by Ann Rule
Peggy Sue asked Vickie to spy on Mark, pore over his accounts and investments so she would know exactly what his assets were.
“I couldn’t do that,” Vickie said. “For the first time ever, I lied to Peggy and told her I couldn’t find any information on Mark.”
There was no telling how much Peggy might receive in a bitter divorce. Still, Vickie wasn’t worried that Peggy would physically hurt Mark. He could take care of himself.
That changed one night when Peggy Sue and Vickie were sitting in a local bar, talking to a regular there, a man named Ollie. Peggy had had a great deal to drink and she was upset about yet another disagreement with Mark.
After listening to her complain, Ollie—who was none too sober himself—offered, “I could take him out for you.”
“I have his gun,” Peggy said slowly. “A John Wayne hand gun. . .”
Ollie saw the humor in that. “Wouldn’t that be ironic,” he said, “to shoot a guy with his own gun?”
“But this time I’ll know to throw it in the water,” Peggy commented.
Vickie, who wasn’t drinking because she was the designated driver, heard that and suddenly everything came clear. She had never believed that Peggy was connected to the murder of Russel Douglas. Peggy Sue might need to be the belle of the ball wherever she went, and she could be mean sometimes, but Vickie had always put up with it because that was just Peggy Sue.
Afraid for Mark, Vickie took the gun away from Peggy.
“But I thought about it and thought about it. When she said that about throwing a gun in the water, I knew in my heart that she was really evil.”
Vickie feared for Mark Allen’s life, even more so when Peggy said to her, “If he dies, I’ll get everything. I’ll be the one telling the ranch hands what to do.”
Vickie called Allen and told him about the conversation in the bar. “And I have your gun; I got Peggy to give it to me,” she said. “And I told him about the things Peggy had said in the bar. Mark agreed to pick it up or have her bring it to him, but he himself was beginning to worry about how far his bride might go.
“In the end,” Vickie recalls, “he arranged to have a friend of his meet me in the parking lot at Wal-Mart and I gave him Mark’s gun.”
Fortunately, Mark remained in good shape. If indeed Peggy Sue had any plans to eliminate him and inherit his considerable wealth, she probably found herself blocked before she got very far with her nefarious plots. Ollie from the bar was a drunk, and he couldn’t be counted on to keep his mouth shut. As isolated as she was in Roswell, Peggy Sue didn’t have anyone else in her life who might accommodate her.
By mid-2008, things were no better in Peggy and Mark’s life. It became clear that their marriage was headed for oblivion. Peggy Sue called her longtime friend when she was very intoxicated and said she was afraid she was going to commit suicide. She still had a rifle in her possession.
“Someone has to take this gun away from me, Vickie. I don’t know what I might do.”
Things around the Double Eagle grew increasingly tense. Vickie was planning to resign her job with Mark and remove herself from the continuing battle. But before she could do that, she heard screams coming from the master bedroom. It was Peggy Sue calling to her.
“Vickie! Vickie!” she hollered. “Dial 911 right away!”
Vickie did.
When Peggy came running out toward Vickie, her blouse was ripped. Peggy cried that Mark had physically attacked her.
The Allens had been married for not quite eleven months. For all intents and purposes, it was over in the summer of 2008. When Peggy Sue’s domestic violence complaint against Mark went for settlement a week later in a New Mexico court, she assumed that he would be banned from the Double Eagle.
The judge shocked her when she said that it was Peggy Sue who had to move out. She wouldn’t even be allowed to get her belongings.
The judge relented when Peggy pleaded and said that Vickie would go with her to oversee that she did not take anything beyond her own possessions.
She had already taken far more than her share of Mark’s assets. In July 2008, Peggy Sue had her burgeoning bank account, the houseboat, the pontoon boat, several cars, jewelry, and probably valuables that no one knew about. Even so, it rankled her to think of the truck and the thirty-five thousand dollars that Mark had given to Vickie. She told her former best friend that the truck wasn’t really hers, and that the thirty-five thousand dollars for a mortgage down payment was meant to be a loan—not a gift.
