Head Shot

by Burl Barer

  Five

  Trouble followed Paul St. Pierre into, and out of, the U.S. Marines. An injured leg from a motorcycle accident resulted in his early discharge, and he was soon back in Tacoma.

  “I heard a knock on the door one day,” said Marty Webb, “and there was Paul St. Pierre, back from the marines, asking Wesley and I if he could stay with us for a while. After that, he moved in with Chris.”

  “I remember when Chris came in and told me that Paul had come back from the marines and wanted to move in with him,” Mark Ericson said. “Chris didn’t like that idea at all. In fact, he said that Paul was ‘going to ruin everything.’ My advice to Chris was just to tell Paul straight out that he couldn’t move in—that the house had enough roommates, there wasn’t room for any more, and that Paul would have to find something else. The next day when he came to work, Chris had a black eye. I said, ‘God, Chris, what the hell happened? ’ He says, ‘I told my brother he couldn’t move in.’ I asked what happened then, and he said, ‘He’s moving in.’ Brothers can scrap like that and still be best friends, so I didn’t think much of it.”

  Returning from his tour of duty, Paul St. Pierre described his life as a marine as consisting primarily of “partying, and kicking the shit out of punk rockers and squids (navy guys).” An example that Paul St. Pierre shared with anyone who’d listen was the time he almost, or perhaps did, beat a squid to death with a primer chain belt made from the primer chain of a Harley, which he doubled over into a club.

  According to Ben Webb, Paul said he took to beating this guy, and was even hitting him with the edge of the chain in the direction it didn’t bend. He got so engrossed with “kicking the shit out of this guy” that he forgot to ask for the guy’s wallet. The guy threw it at him out of desperation to get him to stop beating him. He even yelled, “What do you want?” Paul was seeing red, and if his friends didn’t come pull him off, he would have beaten this poor guy to death. Paul said he didn’t know “if the guy made it or not.”

  The essential difference between Paul and Christopher St. Pierre was that Paul St. Pierre enjoyed violence, and actually sought out physical confrontations. He admitted relishing the sensation of hitting people, of causing them pain.

  Paul St. Pierre soon exercised a strong destructive influence over his younger brother. One significant incident involved Christopher St. Pierre being encouraged to gun down total strangers as some sort of rite of manhood. According to Andrew Webb, he and Paul St. Pierre were driving up Fifty-sixth from Portland Avenue. St. Pierre suddenly handed Webb his .45 automatic. “He told me to shoot these four black guys that were walking up toward McKinley,” Webb later recalled. “He said they were up to no good with their canes and purple hats. I gave him his gun back and said, ‘No, you’re crazy,’ and he just laughed and kept carrying on all the way to the house about how we should waste them.”

  Arriving home, Paul St. Pierre told his brother Chris and Donald Marshall that there were four black guys he wanted to waste, and Chris agreed to do it with him. The St. Pierres retrieved a .38 revolver stashed under the upstairs floorboards of Ericson’s Body Shop so they wouldn’t have to use Paul’s .45, and they took off “to get those four black guys.”

  Webb and Marshall waited, wondering if the St. Pierres were really going gunning for the black strangers. “About a half hour or forty-five minutes later,” said Webb, “they came running in, saying that they shot them.” Paul St. Pierre supposedly sighted the men on the opposite side of the street, and immediately pulled a U-turn so his little brother would be facing the human targets. “Chris unloaded the five-shot thirty-eight on them and said that he got two of them, but that they all went down to the ground,” Webb said. “Paul and Chris were bouncing all around and Paul was slapping Chris on the shoulder saying, ‘Good job, bro.’ Donald and I just looked at each other in amazement. We couldn’t believe our ears.”

  Paul St. Pierre, so the story goes, wanted to celebrate his little brother’s becoming a man. They all went to the store, bought some beer, and took off to share the good news. Their first celebrator y destination was the home of Wesley and Marty Webb. “We woke them up,” Andrew Webb later said, “and Paul told them what they had done. Wesley didn’t seem very happy about it and didn’t know what to say.”

