Last Dance, Last Chance

by Ann Rule

  Even though it was December, the room where they waited seemed to grow warmer with Denny’s anger and frustration. His brother finally came home, but he was furious when he saw the gun. He ordered Denny out of the house and told him to take the gun with him. Denny refused. He insisted that his brother should drive him where he wanted to go.

  The scene was getting more hysterical all the time. Denny’s sister-in-law was pregnant and was due within a few days, and she became so upset that she started having labor pains. At this point, Pat realized she was more worried for the other woman than she was for herself. She was afraid that Denny was going to hurt his sister-in-law, because he was getting so infuriated with her, but he quieted down.

  Denny’s family apparently assumed that Pat was with Denny by choice, and that she was his girlfriend. Should she tell them that he’d kidnapped her? No. That might set him off. All she could do was sit there and watch this absolutely unreal spectacle take place.

  Their conversation turned to family problems, and then the sister-in-law said suddenly, “Gladys is dead. They found her this morning, and they think she was strangled.”

  Instantly she got a frightened look on her face, as if she knew she’d said the wrong thing. She backed up, saying, “No, no, that’s not right. They think she died of a heart attack.”

  Pat had no idea who Gladys was, but she saw Denny’s face change when her name came up. She could tell that he didn’t believe the second version of the news about Gladys.

  Pat felt as if she had come in during the middle of some horror film. She didn’t know what any of them were talking about, and she tried to concentrate on how she could get away from Denny while there were still people around.

  Now Pat Jacque was finally able to put the pieces together. This was why Denny had been so curious about the news. This was why he had said, “You know about me, don’t you?”

  At the time, she truthfully had had no idea what he was talking about. But now Pat thought about what she had heard on the radio during the noon news. There had been a brief mention of a woman who had been found murdered in Kent, but it meant nothing to Pat. Not then. Now it did. She had a terrible feeling that Denny had murdered Gladys. Pat didn’t know whether Gladys was his girlfriend or his wife or who. She had been scared before, but now she realized that she was being held captive by a man who was probably a killer. She tried to concentrate on the conversation to get some clue about Gladys.

  Denny kept telling his sister-in-law that he didn’t know anything about what happened to Gladys.

  Denny Tuohmy’s brother didn’t catch on that Pat Jacque was an unwilling hostage. He refused once more to drive his brother anywhere, saying, “You’ve got a car and a woman; drive yourself.”

  By this time, Pat’s gas gauge was on empty, and she didn’t have any money with her. If they left in her car, it was going to stall on some back-country road. She mentioned that, hoping Denny’s brother would change his mind. Instead, he wrote out a check for $5.00 and told them the location of a gas station where they could cash it.

  Numbly, Pat watched Denny tuck the check in his pocket and stand up. He signaled to her to lead the way to the door. She followed him, sure that she had lost all hope of rescue.

  Once again, Pat Jacque was alone with him, hurtling over rural roads in the pitch-black night, the .303 rifle aimed at her head. Following his directions, she eventually turned onto the Kent-Kangley Road.

  Feeling even more desperate, she happened to glance up at her rearview mirror and saw the headlights of a car moving up right behind them. She waited for it to pass, thinking she might be able to flash her lights or give some signal, but it stayed with them.

  Then Denny saw the lights in the mirror, and he turned around to watch the car. As he did, it dropped back. He told Pat to drive very, very carefully. But if she noticed a car with a blue light, or heard a siren, she was to “step on it.”

  A few moments later, she did hear the wail of a siren and saw a flashing blue light in the rearview mirror.

  “Turn right and speed up,” Denny ordered in a tight voice.

  She did as he said, but suddenly there were cars with flashing lights all around them. Denny poked the gun at her back and told her to floor the accelerator.

  She was going so much faster that she was afraid to look at the dashboard and check her speed. She felt as if she would lose control of her car at any time, and they would all be killed.

  “I just can’t go any further,” Pat cried.

  She was completely terrified, and her arms and feet felt leaden, but he screamed at her to keep driving. She expected Denny to start shooting at the patrol cars, and she knew that she was in the way. He would probably blow her head off when he fired at the cars ahead and beside them.

