Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer

by Gary C. King

  "During your conversations with him, did Dayton ever talk about sex, particularly any peculiar sex habits?"

  "No. The only thing that would come close were his statements about the agreement he had with his wife. He always said that Portland was alive, not boring, that it was an ideal location to seek fun and pleasures." Teresa said she often questioned Dayton's relationship with his wife and felt that it was peculiar. "I always felt he should be at home with his wife and young child."

  "Did he ever talk about traveling?"

  "He mentioned that he went to Reno a couple of times a year." He had a friend, whose name Teresa did not know, and they would stay over the weekend on the twice-yearly trips.

  "Is there anything else you can tell me about him?"

  "He liked to do magic tricks."

  "You mean with ropes, knots, and the like?" Strovink was probing.

  "No. The tricks I saw him do involved cards, coins, and an ashtray trick." Although he didn't smoke, he liked to make ashes mysteriously disappear from one hand and reappear in the other. Teresa was unable to provide Strovink with any further information about Dayton.

  At 7 A.M. the next day, August 14, Strovink reached John Frank at his residence by telephone. Frank confirmed that he had worked with Dayton at the hardware store, and was surprised to learn of Dayton's arrest on the murder charge. Dayton, he said, was a guy who never lost his cool, someone whom he never knew to carry weapons. Frank said that he had, on occasion, gone fishing with Dayton at the Molalla River, and that he had accompanied him to Portland a couple of times.

  "He seemed to have a very different lifestyle," said Frank. "He liked to frequent the bars even though he was married, and he often spoke of the nightlife crowd that can be found in Portland." Frank said that he had accompanied Dayton a few times to some of Portland's bars, but the outings were usually during business trips to the city.

  "Was Dayton ever successful at picking up women during any of these trips?" asked Strovink.

  "I can only remember one occasion when Dayton picked up a woman on one of these trips. Actually, the gal picked him up." Frank said he thought the incident occurred either at a Denny's or a VIP's restaurant. Frank emphasized that he wasn't interested in nightlife like Dayton was, and that his relationship with Dayton outside of work consisted primarily of fishing on the Molalla River.

  "Did you ever see a weapon of any type inside Dayton's pickup?" asked Strovink.

  "Yeah, he carried a club-type device in the cab of his truck." Frank added that he never saw Dayton use it, however, and never witnessed him become agitated or assaultive with anyone.

  "Did he ever mention any unusual sexual activity?"

  "He did say once that he met a lady who liked 'rear entry,' " said Frank. "This was about three years ago. He also told me that he enjoyed going to restaurants where hookers hung out, that he found them interesting and enjoyed talking to them." Frank couldn't recall the names or locations of the restaurants.

  Frank indicated that Dayton's home life seemed like it was quiet and uneventful. He said that he knew about Dayton's agreement with his wife, however, but that Dayton never said or did anything to give him the impression that he was able to go out and "easily get laid." He said that Dayton's wife was a nice, religious lady, and that he didn't believe she would put up with that type of behavior from her husband.

  Frank told Strovink that he knew Dayton to drink alcohol, and when he did so he preferred the "sweeter" drinks, like liqueurs with cream, or vodka and orange juice. Frank admitted that he and Dayton also smoked marijuana periodically, but "not in an abusive fashion." Frank characterized Dayton as an individual with no tact in dealing with customers at the Coast to Coast store and, as a result, was surprised to see that his own business was doing so well.

  Strovink was unable to immediately reach Roberto Ancisco. He was working in Portland, and Strovink would have to trace his whereabouts.

  On Thursday afternoon, August 20, Turner drove to the Coast to Coast store in Woodburn, where he talked to the manager, Beverly Clarambeau, a co-owner of the store. Turner learned that Clarambeau's husband, now deceased, had hired Dayton in June 1984, despite the fact that Dayton had a prior criminal record. Clarambeau said that she was under the impression that he had done time for armed robbery, and was not aware of any other crimes that he might have committed. He worked at the store on a subcontract basis until September 1986.