Vickie went to Mark Allen and asked him if this was true. He shook his head, and immediately signed an affidavit that said the mortgage money was a gift. Then he said, “The truck is yours. It always will be. It always was.”
While Peggy Sue was banned from the Double Eagle Ranch, her mother, Doris, stayed on, comfortable in her fifth wheeler. Mark had always been good to Doris, and she was in no hurry to leave his generosity and protection. She urged Peggy to rethink what she was about to lose by going ahead with the divorce.
Annoyed, Peggy told her firmly: “This is not your divorce! This is mine!”
Few women would hug a divorce to her breasts and brag about it, refusing to share that “honor.” But, for Peggy Sue Stackhouse Harris Thomas Allen, the upcoming divorce was like a trophy she had won after carefully making her plans succeed.
She moved into her houseboat, the seagoing luxury pad. One of the first things she did was rename it. No longer, the Peggy Sue, its new name was Off the Hook.
Vickie Boyer and Peggy Sue exchanged some vituperative emails, however. Peggy was still angry about the truck and the thirty-five thousand dollars Mark had given to Vickie. Peggy considered them hers—and not Vickie’s. Vickie was upset because Peggy had rented a house to one of her daughters without consulting her and because she had finally had to accept that her caring friend had feet of clay. Peggy was badmouthing Vickie to anyone who would listen. She allegedly claimed that her longtime best friend was “a money-grubbing, bad bitch” who was only her friend to get at her money.
For most of the eight years they were best friends, Peggy really didn’t have that much money to speak of and Vickie had always stood by her.
In one email, Vickie wrote, “You never look at the whole circle, Peggy. I gave you plenty, did plenty, backed you up a hundred percent all the time and never did one thing to dishonor you. And you call me names, throw out words like people are nothing to you when all I was doing was covering your ass. You were so damn drunk you don’t even know what you said to strangers, let alone your friend. I brushed it off, but no more! Don’t fucking tell me about using people, Peggy. Don’t tell me how it was all me using you. You know better. You know I did everything you asked.”
Vickie recalled Peggy’s conversation with Ollie in the bar. “By the way, while you were disgustingly talking about taking Mark out, you said, ‘This time I will know to throw the gun in the water.’ ”
Peggy responded scathingly. “You are such a fucking liar, Vickie . . . Ollie jokingly asked if I wanted him to take Mark out and I said, ‘No way!’ I explained to him what I’d been through with Jim, and I didn’t want to hurt Mark. I wanted all of this shit to be over. You know damn well I never said anything about throwing anything in the water because I didn’t have anything to do with that shit Jim did . . .”
Peggy’s email was an example of how she had always before managed to convince Vickie that she was right. She insisted that Vickie knew “in her heart” that she had always been innocent, and that she had maintained that to everyone and never, ever said she was guilty.
But Peggy Sue had been intoxicated when she blurted out her regret about not getting rid of the gun—the gun that Jim Huden had used to shoot Russ Douglas. And Vickie was drinking ginger ale. She had no doubts at all about what Peggy had blurted out in the bar. That was why she had talked Peggy out of the gun and seen that it was returned to Mark Allen.
Peggy accused Vickie of keeping any potential friends away from her because Vic
kie was jealous.
“So, Vickie, throw out your low blow and try and threaten me with me saying something that I didn’t. That hurts more than anything, and you might as well just put a knife through my heart.”
Peggy told Vickie to keep the $35,000 and the truck Mark had given her, but she predicted that Vickie would never have integrity. Ironically, she emailed that she had finally discovered how wicked Vickie was.
“I guess I am the fortunate one to have finally seen it.”
Peggy Sue sarcastically wished that Vickie would be happy, and ended with a flourish of guilt, saying that she would never have any contact with Vickie—and blaming her once-faithful friend for hurting her (Peggy) more than anyone ever had.
“Remember what you told me. You only get in this life what you give. I hope you get yours . . .”
