Practice to Deceive

by Ann Rule

  Deputy Coroner Richard Mayne told reporters that Mary Ellen had received “at least seven severe blows on the back of the head resulting in the basal skull fracture.”

  He added that a Cutco steak knife, taken from her own kitchen, had been used to stab her in the throat, severing her trachea while she was still alive. Her slacks were ripped from her body and dangled from her ankles. Her flower-print blouse was “in disarray.”

  Investigating officers had located a cast-off blood spot on the wall, and another stain on the living room chair. Although she had perished from exsanguination, all of her blood drained from her body, the red rug beneath her had absorbed that blood, disguising the scene so that her children weren’t aware of how grisly it was.

  There were remarkably few signs of a struggle. Mary Ellen’s cup of coffee was still precariously balanced on the arm of the chair.

  * * *

  AS THEY READ THE newspaper articles, Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda knew that they had to go back to San Jose. Most of all, they had to visit their mother’s grave, to be with her in any way they could.

  And they could not just glean what they could from old newspapers; they needed to look into her killer’s eyes. Maybe they could say something to him that would make him know what anguish he had caused.

  When they learned that Gilbert Thompson, who was forty-seven in 1995, was about to have another parole hearing, their minds were made up.

  “We needed some kind of closure, even though we knew there could never be true closure,” Rhonda said. “This would be our therapy.”

  Their half sisters—Sue and Peggy Sue—met the trio at Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle as they landed there after a flight from Idaho and waited to catch a plane to San Jose. Sue and Peggy Sue, of course, had no blood bond with Mary Ellen Stackhouse; Doris Matz was their mother.

  Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda boarded the plane headed for a place they scarcely remembered.

  They found the funeral home that had overseen their mother’s funeral services, and learned that she was buried in Golden Gate Cemetery in San Bruno. They went there first and pored over the huge registry, hoping they could find Mary Ellen’s grave.

  “We found it quickly,” Rhonda said. “It was just off the main road. I had brought a wreath all the way from Bonners Ferry, and I carried it to my mother’s grave.”

  They knelt beside the headstone and posed for pictures. They traced the names and dates from the grave marker with onionskin paper.

  And then they poured some of Rob’s ashes on his mother’s grave.

  They gasped as they saw the steel pins mixed in with his cremains. These were put in to brace Robby’s broken bones after he’d been run over by the bus so many years before.

  So many losses. So many tears.

  They were shocked to learn that Gilbert Thompson had not been in prison over all the years since his conviction. In the late seventies, the state of California released a number of prisoners on parole. Correctional facilities had become more and more crowded, and even some “lifers” were being considered for parole. “Rehabilitation” was the magic word and life didn’t mean life literally.

  William P. Hoffman, chief assistant district attorney of Santa Clara County, was appalled when his office was notified in the summer of 1977 that the California Men’s Colony was about to “set” Gilbert Richard Thompson’s term.

  “When I prosecuted Mr. Thompson, Judge Callahan sentenced him to life in the state penitentiary. I most respectfully suggest to you that this is the proper term, and this is the term which ought to be set.

  “Mr. Thompson has a severe disability,” Hoffman wrote sarcastically. “He thinks about knifing women and girls and having intercourse with them. Unfortunately, he doesn’t just think about it, he does it.

  “Releasing people like Thompson into society is something like releasing an elephant in a china shop. It is completely predictable that other innocent people are going to be killed and, in the analogous case, a lot of china is going to be broken.”

  Hoffman offered to furnish those making a parole decision with eight-by-ten color copies of Gilbert Thompson’s “handiwork” to help them understand what he had been found guilty of thus far.

  His warning did no good. Gilbert Thompson, then in his early thirties, had been released on parole after only fourteen years. He lasted just forty-three days before he grabbed a woman in a mall parking lot in broad daylight. She screamed and clung to her steering wheel as he threatened her with a knife and tried to wrestle her out of her car.

  It took nine bystanders to pull him off the terrified victim. Clearly, Gilbert Thompson was not a candidate for rehabilitation and he never would be.

  He went back to the San Luis Obispo prison, but remained eligible for parole every five years. In prison, he earned a college degree, and although his college professor knew of his record, she married him!

  When that didn’t work out, he began to court her mother.

  * * *

  BRENDA, RHONDA, AND LANA drove next to San Luis Obispo to attend Gilbert Thompson’s 1995 parole hearing. Exhausted, they stayed in a small motel there. In the morning, they would finally see the man who had stolen their mother from them.

  He was there, monitored by two guards. The room was almost empty except for themselves and the three parole officers who sat at a table facing the prisoner.

  The charges against Thompson were read, and they heard their mother’s name—Mary Ellen Stackhouse—as the victim. It somehow made her more alive to them. She wasn’t just a name on a headstone or a blurred memory.

  “That’s when my grief really started,” Rhonda says. “We finally had proof that our mother had existed, and that she was a victim of murder!

  “My mother was real!”

  The sisters had decided to let Rhonda make their statement opposing any parole for Gilbert Thompson. When she began to speak, he averted his eyes.

  “You look at me,” she said angrily.

  Thompson looked up briefly.

