by Ann Rule
Patterson nodded, but he wasn’t sure about this guy. Beverly and Patty were sure taking the long way around if they were going to Wenatchee. They could have caught a ride north on 97 to Wenatchee. Vancouver meant backtracking—but then, hitchhikers can’t be choosers.
“So,” Patterson continued, “did the girls talk to you much?”
“Not really. They were quiet—almost antisocial—until I said I knew about apple picking, and then they had a lot of questions. But they told us what their names were: Bev Johnson and Patty Weidner.”
Maybe the man from Vancouver—whose name Hunt didn’t know—had been a nice guy and driven them more than 200 miles from his home to be kind, or maybe he had expected “repayment” for his trouble. If the latter were true, he had been disappointed. Hunt said they all slept in their own sleeping bags, and the girls’ dogs growled at anyone who came close to them.
There were no hard feelings apparently. “I bought breakfast for all of us Friday morning,” Hunt said. “The guy who gave us a ride headed back to Vancouver. I think he said he worked in some kind of factory there. The girls said they wanted the spot in front of the restaurant, so I walked about a mile up the road. I had to wait an hour, but I got a ride into Cashmere. I never did see the girls come by, so I don’t know who they got a ride with.”
“Do you think it’s possible the guy from Vancouver changed his mind and came back?” Patterson asked.
“I don’t think so. He was pretty mellow, and he seemed anxious to get to work. They were going about 70 miles north and he wouldn’t have wanted to take them that much farther. And those dogs wouldn’t have let him get near Patty or Bev.”
In the end, the friendly driver’s whereabouts didn’t really matter. Someone else had seen the girls later on Friday.
Detective Tillman Wells talked with a long-haul truck driver who felt sure he’d seen Patty and Beverly on Friday, September 26.
“It was right about a quarter to one in the afternoon,” the witness told Wells. “I was on Maple Street in the north end of Wenatchee and I saw these two pretty girls with backpacks, and their dogs were with them.”
“Could you describe them?” Wells asked.
“One girl was blond and the other had kind of brownish hair. See, I read about them being killed, and I saw that picture of their dog in the paper. It was the gray dog. But when I saw them, they had a kind of reddish dog with them too. Both dogs had red bandannas around their necks. I saw them all close up because the girls crossed the street right in front of me.”
He gave Wells information that hadn’t been in the paper. It placed Patty, Beverly, Charlie, and Silas in Wenatchee on Friday afternoon.
After that, there was only silence. The calls of actual sightings dried up. If anyone had seen the girls between Friday afternoon and Tuesday, no one came forward to talk about it. The Chelan detectives got calls all right, but they were all about weirdos who either lived in the Wenatchee-Chelan area, or who were rumored to have traveled through. None of the calls had even tenuous links to Patty Weidner and Beverly Johnson.
Who picked them up near Highway 97 and gave them a ride 35 miles up the road? And how did they end up miles off that road? It was true that camping spots thinned out as the highway wound its way north, but the girls should have gotten a ride all the way into Chelan. They still had six or seven hours of daylight after the trucker saw them, plenty of time to travel only 40 miles.
Patty and Beverly had probably believed in their own invincibility because they’d never gotten into trouble before and counted on their ability to judge character and their dogs’ fierce loyalty. But no one can really discern who is “normal” by looking at outward appearance. Between Wenatchee and the Old Downey Road, the girls had met someone who looked safe, which, of course, is the terrible danger in hitchhiking. Some of the most sadistic creatures on earth look normal, drive new cars, and troll for hitchhikers.
A few days later, the final lab reports came in. One of the victims had had a single dead sperm cell in her vagina, but that could have come from consensual intercourse back in Lincoln City. It might or might not mean that she’d been raped. As far as comparing it to a suspect’s blood type, it was 1975 and DNA matches were unheard of—still something out of science fiction.
But just when the case appeared to have reached a brick wall, information came from an unexpected source. On October 7, Detective Jerry Monroe took a phone call from Constable Keith Johnson of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Johnson said his department had a man in custody who had been talking about murdering two girls near Wenatchee.