  "He was moody," she said. "Sometimes he was very short with the customers. He was always right and the customers were always wrong. At times he was almost belligerent."

  Clarambeau said that she and her husband tolerated his shortcomings, however, because he really seemed to know what he was doing in his work. He was a perfectionist, she said, and had a penchant for cleanliness and order.

  "Why, you could eat off the floor in his work area. If he spilled even a drop of oil, he would immediately wipe it up. My house wasn't as clean as the floors in his shop."

  But he had an ego problem, she said, which he often let get in the way in his dealings with customers and other employees, and she suspected at one point that he might have been stealing parts and equipment from her store to use in starting his own business. Following his arrest for the murder of Jenny Smith, said Clarambeau, a business associate of hers, the owner of the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) liquor store in Woodburn, had related to her that Dayton Rogers had been one of his best customers.

  As Turner was wrapping up his interview, Mrs. Clarambeau informed him that one of her other employees, Joy Bean, had seen Dayton with other women in his truck prior to the incident for which he was arrested. At Turner's request, she called Joy into the room.

  "It was my impression that Dayton was a womanizer," Joy told the detective. She explained that she had heard stories about Dayton frequenting different taverns in the area, and on at least two different occasions she had seen him with two different women in his 1985 Nissan pickup. About a week before Dayton's arrest, Joy said, she saw him southbound on Highway 99E near the community of Hubbard with a woman who had long dark hair.

  "Could it have been Sherry, his wife?" asked Turner.

  "No, absolutely not. I've met Sherry, and that woman in the truck with Dayton was not his wife." She added that when she saw him with the different women, it had always been between 7 and 7:30 P.M., in the vicinity of Aurora and Hubbard, just north of Woodburn and Highway 211. Turner knew that Highway 211 was a direct route to Molalla and the Molalla forest, and he again wondered if Dayton had been the unknown suspect who had driven Heather Brown into the forest and terrified her on July 7. He pushed the thought aside for the moment.

  "What kind of person do you think Dayton is?" asked Turner.

  "He's an oddball," Joy said abruptly. "He was always trying to come on to me, making subtle sexual comments." She said she always rebuffed his advances and had as little contact with him as possible. She wasn't necessarily afraid of him. She just didn't like him.

  After the ashes from the wood stove in Dayton's shop had been sifted and analyzed, state criminologists determined that it contained five belt buckles, two long metal springs, metal shanks from at least five shoes, several buttons, four star-shaped grommets, earrings, a number of bra hooks, fasteners, strap adjustors, other women's effects, and remnants of a burned tennis shoe. Several of the metal parts found in the wood stove closely matched the metal parts of the single shoe discovered in the GMAC parking lot where Jenny Smith was murdered.

  What did the discovery of all the other objects imply? Was the evidence a major break in Turner's case against Dayton in Jenny Smith's murder? Or was it an indication of something far more sinister, something that Turner and the other investigators knew nothing about yet? Turner had a bad feeling about it all, a gloomy outlook that grew more dismal with each passing day.

  Chapter 7

  By the fourth week of August, reports about twenty-three-year-old Lisa Maria Mock were making the rounds through the Portland Police Bureau's Mis
sing Persons Unit. Lisa, a known prostitute and heroin addict, had been missing for more than a month, and Portland detectives were having little success developing any leads to her whereabouts.

  According to Lisa's father, James Holden, a California resident, Lisa was born in Berkeley and first became involved with drugs at age sixteen. She began living a transient lifestyle and eventually ended up in Oregon. She had been living in the Portland suburb of Gresham with her husband, William, also a heroin addict, whom she married on August 9, 1986.

  "She had a boyfriend when she met William," said Holden. "But when he came into the picture, he just swept her right off her feet."