  Marty was no more favorably impressed than her husband. “My God,” said Marty Webb when recounting the incident, “can you imagine someone coming to your house, and waking you up, so they can brag about shooting people? I was furious, and I didn’t trust those guys one bit.” According to Andrew Webb, his older brother took him aside as he was leaving. “Wesley told me that if what Paul said was true, he’s crazy and I had better watch out for him.”

  This incident of racial violence was not atypical of either the St. Pierres or Andrew Webb. Paul and Chris were violently racist for no apparent reason, but Andrew Webb’s racist posturing entailed more complexity. Gail Webb, the sister thirteen years his senior, was married to a black man and is the mother of five interracial children. Her brother is “Uncle Andrew” to her brood of beautiful and obviously “half-black” offspring. At no time did Andrew Webb ever show any prejudice against his nieces and nephews, nor did he display any racist attitudes or behavior toward them.

  “He may have mouthed that antiblack talk to be further accepted by Paul and Chris,” suggested his older sister. “Our youngest brother did have a very bad attitude toward blacks, primarily from his negative experiences of getting beat up every day at the all-black grade school he was bused to when we first moved to D Street in 1966. But even he was never mean to my kids. My mom’s mother said that my kids weren’t welcome to come visit her because they were black, but Mom said, ‘If they can’t come, none of us will ever come.’ That settled that. Grandma did a complete turnaround and made my kids welcome. So the race-prejudice thing with Andrew was either fake, or his kindness to my kids was fake. The things that were very real, especially once he started drinking and drugging, were Andrew’s hair-trigger temper, interest in violence, and really poor judgment.”

  Andrew Webb’s proclivity for illegal and violent acts, unlike Paul St. Pierre’s, didn’t derive from being born with a diminished mental capacity. Instead, any thought disturbances or brain-function irregularities were due to one or more head injuries.

  “Although Andrew had his head hurt a few times when he was little, the first time I noticed a drastic change in his behavior,” said his sister Gail, “was when he was about seven or eight years old. He got into a scuffle with another boy on the way home from school, and he fell down, banging his head on the curb. When he got home, he showed us the bump on his head. He kept saying the exact same phrases over and over to us as if he had not ever said them before. He would show us the bump every minute or so just like we hadn’t seen it or heard about it. Then he also showed some memory loss. Turns out he had a concussion, but by the time the doctor diagnosed the problem, Andrew couldn’t even remember how it happened. From then on, he was not the same in lots of ways, but he was still bright and did well in school, but he gradually became more and more weird. I’m sure smoking pot, drinking, and taking lots of acid were major factors. Especially because of the head injury.”

  Andrew Webb’s successes were consistently noteworthy, both in secondary school and in romance. While attending Lincoln High, he became enraptured with an attractive senior-year dropout named Anne. Equally smitten Anne overlooked all blemishes beyond the superficial. Eager for adulthood and the pride of parenthood, the two married soon after Andrew Webb graduated from high school.

  “When I married Andrew Webb in the summer of 1981, I was so captivated by him that I couldn’t see the major problems, things that were obvious to my parents and my sister. Such as him being a weird and dangerous Bible-quoting alcoholic with a peculiar passion for guns—you know, things like that. But there seemed to be so much good about him, too. Sure, he was the life of the party, but he graduated from high school with honors, was a hard worker, and had that big pride
thing going because he was a real man with a wife and family. Then, one day, he broke his collarbone in a dirt bike accident during his lunch break from work. As it wasn’t a work-related accident, Labor and Industries didn’t cover it. Suddenly, he was out of work, no income, and his pride was hurt more than his collarbone. It healed wrong—the collarbone, I mean—and he had to have it rebroken three months later. I was pregnant, we had to go on welfare, and that welfare thing totally crushed him. It seemed to just drain all the confidence out of him. He started drinking more and more,” recalled Anne. “I kept telling him that if he kept drinking and acting like that, he was gonna go to jail. He didn’t listen to me, of course. He just kept pouring Rainier Beers down his throat one right after the other.”

