by Ann Rule
But on this Monday morning, they hadn’t been alone; Kip had been home. The entire family had perished together.
“Why didn’t Rennsler call in sick?” a detective asked.
“I don’t know,” Clifton said, “but we’re going to talk to his coworkers, and see what they have to say.”
“And Lori Rennsler is fully clothed. There’s no indication that she was raped.”
“It’s weird,” Clifton agreed. “I gotta tell you this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
It was almost dawn when the crime scene technicians—led by Les Cline—had finished processing the house. They were looking for fingerprints, hairs, fibers, shoe prints in blood, matchbooks, cigarette butts, torn bits of cloth, anything that didn’t seem to fit. Before they finished, they had thirty envelopes for George Ishii to examine at the crime lab. They took scores of photographs, recording ghastly tableaus that might be very important in a courtroom one day.
They found Kip Rennsler’s clothing in his son’s room. His blood-spattered athletic shoe rested next to the mattress on the floor, and when they lifted the mattress, there was a pile of men’s clothing underneath: trousers with jockey shorts still inside, a tee-shirt and a dark-colored wool sweater, as well as Kip’s other shoe. The clothes were saturated with blood. Oddly, this blood was still wet, where the blood in the other rooms had dried. Perhaps the attack in Stevie Rennsler’s room had occurred sometime after the other violence. The room was stifling hot; a space heater glowed red in the wall, turned to its highest setting.
Les Cline held up the white tee-shirt and studied the stain on it.
“Check Rennsler’s chest again for me,” he murmured to no one in particular.
“Why?” his assistant, Jay Mossman, asked.
“Just check it closely and count the wounds.”
“Four,” Mossman answered as he returned from the den/dining room area.
“Then something doesn’t add up,” Cline said. “If you’ll look at this tee-shirt, there are only three holes. Two on the right and one on the left. Rennsler was stabbed three times with his clothes on, and then for some reason, his shirt was taken off and he was stabbed again.”
“Why?”
“You tell me. What kind of a nut would stab a man three times, take all his clothes off, lay a mattress on them, and then stab him again? It would make more sense if they’d forced Lori Rennsler to disrobe, but they didn’t.”
“Unless the killer was a woman,” a deputy said.
“No way. There isn’t one woman in a thousand who has the strength to use a knife the way it was used here.”
The investigators believed that Stevie Rennsler had been stabbed in his bed as he slept—and died there. Someone had then carried his body into his parents’ bedroom. His father had probably collapsed for a time on the bunk’s box spring and somehow managed to crawl or stagger into the den where the killer found him. There were more red stains on the dinette table—in a peculiar pattern, as if a man’s hairy chest had slid across the table. A chair in front of the dinette set had been knocked over.
“Rennsler made it to the table, knocked over the chair, then reeled over to the child’s table and collapsed on his back and died,” Clifton said. “He may have been trying to make it to the phone. Maybe he did make it, knocked it off the hook—but was too weak to talk by then.”
A deputy stationed on the bridge came to tell the investigators that three of Kip Rennsler’s coworkers were waiting in the parking area beyond the small bridge. They had caught the first ferry they could to Bainbridge Island after being notified of the tragedy.
They were almost mute with shock, but said they wanted to help in any way they could. Then, for the first time, the sheriff’s detectives had to look at a suspicion they hadn’t even considered, something so seemingly alien to human nature that their minds hadn’t even gone there.
“Kip hasn’t been himself lately,” one of his close work friends began. “I’ve known him and worked with him for about eight years. Something’s been worrying him, and I can’t say what. I guess I could say that he’s been overly preoccupied with really minute details. He seemed to just worry them to death, obsessively. He missed an important appointment this morning at nine. Some men might do that—but not Kip. He was always on time and he scheduled everything. That’s why I kept calling him.”
Another coworker recalled that when Kip Rennsler had left the bank on Friday night—three days earlier—he had carried with him two cardboard boxes, “about the size of a case of beer,” and a white paper bag.
They weren’t full of money. The crime-scene investigators had already found those boxes and the bag; they held office items like mimeograph paper, address labels, and staples, things he often used to do bank work at home. His coworkers said that he also edited a magazine for his antique bottle collectors’ group. He might have been taking slight advantage of the bank by bringing home office supplies, but that paled in contrast to what had happened in his home.
The third bank employee said he was the one who had tried in vain to call the Rennsler residence twice that morning, between 9 and 9:30. The phone rang, but there was no answer. “When I tried again at eleven thirty, the line was busy. I tried several times over the next few hours, and I finally asked the operator to check. She said the phone was off the hook.”
At that point, the coworker was alarmed enough to call the Rennslers’ neighbor. He considered himself a close friend of the Rennsler family, and things just weren’t adding up.
“Kip and Lori—and Stevie too—were supposed to have Sunday dinner with my family at my house yesterday,” he continued. “But Kip called and canceled on very short notice. That wasn’t like him.”
None of Kip Rennsler’s fellow employees knew why he’d been so nervous lately. He was doing well at work, and as far as they knew, he and Lori were very happy together. He wasn’t in debt and his health seemed excellent. And yet he had been jumpy and preoccupied.
