by Ann Rule
Although she had close neighbors, friends she knew well, Mary Ellen was always careful about locking her doors and windows at night. Once she got the children in bed, she allowed herself some “alone” time to watch television and relax.
On Tuesday, June 4, Jimmie called her, something that was unusual for him, and she was happy to hear his voice. But she had Robby in his high chair and was feeding him supper. He demanded her attention; either he or his bowl of food were in danger of falling out of the chair, so she couldn’t talk long. She and Jimmie agreed they would try again soon to have a calm conversation.
Later, with the house finally quiet, Mary Ellen poured a cup of coffee and dished up some ice cream for herself, carrying them to the living room so she could watch one of her favorite shows.
At 10:30 P.M., the sun had finally set. It was a warm night, and she still had the windows open. Uncharacteristically, she put off locking the outside doors, even the one that opened into the lower level of their house. But she was involved in watching television.
None of the children or nearby neighbors heard anything unusual during the night . . .
But things were far from normal in the Stackhouse household. No one woke the children up on the morning of June 5 to tell them it was time to get ready for school.
Lana, who at five was the oldest girl, was the last to see her mother alive and the first to find her that morning. As she stumbled sleepily down the hall, Lana found Mary Ellen lying on the floor, blocking the top of the stairway to the midlevel of the house.
“I had fallen out of my bed about ten P.M.,” Lana told a California parole board a very long time later. “I believed for years that if I had only stayed awake, my mother would still be alive.
“I knelt near her and tried to get her to wake up. It wasn’t real. I thought that my mommy was just sleeping. I knew she would wake up.”
Lana saw Mary Ellen’s “tattered throat wounds,” and her blue eyes staring blankly at nothing, eyes that would haunt Lana forever after.
Her brothers Tom and Mike were only seven and eight, and their bedroom was in the basement level of the house. When Lana screamed for them, they rushed up the stairs. They found their mother there, lying on the floor outside the room where Rhonda, Brenda, and Lana slept. But she didn’t answer when they tried to talk to her, and there was some kind of red liquid underneath her. It was a sight no children should ever have to see.
Tom and Mike realized that she would never answer them again.
They also knew instinctively that it was up to them to get their three sisters and baby brother out of the house.
Rhonda Stackhouse was just three years old. She would never be free of certain flashes of memory, crazy, jagged bursts of light and color as if she was watching a screen in a nightmare.
Rhonda can still picture the pajamas her brothers were wearing: “They had a pattern of cartoon figures on them,” she recalls. “My brothers carried us over my mother’s body, and I could see that one of her eyes was bulging out of its socket. That image has stayed with me.”
Using strength they shouldn’t have had, Tom and Mike somehow managed to lift Brenda, Rhonda, and Robby over their mother’s body and lead them out the front door where they hurried to their neighbor Madeline Cassen’s house. She and Mary Ellen were good friends, and they hoped she would know what to do.
Rhonda recalls that Madeline’s hair was very blond and “puffy.” She took the youngest girls by the hands and Lana walked ahead as they walked back to the Stackhouses’ front door.
“She opened the front door,” Rhonda says, “and she looked up the stairs at the landing. I remember her letting go of my hand, and I looked up at her face and she was screaming and screaming. I can still see her bright red lipstick and her blond bouffant hair as I stood there looking up at her.”
Within minutes, the quiet morning air was pierced again, this time by wailing sirens as one squad car after another drew close.
Their lives changed on that Wednesday morning in the first week of June. It was a school day, very close to summer vacation, and all the children had been looking forward to that.
“I didn’t know what had happened,” Rhonda recalls. “Our whole world just evaporated that night. No one told us anything. Men with cameras took pictures of us, but nobody talked about what was wrong with our mother. When I look at the pictures of us that appeared in the San Jose Mercury News that day, Robby’s crying and the rest of us just look confused. I could see blood staining Brenda’s shoes.
“Brenda—who’s a year older than myself—simply stopped talking for six months; she didn’t utter a word. All of us knew something terrible had happened, but we didn’t know what. I don’t think we even believed our mom was dead at that point. My dad came home from Tennessee, but he didn’t explain anything, either. I do know we never went back to that house—not until we were mothers ourselves.”
For thirty-two years, what Mary Ellen had suffered and the way she died, was never mentioned in Jimmie Stackhouse’s home.
“And we never asked our father,” Rhonda says. “Because we knew it would make him feel bad. He never volunteered anything. He may have believed he was doing the right thing. A long time later, I found out that he sold our house for a dollar—and a handshake. He asked for an immediate transfer to another base, and the navy granted it. We moved to the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington State. I sort of remember that we had some of the furniture from our old house, but I’m not sure if that’s just my imagination.”
Brenda would never remember her mother at all, even though as an adult she consulted therapists to help her open up that padlocked part of her brain.
Mary Ellen died three weeks before Rhonda’s third birthday, and she would retain only fractured memories, blurred scenes of being with her mother. She can recall sitting in a high chair near a big window and watching Tom, Mike, and Lana walk down the sidewalk to catch the school bus, and she remembers sitting on the landing of the stairs, while Brenda, who was sixteen months older, was trying to tie her shoes.