  “There was no one there behind his eyes,” she recalled. “They were just blank.”

  The female member of the parole board warned Rhonda, “You cannot speak directly to the offender.”

  The parole board put Gilbert Thompson through the mill, demanding that he answer embarrassing questions. He finally admitted that he had gone home after he murdered Mary Ellen Stackhouse and masturbated in his garage, still excited because he had realized his fantasy.

  The prisoner whined that it wasn’t fair—that the whole case had been “sensationalized,” turning everyone against him.

  “Mr. Thompson,” the woman on the parole board spoke again. “How could anyone do more to sensationalize this story? You did that.”

  Mary Ellen’s daughters’ cheeks were wet with tears, but they were resolute, strong even in their grief. Lana spoke, too, her words sharp as actual blows as they blasted Gilbert Thompson. These were not helpless little toddlers anymore; these were strong women.

  It took only a few hours for the decision to come down. Parole was denied.

  When the sisters were led to a private room, the parole board members smiled at them. “Ladies, that was all done for you—because he’s not going anywhere.”

  Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda drove back to San Jose, passing acres and acres of orange and lemon groves. It was a beautiful day, a wonderful drive, and they felt that an oppressive weight had finally been lifted off their shoulders and their hearts.

  But there was something more the three sisters needed to do.

  Rhonda recalled, “We had gone to the funeral home, to our mother’s grave, and to her killer’s parole hearing, but that wasn’t enough.

  “I said, ‘I want to go back to the house. We’re here in San Jose . . .’ We found our old house. I started up that front walk, with Lana and Brenda behind me, and I knocked on the door.

  “When a woman answered, I said, ‘Hi, we used to live here when we were little’—and she suddenly burst into tears, and said, ‘I knew you w
ould come back someday.’ ”

  Gloria Perez invited them in, leading them to the living room where their mother had been murdered so long ago. The furniture and the carpet were different, of course, and yet they had some recall of being in this room a very long time ago.

  Gloria, who looked to be about fifty, explained that she had raised five children there.

  “She told us, ‘We didn’t know what was wrong with the house.’ ” Rhonda recalled. “My husband kept saying, ‘I’m not gonna stay here—there’s something wrong. I don’t know what it is—but I’m not going to stay here.’

  “And then he left me and moved out,” Gloria told them. “I kept seeing shadows in the house. I’ve lived here nineteen years, but we weren’t the first buyer after your family left. Realtors didn’t have to tell house buyers about the history of houses back in those days.

  “We used to hear footsteps. The kids would hear them, too, and I’d tell them it was just the heater thumping. One time, I heard a noise in the kitchen, and I said, ‘I’m not scaring you and I don’t want you scaring me.’ But I’m sure she isn’t really here to scare me.”

  Gloria told them that one night about eleven, there was a knock on the door and they found a woman standing there, holding a rosary and a cross. The woman said, “You need to get out of this house!”

  Gloria, startled, had gasped, “What? Why?”

  “Someone was murdered here. Something evil happened here.”

  “I told her to stop,” Perez said, “because she was frightening my children. She looked at me with sad eyes and then she turned around and left. She just came out of nowhere that night. I had never seen her before—and I never saw her again.”

  Gloria Perez said she went next door the next morning and talked to her neighbor Madeline Cassen to see if she had any idea what the woman was talking about. Of course she did. Madeline was the same next-door neighbor the Stackhouse children had run to when they found their mother murdered in 1963. Madeline was the pretty young woman with the puffy blond hair. She was in her sixties now, but she hadn’t forgotten anything about that ghastly morning in June.

  “Apparently, we’d somehow gotten dressed,” Rhonda recalled. “I don’t know if that’s true or not—all I can remember are the pajamas that our mother made for us. But we were good little soldiers and we marched over to Madeline’s. Our mother taught us to be that way.”

  Gloria Perez said Madeline Cassen told her about what had happened there in the early summer of 1963.

  That could explain the shadows, her husband’s refusal to live in the house, and her own strange feelings of anxiety. Finally, she told Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda that she had contacted a priest and asked to have her house blessed.

  “After that, we weren’t afraid any longer.”

  There was no way to find out who the mysterious woman with the rosary was. Another of the neighbors from the sixties? Someone a little deranged who had read the newspaper articles about Mary Ellen’s murder? Some member of her killer’s family?

  Or could it have been the ghost of Mary Ellen herself, her spirit somehow back from the other side? That, of course, was far-fetched, but the sisters were learning how caring and loving their mother had been in life. In some way that was impossible to explain, could she have been watching out for the new family that replaced her own in the house of shadows?

  Gloria’s daughter wasn’t there when the Stackhouse sisters visited, but later she wrote to them.

  When I heard you were all here, I couldn’t believe it. My mom gets so emotional about your mom, you, and your family. There’s a connection. When I was little, and I was afraid, I would talk to your mom sometimes. I just knew she would look after me—us—and she wouldn’t let anything happen to us because of what happened to her. Our house was unhappy for so many years. It wasn’t because of Mary Ellen, but because of what happened to her.

  Gloria’s daughter wanted to stay in touch, and Rhonda sent her and her mother a photo of Mary Ellen.

