Head Shot

by Burl Barer

  The Webb and Nolan assault on Shane and Nellie Sanford, while never rising to the status of a rational act, is more understandable when placed in perspective. In March 1983, Andrew and Anne Webb’s house was burglarized, and two items were stolen: Andrew’s 9mm Smith & Wesson, and Randy Nolan’s nickel-plated .357 revolver. “Honor and pride were important to the Webbs,” recalled Anne, “and it was a poor reflection on Andrew that Randy Nolan’s gun was stolen while in Andrew’s care.”

  So Andrew Webb decided to play detective. “He questioned some girls living down the street in a home for troubled runaways if they knew anybody who had been breaking into houses in the area. By amazing coincidence, those girls had just broken up with two guys who were bragging about doing exactly that. Andrew got a hold of the kind of friends that would back him up with no questions, only action—Cory Cunningham and Paul St. Pierre.

  “Armed with baseball bats, they kicked in the door of one of the ex-boyfriends of these girls. One of them asked what our boys wanted, and they gave them the name of this junior high kid they were looking for. Well, they brought the kid downstairs, and Cory, Paul, or both held this kid’s hands down on the coffee table while Andrew asked the question. If he didn’t respond correctly, or in willing humble tone, they would whack his hands with the bat until he was begging for another chance to get the story correct. Meanwhile, this kid’s brothers are trying to help get this thing over with, saying, ‘You better tell these guys everything they want to know because they are not fucking around.’ This pattern was repeated at the next kid’s house. The kids admitted that they sold the guns, but our armed invaders forgot to ask the name of the guy they sold them to,” Anne continued.

  “On the Fourth of July, Randy Nolan was on shore leave from the navy. Soon enough, both Randy and Andrew are in a drunken stupor, talking about the robberies, and they decide to find out who the guy was that bought the guns. They loaded themselves up with every weapon they could get their hands on.... They had so many guns on them that they couldn’t pull all of them out at once using both hands.

  “The plan was the same as before: kick in the door and take the answer by force. On the way, they stopped by Wesley’s place to see if he would go along; Marty threw a fit about it.”

  “I sure did,” Marty Webb confirmed. “I threw a real huge fit. I was screaming at Wesley like you wouldn’t believe, threatening him that if he went with Andrew and Randy that I was leaving him for good—stuff like that. We’d only been married about a year or so, and he still listened to me a little bit. Also, I think Wesley used my fit as an excuse not to go. He had gone on missions with Andrew before, but enough was enough.”

  “Before the assault charges, I think Wesley helped him go after a guy who ripped him off,” said Anne. “Andrew brought a guy home from work one time who needed a place to stay. When we woke up the next morning, we discovered the guy had stolen all of Andrew’s marijuana plants. Well, Andrew found out that the guy was from Olympia, so he got his pal Cory and maybe his brother Wesley and they got all loaded up with guns and took off for Olympia. They got all the plants back, and that just put more fuel on Andrew’s delusion that he was invincible, that he could go crashing around, waving guns at people, and have it be OK. He just kept getting more and more violent, like it was all leading up to something. The three assaults he admitted to were almost the big finale, and I wish to God they had been.”

  Some people assumed that Andrew Webb’s drunken assault on the Sanfords was the reason Anne kicked him out. Homeless, and not about to move back in with his folks, Andrew Webb took temporary sanctuary with Chris and Paul St. Pierre at the “Animal House” on Pacific Avenue.

  “No, that wasn’t the reason I kicked him out,” insisted the former Mrs. Andrew Webb. “I worked at Tacoma Catering, and I got him a job in the doughnut factory. Well, he didn’t come home one night because he was out till morning making out, or getting it on, with the company’s attractive secretary. He finally came home in the morning with lipstick all over his neck. I just knew right away that it was hers. I told him that someone’s moving out, and it’s not me. That’s when he moved in pretty much with the St. Pierres. Besides, I may have been young and naive, but I wasn’t stupid. Andrew was a drunk, plain and simple. The guns were legal, and Andrew had permits, so I just sort of let that go. It was the drinking. I would come home to bottles and bottles—empty bottles of beer. He absolutely had an alcohol problem. I began to wonder if Andrew could ever be sober.”

