think that the vast majority of people would kill only only in self-defense. Almost any mother—animal or human—will defend her young unto death. Self-defense and the horror of war can change the conscience and sensibilities of us all.
There are other “triggers” that can evoke blind rage, and sometimes we are unaware of what they are, those secret buttons deep inside that can be pushed without warning. Fear and frustration and jealousy may be deadly triggers. Flashbacks of episodes buried in the psyche can play across the unconscious mind. A lot of murder defendants blame “blackouts,” insisting that they cannot recall the moment they snapped, and are, therefore, not responsible for what they have done. In most cases, I don’t buy that and neither do the vast majority of juries.
In the following case, a number of unfortunate circumstances had to have occurred in a deadly chain to set the scene for murder. Without them, it’s unlikely the killer would ever have erupted into a homicidal rage. But, with the dark arrangement of circumstance, heedlessness, and the deserted crime scene, the victim’s sudden death seems absolutely predestined. Indeed, the victim herself contributed to the tumbling down of safeguards that would have saved her life.
She was headstrong, and falsely confident in her own ability to make decisions. No matter how many people loved her and wanted to help her, she chose to walk away from their concern and live her own life exactly as she wanted to.
It was to be the death of her.
It is a lovely patch of woods, where the warmth of bright sunlight just above its treetops grows cooler as the protective branches of Douglas firs in the winter and peach trees in the spring and summer close in. It isn’t that far from a well-populated area, but sound is hushed here, absorbed by a carpet of native vegetation: salal, Oregon grape, kinnikinnik, and feathery sword ferns. Woods like this are one of the inducements for home buyers to accept long commutes into Seattle, crossing over one of the two floating bridges to leave the Emerald City and move to the burgeoning suburb of Bellevue, Washington. The houses that abut these woods are mostly ramblers, huddled close to the ground, landscaped with rhododendrons and dogwoods. They are not plush, but they have grown tremendously in value over the years as suburbs to the east of Lake Washington creep steadily up into the very foothills of Snoqualmie Pass. Families who live there often walk along the meandering paths among the trees. They walk their pets there and ride horses along bridle trails, and young lovers hold hands, enjoying the hushed ambience and the feeling of privacy.
It is a peaceful sanctuary without any sense of foreboding. It is no place for violent death.
It was Friday, December 7, the anniversary of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, but the young people who entered the dark woods didn’t remember the event that sparked the United States to enter World War II; they hadn’t even been born then. They strolled along the path shortly after noon. The girl was seventeen, her friend twenty-two. They
broke off some bright red holly berry sprigs, talked about their Christmas plans, and wondered when the snowpack in Snoqualmie Pass would be deep enough for them to plan a ski trip.
As they moved deeper into the woods, the trees were so thick that it was like being in a cave made of branches. Suddenly, the young woman gasped. A skull lay directly in front of them, resting on the surface on sodden, brown leaves. It was far too big to have come from any small woods creature; it was a human skull.
Forgetting their walk, the couple ran to a nearby house and called the Bellevue Police Department. The first officer on the scene was Patrolman Bob Littlejohn. It was an irony in itself that Littlejohn should be the first lawman on the scene. Looking at the skull, he determined that it was, indeed, that of a human being. Yet he could have no way of knowing at the time that he was viewing the remains of someone he knew.
Littlejohn was joined by Patrol Lieutenant Paul Olson. As they secured the scene and notified detectives at their downtown Bellevue offices, the two officers noted that the woods and surrounding trees were part of a long-forgotten peach orchard—all that remained from the days when the development known as “Sherwood Forest” was once farmland.
Now it had become not only a favorite spot for rustic walks but also a popular dirt path for motorcyclists. Little-john walked carefully in an ever-widening circle radiating out from the skull. Forty feet away, he stopped and stared down at the ground.
He gazed at what first appeared to be only an abandoned Christmas tree. But as he focused his eyes, it resembled one of those drawings that change depending on how the viewer sees them: The woman’s face in the mirror becomes a death’s head, or black letters shift and the viewer sees that the white spaces say something different. Little-john suddenly became aware that this Christmas tree, its branches as bare of needles as the skull itself was denuded of flesh, covered something beneath it: bones that were the widespread legs of a skeleton. The body lay on its back, nude, and decomposition was far advanced. It had to have been here for months.
Within minutes, eight detectives and Bellevue Police Chief Don Van Blaricom arrived. Detective Roy Gleason would take over principal responsibility for the homicide probe. And detectives Gary Trent, Marvin Skeen, Jim Constantine, Mike Lambo, John Cooper, Chuck Webb, and Mike Cate would be assigned to assist in the investigation of what surely was a homicide.
As the investigators looked at the ravaged body— which from the way its hair was cut and the ragged clothes nearby was probably the remains of a female—they knew they would have to call on all their experience and expertise. Going in, this case had all the signs of a loser. The first forty-eight hours after a murder are the prime-time segment when a murder suspect will emerge, and after that the chances of finding him diminish with each passing day. The killer had a very long head start on them. They had no idea who she was, this sad victim thrown away in the woods.
“I don’t think we’re even going to get an identification—let alone apprehend her killer,” Van Blaricom commented.
Before the crime scene search began in earnest, they cordoned the area off, and uniformed officers were stationed at key points to prevent curious passersby from entering the woods.
Although the body was naked, the investigators found several items. There was a red ski jacket, with yellow and orange stripes around the sleeves, waist, and collar. It was a mass-produced item, with a “Made in Hong Kong” label. There was a hooded, yellow cotton shirt trimmed in white with a front neck zipper and a pocket-pouch in front, also zippered. A pair of blue jeans with a twenty-seven-inch waist. White tube socks. A white bra with a J.C. Penney label. There were no panties.