“You have anything like that down there?”
“Yeah,” Monroe said. “We sure do. What’s he saying?”
“The guy first said his name was Maneto Minelli*—but he’s actually Jack Stolle. We have him on forgery and possession of stolen property charges. He says he and a friend from Albany, Oregon, killed two girls by cutting their throats….”
Monroe signaled to Bill Patterson to pick up a phone.
“We’ve got him up here,” Johnson said, “because he tried to open up a bank account with checks stolen from a man in Vancouver, Washington. Then he started talking about killing some girls near Chelan. He gave us four different names and he claims to be the son of some family living in Chelan.”
“Don’t let him loose,” Patterson said. “We’re going to have men on the road up there in about five minutes.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll keep him right here for you.”
Detectives Tillman Wells and Jerry Monroe drove to Calgary the next day, and they were led to an interview room where Jack Lee Stolle, 34, waited. Stolle had a long “rap sheet” for arrests in Washington, Oregon, and California, but he didn’t look like a hardened criminal. He was a slight blond man with rather feminine features and a “cookie duster” moustache.
Stolle’s recollection of meeting Beverly Johnson and Patty Weidner warred with what the Chelan investigators already knew.
“Me and this guy I know—Rudy Snell*—met these gals near Portland and we drove them west to Hood River, Oregon. The four of us spent the night together, but when Rudy and me woke up, they were gone and so was fifteen hundred dollars in cash that belonged to us.”
It was possible, Wells and Monroe knew, that there was some truth in Stolle’s story. The victims had been in The Dalles, which was 15 miles east of Hood River. But that was where they got a ride with the Vancouver man who drove them all the way to Blewett Pass. Wells and Monroe didn’t say anything, but let Stolle keep talking.
“We decided to go and look for them and get our money back. We crossed the Columbia at Biggs Junction and drove into Washington. And we saw them again at a rest stop, where they were trying to hitch a ride. It was somewhere between Yakima and Ellensburg. We picked them up again.”
“What day was this?” Wells asked.
“Lemme see. That was the twenty-eighth. We all smoked pot, drank beer and wine. We were in Wenatchee and then we went to this tavern in Entiat.”
Stolle had wound his story around so that he was only about 30 miles from the homicide scene, even though the first part of his statement seemed to be a patent lie. The victims had found a ride in The Dalles, but not with him—or Snell.
“What were their names—these girls you met?”
“Maude and Frannie.”
The wrong names. Wells and Monroe exchanged glances, but they didn’t comment. The girls from Lincoln City might have deliberately given strangers made-up names. “So, what did you do when the tavern closed?”
“It was Rudy who thought of it. He whispered to me that we should ‘off’ the girls because they stole all that money from us. Me, I thought he was only kidding.”
Jack Stolle said they had driven north on 97 and found a spot near Chelan where they decided to camp out. They had all spread out their sleeping bags as Rudy got angrier and angrier about being ripped off. “He was really mad at Maude and Frannie,” Stolle remembered.
“Me, I was so ston
ed on weed and booze that he was already slashing them before I knew what happened. One girl was dead already, and he made me help him kill Frannie.”
It was a weird confession, but Stolle had just enough of the details and times right to be believable. Still, Wells and Monroe wondered if there really was a Rudy Snell, or if Stolle was making him up to take the blame off himself.
Patty and Beverly had been in Wenatchee on September 25, so why would they have retraced their steps 300 miles back to Hood River, Oregon? They’d almost reached Chelan on Friday, but Stolle was telling the detectives that he had met them way back in Oregon on the 27th. It just didn’t make sense.
They were sure, however, that he had been at the crime scene in the tumbledown shack. He knew too much not to have been there. His work boots closely matched a blurred print they had found in the sand outside the shack and cast into a moulage, but the edges weren’t sharp enough to make it a positive match.