  On January 26, 1984, one month prior to the February murder of Damon Wells, a sober and somber Andrew Webb pleaded guilty to all charges in the three assault incidents. Judge Thompson delayed Webb’s sentencing for several months because the presentence investigation of Andrew Webb by Probation Officer Gerri Woolf requested a complete mental evaluation of Webb. “When Andrew Webb is drunk, or when he drinks,” said Woolf, “it seems to allow him to express the anger or whatever that’s inside of him, and release those emotions that are otherwise not released. If there was a real problem—a mental problem—then the problem should be dealt with. If they could not find a problem other than Andrew Webb’s drinking, then I felt he should be sentenced to prison.”

  On Woolf’s recommendation, Judge Thompson specifically required that Webb obtain “both neurological screening and a psychiatric mental status exam to address the possibilities of psychiatric disorder and/or a biological disorder.”

  Therapist Michael Comte, former Assistant Director of the Sex Offender Program at Western State Hospital, conducted the evaluation and analysis of Andrew Webb. “His attorney at that time, Mr. Craig Adams, asked that I evaluate him,” confirmed Mr. Comte. “I spoke with him actually on April 11, and then again on April 30 when psychological testing was administered by me.”

  Comte’s testing procedure was to administer the test, then have it sent to Dr. Peterson, a consulting psychologist. “Dr. Peterson is not provided with any background information, nor the specifics of the event, and he’s asked to interpret the testing, just the paperwork, and give his best professional shot. He came to the same conclusion I did.”

  “Andrew Webb has a low frustration tolerance,” summarized Comte in his report of May 14, 1984, “an immediate need for gratification, and a hostile capacity to act out his feelings without regard for the consequences in an impulsive fashion.” Dr. Peterson noted that “Mr. Webb is unlikely to experience true remorse or guilt for his behavior.”

  Comte described Andrew Webb as having a mixed personality disorder with antisocial and narcissistic features dominating, intense and abrupt mood swings, alcohol abuse, a lack of ability to deal with anger, and poor impulse control.

  Further testing confirmed that Andrew Webb experienced his rapid and immediate mood swings, a high manic phase, characterized by excitability and explosive anger. “Then he would suddenly drop into a low phase, which looked a lot like depression,” said Comte. “I suspected a couple different diagnoses: a psychothymic disorder and a bipolar disorder. The psychothymic disorder means that the person emotionally swings in a cycle from high to low, from low to high and to low. Bipolar also relates to rapid mood swings. When I spoke to him in conversation, I brought up the topic of hallucinations, and he did start talking about responding to voices, but when I started probing that area, he backed off rather quickly.”

  Andrew Webb backed off, his former wife theorized, “because he realized how stupid he sounded insisting that he held conversations with dead beavers. I’m not kidding. He had these dead beaver skulls which were very important to him. He told me that they communicated with him on a deep psychic level.”

  Andrew Webb’s young nephew Travis has vivid memories of his uncle’s treasured beaver skulls. “Mom and Dad and I went over to Anne and Andrew’s house one day, and I saw these weird skulls on the mantel. As I walked toward them, Uncle Andrew yelled, ‘Travis! Don’t touch those skulls! They died a bad death!’ What the hell was that about?”

  “When I visited Andrew in jail,” recall
ed Anne, “he told me to go home and give the beaver skulls a Christian burial. I went home and threw the damn things in the garbage. Who gives a Christian burial to beaver skulls?”

  “Uncle Andrew also told me that he yearned to eat human flesh,” remembered Travis Webb. “I just said, ‘OK, sure,’ as if they had it on the menu at Burger Ranch. Oh, he also told me that Vikings followed him around—invisible Vikings, of course—and they gave him advice. If the advice was good, it must have been in Norwegian and he didn’t understand it. Either that or the advice sucked, ’cause the best advice would have been to not hit, hurt, or kill people.”

  Telepathic communication with dead beavers and an invisible advisory committee composed of disembodied Vikings were the more benign symptoms of Andrew Webb’s thought disorders. Comte also suggested that there could be something physically wrong with Webb’s brain.

  “Maybe the fact that Mom ran over his head with the car when he was about eighteen months old has something to do with that,” offered his sister Gail. “Mom was getting ready to back out of the driveway, and she saw my sister waving hysterically at her in the rearview mirror. She couldn’t figure out what that was all about until she felt the car run over a bump.”