A check of Old National Bank records showed no irregularities at all. Kip Rennsler most certainly was not an embezzler. His accounts were accurate to the penny.
The man who had found Rennsler’s body said he had given Kip and Stevie a ride the day before—on Sunday afternoon. “I saw them walking quite a ways from their house, and I offered them a ride. Kip seemed upset and he was acting kind of strange. He seemed very tired and he told me that he and Stevie had been walking for a long time.”
The woman who had called the sheriff’s office called again to say that she remembered seeing a car parked close to the Rennslers’ footbridge sometime Sunday afternoon. “It was Sally Newland’s* car,” she said. “Sally is a good friend of Lori’s.”
Detectives contacted Sally Newland, who was shocked at her friend’s death. Shocked, it seemed, but not totally surprised. “I saw both Lori and Kip yesterday,” she began slowly. “It was very, very odd. First, I met Kip and Stevie walking along the road. I asked Kip if he wanted a ride home, but he said no, and then he told me he was taking Stevie for a ‘long, long, walk.’
“I asked him if anything was wrong, and he said there wasn’t but that Lori was very upset. He asked me to stop by their house and tell her that everything was all right.”
Sally had driven to the Rennslers’ house right away, and found Lori in tears. “She told me that Kip had been acting ‘funny,’ and he had asked her to take Stevie to the neighbors’ house. He said he wanted to ask her one question, and she could answer either yes or no. She said she’d told him to just forget it.
“Lori told me that Kip had been behaving very bizarrely for about a week. She had tried to get him to talk with her, but she just couldn’t get through to him. I had to agree with her about Kip. I wish I could put my finger on it exactly—but he was just different somehow.”
One thing had occurred that might have upset Kip Rennsler. He had been trying to put together a deal to buy a historic lodge in a rainforest near the Washington coast. He didn’t have the f
ull down payment, and he’d been seeking a large loan to cover it. He’d been trying to finance the hotel for almost a year.
The investment would be a huge step for the young couple, and Lori wasn’t enthusiastic about his quitting his job and moving them to Quinault, where they would probably have to live in the huge old lodge. But Kip had been very high on the project, and had been terribly depressed when he couldn’t make it come together.
For most people, that would have been a disappointment—not a cataclysmic event. But Rennsler had taken it hard.
Bill Clifton received a phone call from a woman who lived in Poulsbo, a community with a mostly Scandinavian population, about fifteen miles north of Winslow. Solveig Hanson* told Clifton that she’d become acquainted with both Lori and Kip Rennsler within the last few months.
“I need to talk to someone about Kip,” Solveig Hanson said. “There are some things that have worried me.”
The attractive woman seemed relieved to talk to Clifton, but her hands shook slightly as she lit a cigarette. She said she had had various business dealings with Kip Rennsler and that they were friends. “But, before you ask, it was purely platonic. Kip was completely in love with Lori.”
She shook her head, trying to find a way to describe her concerns. “But something changed with Kip. In the last two weeks, he’s visited me half a dozen times. The thing is that each time, his actions became more complex and peculiar than the last. He became obsessed—I guess you’d call it that—to the point that he was beginning to frighten me. He seemed to be seized by the idea that he wanted to help others, and he would go into some detail about people—”
“In what way?”
“Well, he came to my house on Christmas Eve, and he absolutely insisted that I go shopping with him to get groceries for a needy family,” she said. “I agreed to go with him to a supermarket, and he must have spent about $200 buying groceries. Then we drove to a house where he said a poor family lived and he carried the groceries to the front door.”
Solveig said she had been touched by the gesture, and she had attempted to praise Rennsler for doing such a generous thing. “But he became very upset and wouldn’t let me even mention it,” she said.
Since Christmas, Solveig said she had heard often from Rennsler, and he had seemed to grow more disturbed all the time. “The last time he visited me at my home, he was talking irrationally—very fast—and not making any sense. He seemed to have so much to get out that he wouldn’t let me answer or say anything at all. It was just a shower of words coming from a pressure cooker.
“Finally, I got up and left the room to go to the bathroom, just to get away from him for a moment. But he followed me and pounded on the door with his fist, insisting that I hurry out because he had so much to tell me. He had me scared.”
Solveig Hanson said she had finally pushed Kip Rennsler gently toward the door and locked it behind him.
However, on the Sunday night before the murders, her phone had rung six or seven times. “Each time I answered, no one spoke—but I could hear hard, labored breathing. I can’t say for sure it was him, but I just felt it was Kip.”
It was easy enough to check. At that time calls from Bainbridge Island to Poulsbo were toll calls. The phone company pulled up the Rennslers’ records and found that eight calls had been made to the Hanson residence after midnight on Monday morning.
It was beginning to look as if Kip Rennsler himself might have been the monster who erupted in his own home. Any number of people who believed they had known him well referred to how he “wasn’t himself,” and to the bizarre way he had begun to act during the holiday season and afterward. He had functioned well in his job and in the community, although it must have become an enormous struggle for him to keep whatever demons were driving him from surfacing. If he’d bombarded Solveig Hanson with ideas that didn’t make sense, had he also frightened his wife with his distorted thoughts?