  It wasn’t until after their six-month anniversary that Anne Webb glimpsed the first shadows of her husband’s dark side. She rationalized them away as mere manifestations of his stress and physical discomfort. “By the time I recognized the dark side for what it was, it was a total eclipse,” she said years later. “His dark side was so dark that even I couldn’t miss it. I’ll never forget it. I’d never seen anything like it. It started for me when we were enjoying a pleasant drive. We were just chatting away and I made a negative comment—not an insult or verbal abuse or anything like that—I was just sort of venting about stuff. All of a sudden, he began crying uncontrollably—I mean hysterical sobbing and weeping and wailing like he had just seen everyone he ever loved murdered or something. He went out of his mind. Scared the you-know-what out of me. That’s when I thought to myself, ‘What have I got myself into?’ The next event was worse, and they all kept getting worse; he lost his temper when we were in the kitchen. He tipped over the table, then went all over the room smashing holes in the wall with his fists. I was terrified. He suddenly walked out of the room and didn’t come back. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Everything was dead quiet. I finally found him. He was all curled up in the fetal position inside the cupboard underneath the bathroom sink! About three or four more times, I saw him do that—curl up in a ball and hide in the cupboard. Well, I knew then that I had married a first-class wacko. It was pretty obvious that I had to walk on eggshells around this guy.”

  Keeping peace with her volatile spouse kept Anne on her toes; maintaining a positive relationship with her Bible-thumping in-laws required remarkable flexibility.

  “Our in-laws could always find a way to make themselves right and everyone else wrong by bending some biblical reference to fit their personal agenda,” said Marty Webb. “A good example would be the time Andrew strangled his wife to death.”

  “Almost to death,” clarified Anne, “but close enough. Picture this: Andrew is on top of me on the bed, and he’s wearing his nine-millimeter in a holster around his waist... . That’s where he threw me, we’re both clothed, and he’s wearing a gun. His hands are around my throat, and he’s strangling me as hard as he can. I can’t breathe. My own husband is murdering me, and I have no idea why—this happens without warning. What could be worse? My life flashes before my bugged-out eyes, and just when I think I’m about dead, he suddenly stops strangling me and leaves the room.”

  Without taking a breather, Anne Webb leaped from the bed, ran down the stairs, out the door, and to the neighbors’ house. She banged on the door until a young boy opened it. “I ran right past the kid into the house and up the stairs—I didn’t even really know these people—and I was screaming, ‘Lock the doors! Lock the windows! Don’t let him kill me!’ I found a closet, dove into it, and piled a stack of blankets on top of me.”

  Terrified and traumatized, she begged for divine intervention. “I bet I prayed with more intensity and sincerity in that dark closet than my father-in-law ever did in his entire life.” Twenty minutes later, she decided Andrew Webb wasn’t coming to strangle her in the neighbors’ hall closet. Crawling out from under the blankets, she opened the closet door, slipped out, and asked the young boy home alone if she could use the phone. “I didn’t know who else to call,” she said, “so I called my mother-in-law, Dolores Webb. I told her what Andrew did, and that she should talk to him, or get some help, or something, anything, ’cause he’s her son and she’s his mom, and I was scared out of my wits. I couldn’t believe it—my husband was trying to kill me.”

  Dolores had a motherly chat with her beloved son, listened to his version of the event in question, and decided how to soothe her hysterical daughter-in-law. Dolores knew there was no greater trump card than God—all knowing, all wise—who despite His absolute dominion over all worlds, seen and unseen, was apparently unable to exercise even the most minimal influence over “evil spirits.”