Peggy Sue had accused Vickie of subtly threatening her about the Ollie conversation, and now there was little question that Peggy was threatening, too. She sounded very angry—and frightened—that she would be connected to Jim Huden in the murder of Russel Douglas.
The two longtime friends never met again. Mark Plumberg included the exchange of emails in his constantly expanding case file.
Even after Peggy was banned from Mark Allen’s property, her mother, Doris, remained living in her cozy motor home at the Double Eagle Ranch. Always a superb baker, she took Mark cupcakes and cookies. She was, of course, a constant reminder of his unpleasant months with his red-haired bride, and Mark finally managed to get Doris to leave.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
* * *
PEGGY SUE HERSELF LAY low on her houseboat. She was terribly angry with Vickie, and felt betrayed. Looking back over so many years, Vickie seems to have always been in Peggy’s corner, even before the Ms. Washington contest.
But she had seen and heard too much of Peggy Sue’s machinations to continue to follow her every decree.
Suddenly, Peggy’s world had imploded on her. She had no husband, no best friend, no job, and few supporters. Taylor and Mariah were always there for their mother, Jimmie Stackhouse stayed close to his youngest daughter, and Kelvin Thomas, new girlfriend or not, was concerned about his ex-wife.
In the fall of 2008, Russel Douglas’s murder was now almost five years in the past, and once her fight with Vickie sputtered to an end, Peggy Sue didn’t seem outwardly concerned about the continuing investigation far away on Whidbey Island.
If she hadn’t been named more than a “person of interest” after so many years, it didn’t seem likely the sheriff’s detectives had any kind of evidence—circumstantial or physical—connecting her to Douglas’s death.
Perhaps Peggy Sue was unaware that the search warrant served on her house in Henderson, Nevada, in 2004 had revealed the operation manual for the Bersa Thunder handgun. Fingerprint experts were able to find Jim Huden’s prints on it—but they also found Peggy’s.
It wasn’t the strongest physical evidence; her prints could be explained away by a shrewd defense attorney who might say she had been dusting the coffee table where the pamphlet rested and unknowingly picked it up. Fingerprints in blood are dynamic physical evidence; these fingerprints didn’t begin to reach that level.
If Peggy Thomas had blood on her hands, it was only in a figurative sense.
Jim Huden had long since disappeared. Brenna Douglas had collected what was rumored to be about four hundred thousand dollars in Russ’s insurance and left Langley. She bought some expensive vehicles and a house, but didn’t stay long in any one place. Brenna had bought a house sometime in 2004, but it was foreclosed upon and sold at auction in August of the same year.
She moved from town to town around the state of Washington, and eschewed contact with the Island County investigators whenever she could.
* * *
PEGGY MAY HAVE BEEN somewhat dismayed in 2009 by the inopportune timing in divorcing Mark Allen. Reportedly, her alimony was a spare twenty-five hundred dollars a month, far less than what she had hoped to get. She did retain a number of assets she had managed to hide from Mark. Conservatively, they added up to more than a million dollars.
But Mark had been on his way up. In the spring of 2009, Mark’s horse Mine That Bird won the Kentucky Derby—and was headed for the Triple Crown.
Bird’s winning run was the second-largest upset in the 185-year history of the Kentucky Derby!
Had she stayed with Allen, Peggy Sue would certainly have enjoyed the Derby, the fancy clothes and ridiculous hats, mint juleps, and most of all, being in the winner’s circle as the wife of a winning owner. It would have been almost like reliving her Ms. Washington days, not to mention the purse that went with the win.
Three books were written about Mine That Bird’s courage, and a theatrical movie is still rumored to be in the works.
How Peggy Sue would have thrived in that exciting and inspiring Derby outcome, but she had burned those bridges.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
* * *
JIMMIE STACKHOUSE’S FAMILY—OR RATHER, families—had known enough upheaval and tragedy to make their lives seem like a convoluted soap opera. As adults, Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda were more concerned with their husbands and children than they were about the Sturm und Drang of their half sister Peggy Sue’s life. She was nothing like they were, even though they shared the same father.
