Practice to Deceive

by Ann Rule

  Cathy is petite, and standing next to six-foot-tall Peggy, she looked even smaller.

  “Peggy never seemed to remember me,” Cathy said. “Dean and I were sharing a night out with Dick Deposit at China City, and I found myself standing next to Peggy Sue.

  “She looked down at me, and she had a really condescending tone in her voice when she said, ‘Do I know you?’

  “I told her who I was, and she wasn’t impressed. A week or so later, she was standing next to me again, and again, she asked me, ‘Do I know you?’ I just gave up—and said, ‘No, you don’t.’ ”

  When Peggy Sue figured out that Cathy and Dean Hatt were friends of Jim Huden, she was nicer to them.

  After Peggy and Jim moved to Las Vegas, one day she went to pick him up at the airport.

  “She had rented a Mercedes Benz and was wearing a tight, one-piece, black leather outfit,” Cathy said. “She told me, ‘All I’m wearing to the airport is a can of whipped cream.’ ”

  Cathy remembered Jim and Peggy driving up to Dick Deposit’s house on or about December 19, 2003. Rather, she saw Peggy.

  “She told me that Jim was really, really sick that night. I never did actually see him on that Christmas trip. After they left,” Cathy said, “Dick Deposit called me to ask if they had left his house key with Dean or me. And I really don’t think they did.”

  Peggy could turn on the charm and seduce anyone she aimed for—both men and women. She wasn’t interested in women sexually—not at all—and she had few women friends. But she usually had a best friend. One or another “best friend forever” came and went in her life.

  There were two very large families in Langley—the Stackhouses and the Boyers. Vickie Boyer’s mother bore eighteen children— outnumbering even Jimmie’s brood.

  Vickie was one of the younger children and she was sickly. No one in her family expected her to live long. When Clifford Peerenboom proposed to her, she was only fourteen. Her mother knew she was too young—but then she felt Vickie probably wouldn’t live beyond nineteen or twenty and deserved to have some kind of a life. Vickie married Clifford and she didn’t die; instead she suffered through a long and controlling marriage. As the nineties began, she had finally gathered the courage to divorce her husband. When Peggy Thomas befriended her, it made Vickie feel happier and more secure. She dropped her married name at once and went back to her maiden name. She and Peggy Sue were both coming out of the end of their marriages, and it seemed that they had so much in common.

  Peggy, who stood a head taller than Vickie, was the confident one, and Vickie was more dependent after so many years in her emotionally abusive marriage.

  Despite warnings from one of her sisters, Vickie and Peggy became close friends within a short time.

  When Peggy made up her mind to enter the Ms. Washington contest, Vickie helped in any way she could; she raised money, distributed signs, and got Peggy as much publicity and media interest as she could.

  Vickie was almost as thrilled as Peggy Sue was when she won the beauty pageant. They had done it together, and their friendship was solid as a rock. At least it seemed so to Vickie Boyer.

  Peggy Sue Thomas’s photograph appeared on television and in any number of newspapers. She wore a figure-clinging gown and the sparkling rhinestone crown on her head seemed made for her. She was in her glory.

  The next step was a pageant in Las Vegas. Peggy entered the 2000 Ms. U.S. Continental Pageant. During the question-and-answer part of the pageant, Peggy Sue seemed self-assured as she described herself as a “trailblazer” who followed her own path.

  “Women have to know it’s okay to do things out of the norm,” she told the judges. “They should set an example for their children. [That is] the greatest ethical challenge facing women today with all the violence, sex, and drugs in the media.”

  Peggy looked beautiful in her pale purple formal and four-inch pumps, and she won the evening gown competition.

  But she didn’t take first place in the pageant held in Las Vegas.

  Peggy was anxious to get off Whidbey Island. She was skilled at many things, but she sought genuine affluence, not something that a beautician or a mechanic could earn. Peggy longed to be rich. It was nice to have her “Ms. Washington” title, but that would run out in a year.

  She had persuaded a tall, handsome male friend who had a solid position at Microsoft to loan her seventy-five thousand dollars. Peggy needed “seed money”—money for her next transformation. The glitter in Las Vegas seemed like real gold and actual diamonds and she set her sights on moving there as soon as possible.

