by Ann Rule
Two years later, Stan Tappan joined the Seattle Police Department. Like all new hires, he worked in a two-man patrol car, assigned to Seattle’s bustling Asian neighborhood. Rated an expert marksman on the police firing range, he never had to draw his gun on anyone for three years. On the occasion when he finally did, he and his partner were in hot pursuit of a stolen car. His partner was driving and shouted to Stan to “Take a shot!” as the high-powered Buick pulled away from them toward the freeway. Stan’s shot hit the left front tire of the Buick and it went into a sideways skid and stopped.
Stan Tappan moved up through the department when his expertise with a camera became apparent. He was transferred to the crime lab and he often accompanied the lab director, criminalist Dr. George Ishii, to homicide investigations. It was vital to memorialize the crime scenes, as grotesque as some of them were, and Tappan’s clear photographs were a tremendous help to detectives in their investigations and in preparation for trial.
There were even times when Stan was called upon to take pictures in the waters of Lake Washington, Lake Union, Green Lake, or Elliott Bay, where corpses were often discovered floating. He was, perhaps, the only “swimming photographer” in America working for a police department.
Stan Tappan took photographs outside the police department too: some portraits and nature scenes, some pinups, and even nude shots of women. He was working toward his associate’s degree in police science and at the time he was shot, he was only three hours short of a diploma. He himself taught classes in crime-scene photography at several community colleges.
Finally, after six years on the Seattle Police force, Stan Tappan realized his fondest dream: he was appointed to the Burglary Unit as a detective. Anyone who knew him felt he was driven by two consuming passions: his career and his two small children, who lived with one of his former wives in Oregon. Every two weeks, he drove 500 miles to see them, and he never missed a visit.
For all of his success on the job, Stan Tappan hadn’t had much luck with women. His relationships had been stormy and short-lived. He was in his fourth marriage when he was shot, although he had married one wife twice—for the sake of their children. He held high hopes for his current marriage, but Stan had a wandering eye and he was so good-looking that women flirted with him, and he flirted back. That wasn’t unusual for a cop; a lot of women are police groupies, drawn to the uniform.
Now Stan Tappan had been admitted to Virginia Mason Hospital for observation. If his hand was permanently crippled, it would mean the end of his days as a working cop. His X-rays hadn’t shown any internal injuries, but he was in a great deal of pain from his hand and stomach wounds.
There was no rush to move the man who lay in the parking lot. He would have died instantly when Tappan fired at him in self-defense. The cops knew who he was—twenty-six-year-old Nicholas Kyreacos. Tappan had been correct in his identification of the victim.
Nicholas George Kyreacos was no stranger to the police, but he wasn’t a big-time felon either. Detectives had considered him a fringe person, a penny-ante thief. He was a short man who was handsome in a pouty, soft way. Born on May 25, 1947, Kyreacos worked as a waiter at one of Seattle’s finest restaurants. Detectives figured that wasn’t his only occupation, however—more likely, that was his only legal occupation.
When Kyreacos was fifteen, he was charged as a juvenile for extortion and burglary and released to his parents. Two years later, he was picked up for illegal discharge of a firearm and sent to the Youth Service Center, Seattle’s juvenile “jail.” Almost as soon as he was released, he was charged with driving a motor vehicle without permission. As an adult, his crimes were more serious: second-degree burglary, car theft, and robbery. He drew a fifteen-year sentence on the burglary and ten years for car theft. He actually served a fraction of that.
When he was released from prison, Nick Kyreacos got a job as a waiter in the popular upscale restaurant, a job he held for several years. He usually worked in the cocktail lounge from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M., but sometimes he worked in the dining room. He got great tips and was considered a good employee, although he was sometimes prone to outbursts of temper. He had married an attractive blond woman who was quite a bit older than he was, and seemed to get along with her teenage children.
During the summer of 1975, however, Nick ran into trouble with the law. He had been picked up and charged with car prowling on July 23, and three months later Stan Tappan and his partner from the Burglary Unit arrested Kyreacos on the credit-card theft. The card belonged to Kyreacos’s fellow waiter, fifty-three-year-old Branko Ellich. Ellich said that his card had been stolen from his home in July during a burglary.