  Expertly, the sheriff’s officers slowed their speed, forcing Pat to slow hers. She had no place to go but to the shoulder of the road, and there was a deep ditch just beside it.

  Her car was forced off the road, and she stomped on the brake frantically, coming to a stop just inches from a ditch.

  Pat would remember this moment for the rest of her life. “An officer waved at me to get out, but I was afraid to move,” she said. “Then other officers came around on the right and opened the door and pulled Denny out. Someone opened my door and I got out.”

  She could barely stand, but she was grateful to simply be alive. She began to believe that she would see her family again—that there would be a Christmas.

  “Are my children all right?” she begged one of the county patrolmen.

  He smiled and said, “They’re fine. Your husband is with them.”

  Roy Jacque had come home shortly before eight. “I came in the back door, and there were three little kids all lined up, with great big eyes and trying hard not to cry. They said, ‘Mommy went away with a man with a gun.’ I knew Pat would never have left the children alone if she had a choice, or left without a note. I called the King County sheriff.”

  Jacque had spent truly desperate hours waiting for some word of his wife, imagining what might be happening to her and trying not to let his thoughts go that way.

  Alerted first by Roy Jacque and next by Tuohmy’s brother—who had realized that something was wrong—the sheriff’s patrol units had converged in the Kent area, blocking every road leading from town. They were looking for the Jacques’ Ford station wagon, and their radios were alive with chatter as they kept in touch.

  Reserve officers Kent and French first observed the vehicle on Sweeney Road near Wilderness Corner, and they immediately put that information on the air. Detective Sergeant Dave Urban had been taking a report from the defendant’s brother when the call crackled over his radio. He immediately drove to the area where the car had been sighted and spotted it on the road ahead of him. Urban followed the Ford station wagon for three miles, coming up close and then dropping back for fear he would be spotted by Denny Tuohmy. It was when the two vehicles eased onto the Benson Road and Kent-Kangley intersection that he knew he had to move. The fugitive was forcing his captive into a more heavily populated area.

  “I turned on my siren, but there was no response,” Urban recalled. “Then I pulled alongside it with my bubble lights going and the siren blowing—but Mrs. Jacque just speeded up. I then proceeded to force the car off to the shoulder of the road. My car was parked diagonally in front of the Jacque vehicle and I left by the driver’s door, crouching low with my revolver out, and moved around the back of my car. I motioned to Mrs. Jacque to get out. Then Kent and French pulled in behind the station wagon and came up on the passenger side, where they pulled Tuohmy out.”

  The powerful rifle was lying on the seat between Pat Jacque and Denny Tuohmy. It was turned over to Sheriff’s Sergeant John McGowan and Detective George Helland. Helland found that it was loaded with five shells in the magazine and one in the firing chamber.

  Pat Jacque went home to comfort her children and count her blessings. Denny Tuohmy was taken at once to King County Sheriff’s h
eadquarters in the downtown Seattle courthouse building. There, Lieutenant Leonard Givens advised him of his rights under Miranda.

  He was the prime suspect in the murder of Gladys Bodine, but no one yet knew everything Denny Tuohmy had done during the previous 30 hours. There were big gaps in time between Thursday evening and his capture late Friday night.

  The investigators noted that he did not smell of alcohol and didn’t appear to be under the influence of drugs.

  Denny Tuohmy’s state of mind as he sat in the interview room would become very important. Lieutenant Givens recalled that he had found Tuohmy “calm and lucid.”

  He said he was hungry, and he sipped coffee and ate sandwiches provided by the jail kitchen as he talked to Givens and Detective Ted Forrester.

  Tuohmy had expressly asked that Ted Forrester be present as he was interrogated. Forrester had spoken to Tuohmy several months earlier when he was investigating reports of some minor family fights. Now, Tuohmy looked upon him as a friend; the presence of the easygoing, kind detective put him at ease. And Forrester was a man who really cared about people—although, admittedly, killers were not on the top of his list.

