by Ann Rule
Still, this particular case contains answers that could help us understand similar cases that burst onto the headlines every year. I doubt that I could ever again write about such madness and pain, the insanity hidden behind the facade of a killer who seemed to be the perfect citizen.
No one ever knew the churnings of this dangerous mind—until it was much too late to stop the carnage. Perhaps it won’t be too late now to prevent tragedies that begin to bloom into dark fantasies in the disordered consciousness of someone who has not yet acted them out. To be aware of danger is to disarm it and prevent it.
For many years, brilliant criminalist Dr. George Ishii headed the crime lab for western Washington State. Ishii had overseen so many bizarre homicides that nothing really surprised him any longer. He taught classes in crime-scene investigation and kept all of his students—myself included—enthralled with the forensic details of cases that seemed unimaginable.
In the case that follows, Dr. Ishii told us, “The deaths represent the classic example of a case where detectives had to completely reconstruct events through evidence and interrogation. It is precisely this kind of crime that could lead to countless ‘confessions’ in years to come, unless Kitsap County officers were able to finally and completely lay the blame on the guilty party or parties at once.”
Thirty-four-year-old Kip Rennsler* and his beautiful blond wife, Lori,* twenty-eight, were living what seemed to be the ideal life on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The island was—and still is—one of the most desirable places to live in America. Ferries traverse Puget Sound every half hour, carrying the island’s residents to their jobs in Seattle and, later, home to a serene world that is much more than ordinary suburbia. Ten miles long and five miles across, Bainbridge, when the Rennslers lived there, had affordable waterfront property, strawberry fields, and evergreen woods. Farther back—in the forties—when Betty MacDonald wrote her classic novel, The Egg and I, about her wonderfully humorous life on Bainbridge, the island was still rural and seemed more distant from the bright lights of Seattle or Bremerton.
That isn’t true any longer, nor was it entirely true when the Rennslers moved to the lovely island. The strawberry fields, Japanese produce farms, and stands of fir, cedar, and madrona trees have shrunk and expensively appointed houses have sprung up. Bainbridge now attracts well-known authors, attorneys, and executives. To buy a house on Bainbridge, one (or, more likely, a couple) has to have an income in the upper ranges. Still, the main street of Winslow, Bainbridge’s historic village, remains quaint and friendly.
When Kip and Lori Rennsler bought their house on Bainbridge Island, Kip’s career was soaring upward. In his early thirties, he was already vice president of personnel at the Seattle headquarters of the Old National Bank. He’d met Lori when she worked at the bank, and they had been happily married for six years, the last three while living in their waterfront home. By working hard and investing in upgrades for the house, they soon turned it into a lovely home. Their only child, Steven “Stevie” Daniel* Rennsler, was born on September 26,1968.
Each year, Kip’s fortunes rose. His competence and thoroughness in dealing with the problems of the diverse personalities who worked for Old National Bank did not go unnoticed by his superiors. His salary increased enough so that Lori could resign from her job and be a stay-at-home mom. The couple adopted a stubby-legged dachshund pup and joked that he was their watch dog.
Even though Kip often worked overtime and Lori was alone in their somewhat isolated house, she wasn’t afraid. Bainbridge Island had a very low crime rate. Most burglars and rapists preferred to stay on dry land, where they could escape by freeway instead of ferry.
The sixth Christmas Lori and Kip shared together seemed to be happy. Lori had time to hang decorations and lights all around the house, and Stevie was old enough to be terribly excited about Santa Claus. On Christmas Day, they entertained relatives and everyone went home tired but happy.
If Lori—or Kip—had reason to be worried about anything, no one perceived it from their outward behavior. And yet, only nine days later, something terrible would happen in the Rennslers’ home.
At 2:21 on the afternoon of January 3, a frantic woman called the Kitsap County sheriff’s office. Max Abrams, the daytime dispatcher, caught the call as most of the sheriff’s deputies were preparing for a shift change.