These crimes still sounded like fairly small-time offenses. As far as anyone knew, Stan Tappan had never met Nick Kyreacos until the moment in October when he arrested him in the restaurant where both he and the burglary victim worked. Kyreacos had bailed out of jail, and his trial date had been set for early November.
But Nick Kyreacos’s criminal history took on a more ominous tone on the night of November 10. Branko Ellich was standing on his own front porch, fitting his key into his front door, when someone shot him in the head. He died before he could tell anyone who might have shot him.
On the surface, detectives had no difficulty connecting Kyreacos to Ellich, but why would Nick have shot Ellich over something as minor as credit-card theft? Killing Ellich might have taken away the complaining witness, but the trial would have gone ahead anyway; burglary detectives had a paper trail linking Nick to Branko Ellich’s credit cards.
The day before the shooting in the alley, homicide detectives Dick Reed and Don Strunk were stymied in their probe into Ellich’s murder. They had no witnesses and virtually no physical evidence. The only person who might have wanted to silence Ellich was Nick Kyreacos. From the information they had gathered so far, they concluded that something had been frightening Kyreacos. Maybe it was that he was Ellich’s killer. Reed and Strunk met with Nick in their offices. He was polite and cooperative but insisted he had no idea who had shot his fellow waiter. His trial on the credit-card charges had been postponed until November 27. He was somewhat concerned about that, but he seemed far more nervous at the mention of the Ellich homicide.
When Dick Reed heard that Nick Kyreacos had been shot by Stan Tappan, he was dumbfounded. Stan was a good friend of his, a fellow elk hunter, a guy he often had coffee with. Reed, who had been in the Homicide Unit for almost fifteen years, simply could not make the connection that might explain why the two men had been in the dark alley.
Stan Tappan had also been frightened by the Ellich homicide. The night of the incident, he’d told officers Smalley and Hayes that he’d been alarmed to see Kyreacos show up in the alley beside the mortgage company.
“He said he was looking for me,” Tappan recalled. Tappan said he’d been checking the parking lot after walking an employee out to her car when he spotted Kyreacos. “I chased him and put him up against a building.”
“Did you frisk him?” Smalley asked.
Tappan shook his head. “I heard something metal fall on the pavement while I was chasing him and I figured he’d lost his gun—if he had one—and was unarmed.
“And then,” Tappan said, “Nick reached into the waist-band of his trousers and pulled out what looked like a .45. We struggled to get control of that gun, and then I pulled out my service revolver.”
That would have been a .38 caliber police-issue revolver.
During the struggle, both men had been shot. Stan Tappan said he saw Kyreacos lying on the ground, while he himself had managed to stagger over to a courier who had just pulled into the mortgage lot and beg her to call the police.
After Tappan was taken to a private hospital room, Smalley and Hayes bagged his bloodstained clothing into evidence. Back at the shooting scene, Patrolman Richard Duval had chalked carefully around every piece of physical evidence that remained as he’d waited for the paramedics to respond and pronounce the shooting victim officially d
ead. He hoped the rain wouldn’t wash the bright lines away.
Duval had found a .45 caliber semiautomatic with a spare clip and several empty casings near the body. There was also a .38 caliber revolver with a two-inch barrel lying just under the dead man’s right armpit. Several segments of an expandable metal watchband were scattered on the pavement.
Duval looked twice at something in the victim’s right hand to be sure he was seeing correctly. When he did, he recognized a very small piece of physical evidence that would take on gargantuan proportions in the months to come.
Clenched tightly between the dead man’s index and middle fingers was a half-burned cigarette. It looked as if he’d been caught unaware by the gunfire that had ended his life. Certainly, if he’d seen a weapon, he would have dropped his cigarette.
The homicide crew working the scene thought they knew what had happened, but homicide detectives never take anything at face value. One of their own had come so close to being killed, and it looked at first as if a small-time punk had shot him, ending up dead because he’d taken on one of the best sharpshooters in the department.