  By the time Dolores picked up the phone and dialed, she had devised a perfectly good ‘biblical reason’ for Andrew Webb’s behavior. “My mother-in-law called me back at the neighbors’ and told me that Andrew was doing me a favor, that what he did was to free me of demonic possession. I said, ‘Huh?’ And she explained to me that Andrew spiritually perceived that demons had invaded my body and were going to use it for evil purposes—whatever that means. Andrew, being exceptionally bright, outsmarted them. If the demons thought that their ‘earthly abode’—that’s me—was about to be destroyed, if they thought I was gonna die, they would get out of me real fast and go somewhere else. She told me all this like it was the most natural and normal thing for a good husband to do now and then—like taking out the garbage or mowing the lawn, except it was strangling your wife. What did I know? She was the mature adult, not me. I believed all that crap because I didn’t know any better.”

  “Mom didn’t really believe her own explanation,” said Gail Webb. “When she talked to Andrew, she realized that he was out of his mind and on drugs—he had been up for three days without sleep, and nothing for nutrition but LSD and pot. She thought up that demonic-possession thing, which was plausible to her, to calm Anne down, to give the girl some peace and assurance. So there they were: Andrew out of his head, his wife scared and confused, and his mother at her wits’ end. But Mom always had to come off as unruffled, self-assured, and with matters well in hand, even when they were completely beyond her grasp. An explanation involving God and Satan would seem a safe approach to just about any crisis.”

  Dolores Webb embraced a theology in which religion was more magic than mercy, more wrath than reason, and promulgated fearful superstitions about superstition itself. “It was bad luck to believe in superstition,” Anne Webb said with a laugh. “For years I would never wish anyone ‘good luck’ because they convinced me I’d go to hell if I said that.... Poor Dolores had mental problems for sure.”

  “She tried to get help at St. Joseph’s Hospital, Western State Hospital, and Puget Sound Hospital, but no one took her seriously,” explained Gail. “Mom presented herself too well. She looked like she had it all together; she could express herself and was very well mannered in social situations. When she tried to explain to the doctors at the sanitarium why she wanted to be admitted and treated, they told her that she was just under too much stress, and then they suggested tranquilizers.”

  “I sympathize with what Dolores went through, and I guess it explains why she was so crazy and violent, but that doesn’t change what she did, the way she treated people, including her grandkids. And think of what her own children went through,” said Marty Webb. “The emotional abuse, the physical abuse, and of all tragic things, the sexual abuse. What kind of childhood is that? It sure isn’t one any of us would wish on our kids. Yeah, they had some regular fun with the other kids in the neighborhood, but I guarantee you that whatever games they were playing in the yard or in the street, the games going on inside the house were more emotionally intense. Hide-and-seek takes on a whole new meaning when you know why someone is hiding, and what someone else is seeking.”

  Hide-and-seek, tag, freeze tag, red light/green light, run for your life, and kick the can were the energetic fun of a strictly traditional nature enjoyed outdoors by the Webbs and St. Pierres in their you
nger days. As the boys grew older, the games changed to knockout, truth or dare, stick ’em, stretch ’em, and target practice.

  Target practice involved throwing a knife or hatchet at targets drawn on the Webbs’ old garage door. Neighborhood consensus conferred the knife-throwing championship on Andrew Webb.

  “Who do you think threw that knife into Damon Wells’s back?” asked Marty Webb rhetorically. “Who was the champ at knife throwing? Andrew Webb, that’s who. I bet he threw the knife into Damon’s back. And here’s something else to think about,” added Marty. “There were several conflicting versions of what really happened to Damon Wells. Who of those three guys could possibly have a motive for killing that kid?”

  The three requisites of homicide are means, opportunity, and motive. The knife was the means; deserted Salmon Beach was the opportunity. As for motive, Detective Yerbury easily offered his professional opinion. “From those three—Paul and Chris St. Pierre, and Andrew Webb—only one of them had anything to lose from Wells being alive, or to gain from Wells being dead. Paul St. Pierre and Chris St. Pierre had no adult criminal records. If they were charged and convicted with assault, it would be as first-time offenders. Andrew Webb’s situation, however, was altogether different. He was just about to be sentenced for those three assault cases, including the one Randy Nolan and he committed against the Sanfords.”