The investigators suspected that Stolle was probably “confabulating”—taking things that were true and mixing them up with some other time in his life or in his imagination. At any rate, they needed to get him back into the U.S. and to Chelan County to figure out what part he really had played in the death of the two young women. Ex-tradition proceedings began.
Bill Patterson’s team of detectives found that Jack Stolle was, indeed, familiar with the area where the girls had been found. He had worked for a family named Minelli who owned a farm near Chelan. They had a son named Maneto, but he was accounted for. Stolle had simply taken his name as an alias.
The Minellis said that Stolle and his uncle had come to work for them four years earlier. He had been a good worker, and they hired him again the next summer. “He worked until late August,” Nick Minelli said, “and he said he had to go into town to see to some legal papers. And he was gone for a whole month! The next time we heard from him, he was calling from Idaho. He needed eighteen dollars for bus fare to get back to Chelan. We sent it to him.”
“Where did he say he’d been?” Tillman Wells asked.
“He didn’t talk much about that. Later, we found out he’d spent twenty-eight days in jail in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He never did say what for.”
The Minellis were a very forgiving family and they hired Stolle again. He’d then worked until November 1972.
“So the next time we heard from him was in February 1973, and he was calling from Boise, Idaho. He said he’d been sentenced to twenty years in prison for forgery. He wrote to us from prison because he wanted to apologize to us for stealing one of our radios.”
“You ever hear from him again?”
“Three years later—in July, this year. He wanted to come back and work for us, but we’d had enough. We turned him down—and that’s the last we heard from him.”
So Stolle had known the area between Wenatchee and Chelan very well, and he’d been there as recently as late July. One sad discovery indicated that he may have been very close around the time Beverly Johnson and Patty Weidner were murdered. Silas, the missing red setter mix, was finally found dead. Maybe Stolle had taken the dog with him when he left the dead girls, or maybe the frightened animal had followed the only human alive out from the desolate hills. Railroad workers found the remains of the dog on the railroad tracks near Stayman Flats, very close to the Minelli farm. Although, weeks later, there was little left of the dog’s body, the detectives were able to identify it by its hair and scraps of the red bandanna, which had the same print as the one Charlie wore.
Detective Chief Bill Patterson called the Hood River, Oregon, Police Department to see if there might really be a man named Rudy Snell. To Patterson’s surprise, Snell turned out to be an actual person. A Hood River investigator located him and reported back that Snell knew Jack Stolle and had worked in the orchards in Hood River—not in Chelan—with Jack Stolle.
When Patterson checked the Hood River orchard, he learned that Stolle and Snell had been hired as temporary pickers, and that they’d worked on September 26 and 27. They had, however, failed to show up on Sunday the 28th.
“They came in on the 29th,” the orchard foreman said, “but they only picked up their checks and left. We haven’t seen them since.”
Rudy Snell told the orchard foreman that he lived in Albany, Oregon, and that his wife was sick, so he’d had to go home. Oregon State Police verified that Snell did live in Albany. Armed with a search warrant, they brought in criminalists from the Oregon State Police Crime Lab to process his vehicle. Snell didn’t protest. Actually, he couldn’t; he was in jail in Albany on drug charges.
While Jack Stolle was short and slight, Rudy Snell was a huge man who weighed more than 250 pounds.
Detective Don Danner flew to Oregon to interview Snell, who was very cooperative. He said he’d met Jack Stolle for the first time in early September, and they’d picked fruit together in Hood River off and on during the month. They had picked on the 26th and 27th, getting off about 3 P.M. on that Saturday.
“We never left the Hood River area Saturday or Sunday,” he said.
That seemed to shoot down the Chelan County investigators’ firm belief that they had found the killer or killers of Beverly Johnson and Patty Weidner. But they weren’t ready to give up.
They weren’t sure Rudy Snell was telling the truth, or even if he had his mental timetable right. He did remember that he and Jack Stolle had met two girls, but his description of them didn’t sound at all like the two murder victims. “We drove over to Biggs Junction and spent the night, but we were back in Hood River before noon on Sunday. I worked on my car on Sunday afternoon, and we started picking again on Monday morning.”