“I could picture waking up and my mom was carrying me to her bedroom—and having a warm washcloth put over my eyes because I couldn’t open them. I must have had an eye infection. There were small things like sitting on the kitchen counter, with my mom holding me and reaching to get something out of the cupboard.”
When Jimmie Stackhouse hopped off the plane, he had immediately gathered his children around him.
“My dad never went back into our house,” Rhonda said. “I think my Aunt Ellen flew down from Whidbey Island to be with us. And I believe we lived with her and Uncle Cat—who was a tugboat captain when we first moved up there, and Dad was building us a house.”
When someone praised Jimmie for keeping his family together, he was puzzled. Why was that so brave?
“Of course I took care of my children,” he said. “I would never walk away from my family. I had six small children. My main concern was to get them out of the house, out of San Jose—where reporters were hounding us—and get them settled. I didn’t discuss it with the children. I didn’t know they wanted to.”
He was still young, a man who had truly loved his beautiful wife, now suddenly widowed. His adult life was well nigh perfect until sometime between 10 and 11 P.M. on that warm June night. Jimmie Stackhouse was doing the best he could, believing that if his children didn’t know all the horrifying details about their mother’s death, they would adjust soon enough.
Jimmie had learned to be stoic. His mother had died from childbirth complications when he was only nine days old, and he was raised by an angry and abusive grandmother. At seventeen, he left her South Carolina house and never went back.
“No one explained a thing to us,” Rhonda said. “It took years to forgive my dad for the hell us kids went through and his part in brushing it all away without really investigating if his children were okay. It was right there in front of him that we were not, but I don’t fault him. He coped the way he knew how.�
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They didn’t have therapy; therapy wasn’t the automatic answer to post-traumatic stress disorder (in 1963, the term itself was yet to be coined).
Lana felt overwhelming guilt, Rhonda needed to know the truth, and Brenda had been struck dumb. Robby was too young to even remember his mother, and the big boys were doing their best to be brave.
When they fled their house on the morning of June 5, Tom, eight, had insisted on taking his toy pistol, saying, “I’m going to get the person who hurt Mommy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
* * *
MARY ELLEN’S MURDER MADE the kind of headlines newspaper editors in the sixties cherished. Words like “sex fiend,” “bloody enigma,” and “telltale clues” were common in describing homicides.
The hunt didn’t last long. Mary Ellen had recently confided to a close friend that she was afraid of prowlers who might be watching her. She had received several obscene phone calls from a man who seemed to be disguising his voice.
“He’s threatening to kill me,” she said fearfully.
For some reason, she did not report the calls to the police, but she had her phone number changed to an unlisted number, telling herself that it was just a prank caller and if he didn’t have her number, he couldn’t call.
Although tracing phone calls to their source is much easier today than it was fifty years ago, there were ways police and phone companies of the sixties could have put a pen register on her phone and kept a record of the numbers her threatening caller had used. Unless he was calling from a pay phone, or hung up too quickly, or used other methods to hide his identity.
Would it have saved Mary Ellen Stackhouse’s life? Quite possibly—but one can never be sure. The caller might have been her killer or someone else entirely. Many pretty women whose husbands are often away on military duty receive weird phone calls.
If it was the murderer who had made the calls, investigators had no feasible way to sift through the thousands of military personnel around Moffett Field.
Fortunately, several tips that came into the police offices named a possible suspect even before the sun set on the day her body was discovered.
Neighbors on Ruskin Drive and adjoining streets told homicide detectives that Mary Ellen had had some issues with a teenage neighbor boy who lived with his parents in a house located directly behind the Stackhouses’ home. More accurately, he lived in the garage outside his family home. The rumor was that Gilbert Thompson, sixteen, wasn’t allowed to sleep in the house because he was “strange sexually” and his parents didn’t want him sleeping so close to his female relatives because he was molesting them.
Thompson had a German shepherd that was allowed to run free, and the dog had dug up the Stackhouses’ front lawn and garden that Mary Ellen tended so carefully. She had scolded Gilbert, saying he should keep his dog fenced in. He had been very angry. Indeed, just before Jimmie left for the Tennessee training facility, he had given their own bulldog to a farm home because it too was destroying their freshly planted grass.
If only the Stackhouses’ dog had still been in the basement, Mary Ellen would have had some warning.
Shortly thereafter, Gilbert’s dog disappeared and he was convinced that Mary Ellen had called the dogcatcher to take his pet away. Whether she had done that is moot; she would never be able to say. There were other neighbors who were concerned about the dog and also might have reported it to animal control.
In the days before Mary Ellen’s murder, witnesses told the investigators that Thompson had blamed her and shouted at her “in unpleasant terms” about his dog’s disappearance.
No one said “person of interest” in 1963; police just came right out and said “suspect,” and early on Gilbert Thompson was definitely a prime suspect in Mary Ellen’s homicide.
Ironically, Gilbert’s parents—who had lived in the neighborhood for only six months and had six children of their own—had been among the first to offer to care for Mary Ellen’s children until Jimmie Stackhouse’s flight from Tennessee landed.