  Lisa prostituted herself to support her and William's habits, sometimes hooking in Gresham, sometimes in Portland. When prostituting in Portland, Lisa often worked out of the eighty-room Continental Motel on East Burnside Street near downtown. Sandwiched between a restaurant on one side and a topless tavern on the other, rooms at the Continental typically went for $19.95 a night or $99 a week. The Continental was an unsavory place well known to the police, located in one of the sleaziest areas of town and sometimes referred to by those in law enforcement as the "Homicide Inn" and "Motel Hell" because of its unsurpassed reputation for turning up murder victims.

  For example, two months earlier, on June twenty-first, Portland detectives had been summoned there to investigate the grisly murder of Candace Marie Straub, twenty-six, whose badly burned body was found inside Room 214. Straub had been bound and gagged by two men who subsequently tortured and strangled her in the bathtub following an attempted rape. Before leaving, the attackers doused Straub's body with lighter fluid and set it and the room on fire.

  A year earlier, on May 17, 1986, a motel maid found the partially clad body of thirty-four-year-old Barbara Ann Maher in the bathtub of Room 116. Maher had been stabbed in the chest. Additionally, a man and a woman were found shot to death at the motel in the early 1980s, and there have been numerous other shootings and knife attacks in and around the establishment over the years. One of the latest incidents there involved the murders of yet another man and woman, and when police arrived they found a nine-month-old baby boy crawling on the floor in his mother's blood. It was little wonder that investigators were now concerned over the mysterious disappearance of Lisa Mock, who was last seen leaving the Continental on July 23 with three men. Lisa's father told police that he became concerned when she failed to show up in court on August 20 for an inheritance hearing that involved $25,000 left to Lisa by a relative who had passed away.

  Based on a description provided by Lisa's father, Portland missing persons detectives issued an all-points bulletin that described her as five feet six inches tall, 120 to 130 pounds, sandy blond hair, and good straight teeth due to having been fitted with braces when she was younger. There were several tattoos on her body, including a black Harley Davidson emblem across her lower back with the word BITCH under it, a colorful unicorn on one of her shoulder blades, and some homemade initials done in black on her biceps.

  "She was a very pretty girl, except for those tattoos," said Holden. "I could never stand to look at them."

  When she was last seen, Lisa was wearing blue jeans, a multicolored belt with two ring-type buckles, a black slingshot-type blouse, and black Reebok tennis shoes. She also had a pink bandanna in her hair and was wearing a silver ring with a pearl.

  Holden explained to police that he "kidnapped" Lisa on one occasion in an attempt to get her off drugs, and brought her back to California. After three days she left, however, but enrolled in a drug rehabilitation program in San Francisco, where she obtained a job as a secretary for a company that makes burglar alarms.

  "She was straight," said Holden. "She had a job as a temporary secretary. Eventually she got her own apartment and a car. Everything sounded okay. She was back to being our little girl."

  But then Lisa and a girlfriend began moving around, and they eventually went to Portland. William followed her there, and within a month after he joined her she was back on heroin.

  "She never told me, because she knew how I felt," said Holden. "But she told her grandmother. She also told her grandmother that she was working as a prostitute. That's when the trouble started. She called me and said she was trying to get her life together again. She said she was going to call me back. That was on July 21. Two days later she walked out of the Continental at two A.M. to get a pack of cigarettes. She never came back, and no one has heard a thing from her since."

  While trying to find out what happened to Lisa Mock, Portland investigators also began looking into the mysterious disappearance of Maureen Ann Hodges, known as "Mo" on the street, during that same time frame. Although the priority of both cases were considered equal in the eyes of the police, there was no reason at this point for detectives to suspect that they might be linked. Neither woman had turned up dead yet, and there was little at this point to suggest that foul play was somehow involved. They had simply mysteriously disappeared, and there's no crime in that. People vanish all the time for one reason for another, often of their own doing.

  As they probed into Mo's background, Portland's missing persons investigators learned that she had met a man named Tim Wilson,* twenty-seven, in a Portland bar the previous May. This was some two months after her last contact with Tracie Baxter. Although the police didn't know about Tracie's encounter with the man in the blue pickup yet, and wouldn't for another two months, Tracie had by that time become pregnant and was off the streets, taking steps to turn her life around. As best as the police could determine, Mo was still turning tricks to support her habit when she met Tim. Tim, at that time, had no idea that Mo was working as a whore, and the two of them really seemed to hit it off. After only a couple of dates, Mo moved into Tim's downtown Portland hotel room and became known to Tim's friends and acquaintances as his woman.