And Jimmie’s first three daughters were still trying to cope with their own loss at the hands of a vicious sex killer. Fourteen years before, they had found answers to many of their questions about Mary Ellen Stackhouse. That helped a lot, but they still bore scars—particularly Brenda.
Brenda had had profound post-traumatic stress disorder for all of her life. She still screamed in her sleep and suffered terrible nightmares.
Her sisters worried about her, but weren’t sure how to help. They, too, were survivors of a homicide victim, but Lana and Rhonda were able to deal with the pain more effectively.
In October 1995, Rhonda, who was a superior court clerk in Boundary County, Idaho, was watching television with the rest of the court staff as they waited to hear the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder trial.
As reporters did a summary of how Nicole Simpson had perished, Rhonda realized that that was probably how her mother had died.
“The details on the Simpson case made me sick,” she recalls. “And then O.J. was acquitted. I wondered if whoever killed my mother was still in prison—or if he was wandering around free.”
Rhonda and her sisters were consumed with the need to know the things they had never learned about Mary Ellen Stackhouse. Would they feel better or worse if they found out what had really happened?
They decided that it was worth the chance. Rhonda began to surf the Internet, looking for her mother’s name. She found a link there to the San Jose Mercury News, and a column called “Ask Andy Bruno.”
It had been such a long time—more than thirty years—but Rhonda wrote to Bruno, wondering if anyone on the paper had any information about a crime so far in the past.
Bruno headed for the microfiche for newspapers in the sixties, and found an article written by Ed Pope.
“He still works here,” he told Rhonda. “He wrote the original story about your mother’s death.”
Rhonda says, “I talked to Pope, read the newspaper coverage from 1963, and I had proof that my mother had existed.”
* * *
FOR THE FIRST TIME, Lana, Rhonda, and Brenda saw the article that dominated the front page of the San Jose Mercury News on June 5, 1963. The headline was seven inches wide and stretched across the top of the page: HUNT SEX FIEND WHO KILLED MOTHER OF 6.
They recognized their mother’s picture from seeing it in an old album. She was a lovely dark-haired woman wearing a cashmere sweater and a double string of pearls. The woman in the photo was years younger when she’d died than they were now.
A smaller headline said: CHILDREN FIND BODY OF VICTIM, YOUNG WOMAN BEATEN, KNIFED.
And there they all were, lined
up on their back patio steps, squinting toward a photographer for the Mercury News. They had never seen a picture of themselves at that age; there were photos later—but not in 1963, not any they had seen.
Tommy, 8, Mike, 7, Robby, 18 months, Lana, 5, Rhonda, 2, and Brenda, 4.
Their brothers and Lana half smiled, although they clearly had little idea of what had happened to their world. Robby, in Lana’s small arms, was crying, and Rhonda and Brenda had identical expressions of shock and suspicion.
It seemed a transgression of their privacy to line them up that way, six little kids whose mother had been violently raped and murdered only twenty-four hours earlier.
Rhonda wondered who had allowed them to be thrust into the strobe light of the photographer’s camera. Probably not their father; Jimmie was on his way home from Tennessee at that point. Perhaps one of the neighbors whom the paper said was taking care of them? Those neighbors’ quotes in the paper showed that they, too, were in shock. In the end, she knew it was the newspaper’s cameramen who had snuck up through the neighbors’ yards to get photos.
None of the trio of sisters remembered that particular moment on that particular day.
Thirty-two years later, it hurt to read the details about the very questions they had been afraid to ask. But there was also the beginning of cleansing. Until they read that newspaper article, the three sisters had all felt an amorphous terror, something waiting in the shadows that they couldn’t see clearly, something that frightened them. Of them all, Brenda had blocked any memory of her mother’s leaving.
She seemed to be doing all right as they set out to learn more and to honor Mary Ellen in whatever way they could.
There were things printed that would not have been allowed in the media of the twenty-first century, things revealed that could have interfered with a murder probe. Fortunately, in their mother’s case, they hadn’t.