Detective George Marberg placed each gun in an individual evidence bag. He did the same with the spent bullets and casings, marking the bags with the date and his initials. He and Jesse Cook used tweezers to retrieve fibers from the fenders of Stan Tappan’s truck, dropping the tiny fragments into cardboard boxes. They did the same with the cigarette from Nick Kyreacos’s hand. It was a Marlboro 100, smoked down to two-and-a-half inches.
Al Gerdes photographed the body where it lay, several feet in front of Tappan’s truck. His legs pointed toward the truck’s grill, his head toward the detox center on the other side of the alley. His arms were stretched out like wings.
The investigators could see where their fellow detective had bled too, the rain now thinning the scarlet stains. Many of them had worked with Stan Tappan for more than three years, while he had been the investigator taking the pictures. They couldn’t allow themselves the luxury of emotion at this point. They had to gather as much physical evidence as they could before the pounding rain washed it all away.
There was such a massive police presence at the shooting scene that no one noticed a teenage boy who ran past an X-rated theater on the corner, up Pike Street, and into the alley. He stopped, shocked, as he saw the blue lights spinning crazily atop more squad cars than he could count and the circle of a half-dozen cops who had formed a phalanx to shut out onlookers.
Slipping up to them, the teenager approached officers Robert Vanderway and Gary Allenby. “I know that guy on the ground,” he gasped. “It’s Nick Kyreacos. I was with him. See that broken walkie-talkie? That’s his. I’ve got one too. I was supposed to back him up.”
The boy was obviously scared to death and very emotional. He seemed on the verge of hysteria and wasn’t making a lot of sense. The officers led him over to a police car until detectives could question him. In the meantime, he huddled in the squad car, shivering. It would take a while to sort out any real witnesses from the curious gawkers drawn by the lights and sirens.
Another passerby walked up to Officer David Bruck-bauer and held out a knife. “Hey, man,” he said, “I found this shiv out on the sidewalk on Pike Street. I was going to keep it, but then I saw all the cop cars and I figured it might be something important.”
It might well be. They slipped the knife into an evidence bag, and took the man’s name so detectives could call him.
Stan Tappan said he’d heard something metal clatter to the pavement as he pursued Kyreacos. Stan’s gun was a police issue .38 revolver, and the investigators figured that the .45 had belonged to the dead man.
Finally, word reached those at the shooting site that Tappan was in serious condition, but that doctors were cautiously predicting that his hand had not suffered nerve damage, nor would he lose any fingers. His abdominal wound wasn’t nearly as bad as it had looked; it was only a flesh wound and, miraculously, none of his internal organs were damaged.
Worried police officers had gathered at Virginia Mason Hospital to find out how Stan Tappan was doing. Sudden death was always a possibility for any cop, and that didn’t change when they became detectives. Dick Reed, who was investigating Branko Ellich’s murder, was very concerned about Stan Tappan. They’d hunted together in eastern Washington only a month before. The doctors assured those in the waiting room that, although he was in a great deal of pain, Stan Tappan was going to live.
Now, the homicide nightshift crew spread out to backtrack on Nicholas Kyreacos. They learned that he had worked his usual shift at the restaurant’s cocktail lounge from 11 A.M. until 3 P.M. Asked if anything unusual had happened that day, the receptionist told the detectives that Nick had received a phone call from a woman at about 2:40 P.M. “He was in the kitchen and he picked up the phone there. The call lasted about five minutes—and I recognized the woman’s voice as the person who had called him the day before too.”
Something about the call had upset Kyreacos. “He came out to the front desk and he was really pale and looked shaken,” the receptionist continued. “I asked him what was wrong—but he wouldn’t tell me. He kind of ran into the cocktail lounge and he came back with Florrie*—she’s a cocktail waitress and they’re close friends. And then she stood by while he made a call from the public phone in the lobby.”
In talking with Florrie Pappadopolis,* Bruce Edmonds’s detectives learned that the woman on the phone had asked Nick to meet her in the alley off Boren between 6 and 6:15 that night. “She told him something that scared him,” Florrie said. “I don’t know all the details, but she said that she had things to tell him about Branko Ellich’s murder.”
