Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  In the first week of December, to Larry's relief and joy, Gareth Leifbach did come back to Seattle. And he did move in with Larry. For a man with such impressive contacts and grand plans for the future, Gareth had precious few possessions, only a few clothes and his shaving kit. It didn't matter. Larry was more than happy to share his furniture, stereo, and television with Gareth. Things would start to happen soon, and it would be exciting to be on the road with Gareth, to stand beside him as they toured the country on speaking engage ments. Larry was sure they would be together for a long, long time.

  December 14, 1979, was a blustery, rainy day. Final exams were approaching at the University of Washington and the campus was crowded that Friday night; some people were studying in the library, some had night classes, and many were attending Christmas musicals and plays.

  A Christmas card rested on Larry Duerksen's mantel. It had been mailed on December 7 by a friend in Santa Barbara. Its sentiments were to prove prophetic, "Dear Larry, How are you? I hope all in one piece. Good Lord, you do attract strange ones! Be careful." It was probably a response to Larry's earlier letters describing the unseen enemies who were out to get him.

  Larry was just one of the hundreds of people walking along the diagonal paths of the campus that evening. For once, he didn't tell everyone what his errand was. He confided in only one person.

  * * *

  Lorraine Lacey, a graduate student, got off a Metro bus at the intersection of 15th N.E. and N.E. 41st just before 7:00 P.M and headed for the campus. It had been dark for almost three hours by then. She was a little wary; the campus paths were like black tunnels between evergreens and rhododendrons, and she was alone. For that reason, she watched the two men who were walking toward her more closely than she would have if it were daylight.

  The taller of the men held an umbrella over both their heads for protection against the driving rain. She would later recall to the police that she sensed they were no threat to her; they seemed to be very close friends, perhaps even lovers, focused only on each other. She continued down the dark path, her mind at ease.

  Lorraine had just reached a circle of light beneath a lamppost when the night air was pierced by a series of loud noises. Firecrackers? No, this was louder. She whirled around and saw a man bent over in a crouch, his arm extended toward the ground. When she saw the flash of a gun, she shrank silently into the shrubbery, shocked and frightened.

  It was all over in a matter of seconds. The man with the gun turned and ran away, headed north. Forgetting her own fear, now, Lorraine Lacey hurried to the spot where she'd seen the gun flash. She found a man on the ground, his body being pelted by the rain. He was bleeding profusely from the nose and mouth. He seemed to be comatose, and she looked for something that might at least keep the rain off him. She found a broken black umbrella, and managed to prop it over his face. Then she looked up to see two young women walking nearby, and she called out to them, "Run! Call the campus police!"

  Within a few minutes, a half-dozen university police officers arrived. They were soon joined by a Medic One unit from the Seattle Fire Department. Oblivious to the fact that they were kneeling in an icy puddle, the paramedics began to work on the victim, a tall, bearded man who appeared to be in his late twenties. He had sustained gunshot wounds to his head and both arms. The medics inserted an airway to help him breathe, but his condition was very critical as he was rushed to the Harborview Hospital. Physicians there immediately monitored his vital signs. He appeared to have lost a great deal of blood and to have sustained terrible brain damage; there was only a slight chance that he would survive.

  Back at the site of the shooting, the campus police officers rigged a tarp over the ground where the victim had fallen, suspending the cover from several chairs. The broken umbrella marked the spot where the violence had erupted. Attempted murder is not a crime that college police have much experience dealing with, and they called for help from the Seattle Police Department's homicide unit.

  Detectives George Marberg and Rick Buckland were next up to catch a night call. Before Marberg left the downtown homicide headquarters, he checked with the Harborview emergency room and learned that the John Doe victim had died. He left for the scene. Seattle Police K-9 officers and their dogs milled around, as the animals tried to pick up the scent of the killer, but they went only so far and then came back to the umbrella, frustrated; the rain had washed away all traces of the man with the gun.

  The scene of the shooting was known on campus as Hippie Hill. It was really only a grassy knoll near Parrington Hall, home to decades of classes for hopeful writers. Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas and Richard Eberhart had once taught there. Many writing students, including myself, went on to publish articles and books with skills learned in Parrington Hall.

  On this moonless and stormy night, only faint light from the streetlamps filtered through the dense greenery of trees and shrubs as the detectives began their work. The ground beneath the tarp was still stained with blood and brain tissue and littered with paraphernalia left by the paramedics. Three expended cartridge casings— probably .32 caliber— glinted in the beams of the auxiliary lights the investigators had brought in. These and the broken pieces of umbrella were all they had to go on at the start of the investigation. A man had died— suddenly, violently— in the midst of a rainstorm on a black December night. They didn't yet know who he was or why he had died. They had one witness who'd seen a dark figure scurrying away. A quick solution didn't look at all likely. The scene was photographed, measured, and triangulated so that it would be recorded exactly, even though the wind and rain threatened to destroy it. The shell casings were bagged and retained. Held up in the light, Marberg could see that they were Remington-Peters .32 automatic cartridges.