“Please get someone out here right away,” a tremulous female voice pleaded. “We just found our neighbor inside his home. His chest has a terrible wound. I’m sure he’s dead—”
Abrams kept his voice steady and reassuring, trying to keep the woman from lapsing into complete hysteria. “Please stand by, ma’am. I’m going to get our deputies in your area on the way.”
“Please hurry! We’re in the Ferncliff area. It’s horrible.”
Abrams managed to get an exact address from her, and then dialed the intercom line to alert Bill Clifton, the chief of detectives.
“We’re not sure what it is yet, Bill,” he said, “but the woman who called is really shook up. I’ve already started units on the way.”
By land, it was a forty-mile trip from the sheriff’s headquarters in the town of Port Orchard to the Ferncliff area. Clifton sent Sergeant Don Hamrich—who was stationed in Winslow—to check on the situation, and dispatched two detectives from Port Orchard, followed by his identification chief, Les Cline, a crime-scene expert.
There were six officers en route to the scene, whatever the scene was. It wasn’t that unusual to get hysterical calls over dogfights and family beefs, but this complainant had talked about someone with a critical chest wound. Clifton paced as he waited for Don Hamrich to call back.
“You’d better get up here as fast as you can, Bill,” Hamrich reported, his voice tight with shock. “It looks like homicide—triple homicide. The man’s in the front room with stab wounds in his chest. They’re all dead, Bill. The woman and the baby are in the bedroom. Maybe there’s more—I don’t know.”
“Close up the house,” Clifton said. “I don’t care what you have to do, but don’t let anyone in that house until my identification crew gets there.”
Bill Clifton grabbed his coat and headed for his car, stopping only long enough to tell Abrams to alert every commissioned officer on the sheriff’s staff. “If they’re not in a car, call them at home. I don’t know what we’re going to find up there.”
The detective chief was only a mile away from Bainbridge Island—but that was by water. He wished he had access to a boat or even a helicopter, but he didn’t, so he raced toward the island along the Puget Sound shoreline with his bubble lights twirling and his siren wide open. He navigated around Liberty Bay, past Silverdale, Key-port Junction, and finally across the Agate Pass Bridge.
Already deputies from the north end of Kitsap County were stringing yellow tape around the Rennslers’ yard. Curious neighbors, drawn by the wail of sirens and the sight of police units, stood respectfully back from the crime-scene tape, hovering a good distance away from the neat yard, far down the long driveway. It was a gloomy day, already getting dark, and from the looks on the deputies’ faces, Clifton knew that something really shocking had to have happened inside the pleasant yellow house.
Hamrich stationed himself on the porch. He knew how important it was that the scene inside be left exactly as it was. A careless step, a hand closing a door, a stubbed-out cigarette, even flushing a toilet or turning on a faucet could destroy vital evidence.
As Bill Clifton pulled up, he was relieved to see only squad cars near the house itself. It was necessary to negotiate the long driveway down to the yellow house, where it sat surrounded by evergreens. Even then, the parking area was separated from the residence by a wide gully that ran all the way down to the saltwater beach. To get to the front porch of the house, the investigators had to cross a four-foot-wide bridge that angled up to a series of cement slab steps.
It was eight minutes after three. Clifton had somehow managed to travel forty miles in less than forty-fiv
e minutes since the first call for help had come into the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff’s officers stepped into the living room. It was nicely decorated in a rustic manner with a freestanding Franklin stove serving as a fireplace and providing heat on stormy nights. There was a combination breakfast bar and room divider between the living room and the kitchen. At first glance, everything seemed normal. A woman’s purse rested on the divider along with some notebooks, a birthday card, and a phone. But on closer examination the investigators could see faint red smears on the phone, dried now.
The sheriff’s men moved around the divider and another room came into view. It was a combination dining room and den. Now all semblance of normalcy vanished. They were looking at a male body so grotesquely displayed that it might have been part of an Aztec torture-sacrifice ritual. The man was completely naked, and he lay on his back on top of a child’s table. His heels barely touched the floor, his arms were outstretched, and his head tilted back.