Of course, the petite waitress said, Nick knew Branko. They were both waiters in the restaurant, but she didn’t know how close they were or what business they might have together.
“Tell us about Nick,” George Marberg said.
“Well, he was very impulsive and dramatic. He could be irritable in a childish way, like he might throw down a dish or a tray if something went wrong. He was so upset today that I told him not to go meet the woman. I said, ‘I hope you’re not stupid enough to take any kind of a weapon with you.’
“And Nick promised he wouldn’t. But then he said, ‘I won’t go unprepared either.’ I have no idea what he meant by that.”
The case was becoming murkier. Despite his claim, it seemed that Nick Kyreacos had known something about Ellich’s murder. He’d been to see Dick Reed and Don Strunk in their offices only the day before. Now, Florrie Pappadopolis said that she thought Nick had called his attorney before he went to meet the woman in the alley.
He had, and he had also called Detective Don Strunk. Strunk remembered that the phone call had come in about 3:45 P.M.—just as he was leaving the office at the end of his shift. Kyreacos said his lawyer had told him not to meet with a stranger in an alley, and Strunk told him that was good advice. He and Dick Reed were investigating the Ellich killing, and Kyreacos should stay out of it.
As Don Strunk was talking with Nick Kyreacos, Stan Tappan was walking up the Cherry Street hill to get in his truck and go to work at the mortgage company. He and Kyreacos were at least a dozen miles apart, two men on different errands.
Dick Reed questioned the witnesses who had come forward. A clerk in a Ballard area radio and electronic store remembered Kyreacos well. He had rushed in about 4:30 P.M. that Tuesday. Although there were several customers waiting in line, he pushed his way to the head of the line. He told the clerk he was looking for a small tape recorder. Then he picked out a unit about four by seven inches, tested it, and slipped it into his coat pocket, asking, “If I don’t like it, could I return it later?”
“I told him ‘Yes, until seven,’” the clerk told Dick Reed.
Next, Reed talked to the teenage boy who had appeared at the shooting scene, claiming that he knew Nick Kyreacos. He was calmer now, but still seemed frightened.
“You knew Nick Kyreacos?” Reed ask
ed.
“Yeah—he lived in my neighborhood. He called me about 5:30 Tuesday afternoon and told me he needed ‘a favor.’”
The boy recalled the odd conversation he’d had with the man who was dead now. “He said, ‘Look kid, I’ve got to meet this woman in an alley downtown. It’s got something to do with a guy I knew who got murdered.’ He needed me to go along—but all I had to do was be a witness.”
“How can I be a witness if I don’t know anything about it?” the teenager had asked warily.
“You don’t even have to be right there. I’ve got walkie-talkies,” Kyreacos had told him.
“Why does this woman want to see you?”
“I’ve got some theories on that,” Kyreacos had said excitedly. “Either she really wants to give me some information about Branko or maybe she’s some kind of relative of his and she wants to set me up—or have the police set me up. Maybe she’s going to blackmail me.”
“That sounds dangerous,” the boy recalled saying. “I wouldn’t go if I were you.”
“Nahh,” Nick had said. “I’ve got this knife and this pistol—it’s a starter’s pistol but it looks real. I’ll scare him with it.”
The kid told Dick Reed he had wondered why Nick was talking about a man when he’d said before that it was a woman he was meeting.
Nick and the kid had driven through the rain to downtown Seattle; as they neared the alley at Pike and Boren, Nick pulled over to a small grocery store and said he had to make a phone call. “I gotta call in to work to be sure they don’t need me for the night shift,” he’d explained to the boy.
As Nick grabbed his coat, the teenager had seen the tape recorder under it. Apparently, they were going to use that as well as the walkie-talkies. Nick said something into it, and then played it back—to be sure it had recorded. It had. He slipped the tape recorder under his lavender shirt, tucking it a little behind and to the left side of his body. He’d clipped a small, round $1.98 mike to the collar of his tee-shirt, and then put his bulky, fleece-lined jacket on. The tape recorder was completely hidden.