The new information wasn’t nearly enough to mark three brutal deaths as “Closed” in the sheriff’s files. Somehow, investigators would have to do a psychological autopsy of a dead man if they had any hope of understanding the enormous “Why?” that still existed.
What had caused Kip Rennsler to implode?
He had no business pressures because he was doing extremely well at his bank job—but he had become extremely morose and frustrated when he couldn’t get the loan to buy the lodge in the rainforest. He was said to be in love with his wife, but he had certainly spent a lot of time with Solveig Hanson in Poulsbo. Perhaps she wasn’t interested in him, but he had called her repeatedly in the wee hours of the morning when he had either just killed his family or was about to. He may well have felt tremendous guilt at even contemplating an extramarital affair.
Then again, it was beginning to look as though Rennsler had succumbed to a psychosis, perhaps one triggered by some recessive gene buried far back in his family tree. His recent actions certainly seemed insane. All his manic ravings might have ended in utter horror for so many other people.
A Seattle doctor said he’d treated Kip Rennsler for a duodenal ulcer in the recent past. He had found Rennsler to be under some tension, but hadn’t found that unusual for a businessman in a fast-paced world. The physician had prescribed a mild tranquilizer, a routine drug for someone under stress. The drug carried no risk for mania or psychosis as negative side effects.
One of the other vice presidents at Old National Bank recalled that he had gone to lunch with Kip Rennsler on December 31. They were coworkers, but not really close. The officer recalled that Rennsler had asked him, “Have you seen a change in me lately?”
“I finally said, ‘Yes, you seem much more happy and outgoing.’”
Rennsler had then gone into a complicated explanation of his new attitude and how happy he was because he had decided not to let things worry him as he had done in the past.
“I feel I’ll be a better person to work with,” he confided. “I’m not going to let finances bother me as much.”
The other bank officer had assumed at the time that they were talking about New Year’s resolutions and hadn’t been too concerned that Rennsler had suddenly chosen him as a confidant. He knew that Rennsler’s efforts to buy the hunting and fishing lodge had failed spectacularly, and figured that was what he was talking about.
Apparently, Kip Rennsler had talked to numerous people about buying the Quinault property for more than a year. When the news of the Rennsler family tragedy became public, a number of regular ferry boat commuters called sheriff’s headquarters. Kip had buttonholed a lot of people to talk about his grand plans. More intimate friends came forward to say that Kip Rennsler had been completely devastated when the deal fell through.
“He told me,” one man said, “that if he wasn’t able to buy that place, he didn’t know how he could face the future. I thought he was exaggerating, of course.”
Rennsler’s usual personality was that of a strong competitor, his friends told detectives. “He was the ultimate competitor,” an acquaintance said. “You know, the kind of guy who had to be the best and the first at everything. He had to win at games, and when we went on camping trips, he was always the first to get his tent pitched. A winner all the way.”
Lori Rennsler’s friends said that Kip had always been the absolute head of the household, and that he could sometimes seem domineering. “But he loved her—and Stevie—and she never complained. She accepted him the way he was.”
Perhaps Lori could not accept her husband the way he had become in the days before her death. Or perhaps she didn’t know how far his mind had slipped over the edge of madness.
The postmortem examinations of the Rennsler family took place as their friends and family made funeral plans. The pathologist looked especially for some kind of defect in Kip Rennsler’s brain that might have caused him to behave so bizarrely and violently, perhaps a tumor or a tangle of blood vessels that had caused an aneurysm or even a stroke. But there was nothing. The cause had not been p
hysiological; it had been psychological.
Although it seemed unthinkable, Rennsler had apparently committed suicide by stabbing himself in the chest. Suicide by repeatedly slashing oneself is not without precedent, although it is extremely rare. The body tends to pull away from pain, and “hesitation wounds” are to be expected.
Rennsler had succumbed to the last of four stab wounds to his chest. The first three—which had stained his tee-shirt—were remarkably deep, but not deep enough to penetrate his heart or any other vital organ. The fourth thrust, however, had severed the intercostal artery on his right side, and his lung had filled with blood and collapsed, a condition called hemopneumothorax.
He would have lived several minutes at most after the fourth self-administered stab before literally drowning in his own blood.
He had a cut on one finger, but that was several days old, and probably accounted for the bandage detectives had found in the kitchen.
There was some—though not much—comfort to be taken in the findings on Lori and Stevie Rennsler. They had probably been asleep when they were stabbed fatally in their chests. There was no evidence at all of defense wounds on their arms or hands, and no bruising on their bodies.
The crime scene was cleared, and grieving family members were allowed to enter the yellow house to collect keepsakes and other items. All the evidence had been evaluated, and there was nothing at all to indicate that anyone other than the Rennsler family had been present on the Monday night they all died.
One relative came across a mass of torn paper fragments in Kip Rennsler’s sports jacket. She brought it to the detectives.
Tediously, they laid the ragged pieces of paper out on a flat surface, arranging and identifying them as though working on a jigsaw puzzle. At first, the combined scraps looked like a jumble of scribbled letters on wrinkled paper, but slowly, slowly, a pattern began to emerge.