  The Fairfield Hotel, located on Southwest Stark Street near 11th Avenue, was a dive by most people's standards. It served as a temporary resting place for a variety of derelicts, drug addicts, hookers, and the like, but it also had a few permanent residents like Tim and Mo who were down on their luck, people who would stay there for a few weeks to a few months because of the cheap rent. Although Mo would have liked something nicer, the Fairfield did provide shelter and it soon became home to her, even if for only a couple of months. It also didn't churn out dead bodies at the rate that the Continental did. Mo, even at twenty-six and despite the rough and tough outer shell that her lifestyle had created, was still an attractive woman. Her nose had been broken earlier in life and, although it had been left slightly crooked, it hadn't severely marred her looks. At five feet eight inches and 125 pounds, her figure was trim. Her flowing brown hair and hazel eyes rounded out her appearance. The tattoos on both arms and her chest were a turnoff, but fortunately, they weren't normally visible unless she had her clothes off.

  Mo didn't dress like most other hookers, which is perhaps why Tim didn't catch on to or otherwise question her activities at first. Instead of wearing garish or tawdry outfits, she usually wore plain clothes, like blouses with fabric designs and Levi's 501 jeans or slacks. Sometimes she wore a white sweater with birds and trees on it, but she never wore dresses on her dates. Likewise she did not wear pantyhose, but normally wore socks with white tennis shoes or black boots. She was almost always home by 4:30 in the afternoon, which Tim liked. It also helped to conceal her true self from him. But one day he came home unexpectedly and discovered her secret. Unnoticed, he quietly stood by the bathroom door which Mo had left ajar and watched her inject a syringe full of heroin into her stomach. When she was finished, he learned that what he had seen was only one of three or four daily fixes, each consisting of a $20 "paper" or "bag" of smack. It explained all the boils he had seen on her stomach, for which Mo had not given him an explanation.

  When he asked how she obtained the money to support her habit, Mo had tearfully confessed that she worked as a prostitute and that she often shoplifted valuable items from several
of the more classy department stores in Portland, such as I. Magnin, Nordstrom and Meier & Frank. Tim took the startling revelation hard at first, and considered leaving her. But when he had time to consider his feelings for Maureen, he realized that he truly cared for her and decided that he would try to help her. In an effort to get her off the streets and put an end to her shoplifting sprees, Tim soon began supporting Mo's habit with his own money. At one point it had looked as if she might even beat her addiction, and those who knew and cared for her held on hope that she was finally well on her way to conquering her dependency. She managed to gradually work her habit down to $40 a day, half of what it had been for years, and she felt that she could cut it in half again, given a few more weeks. Then came the silly argument on July 8, a Wednesday, and that changed everything.

  Mo came home with a package of new clothes that she had picked out specially for Tim. It was her way of showing him that she appreciated all the concern he had shown her and all the help, emotional and financial, he had provided. But Tim didn't see things that way. He did not want her buying him things, particularly with money that he knew came from her prostitution activities. To him it was her money, it was dirty, and he didn't want anything to do with it.

  Angry, Mo walked out about noon that day and took a bus from downtown out to 82nd Avenue, never to return or to see Tim again. But, although she didn't know it, Tim saw her one more time, later that afternoon, from the window of a passing Tri-Met bus he was on, one he had taken from downtown to go out looking for her. She was working 82nd Avenue and Holgate Boulevard as the bus passed by, the last time he ever saw her. Although Mo was a very tough, street-smart woman, Tim knew that she was at her most vulnerable when she was strung out and in need of a fix, as she was then. He got off at the next corner to try to talk her into coming home, but he was too late. She had already climbed into the light-blue Nissan pickup and was gone. Forever.