  “All these years,” Gloria told Mercury News reporter Ed Pope, “I’ve wondered what happened to those kids. And now I’ve seen her [Mary Ellen’s] face, I feel complete. Maybe now that her kids have been here, she can rest.”

  What they had learned so far was oddly comforting to Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda. They realized that there were still people who cared about their mother, and had never forgotten her.

  It was as if long-locked floodgates were opening.

  “My first email to the Mercury News column ‘Action Line,’ ” Rhonda said, “drew so many responses from people who had known my father or my mother.”

  Rhonda wrote to everyone who was involved—the DA, detectives.

  The “Dear Action Line” column received many responses from the Stackhouses’ neighbors and friends who had lived in San Jose in the early sixties.

  “Our children played together,” one began. “We didn’t know what happened to you. You were just gone.”

  Through the following years, Rhonda and her sisters heard from people who were able to fill in some of their early history. This mattered a great deal to them.

  In 2002, Lana Galbraith and one of her cousins returned to San Jose to witness yet another parole hearing for Gilbert Thompson. He was close to fifty now and had been turned down for all his petitions to have his sentence reduced. Prison psychologists still considered him dangerous, particularly after his one early release where he attacked a woman only weeks later.

  Thompson looked up as Lana and her cousin entered the room, grimaced, and asked to leave the room. Remembering how he had been castigated and shamed before, he was ready to withdraw his plea for parole rather than face his victim’s family again.

  Gilbert Thompson died at the California Men’s Colony prison shortly before Christmas in 2004.

  Jimmie Stackhouse’s first three daughters heard from their San Jose neighbors and their mother’s friends occasionally over the next eight years. As late as 2012, Rhonda Vogl received an email from a woman who worked for a university in Kansas. She had come close to living the same nightmare the Stackhouse children endured.

  “Every once in a while, I’ve done a search on the Internet for Gilbert Thompson,” Cathleen Wilkinson wrote. “And I found the story about how you and your sisters confronted him—”

  Cathleen explained that her own mother had been attacked and beaten by Thompson a few months before he murdered Mary Ellen Stackhouse. The assault had happened at the Fort Ord military base.

  “My mom was on her way to walk to work, which was probably a couple of miles away across a wide open field [with a] dense shrub area. Every day, she took our German shepherd with her so they could both get some exercise. On the one and only day that she did not take our dog, a ‘soldier’ came out of the trees and came up behind her. When she turned around to see who it was, he hit her in the head with a huge wooden two-by-four, knocking her to the ground. He drug [sic] her back to the trees, strangling her so badly that she was fading in and out of consciousness. I remember her telling me that she’d always heard people say that when someone was dying, they could hear music. She said she could hear music and was seeing white horses coming to pick her up.”

  Although her mother had died recently, Cathleen wrote that she sensed her mom had always felt guilty that her testimony wasn’t enough to get Thompson convicted before he could creep into Mary Ellen’s home.

  Rhonda and Cathleen exchanged many emails and calls. Facing the ugly past together helped the heretofore strangers cope with it.

  That is so often true; survivors of victims can understand and empathize with what more fortunate people can’t begin to understand. There is shock, grief, tragic acceptance after losing someone to murder—but there really is no closure. It is a concept that is alien to survivors. They do go on, but they never forget the time when their lives were forced into a different direction, when everything changed.

  PART EIGHT

  * * *

  Arrest and Punishment
/>   CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  * * *

  AS TIME PASSED, MARK PLUMBERG of the Island County Sheriff’s Office never gave up on tracking down Jim Huden or knowing where Peggy Sue Thomas was. While he handled day-by-day assignments, Plumberg kept the missing suspect in the back of his mind, and worked on possible leads and theories whenever he could. Island County didn’t have that many detectives and they were kept busy with more current cases.

  Plumberg didn’t believe that Jim Huden had committed suicide as Jean Huden sometimes hinted. Unless he was in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, it was probably a lot easier to keep a few steps ahead of the investigators who were tracking him than it was to commit suicide without having your body discovered over seven years.

  It was, however, quite possible that the wanted man had somehow managed to get out of the country. If Jim had had help, it would have been achievable.

  Often it seemed that it would take the next thing to a miracle to find Jim Huden.

  The year 2011 was to be a watershed in the long-unsolved murder of Russel Douglas. As the Island County detectives had long suspected, Jim Huden’s wife, Jean, had known where he was since late 2004, but she had gone to great effort to keep that information to herself.

  But Jean continued to have a drug problem, and a very long rap sheet that listed more than twenty drug and larceny arrests. In the spring of 2011, she was arrested again on drug charges, and she faced a long prison sentence in Florida if she was convicted.

  She had a choice. Authorities in Florida were aware of the Washington investigators’ continuing search for Jim. Jean was offered a deal: if she would reveal where her husband was, she was likely to get a much-reduced sentence on her own criminal charges. If she didn’t, she could go away for years.

  Jean wouldn’t be able to help Jim if she was in prison, but most of all, she valued her freedom. Her only chance to avoid prison was to divulge where Jim was—if he was still alive—and to agree to cooperate when he went on trial for murder.