  The bump was Andrew Webb. The expression of horrified shock on her daughter’s face was sufficient confirmation for the panic-stricken Mrs. Webb. “She ran over his head, but the tire wasn’t still on him. She jumped out of the car, scooped him up, and ran screaming to the neighbors’ house. The neighbor lady tried to calm her down, and agreed to take them both to the hospital.”

  The emergency room staff treated him for a broken jawbone, but wasn’t buying the “I accidentally ran over my son’s head with the car” story. The doctors’ doubts turned to chagrin when a bruise unmistakably shaped like a tire track appeared across his left cheek.

  The doctors reasoned that Webb’s head wasn’t crushed because the driveway was made of sand. The weight of the car simply pushed his head deeper into it, cushioning the head-popping pressure.

  “When Andrew Webb gets under pressure as an adult,” ventured Marty, “he breaks into people’s homes, puts a firearm in a person’s face, threatening to shoot their head off, and slices people’s throats because he fears they are going to rip him off. If anyone wanted to see Andrew turn into a violent madman, all you had to do was mix him with alcohol.”

  Andrew Webb’s alcoholism and chemical dependency came as no surprise to his wife, nor did it elude evaluation by the Tacoma Treatment Alternatives to Street Crimes (TASC) staff who evaluated him after his arrest. “We would be willing to work with this individual, based upon his substance use history,” reported TASC, affirming their commitment to helping Webb achieve ongoing sobriety, “though we are concerned about the alleged incident that brought him here.” Because of this evaluation, an additional legal requirement insisted upon by the judge was that Andrew Webb remain drug and alcohol free, not possess a firearm or dangerous weapon, and that he “stay out of trouble” until his sentencing.

  “Andrew Webb was sentenced on those assault charges on June seventh,” recalled Detective Yerbury, “exactly two days before Paul St. Pierre shot him.” Judge Thompson, who sentenced him on the assault charges, didn’t know Webb was involved in the Damon Wells homicide, and Andrew Webb wasn’t about to tell him or Probation Officer Woolf. Had Judge Thom-spon known that Webb was involved in two murders, both of which happened while Webb was on probation, the sentence imposed would most assuredly not have been deferred, nor would Webb’s debt to society have been paid by 700 hours of community service.

  “Simply put,” commented Detective Yerbury, “I was of the opinion then, and I hold that opinion today, that Andrew Webb killed Damon Wells in a desperate act to avoid going to prison.”

  Six

  Charged with murder, and locked up in the Pierce County Jail, Andrew Webb and the St. Pierre brothers weren’t speaking to the authorities, but they talked profusely to friends and family. “They were continually calling me on the phone collect from the Pierce County Jail,” remembered Marty Webb. “Each of them had a different story, and none of them were the same. I wasn’t the only one they called. They were calling Mark Ericson, Jim Fuller, and all sorts of family members.”

  In one version of the Salmon Beach events, Paul and Chris St. Pierre tackled Damon Wells, then held him down. “Chris said he had kicked the guy in the head a few times. They then held him while Andrew came up from behind, grabbed his hair, pulled back his head and, with the knife Paul had given him, drew it across his throat from ear to ear. Then Andrew turned and walked away. When Andrew called, he told me that he threw the knife down after that,” explained Ben Webb, “but Chris said that Andrew didn’t throw it down. He said that Andrew turned back, threw the knife, and it stuck in the guy’s back. Paul was the heavy that night, and I’m sure at this point he took a stab at Wells and he would have made Chris do the same. I think the idea was that doing that would link them all together—if one falls, they all fall.”

  “Chris called me from jail, too,” recalled Mark Ericson. “He said that Paul killed that kid out there in Salmon Beach. ‘Paul killed that kid.’ And then Paul would call me up and say, ‘Gee, those guys are nuts, man. Andrew killed that kid.’ Chris said they’d beat him up, took him out there, but he didn’t want to go. In one version, maybe Andrew’s, Paul pulls his gun out and tells Chris to ‘take care of him.’ Chris says, ‘No, you can’t shoot him because it will make too much noise.’ Paul goes, ‘Yeah, right,’ puts the gun back, and Andrew and he chased the guy down. Paul pulls his knife out and says, ‘Andrew, you gotta take care of him.’ I guess he handed the knife to Andrew, and Andrew slit his throat. But first Chris kept telling me that Paul slit Damon Wells’s throat. All I know is what they said to me on the phone, and they all said something different. I hated even hearing about it. It was horrible and heartbreaking for everyone involved.”