  The police left the bloodied knoll until it could be checked thoroughly in the daylight. University police would guard it through the night so that no one would contaminate the scene of the crime. Detectives Marberg and Buckland coordinated their investigation with Lieutenant William Dougherty and Sergeant George Vasil of the university police force. The college officers had obtained a name for the victim from his possessions: Larry Dwayne Duerksen. Duerksen's wallet contained forty dollars when it was checked at the hospital. Dougherty and Vasil went to the apartment house listed as Duerksen's residence. There they were met in the lobby by an apparently grief-stricken Gareth Leifbach, who said he was Larry Duerksen's roommate.

  They could see that Leifbach had been crying. Since he was listed as Larry's next of kin in case of an accident, Leifbach said someone at Harborview Hospital had called to tell him about Larry's death. He requested that police come at once to talk with him. He had also called Tami Scott and Ruth Rudd, two young women who were Larry's close friends, and they had rushed to his apartment to help him deal with the shock.

  Gareth Leifbach and the two women spoke to Dougherty and Vasil in Larry's apartment, their voices hushed with shock. Unable to stop his tears, Gareth volunteered information that seemed way off the subject of their visit. Rather than talk about Larry, his recently deceased roommate, Gareth told them that he was gay, and that he'd been discharged from the army at Fort Lewis for that reason. Before they could comment, he rushed to open his briefcase and pull out a sheaf of clippings detailing his fight with the army. He seemed proud of his notoriety, and very anxious to let the police officers know exactly who they were dealing with. He was, after all, a kind of celebrity.

  Dougherty and Vasil looked puzzled, but they knew that grief and shock could make people behave in unexpected ways. "How long have you known Larry Duerksen?" Dougherty asked Gareth.

  "During the time I was contesting my discharge, Larry wrote to me. We met and became friends. I traveled around after my discharge, and then came up to Seattle about the third or fourth of this month. I moved in with Larry."

  "Do you know of anyone who might want to harm Larry?"

  "I got a phone call yesterday from a man who asked for Larry. I gave him Larry's number at work
and his work hours. Before he hung up, he said 'You're Gareth Leifbach, aren't you?' The guy called today too. When I told him Larry wasn't here, he said, 'I hate faggots,' and then he hung up." Asked for a recap of his activities during the day, Leifbach said he had stayed in the apartment until 11:30 A.M., and then gone down to the "Ave" —the main drag of the University District, a block away— to have lunch at Pizza Haven.

  "I did some window shopping," he said, "and got back here about one-thirty, and Larry was here. They gave him the afternoon off from the library."

  So far, Gareth Leifbach's and the victim's day sounded pretty normal, but Leifbach continued. "Around two o'clock, Larry called a cab and we both went to some bridge," Gareth said. "Larry took this gun from his jacket and handed it to me. He told me to throw it off the bridge, and so I did. Then we came back to the apartment."

  When the two college policeman asked him to tell them more about the gun, Leifbach said, "Larry and I thought it was a good idea to have a pistol for protection." To make his roommate feel more secure, Leifbach explained that he had bought the pistol. On December 11 he'd paid $305 for it at a shop in downtown Seattle. He'd also bought a box of bullets. He hastened to tell the investigators that he knew nothing about guns. "Larry loaded it— it was a Beretta automatic— but we changed our minds. We agreed to dispose of it."

  For a man with more than two years in the air force, it seemed peculiar that he claimed to know nothing at all about guns. And when one of the investigators deliberately referred to the Beretta as an automatic, Leifbach corrected him quickly, "No, it's a semiautomatic."

  They asked him why they had thrown a $300 gun off a bridge. Why they didn't sell it, or take it back to the store, but Leifbach just shook his head. He had no answer for that. Instead, he moved through the rest of the day's events. He said that he had prepared dinner for the two of them— bacon and eggs— around five.

  "Between 6:00 and 6:45 P.M. Larry told me he had some business to take care of at the University," Leifbach said. "He didn't tell me what it was, and he declined my offer to go with him."

  "You've been here ever since then?" Vasil asked.

  Leifbach nodded. The officers looked toward a jacket hanging in the closet, a jacket Leifbach said was his. It had a brown outer shell and a fleece lining. They noted that the cuffs of the sleeves and the bottom of the coat were soaking wet. That seemed odd. Leifbach insisted that he hadn't left the apartment since he and Larry had come back from "the bridge" at two-thirty.

  Tami and Ruth spoke up, explaining that Larry had been threatened repeatedly by someone and that they thought the threats had been reported to the Seattle Police Department. Gareth Leifbach paced the floor. He seemed very agitated and he nodded as the women talked. He said Larry had told him about the threats, too. All three of the witnesses were emphatic that Larry Duerksen had been living in fear, but none of them knew if Larry had known who was after him— or why.

  Asked if he would be willing to take a lie detector test, Leifbach agreed to do so without hesitation. "I'm thinking of doing my own investigation of Larry's death," he said. "Around the end of October, somebody tried to run over Larry in front of the Sexual Minorities Counseling Center on Capitol Hill. And then somebody left a dead pigeon in a brown paper bag outside the apartment here."