  Despite the Miranda warnings, Tuohmy seemed anxious to talk to the two detectives. Maybe he needed to ease his conscience. Maybe he relished the attention. Or, as he would claim much later, maybe he was mentally ill and didn’t understand the consequences of what he had done.

  As he spoke, Givens and Forrester thought it was a miracle, indeed, that Pat Jacque had survived her ordeal without being injured or killed.

  Later, Tuohmy signed his confession. He prefaced his unburdening by telling them how he had tried to get back with Cherie. He felt that other people were deliberately trying to break up their relationship, and he had gone to talk with her and with her mother, Gladys, on the morning of December 19. He believed that Cherie was living there, but realized she had lied to him. She had moved away to be free of him.

  Cherie had already left to get her hair done when Denny got to her mother’s house in Kent very early in the morning, long before it was light out.

  “On December 19,” Denny Tuohmy’s statement began, “I walked and ran down to Gladys Bodine’s. I went to see Cherie Mullins. Gladys came to the door in a robe and said, ‘Hi, Denny,’ and I said, ‘Hi, Gladys.’ I asked her if she had some coffee, and she went to the kitchen to warm some up. She told me Cherie didn’t live there any more. I told her I wanted all three of us to get together and talk. I kept talking to Gladys, but I wasn’t getting the right answers—not the answers Cherie had given me. I put my arm under her chin. She said, ‘Denny, please let me go and I’ll give you the right answers.’ I moved toward the back bedroom and laid her down. One hand moved. Then I got scared and I left by the back door.”

  It seemed impossible that Tuohmy had been able to overpower Gladys Bodine so easily. The detectives knew that she was almost six feet tall and had outweighed him by about 40 pounds. And yet, they had seen her body, and she had been brutally strangled.

  “I went downtown and had a few beers with [my friend] Fritz Donohue,” Tuohmy continued. “I rested in his car for a while alone, and then he came out and we went to his place to sleep. I stayed up and I tried to call Cherie at 8:15, then 8:30. I went down to my sister-inlaw’s car and got my rifle and my bowling ball. Then I went home and packed my clothes to go to Cherie’s house in Kent and see if she would go to California with me. I called Fritz to take me to Cherie’s nursing home on the West Valley Highway near the Smith Brothers’ Dairy. He said he would if he didn’t have to work overtime; he’d be by at 3:15.”

  Apparently, Fritz had kept his promise to Denny, and he had come home to pick him up around three in the afternoon. The next part of the confession was a complete surprise to the detectives.

  “We went out to Kent and missed turns and came to a bridge where we couldn’t go any further. We started to back up, and then decided to get out of the car and relieve ourselves. I said, ‘Hey, Fritz, I want to show you something.’ He looked at the rifle and said, ‘Yeah, your gun.’

  “I carried the rifle in my right hand. I remember my foot slipping. The rifle went off and I saw a shadow moving. I got scared and tried to start the car. It wouldn’t start, so I ran through the woods and the branches slapped me in the face.”

  Denny seemed to be telling them in an oblique way that he had shot Fritz. But there hadn’t been any reports of a dead man found near Kent. Was he only saying that he had left his friend in the woods with a broken-down car?

  Givens looked at Denny to see if he was making a bad joke or if he was tricking them. But he seemed rational enough, so Givens immediately detailed a patrol car to search the area for Fritz Donohue.

  “Our prisoner says that he’s lying out there somewhere, wounded.”

  At this point, Fritz Donohue’s fate was in limbo. Radio had received a complaint from a couple who lived in the south end of the county. They reported that an older model car was parked at the end of the road past their home with its lights on. Hours passed, and still the car sat there with its lights burning. Near midnight, when no one had approached the car, the couple called the sheriff’s office. The deputies sent there walked toward the abandoned car.

  Fritz Donohue had been found. He lay on the frozen ground, his left leg outstretched and his right leg under it, crossed at the knee. His sightless eyes gazed up at nothing, and the ground beneath his head was soaked with blood.