The orchard foreman, however, had said the men had come in on Monday only to get their paychecks. And he wasn’t sure of the time.
Rudy Snell hadn’t actually seen Jack Stolle, according to his story, at least, from before noon on Sunday, September 28 until sometime Monday. “Jack quit the orchard on Monday—he said his stomach hurt. He told me he might go to California or Wenatchee. I left him at the bus stop about eight Monday night, and I went home to Albany.”
The results of the processing of Snell’s car were startling. The state police criminalists found many dog hairs as they examined the contents of their vacuum cleaner bags. The hairs were gray or white. Snell explained that away easily enough; he owned a Samoyed, and the hairs were from his own dog. Hair comparisons rarely yield absolute results, even under a scanning electron microscope. They can only be deemed microscopically alike in class and characteristics.
Rudy Snell acknowledged that he had once picked apples in the Wenatchee area. “But that was seven years ago,” he said, “and I haven’t been back there since.”
He willingly took a polygraph test and Oregon State Police experts said the results indicated he was telling the truth about not being in Washington State for years. Nor did his blood pressure, breathing rate, pulse, or galvanic skin response suggest that he had killed Beverly Johnson or Patty Weidner, and he clearly didn’t know who had. He showed no deception at all during any questioning about the Chelan County murders.
That left Jack Stolle as the lone suspect. Even so, Stolle would have to have adhered to a very tight schedule if he had killed the young women. It was about 170 miles from Hood River to the murder site. If Snell was remembering accurately, Stolle had been out of his sight from sometime Sunday morning until sometime Monday. Sunday was the 28th of September, the date Dr. Bonafaci believed the women had died. Stolle would have had to have caught a good hitch that took him all the way to Chelan. It was possible that he knew about the shack and had gone there to sleep Sunday night, hoping to go to the Minelli farm in the morning to ask for one more chance to work for them. But he would have found Beverly and Patty asleep in his secret camp….
The detectives found the motel in Biggs Junction where Stolle had stayed Wednesday and Thursday nights, September 24 and 25, paying for his stay with stolen checks. He checked out the morning of the 26th but he’d pick
ed apples nearby that day and the next.
One thought kept coming back to the Chelan County investigators. It had to be more than mere coincidence that Jack Stolle had been within 15 miles of where Beverly and Patty caught their ride north on September 24. It was quite possible that he had spotted them and stopped to talk as they waited for a ride. Nobody knew how long they had stood there before they met Jeff Hunt and the man who gave them a ride to Mineral Springs.
Hunt had told the detectives that the women weren’t friendly until he brought up the subject of finding orchard jobs. Jack Stolle was also an old hand at apple picking, and he might well have told Beverly and Patty about the Minelli farm and the shack.
The thought of two pretty girls alone out there so far from civilization could well have festered and churned in Stolle’s mind over the next three days, enough to draw him back to his old stomping grounds.
Stolle’s stories to the detectives were a strange inter-weaving of sexual fantasy and fact, and it was difficult to tell where one stopped and the other began. And, unlike Rudy Snell, Jack Stolle “blew ink all over the walls” when he took a lie detector test. His responses were so emotional and chaotic that it was difficult to interpret the tracings on the polygraph. That, combined with his knowledge about details of the girls’ murder and the shack where it happened, was enough for the Chelan County Prosecutor to charge him with murder. He was scheduled to go on trial in March 1976.
Given Stolle’s ramblings, the public defender who represented him was inclined to offer a plea of innocent by reason of insanity. However, he first decided to ask for another lie detector test. Washington State’s legendary polygraph expert, Dewey Gillespie, of the Seattle Police Department, agreed to administer it. Both the prosecution and defense stipulated that the results could be used in Stolle’s trial.
The results of the second test hit like a bombshell. Stolle passed. Where only a few months before he had seemed to have extensive guilty knowledge of the victims’ deaths, Jack Stolle now barely reacted to Gillespie’s questions.