  * * *

  VICKIE BOYER MOVED TO Texas in 2002 to do some training for the company she worked for—the CVS pharmacy chain. Shortly thereafter, Peggy Sue and Jim Huden were in the Southwest, too. By the summer of 2003, the couple were living in a high-priced rental house.

  Peggy’s two daughters, who were now twelve and ten, were living with them, but spending time with Kelvin Thomas during vacations and holidays.

  Vickie still considered Peggy Sue to be her best friend, and she came to Las Vegas to visit Peggy and Jim in September 2003. While there she met another Whidbey Island expatriate.

  Scott Mickelsen appealed to her, and she saw him often during the visit. She seriously considered moving to the gambling city.

  When she came back in November, Vickie spent more time with Scott and she made plans to move to Las Vegas as soon as she could. Peggy said that Vickie was welcome to stay with her. Her house was big enough for a number of guests and her half sister, Brenda Gard, lived with her for a while, too.

  Peggy and Jim, who seemed to be doing very well, were actually living on credit cards and the money Peggy had borrowed. Their economic situation grew tighter every month. To their disappointment, Las Vegas streets were not paved with gold after all.

  Vickie Boyer moved into their large rental home on Christmas Day 2003. A few days later, Peggy Sue and Jim returned from their trip to Whidbey Island. They seemed exhausted from the drive, and didn’t say much about their Christmas trip to Washington State.

  Jim Huden didn’t stay in Las Vegas very long. He told the two women that he was going back to Florida.

  “They had run out of money, and Jim said he was going to go to Punta Gorda, but when he came back, he would have a lot of money with him,” Vickie said. “I figured he was going to liquidate his business or something.”

  Jim and Jean Huden had run a successful business in the computer industry, but it had long since fallen fallow due to Jim’s disinterest.

  Peggy had to find some way to make money, too, because she and Jim were dangerously close to maxing out their credit cards. Soon, with neither of them working, they wouldn’t even be able to pay the rent.

  As the months passed, it became obvious that Jim Huden probably wasn’t coming back at all and that he’d gone back to his wife, Jean. His once-thriving computer support company had perished from neglect, and he had no business left to liquidate.

  Before Huden fell in love with Peggy Sue, he was voted “Businessman of the Year” in Punta Gorda. But now his life had crumbled into ashes.

  He was a man filled with anxiety. He told his Florida friends that he longed to go back to Las Vegas and Peggy Sue—but he didn’t leave Punta Gorda.

  He and Peggy Sue had been “passionately” in love, according to most of their friends. Their mutual attraction was so intense that it had seemed they would give up whatever they had to just to be together. Peggy had divorced Kelvin, and Jim seemed ready to split from Jean.

  What could have happened to keep Jim from flying back to Las Vegas? He had told Bill Hill that he intended to fly back to the gambling city.

  Why had Peggy let their relationship end so bleakly? Was she afraid contact with Jim might entangle her in a murder plot?

  Jim was afraid of something, but none of his buddies in Florida knew what it was. Jim and Jean Huden did a lot of drugs, but an arrest for possession of illegal substances wasn’t that intimida
ting, especially in the crowd of musicians that Jim ran with.

  Something, however, was haunting Jim Huden. His band members—the X-hibitionists—were growing annoyed with him because he missed so many gigs and practices.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  * * *

  PEGGY HAD TOLD DETECTIVES that she and Jim stayed at Dick Deposit’s home during the 2003 Christmas holidays. All of his friends knew that Deposit, a certified public accountant, was meticulous and paid great attention to the smallest details. If anyone would remember the most minute aspect of his friends’ visit, it would be Deposit. Now, on August 13, 2004, Plumberg went to Deposit’s apartment to interview him. Dick Deposit said he’d known Jim Huden since they were in fourth grade together. Peggy Thomas’s half sister, Sue Mahoney, was a dear friend of his. Deposit was aware that Jim had left his wife, Jean, months before, and moved to Las Vegas so he could be with Peggy.

  The accountant didn’t live in his house on Soundview Drive, but he often spent weekends there, usually with guests. And he allowed his friends to stay there. He left a key to the house with Dean and Cathy Hatt, and asked those who stayed in his guest room to return the key to the Hatts when they left.