It appeared to be standard attire of an average young woman, and not distinctive enough to aid in identifying the body in the woods. Still, the clothing would be carefully dried and photographed on the slight chance that someone would recognize the items.
Dr. John Eisele of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office arrived to do a preliminary examination of the victim. He could give only a “ballpark figure” as to the time of death. “Two, three months ago—possibly longer.”
The cause of death would be harder to determine. Much soft tissue had been lost to the elements, the burning sun of late summer and early fall, and then rain and snow in November and December. There were animals in the woods, too, mostly small. Eisele could not immediately isolate any cause of death. “I’ll be able to tell more at the postmortem,” he said.
Roy Gleason and his fellow detectives worked through the long, chill December afternoon, first with the rays of pale sunlight that cut through the trees, then with auxiliary lighting as the sun set. In December, that occurred well before four. They bagged and labeled the dead woman’s clothing for evidence, and did the same with soil and leaf samples.
They took careful measurements, triangulating them with trees, and photographed the remains and the scene. At length, the fragile remains were removed for autopsy, and the Bellevue investigative crew cleared the scene.
The woods were now as they were before.
She had lain there for so long. There was no point in hurrying, but they were back in the woods and the adjoining neighborhood as soon as the sun rose. They canvassed the nearby homes, but their questions netted nothing helpful. Most people don’t recall noises or out-of-the-ordinary incidents that happened months ago—not unless there is something on which to peg a hidden memory. Sherwood Forest residents were accustomed to a lot of foot traffic through the woods, and the less welcome roar of motorbikes and cycles.
“Who was she?” was the question that kept niggling at them. Would they ever be able to find that out from a few bagfuls of mouldering clothing? They had found some of her teeth, but they had fallen out and landed in the wet, yellowed peach leaves. It wasn’t as if they had an intact jaw that a forensic odontologist might use for identification. The separate teeth had probably been knocked out in a violent struggle. There might be enough of them left in the skull for a forensic dentist to make a positive comparison—if they could locate the dental records of the dead girl. It was a vicious circle. Unless they had some inkling about her name, they wouldn’t be able to locate her dental records.
Was there someone, someplace, who missed her—who would read of the discovery in the lonely orchard woods and call in? The Bellevue detectives knew that was their best hope.
Bellevue itself had no reports of women who had gone missing in the last six months, but the Seattle Police Department and the police of Lynnwood (a small town along I-5 north of Seattle) shared open files on a missing case, one that had baffled them since July 9.
Stacy Sparks, eighteen, had had no reason to run away. The recent high school graduate had a new job she liked, a ticket already purchased for a dream trip to Hawaii, and a steady boyfriend. She had lived with her mother and stepfather in the Ballard section of Seattle, apparently in complete harmony. Aware of the Sparks case, the Bellevue detectives thought first of the pretty blonde who had vanished so inexplicably on that Monday night. No one believed that Stacy had left of her own accord.
And yet, no one had seen Stacy Sparks since she left the Raintree Restaurant in Lynnwood at 9:30 P.M. on July 9. She had promised to pick up her boyfriend from his job in south Seattle, and she had been driving her prized Plymouth Arrow hatchback with the white racing stripe.
Five months now, and they had found nothing of Stacy Sparks—not even her distinctive car. The first opinion of those most familiar with her case was that this unidentified body in Sherwood Forest would prove to be Stacy’s.
However, there were things that didn’t fit: Stacy wore a yellow cotton shirt the night she disappeared, but hers was a T-shirt with a rose appliquéd on it—not a hooded sweatshirt. The jeans were right, but the blouse wasn’t. Of course, there was always the possibility that Stacy had stopped somewhere to change her clothes before she either encountered someone dangerous or, less likely, chose to run away.
Stacy had yellow-blonde hair and the hair near the
skull in Bellevue was more a “mousy” blonde, more brown than Stacy’s appeared in the missing posters that still clung to fences and utility poles, faded and tattered now.
The possibility that this victim might be Stacy Sparks proved unlikely after the postmortem examination. Dr. Eisele performed the autopsy on the nameless young woman. Detectives Marv Skeen and Gary Trent attended the postmortem, and listened intently as Eisele outlined many of the facts that can be elicited from forensic pathology.
“She was very young,” Eisele said. “Probably about thirteen to fourteen—possibly as young as eleven—or as old as sixteen. Caucasian. She was between five feet one and five feet, five inches tall—slender—and she had medium length light brown hair.”
“Cause of death?” Trent asked.
Eisele shook his head. “There’s no way to tell. I can only tell you that there’s been no fracturing of her bones. No trauma to any bone, not even the skull. The internal organs have decomposed. If she was shot or stabbed, it penetrated the soft tissue—and that’s gone. If she was strangled—same problem.”
The dead girl could have succumbed to a bullet, a stabbing, a strangling, or suffocation, but there was no way left to say absolutely what had happened.
The motive for the killing was obvious, grotesquely apparent. Her skeleton had been found in the “classic” rape position, on its back with legs spread wide. Dr. Eisele found that a branch had been savagely shoved into the vaginal vault, effecting both a symbolic and a legal act of rape.
It’s not unusual to find all manner of foreign objects in the vaginas of women who have been killed by someone in a sexual rage: bottles, umbrellas, sticks, and branches are “signatures” of impotent killers or of rapists so full of anger that they are not satisfied just to violate the bodies of their victims. They are also compelled to leave something behind to demonstrate to the person who discovers a body or to the police how powerful they are. It is an act hard for the normal mind to comprehend. In this case, any residual semen that might have been deposited during forced intercourse was, of course, gone, lost to the rain, wind, and processes of decomposition.