Last Dance, Last Chance

by Ann Rule

  Another patrolman reported that he’d shaken down and F.I.R’d (Field Investigation Reported) a white male, 32, outside the motel on the night before the murder. The man had given his name as Albert Selleck* and he said he was staying in Unit 2. He explained that he’d had a fight with his wife and moved out of their house in the north end of Seattle. The man had been highly nervous and had driven away in his clunker of a car when the officer turned away for a moment.

  But the cop got the license number. He ran it through auto records in Olympia, and it came back listed to Albert Selleck. At least, he hadn’t lied about his name. Maybe he hadn’t lied about anything.

  After several tries, the detectives found Selleck at his north Seattle address. He had left the motel even though he still had another day paid for. He said he’d made up with his wife, and he had a solid alibi for May 18. Sheepishly, he admitted he’d panicked when the officer stopped him. He felt stupid for driving away.

  Other guests at the motel told detectives that they had come home to find their units double-locked on Saturday afternoon. Bertha told them she’d had trouble with a man who hadn’t paid his bill, and she’d locked the units to be sure he couldn’t sneak back in if he’d had a key copy made. To the best of the witnesses’ recollection, she hadn’t mentioned his name or anything else about him.

  The mystery man couldn’t have been Albert Selleck; his rent was paid well in advance. And reports on sightings of Carl Bowles placed him 300 miles south of Seattle, near Eugene, Oregon.

  Detectives Fonis and DePalmo began a search for the store that had sold the death hammer, carrying a picture of the hammer to show the employees in the many outlets of Ernst Hardware stores. The sales slip showed the hammer cost $3.46. The purchaser had given the clerk a five-dollar bill and a penny and received $1.55 in change. Beyond that was the notation “256 18, May, 74.”

  The manager of the Ernst store in the Northgate area explained that 256 was not the number of the store selling the hammer, but rather the number of the sale in a particular store on May 18. It would be more difficult to find the store where the hammer had been purchased, but he said he would try.

  Unfortunately, many of the motel guests had checked out and gone on their way before the body discovery. The investigators sent letters to everyone listed on the log for May 17–18, asking that the recipients call the Seattle Homicide Unit collect. Within a day all of them had responded, but none of them had any new information to offer.

  Sergeant Ivan Beeson, Fonis, and DePalmo returned once again to the Eldorado, where they carried out a very thorough search. They found a black purse in a closet in Bertha Lush’s apartment. It was empty except for her birth certificate, which showed she’d been born in Harlan County, Nebraska, on September 7, 1909, and two sets of keys for her Studebaker, parked out in back. They searched the car but found nothing connected to the murder.

  A nearby business owner walked over to tell them that he and Bertha were friends, and that he’d tried to watch out for her. “She hasn’t driven that car for a long time,” he said.

  “I noticed two guys outside her place Saturday night,” he said. “They were jittery-acting.”

  “What did they look like?” Benny DePalmo asked.

  “I’d say they were both in their 50s—and one was short and the other one was really tall.”

  Two more suspects in an already crowded investigation.

  As the news of Bertha Lush’s murder flooded the media, the detectives began to get phone calls from other people who knew Bertha. One reported that he knew her well from her days at Boeing and that he’d often ridden the bus with her.

  “I visited with Bertha on Saturday, the 18th, from 1 P.M. until 3:30. I went over to her place to buy a tool that I needed at work. Bertha had one she didn’t need anymore,” he said. “Well, the funny thing is—she showed me this blue-green suitcase and a shaving kit or something. She said she was holding them for some guy who couldn’t pay rent. She said she was kind of afraid of him. Some girl had dropped him off at her place to stay, and then he couldn’t pay her. She said he tried to borrow money from friends but he couldn’t get any.”

  So Bertha had been afraid on the afternoon before she died, and specifically fearful of the man who owned the blue suitcase. Unfortunately, she hadn’t mentioned the name to her friend, or anything else that might help to identify the stranger.

  Bertha’s sister in Denver called to say that she’d talked with her between 9:00 and 9:30 (Seattle time) on Saturday night and that they’d had a perfectly ordinary conversation. “Bertha didn’t say a thing about being scared.”

