Head Shot

by Burl Barer

  Don Marshall’s version of the Friday-night party, the Webb/Wood rumble, and Steve Wood’s hasty exit was almost identical to that of Mark Perez. His memories of the postparty bathroom incident, however, were significantly more upsetting.

  “As I came out of my bedroom,” he told the detectives, “and was going by the bathroom, I heard a scuffle, pounding on the walls, someone fell into the toilet seat and hit the floor. I heard, like, legs kicking up and down off the floor like someone was in pain.

  “Paul said, ‘Andrew, that drunk motherfucker, got blood all over the place’; then he asked Mark Perez to help me clean up the blood in the bathroom while they took Andrew to the hospital. At this point, I noticed the toilet seat was broken, blood around the washup sink, the left wall, and the right wall when you first come into the bathroom. It was mostly spotty, but the blood on the wall looked deep and dark.”

  When Andrew Webb and the St. Pierres returned from their supposed visit to the hospital, Marshall found it peculiar that they built a fire and began burning their clothes. “I then confronted them on exactly what was going on, or if they were hiding something from me. Andrew put his hand on my chest and stated that I don’t need to know nothing, and that we Marshalls used to be something but we ain’t nothing now, and he also said to me that I don’t need to know shit.”

  If Don Marshall harbored doubts concerning the appropriate time to consider future residence options, they evaporated in the heat of Andrew Webb’s scathing remarks. “I decided that I was going to move from that point on, and I told Mark Perez that he should move, too. I never returned to the house by myself from that day on because I was afraid of what might happen.”

  Marshall had good reason for concern, according to Andrew Webb. “Paul and Chris were angry with Don for moving out so quickly. They said he had chicken shitted out on them, and they talked about wasting him because they feared he would tell what he knew.”

  On Monday June 11, Chris St. Pierre showed up at Friday’s Unfinished Furniture. He wasn’t there to buy a bookcase. “He said that everyone was talking too much. He told me that I better shut my mouth and don’t worry about anything. Then he showed me a handful of bullets he had in his pocket, shook his head, and walked away.”

  Two days later, said Marshall, he heard secondhand that Paul St. Pierre had “picked up some kid on the way to the Rush concert and took him to the house on Pacific Avenue to buy some drugs. Somehow, an argument broke out between Paul and the kid in which Paul just pulled his gun out and blew the guy’s head off. At this point,” admitted Marshall, “I really feared for my life, and when a friend advised me to come forward, that’s exactly what I did.”

  “The friend who advised Don Marshall to come forward was a gentleman named Roy Kissler,” recalled Detective Yerbury. “Don Marshall told us that Mr. Kissler would be very valuable to our investigation, and that Paul St. Pierre allegedly confessed to Kissler, giving him graphic details of a homicide. Naturally, we got hold of Mr. Kissler, and he was eager to meet with us and give a sworn statement.”

  “It was June 15, 1984, that I showed up at Detective Yerbury’s office,” Roy Kissler recalled, “and I was more than happy to tell them everything I knew, everything I suspected, and everything I feared. I think fear probably being the primary word. Not so much fear for myself, but fear for other members of my family.

  “After Paul came back from the marines,” continued Kissler, “I started hearing all sorts of strange stuff from the other guys in the neighborhood. The first thing I heard was that Paul St. Pierre shot Kevin Robinson, a black man, at the IGA supermarket—shot him in the stomach with a forty-five, and got away with it. From the things I heard, it was obvious that things were getting out of hand. Some of the stories were insane, but believable. Like the St. Pierre brothers driving by the Drift Inn Tavern down on Fifty-sixth and Portland in Chris’s Pontiac Firebird. They had an M-one carbine, and they started shooting into a group of blacks.

  “Then another time,” added Kissler, “Paul supposedly started shooting at a guy in a Corvette for some reason. I mean, they were just getting more and more out of control, and I could see that their lives were going nowhere fast. My old friends from the neighborhood would talk to me about it because I was completely out of all that stuff by then. I’d changed my lifestyle one hundred percent, and they knew they could trust me. I’d known these fellows all my life, and deep down I cared for them. I thought maybe I could reach them, have a heart-to-heart talk or something like that. Most people were too scared of Paul St. Pierre to talk to him about anything, but I was never scared of him in the least. I could kick his butt any day of the week, and he knew it. He may have been in the marines, but I’d had six years of intensive martial arts training. Paul respected that big time. I was bigger, faster, stronger, and Paul would never dare to pick a fight with me. Anyway, I said to myself, ‘I’m not afraid of them. I’ll go down and talk to them. See if I can talk some sense to them.’ ”

  This well-meaning attempt to pull the St. Pierre brothers from the slough of self-destructive behavior was neither an expression of naivete nor the ill-informed effort of a self-righteous prig. Kissler’s personal résumé of unrighteous acts and illegal activities easily eclipsed the then-known behavior of Paul and Chris St. Pierre. While Kissler is now a respected family man and successful builder of custom homes, he was once a hard-drinking, drug-dealing madman on a motorcycle.