  Paul and Chris St. Pierre also shared their consistently conflicting versions with auto mechanic Jim Fuller. “Paul told me that he shot one guy in the head, but it was Chris who said that it was over a bad drug deal,” Fuller later told police. “Then Paul told me that Andrew is the guy who cut the guy’s throat, and Chris backed that up with one of his phone calls. He told me they dropped him at Salmon Beach and that Andrew ran after him and pushed him down and cut his throat while Chris and Paul were looking on.”

  “Jim Fuller was not involved in any wrongdoing,” confirmed Detective Yerbury. “He contacted us because he was aware that we were told that Damon Wells and he left the party together, and he feared accusations of being an accomplice.” When Jim Fuller saw the front-page headline of June 21, 1984—2 MURDER VICTIMS IDENTIFIED—he picked up the phone.

  Reporter Bill Ripple’s compelling article in the Tacoma News Tribune named Damon Wells and John Achord as the homicide victims. Police would not release the murder suspects’ identities until formal charges were filed in superior court. The savvy reporter, however, easily discerned and printed the two most probable names: Paul St. Pierre and Andrew Webb.

  “That wasn’t too difficult to figure out,” newsman Chet Rogers later commented. “The police released information that two of the guys were involved in an earlier assault incident where one of them hauled off and pumped hot lead into the other—not the official police wording, of course. Well, the only earlier Tacoma assault case fitting that exact description transpired at, amazingly enough, the same house next to Ericson’s that the cops got the search warrant for. Our brilliant, analytical minds—Bill Ripple’s included—quickly discerned that two of the arrested men were (a) the guy who pulled the trigger, and (b) the guy who caught the bullet—Paul St. Pierre and Andrew Webb.”

  The news media also reported that police found the suspected murder weapon. Recovering the double-edged Gerber knife in a brushy area near the SR7 Freeway Interchange with South Thirty-eighth Street was not accomplished by simply foraging through the bushes. The successful search required thorough p
rofessional planning, including careful coordination of three distinct search groups under the direction of Officer Donald E. Moore, search and rescue (SAR) coordinator for the city of Tacoma.

  Given the assignment, Moore teletyped a message to the Department of Emergency Management requesting an Evidence Search Training Mission Number, and the following search groups were called into action: Evergreen SAR Tacoma CB Radio Association, and Explorer SAR.

  Detective Price took Officer Moore to the freeway interchange, and pointed out where Tony Youso allegedly threw the knife from a moving car. Moore returned Price to Central Station, ordered traffic barricades and ROAD CLOSED UP AHEAD signs, and contacted the Washington State Patrol.

  “It was my intention,” reported Moore, “to block traffic completely from the ramp area to insure the safety of the volunteer searchers. The Washington State Patrol was further advised of the intention to close the ramp with an estimated start time of seventeen hundred hours.” The Tacoma Fire Department Station #11 became the search base, and it was here that the Tacoma Public Works Department delivered twelve traffic barricades.

  “With the arrival of Explorer Search and Rescue, all search groups were briefed,” said Moore, “and all traffic onto the SR seven ramp was diverted with search base being moved onto the ramp. Using the streetlight standards, string gridlines were set in at the light standards,” he explained, “and halfway between each two light standards. Shoulder-to-shoulder grids were used, starting from the pavement and working northbound up the hill.

  “Heavy rain and five-knot winds made the brush and grass wet enough to cause them to be laying down with the weight of the moisture,” Moore reported. “Searchers were on their hands and knees each time they went uphill.”

  At approximately 1755 hours, Marvin E. Thompson, a member of the Tacoma CB Radio Association, located the double-edged knife. “It was not touched by any volunteer,” stated Moore, “and it was left in the field location until later when the knife was taken into evidence. At twenty-one oh-nine hours, the Washington State Department of Emergency Management was notified that the search was completed with positive results.”