  “The only person who goes to my house alone, though, is my girlfriend,” Deposit said. “Sometimes she goes there with her friends.”

  Deposit had heard the accusations and rumors about Peggy Sue Thomas and Russel Douglas’s puzzling murder. Almost everyone connected to either Peggy or Jim had.

  “Did Peggy deny those allegations?” Plumberg asked.

  “My feeling was that she thought it was a total fabrication,” the accountant answered.

  Deposit said he hadn’t seen Jim since the previous December, but he had seen Peggy a few weeks before at Sue Mahoney’s birthday party.

  “I think I saw both Peggy and Jim during the week of Christmas—probably that Sunday, the twenty-first,” he said. “Jim, Peggy, Sue Mahoney, and her daughter were all at my Soundview house for dinner.”

  Asked if he’d gone to his house any other time that week, Dick Deposit thought he had probably dropped in on Christmas Eve.

  “Do you have a room there that you’ve set aside for the guest room?”

  Deposit nodded.

  “Did you check the house to see if everything was okay?”

  “I probably looked around. I usually do.”

  “Did you have to make the bed in the guest room?”

  “I don’t recall that—no. But I think I would have noticed if the bed wasn’t made.”

  That was on December 24—a day after Peggy Sue Thomas and Jim Huden left the island. And yet, when they said they’d come back to leave the key on the twenty-sixth, Peggy Sue had been emphatic about having to dry the sheets and make the bed in the guest room.

  It was another small disparity, but the string of events had more and more gaps with question marks.

  * * *

  PLUMBERG DECIDED TO CLOCK the time and distance between the Marriott Hotel near Sea-Tac Airport to Douglas’s apartment in Renton. Although they had yet to find any present that either Jim or Peggy—or both—had given Russ, each had indicated that they had traveled from the hotel to the Mission Ridge Apartments. Peggy Sue’s version was that Jim had left the Marriott headed for Russ’s apartment, but had called within ten minutes saying he couldn’t find it.

  That was strange. The location was easy to find, particularly for someone who had lived in the Seattle area for years.

  When Mark Plumberg did test drives in normal traffic conditions, he found one route was 9.3 miles and took twenty-one minutes. The alternate route was 5.6 miles and required twelve minutes’ travel time.

  Next, he drove from Dick Deposit’s Soundview Drive home to the crime scene on Wahl Road. The distance was only 5.1 miles. Peggy had recalled that Jim left to get “smokes,” while she dried the guest room sheets and made the bed. In her first statement, she said Jim was gone for a half hour to forty-five minutes. Later, she corrected herself and told Plumberg that Huden had been gone only fifteen minutes.

  With a search warrant, Plumberg obtained Jim Huden’s December credit card bill. All the places he had used it correlated with his and Peggy’s travels on December 26. They were in Washington all day, traveling up and down I-5. By the twenty-seventh, a credit card slip showed that they bought gas at a Chevron station in Fresno, California. This would have been on their way back to Las Vegas.

  Jim Huden was no longer living with his wife, Jean, in Punta Gorda. When he left the first time in September, it wasn’t for good; he had simply taken a weekend trip, and soon neighbors saw his red car back in the Hudens’ driveway.

  But he was definitely gone a month or so later. No one in Florida recalled seeing him for weeks. Nor had he been seen in the Las Vegas area.

  Jean Huden claimed to have no knowledge of where he was, although she evinced concern that he might have been depressed enough to commit suicide.

  If he was alive, she was one of the most likely people who might have heard from him. Detectives wondered if it was possible that Peggy Sue had, too.

  Gerald Werksman, Peggy’s attorney, was present on August 30, 2004, when Shawn Warwick, Ed Wallace, Sue Quandt, and Mike Beech went to Henderson, Nevada, for yet another interview with Peggy.

  Peggy told them she was sure that Russ Douglas and Jim had never met each other until December 23, 2003, when they took the gift to him for Brenna.

  Warwick asked Peggy about the gun that they had shown her photos of the day before. “I did not know about the gun,” she said.