  “I rode a Harley-Davidson, and so did Paul St. Pierre and his brother, James. Paul and I would go riding together quite a bit. Back in the 1960s and 1970s,” admitted Kissler, “I was real involved in drug-trafficking out of California with the Hell’s Angels. I was full tilt into drugs.

  “One Friday night back in 1976, I was driving up Thirty-eight Street by the Tacoma Mall at three-thirty in the morning. I’d been smoking angel dust and drinking whiskey,” he recalled, “and I was talking to myself out loud. I said, ‘God, there’s got to be more to life than this.’ The next thing I know, I’m sitting in a church parking lot on Thirty-eighth Street. I just sort of sat there for a while. I mean, I’d said, ‘God this’ and ‘God that,’ but I never had God talk back—I was really impressed. I made that one comment, and all of a sudden, I’m staring at a church.”

  Kissler finally decided to get out of the car, and was halfway to the church’s front door when he realized that he not only reeked of whiskey and pot, but also was carrying deadly weapons. “I had two guns, so I went back and stashed them in the car. Then I walked up and rang the doorbell, and the pastor of the church actually answered. He’d been there all night, and told me he just felt he was supposed to be there. We sat there talking until the sun came up, and that’s when my life started getting turned around.”

  By the time Roy Kissler walked on over to Paul St. Pierre’s house, he was clean, sober, respectably employed, and perfectly willing to reach out to his old buddy. “I went down to their house, where they’re living next to Ericson’s Auto Body. Paul was there, and I invited him to come with me up to my cabin and check it out for hunting season.”

  “Let’s go up to my cabin for the night,” Kissler said to St. Pierre. “We can talk.” Paul St. Pierre wasn’t doing anything anyway, so he grabbed a sleeping bag, strapped on his .45, and joined Roy Kissler for a leisurely drive to the little cabin in the big woods on the Cowlitz River. “On the way to my cabin, he told me about the shooting incident at the IGA store when he shot Kevin Robinson, and how he got away with it. I didn’t tell him that I’d already heard the story; I just let him go on about it like it was all news to me. Then he was quiet for a while until we crossed the bridge at Alder Lake. Right in the middle of that bridge, Paul turned to me and said, ‘Yeah, we’ve been killing these guys.’ ”

  There was no mistaking the plurality in St. Pierre’s impromptu confession. “He said ‘we’ and ‘guys,’ and it was like someone dropped a chunk of dry ice in my gut. I continued driving, trying to process what I just heard. Paul didn’t say another word; he just sat
there staring out the window.”

  It was four o’clock in the afternoon when Roy Kissler and Paul St. Pierre arrived at Kissler’s remote cabin. “We were way back in the woods, and there was nobody around for miles and miles. My cabin is about twenty by sixteen—one big room. There we were, just the two of us. Well, three of us if you count my dog. As soon as we got inside, Paul just starts spilling his guts. He gave me graphic details on how this one guy was killed. He didn’t give me the name of the victim, and he didn’t tell me the names of the people he was with, but I could tell for a fact he was telling me the truth. I mean, it was very obvious. I told him straight out, ‘Paul, you owe society a price for what you did, but you can get your life right with God because of what Christ has done on the cross for you.’ ”

  Paul St. Pierre told Kissler that he didn’t care, and he didn’t want to hear about it. “Then he starts telling me how he cut this poor guy’s throat and watched him as he tried to breathe. He just started getting into some real graphic, brutal stuff about how one of them stabbed the guy in the back, and that was when Paul St. Pierre said that he cut the guy’s throat. He talked about how they put him in a sleeping bag, put him in the trunk of Paul’s white Cougar, and took him up toward Mt. Rainier, dug a grave, and buried him. He told me that the guy wouldn’t fit in the grave, so he put the guy’s legs on the side of the grave and jumped on him until they could fold him up and put him in the grave. He said it took place outside, and that they buried him up toward where we were.”