  They were shaving minutes off the vital time period. Bertha Lush was alive at 9:30 and dead at 10:15, yet no one had heard a scream or the sounds of a struggle.

  When they’d opened the suitcase, they knew they were looking for an “invisible man” who was medium-sized and who wore Brut men’s cologne. He’d fled without the possessions in his suitcase. He hadn’t had enough money, apparently, to pay the seven dollars to rent a room at the Eldorado—but he’d had five dollars to buy a hammer.

  Wayne Dorman and Benny DePalmo began a frustrating canvass of Ernst Hardware stores, looking for someone who could recall selling a 42-ounce Stanley brand ball peen hammer on the afternoon of May 18. The sales tally didn’t match the Northgate store, but it did seem close to the number of sales made at the 6th and Pike store in downtown Seattle. Made at Register #1, it was the 256th of 277 sales that day.

  Since the store closed at 6:30 P.M., store officials estimated that the hammer had been purchased at about 4:00 in the afternoon.

  Dorman and DePalmo interviewed the clerk at Register #1, but they were disappointed again to find that she had no recollection of selling the hammer. Nor did any other Ernst clerks. It was only one sale among 277. Evidently the killer-to-be had looked and acted average enough to maintain a low profile.

  Criminalists reported that they had been unable to lift any legible prints from the hammer. Nor had they found usable prints on the toilet paper roll. “What if you cut through the roll to the cardboard in the center?” Benny DePalmo asked Criminalist Ann Beaman. “Could the killer have grasped the roll with his fingers inside the core and left a print there?”

  After Beaman made the cut, they found that he had done just that. One perfect print surfaced with the Ninhydrin process. It was the first break in an ultimately frustrating case. But this investigation occurred years before the computerized AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Analysis System) technique was established. The print would do them no good unless there was a suspect print to compare with it. The FBI kept single prints only for the ten most wanted fugitives in America.

  Although Bertha Lush had lived a moderate life, neither smoking nor drinking, obeying the law and minding her own business, some of her male relatives had had runins with the police. Now the Seattle detectives attempted to locate those men. The family knew that Bertha was financially secure and that she always had cash in the motel office to make change. That might have been tempting to a few of them who always seemed to need money.

  An active warrant was out for Bertha’s grand-nephew on assault charges. The detectives soon found out where he was. They left their cards, and he walked into the Homicide Unit voluntarily to talk to them. He said he hadn’t seen his great-aunt in seven months. He’d been in Everett—26 miles north of Seattle—with his sister on the evening of May 18. He produced a bus ticket that showed he’d left Everett for Idaho at 10:30 on May 19. Witnesses verified his story, and he passed a polygraph test cleanly.

  Another nephew was located in Payette, Idaho. He said he hadn’t been in the State of Washington for months; in fact, he couldn’t travel because he was recovering from a back injury.

  Bertha Lush had saved everything, and the detectives sorted through piles and piles of papers, receipts, and other records in the motel office. They found a receipt from a drug-abuse center in the north end of Seattle, which showed that Bertha had made a donation of some chai
rs for a garage sale. Was it possible that the men who picked up the donated items had thought Bertha would make an easy target for robbery?

  It was possible, but it hadn’t happened. The men who’d come for the items were the responsible directors of the center. They remembered going to the motel on May 15. Bertha Lush had given them bottles, vases, and chairs.

  “She was a real nice lady—a little eccentric, maybe—but really nice,” one man commented.

  By the end of June, Detectives Fonis, Dorman, and DePalmo had come to a dead end on a case where so many promising leads fizzled out. They had a suitcase, a shaving kit, the print from the toilet paper core—and that was about it. Half a dozen suspects had had their prints compared with the killer’s. None of them had matched. The mysterious woman who had dropped off the man Bertha was afraid of had never surfaced. Maybe she hadn’t seen all the TV coverage on the case, or maybe she was part of the crime. It was possible that she was simply someone who had given a stranger a ride.

  On July 17, Detective Sergeant Jim Lehner of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, Police Department called the Seattle Police’s Homicide Unit. He inquired if Seattle had an open case involving the murder of a woman in a motel.