“My God, look at his chest,” one deputy breathed.
They all stared down at the man, who had obviously been in perfect physical shape, his muscles toned and powerful. But now he had four wounds in his chest, one of them gaping as if someone had been intent on reaching in and ripping his heart out.
Experienced as they were, none of the four men had ever seen anything like this. As dispassionately as he could, Les Cline took photographs of the dead man.
The other investigators followed Bill Clifton as he moved toward the doors of two bedrooms that were now visible. They saw the woman, who lay facedown on the rumpled king-size bed. She was very slender and wore a red and white quilted satin robe, belted tightly at the waist. She was positioned crosswise on the bed, with her feet dangling over the edge and her hands tucked beneath her. There was a large knife to the left of her head, its blade slightly bent at the sharp end, its handle crusted with blood.
Les Cline was the last into the bedroom and his eyes were drawn to a small form, half under the bed. The bedspread flounce covered the upper part of a child’s body. His feet and legs were covered with baby pajamas. The little boy appeared to be two or three years old and he lay on his back.
The child was dead too, with a puncture wound to the left side of his neck. The investigators wondered why on earth it had been necessary to kill the child. What possible harm could he have been to anyone?
The bedroom was a chamber of horrors. As the team looked more closely at the woman’s feet, they saw the small brown dog, the dachshund puppy, lying on its side a few feet away. It too had been stabbed.
Like men moving through a nightmare, placing one foot deliberately in front of the other, Clifton and his detectives moved around the bed. They stared down at the woman who lay atop the expensive flowered spread. Unlike the little boy and the naked man, there were no bloodstains on her body or clothing beyond a faint mark on the collar of her robe. Bill Clifton knelt very carefully on the edge of the bed, and lifted the robe’s collar at the back of her head.
“Les,” he said with his jaw clamped tightly. “Her neck is gone. This looks like the exit wound of a contact shotgun blast. She may be lying on a shotgun. What else could have caused this kind of damage?”
Gingerly, the two men turned the once-pretty blonde over. There was no gun beneath her, but something had virtually severed her head from her body. Only her fragile cervical spine was intact. Someone had methodically hacked away with the knife in an effort to decapitate her.
Chest wounds were evident now—perhaps four or five. The investigators told themselves that she must have already been dead when the neck wounds were inflicted.
Three of the bedroom walls were splattered with cast-off blood, probably from the knife as it had been raised again and again, flinging red droplets on the wallpaper. However, some of the irregular smears had surely come from a human hand sliding over the wall’s surface.
Oddly, the only signs of a struggle in the bedroom were some items that had been knocked from the dresser near the end of the bed.
“I hope to God there aren’t any more,” a deputy muttered as they all walked carefully toward the second of the three bedrooms in the house.
They found no more bodies, but this bedroom—obviously the little boy’s—was an abattoir too. A bunk bed was placed alongside one wall, and the top bunk clearly hadn’t been used. For some inexplicable reason, the bottom mattress lay on the floor next to its box springs. All the sheets and blankets were soaked in blood, and so was the cover of the box springs.
“This is strange,” Bill Clifton said, his voice no longer firm. “I don’t see how anyone could have bled enough to soak through a mattress into a box spring. The human body just doesn’t hold that much blood—especially a child’s body. But I think it was the little boy who was here on the mattress. That would account for the fact that there isn’t any blood under his body now. He had no more left in him.”
Apprehensively, they walked to the third bedroom, and as the door creaked open, they were vastly relieved to see no sign at all of violence. That room had apparently been used only for storage. The bathroom was clean too, but they did find a gauze and tape bandage, shaped like a finger, in front of the refrigerator in the kitchen.
Otherwise, the kitchen was neat. Two or three cups with sodden tea bags in them and a few glasses were stacked by the sink. A garbage strainer floated on one side of the divided sink. A dripping faucet had filled the sink with water.