  “You need to get your life right with God,” insisted Kissler, “and you’re going to have to pay for [what] you did.” St. Pierre, increasingly aggravated by Roy’s religious attitude, became hostile and threatening. “How about if I do something like that to you, Roy?” he hissed. “Whatcha gonna do then?” Kissler offered an immediate and honest response: “Just try it, Paul, and I’ll break your fucking legs.”

  “It kind of shocked him when I said that,” Kissler later recalled, “after all, he was supposed to be the bad guy, but I confronted him. My language in those days hadn’t quite been cleaned up yet.” In response to Kissler’s remark, Paul St. Pierre peeled off his shirt and began growling like an animal. “The whole countenance of his face was angry, mad, and vicious. I don’t know if he’s trying to intimidate me, [or] if he was just totally nuts. He was just standing there shirtless, snarling like a puma. I was thinking that maybe the best thing to do was to put a bullet in him.”

  When growling failed to either impress or intimidate his host, Paul St. Pierre relaxed and, as if nothing upsetting had transpired, shifted into a more conversational mode. “He started telling me about a girl they had tied up in the house at [address] for at least a week. He said that they were raping her, and all sorts of different things. He didn’t say how old she was, and he didn’t say that he or they killed her, but you know that she’s not going to walk out of there afterward and let him get away with that. Later I learned that Wesley and Marty Webb, and her best friend, Christie Castle, saw that girl at Paul’s house. She was in the bedroom with Mark Perez. I think it was Christie who heard her crying that she wanted to go home. I don’t know all the details, but Andrew Webb’s wife said she heard from Andrew about that girl being kept against her will.”

  Wesley and Marty Webb remembered that unpleasant and unsettling incident. Most specifically, they remember the little pink tennis shoes they saw on the floor. “I knew none of those guys wore little pink tennis shoes,” said Marty. “We caught a glimpse of the girl—she looked really young, hardly teenage. She was very unhappy.”

  “I could hear her through a crack in the door,” recalled Wesley Webb. “The poor little thing sounded miserable. I could hear her whimpering little voice say, ‘I just wanna go home.’ That isn’t something you listen to and feel comfortable about.”

  Roy Kissler listened uncomfortably as Paul St. Pierre continued on about the repeatedly violated female captive and the throat-slash killing of an unknown victim. “He also said that he would like to kill people for money,” stated Kissler.

  The hours crept by; each filled with morbid details of beatings, murder, and burial. As the night wore on, St. Pierre wore out. “He rolled out his sleeping bag and got in it. My dog gets up, walks over, and lays right on top of him. He didn’t say a word to the dog. He said to me, ‘Your dog’s laying on me.’ I said, ‘That’s OK. He likes to sleep that way.’ I think the dog had a sense of everything that was going on. It was a good-sized Lab, too, so that was a little bit of comfort. Of course, I didn’t sleep a wink. I was up all night trying to figure out what I’m gonna do. We drove back into town first thing in the morning, and neither of us said a word. It was dead quiet.”

  When Kissler pulled into the alley next to the house, Paul St. Pierre invited him to see his Mercury Cougar’s bloodstained taillights, and then made a friendly offer of hospitality. “Come on inside,” said St. Pierre, “let’s go see what the rest of the guys are doing.”

  Begging off, Roy Kissler drove directly to the home of his older brother, Joe. “I told him everything, and made sure he knew this was all for real. I wanted him to know what was going on if something should happen to me.

  “Shortly after Paul St. Pierre confessed to me, my younger brother, Boyd, went over to his house for a party. The two of them—Paul and Boyd—had somewhat of a falling-out previously, but not severe enough to keep Boyd from going over. The St. Pierres sort of chased everybody out of the place, and took Boyd out back by the garage and started beating the hell out of him. I firmly believe that my little brother would have been murdered, had it not been for a guy named Rick Hunt. Rick showed up for the party, couldn’t find anyone in the house, and went out back to see if the action was out there. Well, it only took Hunt about two seconds to size up the situation. He immediately rushed to Boyd’s aid, knocked those jerks back, grabbed my brother, and got him out of there as fast as he could. I really think that Boyd could have got murdered that night if it wasn’t for what Rick Hunt did, and I really appreciated that.