  It was the kind of break that detectives dream about and devoutly hope for—but that happens infrequently. Benny DePalmo called Lehner back the minute he arrived for the early morning shift. Lehner said that two detectives from his department had staked out a downtown corner after they got a tip that a man wanted for murder in Seattle would be there soon.

  “Our informant tipped us to this guy,” Lehner said. “Your guy’s name is James Homer Elledge. He had a lot to tell us. I’ll fill you in—and I’ll send you his mug shots and fingerprints.”

  Lehner said that he’d gone through Elledge’s wallet and found the name and phone number of a Seattle woman. “Her name’s Kim Lane*.”

  After two months of dead ends, the solution to Bertha Lush’s death seemed close. DePalmo called Kim Lane and talked to a very startled young woman. She said she was unaware of the murder because she never followed crime news.

  “But I know Jim Elledge,” Kim said. “I met him on a bus from Texas to Seattle on May 10. He seemed like a good guy. We had coffee together at all the rest stops along the way. He told me that he was regional manager for a big restaurant chain. He said he’d worked so much overtime for so long that he just made up his mind to take a leave of absence. He was traveling around the country to see old friends.

  “He got off the bus in Wichita Falls, Texas—”

  DePalmo’s heart sank. If Elledge had gotten off the bus in Texas and he was in New Mexico now, how could he be Bertha Lush’s killer?

  “He asked for my phone number,” Kim continued. “He said he was planning to come to the Northwest soon. I really never expected to see him again.”

  “Did you see him again?” DePalmo asked.

  “Yes. I got home to Seattle on May 12, and I got a phone call two days later about 7:30 in the evening. It was Jim. He told me he was in Portland, Oregon, and was just about to get on a plane for Seattle. He asked if I could pick him up at the airport.”

  A plane ride from Portland only took half an hour or forty-five minutes, and Kim met Jim Elledge at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport a little over an hour later. “We had a drink in the airport lounge—and then Jim said he had to make some phone calls to a friend in Phoenix. He said his friend would wire him some money.”

  But Elledge had returned to their table looking grim. “He said his friend wouldn’t be able to wire the money until the next day—this was on a Sunday.”

  Kim admitted to DePalmo that she was beginning to wonder if Jim’s story about his high-paying job as an executive in the restaurant business was true. He didn’t seem to have any money at all. She ended up paying for their drinks.

  “I offered to loan him $20,” she said, “and I said I could take him to a motel. I wasn’t about to take him home with me.”

  Elledge had accepted the offer, and Kim headed for the I-5 freeway. She exited at the first off-ramp, and he went into a newer motel there. “He came back out, and he looked pretty disturbed because they wanted $20 a night. He said he wouldn’t pay that much, so I headed for “Old 99” and Aurora Avenue. I took him to an older motel there. Well, that was too expensive for his taste, too. Finally, I drove him to the Eldorado.”

  Kim Lane said she’d begun to be really nervous about Elledge. She just wanted to be rid of him and get home. “But I waited. I saw him talking to an older woman in the motel office, and then they walked out and went to the first room at the end of the driveway. Jim came out to my car and asked me to come in and see his room. I only went as far as the open door and peeked in.

  “Then the woman—the manager, I guess—came in with a coffee pot and coffee for him, and I just made my excuses and left.”

  “Did you see him again?” DePalmo asked.

  “He called me the next day and asked me to go to dinner with him at the Space Needle. I said ‘No,’ and I don’t know why—just something. I never saw him again.”

  Kim Lane said that Elledge was about 30 and good-looking and wore his blond hair in a crew cut.

  “How tall is he?” DePalmo asked.

  “Maybe five nine or ten—and he was average weight.”

  They probably knew now who the man was who matched the suitcase left in Bertha Lush’s office. Jim Elledge had checked into the Eldorado on Tuesday, May 14. He’d had $20 then—just about enough for three nights at the Eldorado prices.

  Bertha had talked about a man who couldn’t pay his rent. Maybe Elledge hadn’t paid for three nights; maybe he’d held out five dollars to buy a hammer. At any rate, by Saturday night, May 18, he would have been at least three days behind. Bertha was kind, but she wasn’t a pushover; she would have asked him to leave.