Shaken but determined, the detectives held a hurried conference. “We’re going to be flooded by demands from the media and thrill seekers as soon as this gets out—which is probably about now,” Clifton said, “and we’re going to have to have enough men out there to keep them on the other side of the gulley.”
The Kitsap County investigators had not even positively identified the dead yet. They found boxes of papers and more notebooks in the living room and the den. Each had the name the neighbor had given them, and from the paperwork it did appear that the dead man was undoubtedly Kip Steven Rennsler, a vice president at the Old National Bank.
Although they were in deep shock, the neighbors who had seen the body were quite sure the naked man was Rennsler. “I went over there,” one woman said, “because one of Kip’s coworkers at the bank called me. He’d been calling the house many times—and was either getting no answer or a busy signal. That kind of scared me, so I went and got a neighbor man to go over there with me. Well, we went in, and the first thing we saw was the phone hanging down by its cord. The gentleman with me went further in, and he saw a man’s body. He just turned around and came back out.”
“The phone wasn’t off the hook when we got here,” Clifton said.
“I know. The neighbor man hung it up, just kind of a reflex,” the woman said.
That was disappointing news for the detectives. If there had been fingerprints left on the phone, they might have been matched to a suspect’s. Chances were that they were smeared and useless now.
The question that screamed the loudest was “Why?” These people had been a nice little family, living in a nice little house that they’d fixed up themselves. Why would anyone want to savage them in this way? These weren’t normal murders—if, indeed, there was such a thing. This was maniacal overkill, something straight out of a nightmare.
Detectives and deputies were out canvassing door to door, asking neighbors if they knew anything about the Rennslers or anyone who might want to hurt them. So far, no one did. Asking neighbors if they’d heard anything wasn’t helping. The Rennslers’ house was isolated enough that their screams or calls for help couldn’t have been heard. Waves washing onto their beach would also muffle sounds.
The neighbors who’d called for help said that the front door of the yellow house had been ajar when they arrived. It was January and it was cold. Why would their door have been partially open? Would they have felt safe enough in their house, cut off from the road by a ravine and a little bridge, that they didn’t bother to lock their door
s? That hardly seemed likely. Probably the killer or killers hadn’t bothered to close the door when they left.
Searching for a motive, Bill Clifton kept returning to Kip Rennsler’s occupation. “He was vice president of a bank. It wouldn’t be the first time somebody who wanted the combination to a bank vault went to a bank officer’s home and held his family hostage. Maybe Rennsler had that kind of information, but probably he didn’t. But that doesn’t matter. If someone thought he did, it wouldn’t be hard to chart his movements.”
The detective chief tried to find a scenario that fit this tragedy. “OK,” Clifton began, “the neighbors say that Kip Rennsler took the seven ten A.M. ferry like clockwork every day. By a quarter to eight, he was in downtown Seattle. But suppose he was sick today and he stayed home? Suppose somebody came to the house expecting to find only the woman and the little boy, planning to hold them hostage, while they called Rennsler and forced him to come home by threatening their lives? But Rennsler was in the house today, so that would have thrown their plans into chaos.
“The woman and the boy were in nightclothes, and Rennsler was nude. Maybe he just got out of the shower. He could have come rushing out and put up one hell of a fight.”
That was true. Rennsler was muscular and strong, but he would have been taken unaware. He probably could have subdued one man, but there might have been more.
There was another possibility. Lori Rennsler was a beautiful woman. She might have been the target. Somebody could have watched her on the beach, stalking her as she went into Winslow for groceries or to the library, and become obsessed.
“Erotomania,” one detective said. “That’s what they call it. People fixate on someone they don’t even know. And some of them don’t quit until they have that person in their power.”
According to their usual schedule, Lori and Stevie were alone in the secluded house after 6:30 every week-day morning. It was a perfect setup for a sexual psychopath—a woman alone before dawn, a little boy, and a small puppy, in a house far away from everyone at the end of a long driveway.