  “At that point,” admits Kissler, “I was in the consummate quandary. I was worried that someone else was going to get either hurt real bad or killed, maybe one of my own family. I figured that I couldn’t go to the cops because I didn’t know who he murdered, and I didn’t know who he was involved with. So I took a risk and started sort of asking around, talking to some of the guys, leading them into conversations.

  “One of the guys I talked to was Don Marshall. Turns out that Paul and Chris St. Pierre ran Marshall out of the house, so he knew there was something up, but he didn’t know exactly what. It was about the second week of June that I decided to drive over and have a chat with him. We had a nice long talk. I strongly suggested that he go to the cops, and that I’d back him up if he did.”

  “It was June twelfth that Roy Kissler approached me,” Marshall confirmed. “He asked me out to his nice car and we sat down and discussed a lot of things. Roy told me that Paul told him in detail that they had really, actually killed that kid. Roy said Paul showed Andrew how to really kill the guy by cutting his throat after Andrew had already stuck him in the kidney. They wrapped him in a sleeping bag and threw him into the trunk of the car. Andrew, Chris, and Paul took him out to some secret place where Paul buries people. Roy said that they dug a hole to bury him in, but the kid wouldn’t fit in with the sleeping bag. They took him and Paul proceeded to break his arms and his legs so that he would fit in the hole.”

  In this close-knit neighborhood, there were soon enough whisperings and violated confidences that it was only a matter of time until someone called the cops. When Paul St. Pierre shot Andrew Webb, that was all anyone needed—it gave a good excuse for someone to pick up the phone and call the Tacoma Police. “Sure enough,” said Kissler, “one of the neighborhood moms, I think, at the prompting of her kids, called Crime Stoppers. The next thing you know, there I am with Yerbury, Price, and a stenographer giving them my statement.”

  At police headquarters,
the sworn statement of Roy Evan Kissler, twenty-eight, lasted exactly sixteen minutes. In part, Kissler’s official deposition, reads: “He said they started beating a guy up just for fun, and he said the guy was going to ‘get them back’ for what they had done. That’s when one of them stabbed him in the back. Paul St. Pierre said that’s when he cut the guy’s throat. The guy lay there for quite a while and didn’t die right away. After cutting his throat and he was dead, they put him in a sleeping bag, put him in the trunk of Paul’s white Cougar, then took him towards the Mt. [mountains] to bury him out there. Paul said that by the time they were ready to bury him, rigor mortis had set in and the hole they had dug wasn’t big enough. So Paul had to jump on the guys [sic] legs to break them to get the body to fit in the hole. By the time they had finished, the sun was coming up. At that point I told him he was crazy, and he got rather upset with me at this, and during the next part of the evening (for the remainder) he just kept going over certain things which he had already told me. I just waited for him to go to sleep and as soon as morning came around, I headed back into town with Paul as soon as possible. He just kept talking about the incident and I finally told him I didn’t want to hear anymore. We got back to town and I dropped him off at his house, and at that point, he pointed out to me where he had blood left on the Cougar around the taillights. I didn’t check that, I just left.”

  Because Kissler’s narrative meshed with the basics related by the anonymous caller, and the previous statements of Perez and Marshall, the detectives brought Mark Perez back for a second interview. They were especially interested if he knew anything about the alleged shooting the night Rush played the Tacoma Dome. Mark Perez remembered the date perfectly—May 18, 1984—because it was three days after his birthday. Perez didn’t attend the concert, but Paul St. Pierre and Andrew Webb did.

  “I was sick and missed work on the eighteenth,” Perez told Yerbury, “because of an ear infection and high fever. I was awakened at three A.M. by a loud noise that sounded like somebody kicked in my front door. The noise was loud, and I heard Chris say, ‘Fuck! Goddamn it, Paul, what the fuck did you do?’ Paul said, ‘I had to; he was going to stab me with a knife, so I had to shoot him.’ Then Chris came into my bedroom and asked, ‘Were you sleeping?’ I said I was and he said, ‘Oh, well, never mind.’ Andrew came in and asked me if I heard anything; then Paul came in and said, ‘Come on, Mark, get out of bed and come see this.’ Andrew said, ‘Are you crazy? Come on, get out of here.’ He pushed Paul out of the room and said to me, ‘No, no, stay here, don’t move; the less you see and the less you know, the better off you’ll be.’ He stressed this several times. He told me to just go back to sleep like nothing had happened.”