Within hours after they had responded to the scene of Mary Ellen’s murder that Tuesday, detectives went to the Thompson home. But there was no one there except for Gilbert’s mother. She said her husband was a roofer, and Gilbert was, too, although he was employed by another company. They were both at work.
Mrs. Thompson was as upset and grieving as all the other neighbors the investigators had talked to. She offered again to take the Stackhouse children into her home until relatives arrived to care for them.
On Wednesday evening, Captain William McKenzie and Detective Sergeant John Mattern went back to the Thompsons’ and asked to speak to Gilbert. By 9 P.M., it seemed clear to them that the sixteen-year-old had some guilty knowledge or involvement in the Stackhouse case. He and his father agreed quite willingly to go to headquarters to talk further, and if it was indicated, for the teenager to take a polygraph exam.
When the detectives spoke to Gilbert’s father privately, they learned that the elder man had dealt with his son’s oddly perverse sexual obsessions for a very long time. Eight years before—in 1955—the family had lived in Bakersfield. At the time his son was only eight, but Gilbert had been caught forcing a girl to strip as he pointed a knife at her.
Four years later, there was an incident in Missouri where the then twelve-year-old Gilbert was arrested for attacking a woman on the street, again with a knife. He was also accused of stealing from a teacher that year. Later, in Monterey, California, he was arrested for choking one woman and wrestling another to the ground.
“He used a knife in both of those attacks,” his father finished grimly.
School authorities in Bakersfield had handled the first incident when he was eight. He seemed far too young to be dealt with by the police. There was no record of the events that had allegedly happened in Missouri four years later, and the San Jose detectives suspected that his juvenile record—if he even had one—had been shredded in Missouri.
Between some of the attacks against women, Gilbert Thompson had lied about his age and enlisted in the army. He wasn’t very big, only about five feet, six inches tall and 140 pounds, and somehow he managed to convince recruiters that he was eighteen.
When he reoffended, the army quickly gave him an honorable discharge for “fraudulent enlistment,” and turned him over to juvenile authorities in California.
There were more cases where he had been a suspect, but Gilbert Thompson had apparently avoided being in trouble with the law in San Jose County. If he was, he wasn’t caught.
Or he was passed on to other agencies.
The salient factor, as far as Captain McKenzie and Sergeant Mattern were concerned, was that Gilbert Thompson had never submitted to any psychiatric counseling, or been placed in an institution.
And that was appalling.
If his attack on a fellow elementary school student when he was eight had happened in Santa Clara County—the county where he killed Mary Ellen Stackhouse—he would have been automatically referred to the Santa Clara County Juvenile Probation Department. There, he would have been seen by a psychiatrist and been given a battery of psychological tests.
In almost any case involving bizarre sexual acting out, a child like Gilbert would surely have been remanded for treatment to the children’s section of Napa State Hospital.
Most sociopathic boys act out by the time they are five, usually by torturing animals or setting fires. Whether Gilbert would have been treatable at the age of eight, no one can say. It might well have been too late. But at least someone would have noticed a burgeoning social predator.
His parents had felt that he “was just going through a stage” in his early attacks. Moreover, they couldn’t begin to afford the twenty-five dollars an hour that was the going rate for psychiatric treatment in the fifties and sixties.
With Mary Ellen Stackhouse’s shocking murder, there were cries from the public, who blamed authorities, his parents, and the buck passing of different law-enforcement
agencies for failing to treat Gilbert.
(Fifty years later, nothing much has changed. Blame for violent atrocities is still at the top of the news, with much finger-pointing and little definitive action.)
* * *
WHEN BILL MCKENZIE AND John Mattern joined Gilbert Thompson himself for an interview, they were surprised at how nondangerous he appeared. He wasn’t all that big, and looked smaller as he slumped in a chair in the interview room. Gilbert wasn’t a bad-looking kid—he had wavy brown hair, a sprinkling of freckles, and slight acne.
When he opened his mouth, however, Gilbert began to describe the fantasies that filled his world. He said he’d had some homosexual encounters, but that he also thought a lot lately of what it would be like to have forcible sex with several women in his neighborhood. One of them was Mary Ellen Stackhouse.
The teenager said he’d gone to bed in the garage behind the family home. From there, a path led through tall weeds about seventy-five feet to the Stackhouse property. He wasn’t able to fall asleep, and he got up around 10:30, dressed, and crept over to his potential victim’s backyard.
When he tested the back door on the ground level, he found it wasn’t locked. He walked in, moving silently past the two older boys—Tom and Mike—who were sound asleep. Gilbert hadn’t brought any weapon with him, but he saw a hammer on a work bench on his way to the stairs that led up to the living room.
He grabbed it.
As he reached the top of the stairs, he could see Mary Ellen sitting in an armchair, watching television, but she had her back to him and wasn’t aware he was behind her—not at first.
And then there was some slight sound as he turned into the living room itself, maybe a creaking floor or even his own harsh breathing. Mary Ellen turned around, startled to see him inside her house.
“What are you doing here?” she shouted. “Get out!”
But he didn’t leave. Thompson estimated that he then struck her on the head with the hammer at least seven times.