  Working in the icy early morning rain, detectives brought in floodlights and took triangulation measurements so that later they could tell exactly where the victim’s body had lain and where evidence was found. They marked the scene off into grids, looking for the spent bullet casing from a .303 Britisher bullet, like the bullets in Tuohmy’s gun. They finally found it 43 feet from the car. Carefully, they checked to see if the victim’s car would start, and it wouldn’t turn over. So far, Tuohmy’s information was accurate.

  Fritz Donohue, a small man like the suspect, was finally removed from the crime scene and taken to the morgue to await autopsy.

  The postmortem exam of Gladys Bodine’s body began first. Dr. Gale Wilson described the procedure in his report, as he would in trial testimony one day.

  “The deceased was a woman of 58, 5’10" tall and weighing 174 pounds. Her face was livid, her lips blue,” the pathologist dictated. “A large number of petechiae—small reddish spots resembling paprika and resulting from rupture of capillaries—were evident on her forehead, cheeks, lips, within the small vessels of her brain, the left strap muscle of her throat, her larynx, and her heart.”

  Since most laymen have never heard of petechiae, Wilson explained further. “These result from the damming of capillaries which burst from prolonged pressure. The whole picture is one of manual strangulation. There are two rounded depressions on the right forehead and concurrent hemorrhaging in the brain itself, but no skull fracture. The hemorrhages in the neck area are of the type caused by fingers.

  “To make marks on the neck like this, it requires a great deal of pressure. The victim would have lost consciousness in 15 or 20 seconds. I would say she was clinically dead in a couple of minutes. In my opinion the person strangling Mrs. Bodine would have had to apply steady pressure for at least two minutes. She died at approximately 7 P.M. on December 19, 1963.”

  Gladys had been dead since Thursday evening, but her daughter had had no inkling of the horror in her mother’s house when Denny Tuohmy called her as she arrived at work Friday morning. Now she understood why he had asked her if anything was wrong, and wanted to be sure that she still loved him. In all likelihood, he had strangled her mother the night before. He must have been checking to see if she knew about her mother’s murder yet.

  Dr. Wilson performed the autopsy on Fritz Donohue’s body next. It was still early on Saturday morning, December 21.

  “Donohue was a man of 39, 5’7" tall, weighing 135 pounds. His body showed a large caliber gunshot entry wound just in front of the left ear c
anal. The bullet passed horizontally through the base of the skull and emerged through the right ear. The skull in these cases is so fragmented that the head feels like popcorn in a bag, the whole head has a putty-like feeling. There were no other injuries.”

  Dr. Wilson felt that the location of the single bullet wound was consistent with a bullet fired by a person holding his gun to his shoulder and aiming carefully. “Assuming the victim was standing up, the bullet traveled horizontally, approximately five feet above the ground.”

  The only other alternative would be more damning for Denny Tuohmy. He would have had to aim straight down at a victim lying on the ground. That was not, however, consistent with Tuohmy’s height. He was too short to have held the gun far above Fritz’s head, and the entry wound didn’t have the characteristic powder burns and gun barrel debris of a near-contact wound.

  Denny Tuohmy was arrested and charged with murder in the deaths of Gladys Bodine and Fritz Donohue.

  Cherie Mullins visited him in jail on Christmas Eve, not because she felt affection for him but because she was completely stunned and shocked, and full of questions.

  She found that Tuohmy was quite clearheaded. “But he seemed sad and tired. I looked at him and I said, ‘Why Denny, why?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know, Mama,’ and I said, ‘Do you know what’s going to happen to you?’”

  Tuohmy’s response was with a hand gesture. “He drew his finger across his throat like this.”

  He would spend the six months following his arrest in the King County Jail. He wrote letters—rational, lucid letters—to relatives and to Cherie Mullins.

  The most significant question was this: Was Denny Tuohmy sane or insane at the time of his crimes? Under the M’Naughton Rule, the killer must have the ability to perceive reality at the time of the crime and must be able to differentiate between right and wrong in order to go to trial. Defense attorneys worked feverishly to prove that Tuohmy had been certifiably psychotic when he killed Gladys Bodine and Fritz Donohue and when he kidnapped Pat Jacque.