  Sergeant Jim Lehner in Albuquerque filled in more chinks in the case’s structure. Lehner said he had been tipped to Elledge’s alleged crime by one of the suspect’s own friends. Elledge had never been a restaurant executive, but he’d been a cook.

  The man who called Lehner was an air traffic controller. He said that he’d had a phone call from Elledge around the middle of May. He’d been calling from a motel in Seattle and asked that the informant wire him some money.

  “The woman who owned the motel came on the line,” Lehner said, “but our guy here said he didn’t promise to send Elledge money. Instead, he told her that if Jim didn’t pay her, she could bill him and he’d send it to her. He wasn’t about to wire money to Jim.”

  Calls kept coming into Elledge’s friend for the next two months, and Jim was always in a different spot on the map.

  “Elledge got back to Albuquerque on July 16,” Lehner said. “He told his friend here that he’d been so desperate that he started to rob the woman in the motel in Seattle. When she fought him, he said he had to hit her with a hammer. And he claims that he killed her. I guess he blamed himself for panicking. He said, ‘It was stupid—because I left the hammer there.’”

  “Yeah, he sure did,” DePalmo said. “We found it.”

  Elledge’s claim to be a murderer had been too much for the air traffic controller, and he called the police.

  “I told him I’d meet him on a certain corner of First Street,” the informant said. “He thinks I’m bringing him money. He says he’s driving a Buick with Louisiana plates.”

  Lehner and his crew had been on the prearranged corner on the evening of July 16. They spotted a 1967 Buick with Louisiana plates and asked Radio to run the plates through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computers. It came back as stolen from West Monroe, Louisiana, six days earlier.

  As they watched, the suspect left the car and walked south on First. He leaned against a light pole, his eyes searching the street for someone. The Albuquerque detectives moved in and arrested him on suspicion of auto theft. Elledge had a loaded .38 Smith and Wesson snubnosed revolver tucked into the waistband of his pants. The cylinder ha
d two spent, and three live rounds.

  “When we inventoried his car later,” Lehner said, “we found a bowie knife under the driver’s seat.

  Something lay heavily on Jim Elledge’s conscience. The Seattle detectives hadn’t even packed their bags to go to Albuquerque when Jim Elledge felt the need to unburden himself again. He talked to Sergeant Jim Lehner.

  Lehner called DePalmo to relate his confession. Elledge had confirmed that he’d stayed at the Eldorado, and that he’d run out of money after three days. He hadn’t been able to get money from his friend in New Mexico, so Bertha Lush had taken the phone and received a promise that she would get her money if she billed the friend.

  “But that wasn’t good enough for her,” Lehner said. “She told Elledge he had to leave. He spent a couple of nights sleeping in a field across the street from the motel. Is there a field there?”

  “Yeah,” DePalmo said. “There is.”

  “So he goes back on Saturday and offers to do some chores to pay for a room, but she said no. Then he told her he had jewelry and personal items worth $200 and she could hold them if she’d give him a night or two in the motel. But she didn’t want him there.”

  Lehner read from the confession Jim Elledge had signed:

  “…She got angry and called me a bum and an ‘S.O.B.’ I think I was leaning on the counter and she was coming at me. I don’t remember who grabbed who first. I remember having the hammer in my hand. She grabbed my wrist, and I remember hitting her in the face with the blunt side of the hammer.

  “We struggled, and I came to standing over her. I had blood all over my hands, face, and white shirt. I got a pink shirt out of the suitcase and washed at the basin. I do remember that I was scared as hell. After I washed my hands, I remember grabbing money from the office—$80 or $85—took a taxi to the airport, and took a plane to Portland.”

  In a fictional mystery, a confession would be enough. But in reality, direct physical evidence is better. The best evidence of all is a fingerprint in blood. The Seattle detectives had that. When Jim Elledge’s fingerprints arrived from New Mexico, Criminalist Jean Battista was able to match his left middle finger to the bloody print inside the toilet paper roll and his left thumbprint to a partial latent print left on the Brut spray bottle.