  He asked Peggy if she saw the gun go from Jim’s hands to “another person” who then gave the gun to the New Mexico sheriff.

  “I did not. I did not see a gun,” she said firmly. “I may have seen a pouch with a gun in it in February of this year.”

  * * *

  ON SEPTEMBER 15, 2004, Brenna Douglas came into the Island County Sheriff’s office in Langley carrying a huge wicker basket trimmed with ribbons, and filled with an assortment of fancy soaps, oils, and brushes. She explained that this was the gift she had received from Peggy Thomas. She said she thought she got it on Christmas Day from Peggy Sue herself, but she wasn’t sure.

  During September 2004, Mark Plumberg was able to get a temporary felony warrant and a BOLO (be on the lookout) alert as Jim Huden had seemingly vanished.

  And then the holiday season was once again approaching. On December 13, Mark Plumberg filed a follow-up report, saying, “I believe there is probable cause for the arrest of James E. Huden (b. 8/26/53) for the First Degree Murder—RCW 9A.32.030—of Russel A. Douglas (b. 9/09/71).”

  Soon it would be the first anniversary of Russ Douglas’s murder. Christmas lights in the small towns on Whidbey Island seemed to mock Plumberg, reminding him that his “persons of interest” were still walking free, and that one of them had disappeared completely.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  * * *

  ALWAYS RESOURCEFUL, PEGGY SUE Thomas had landed on her feet just as she found herself really broke in Las Vegas.

  Vickie’s Boyer’s boyfriend, Scott Mickelsen, recommended Peggy Sue to a company that operated an upscale limousine service. And she proved to be a natural. She drove wealthy clients and celebrities, and after one ride, most of her customers asked for her the next time they were in town. It didn’t hurt that her business cards were very seductive. Wearing a blouse cut down to her waist, Peggy Sue posed for her cards, draping herself over one of the limos.

  Before long she had a file full of prospective clients. They weren’t just men. Several couples always asked for her when they came to Las Vegas.

  It wasn’t particularly unusual for Peggy to get a thousand-dollar tip. She kept track of the restaurants, hotels, and extras that her repeat clients enjoyed. She provided expensive liquor, snacks, and other sought-after items in the limo she drove.

  Vickie Boyer looked after Peggy Sue’s daughters, since Peggy was often working until six in the morning. Taylor and Mariah w
ere used to their mother’s involvement in other matters, but they also knew she loved them devotedly.

  Her half sister Brenda had watched her nieces when she lived with Peggy in Las Vegas, and after she left, Peggy hired a series of women to watch over her daughters. Unfortunately, none of the sitters and housekeepers lasted more than a month before they quit.

  Vickie was shocked when she saw what was probably Peggy’s biggest tip or perhaps a gambling win: eighty-five hundred dollars in one-hundred dollar bills was stacked neatly on Peggy’s dresser.

  Whatever else she might be engaged in, Peggy adored her two daughters and they felt the same about her. “She has always loved her girls,” Vickie recalled. “And so does Kelvin. The girls are pretty, smart, and well behaved, for the most part. But when Brenda lived with her and she did something that Peggy had forbidden, they tattled on her.”

  Both Rhonda Vogl, Peggy’s half sister, and Vickie Boyer recalled that Brenda was “afraid” of Peggy. Peggy was probably more domineering with Brenda than she was with anyone. It got to the point where Brenda had to wait to make her morning coffee until Peggy said she could. She lasted about six months before she fled Nevada and returned to Whidbey Island.

  Peggy Sue Thomas was a complicated mix of both good and bad traits. Once she got on her feet financially, she could be very generous to someone who might be down on his or her luck.

  Vickie Boyer was sorry, though, to hear Peggy brag about how kind and giving she was. She seemed incapable of doing good deeds without taking credit for it.

  At one point, Peggy read about a girl who couldn’t afford a dress for her high school prom, and she arranged for her to have a four-hundred-dollar formal and a limo to arrive in. It was a very kind gesture.

  “It sort of spoiled the picture of her being so benevolent to people,” Vickie said wryly. “If she had just given someone something and kept it to herself, it would have been better. But she had to toot her own horn all the time. She told a lot of people about the poor girl who needed a dress and how she had stepped forward.”