  Gareth said he felt that the killer had been trying to get to him by hurting his roommate. "Larry was planning to make speeches on my behalf to assist in the $3.5 million lawsuit I'm bringing against the army," he said with tears streaming down his face. "I hate guns! If it hadn't been for that gun we had, Larry would still be alive."

  Again, what an odd remark. He had just told them that he'd thrown the gun off a bridge hours before Larry Duerksen was shot. Leifbach signed permission for Lieutenant Dougherty and Sergeant Vasil to search the apartment. They did look around, but they found no bullets and no more wet clothing. The only thing dripping with rain was the fleece-lined jacket.

  Detective George Marberg ran Duerksen's and Leifbach's names through the law enforcement computer network and didn't find any criminal record for either of them. He also checked for Duerksen's name at the records bureau of the police department. Although Larry Duerksen had told many people that he had reported the threats against him, his name wasn't in the police files as a complainant. It was becoming more and more difficult to separate truth from fantasy, and reality from the histrionic and attention-grabbing behavior of these two roommates— one dead and the other apparently immobilized with grief, yet not too stunned to trumpet his own fame to the detectives who questioned him.

  Gareth Leifbach had been crying when the two University of Washington police officers talked to him; they couldn't mistake his red, swollen eyes. His ordeal wasn't over. He had gone from that interview to identify the body of his roommate-friend-lover, and he sobbed then too. It looked as though Larry Duerksen's complete devotion to Gareth's fight for gay liberation in the armed services had been the death of him.

  The fatal shooting wasn't Larry Duerksen's first brush with death. In addition to Leifbach, both of his women friends, Tami and Ruth, verified that Larry had almost been hit by a speeding car shortly after he aligned himself with Leifbach. He had managed to leap to safety at the very last minute. It was perfectly understandable that Gareth Leifbach felt not only grief but guilt over Larry's death.

  Early on the morning of December 15, Dr. Donald Reay, the King County medical examiner, performed the postmortem. He found that the fatal bullet had entered near the right side at the back of Larry Duerksen's head and then traveled through the brain before exiting above his left eye. There was also a through-and-through flesh wound in his right arm, a grazing wound across his chest, and another severe wound in his upper left arm. The humerus— the large bone in the arm— had been fractured by the impact of a bullet. From the angle of fire, Dr. Reay determined that the victim had been on his feet when the arm wounds were sustained, but was lying facedown when the fatal wound to the head was administered. It was a classic execution-style killing. Larry Duerksen had been knocked to the ground by the force of the bullet that broke his arm, and then had been shot in the head as he lay with his face pressed to the sodden turf of Hippie Hill.

  When the day shift came on duty, the Duerksen murder case was assigned to Detectives Mike Tando and Duane Homan. They immediately began to receive calls from members of the victim's family. All the detectives could tell them at this point was that Larry had been shot to death and that there were no suspects yet.

  Homan and Tando returned to the crime scene and viewed it in daylight. Although the scene had been well protected all night long, they found nothing that seemed to further the investigation. The detectives moved over the pale grass of winter with a metal detector, but there was no reaction that might suggest that a slug was lodged in the ground. They dug down six inches into the turf and still found nothing.

  Gareth Leifbach had been open about where he'd bought the gun that Larry wanted "for protection." The detectives talked with the proprietor of a pawn shop near skid row where Leifbach said he'd bought the missing Beretta. They learned that he had also bought fifty rounds of .32 caliber Remington-Peters ammunition. "Mr. Leifbach picked a .32 caliber Beretta, Model 81, on December 14," the pawnshop owner said. That was just what Gareth had told the campus police. And the Remington-Peters casings matched those found at the shooting site. Interesting…

  The detectives then verified Gareth's story further by checking the records of the Yellow Cab Company. Their trip records showed one call to Duerksen's apartment complex on December 14. "Our cab number 45 went out there in the morning at ten A.M. He took the fare on a round-trip to the Central Loan pawnshop," the cab manager reported. "The guy went in and came back a few minutes later. He was driven back to his home address. He tipped five dollars on a ten-dollar fare."

  The physical description of the taxi passenger matched Gareth Leifbach. Leifbach had already admitted that he purchased the gun, but he hadn't mentioned that he picked it u
p only nine hours before Larry Duerksen was shot. He had told the University of Washington police that he and Larry had the gun for three days before they decided to get rid of it on the afternoon of December 14. It was a small variation on the truth. Was it significant? Minor inconsistencies in recollection don't matter much in ordinary life, but they can be crucial in a murder investigation.

  Detectives Homan and Tando drove to the dead man's apartment and picked up Gareth Leifbach for a trip to Homicide for an interview. After reading and signing his rights admonishment, Gareth again launched into a strange monologue about his homosex uality, his fight with the army, and the huge lawsuit he had filed against the army.

  His attitude seemed inappropriate. The only way to describe his attitude was grandiose; the grief he'd shown right after his roommate was shot was no longer evident, and the change was startling. "I'm into a heavy schedule of appearances and speeches for my cause," he said proudly. "I've had a lot of publicity. You've probably seen me on television."

  Homan nodded noncommittally. He had heard the guy was pretty full of himself, but he had never seen him on television. The tall, easygoing detective asked Gareth about his life, and how he and Larry had met.