Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers

by Ann Rule

  He spent Tuesday morning, November 5, looking at houses “because I planned to go into the real estate business with Sara,” he explained. “I ate lunch with her. Later I had supper—what little I managed to get down.”

  He said he owned three complete theatrical makeup kits, and he made himself up to look like a South American revolutionary, with dark makeup, the false facial hair, and the fatigue jacket and pants. “I took two guns with me—one a drop gun [an untraceable gun left at the scene to confuse police] and the attack weapon that I tucked into my belt.”

  He said he hadn’t worn his glasses for fear he might drop them and his prescription would be traced to him. “I’m nearsighted in one eye,” LeClerk said, “and farsighted in the other. My night vision in the medium range is poor.”

  Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo stared at the hit man. He seemed to be living in a fantasy world—with his elaborate makeup—but he was not as clever as he pretended to be. To go out on a murder-for-hire mission half blind without even knowing what his quarry looked like seemed less than clever. And yet this man in front of them was supposed to be a genius.

  “I deliberately had no identification on me,” LeClerk said, “just that napkin that Nancy gave me at the Holiday Inn on Halloween.”

  They had arrived near the Acadia Health Center around 7:00 P.M., Bennett unaware, of course, that they were tailed by a caravan of law enforcement officers. “I figured Art would park his car near the Bounty Tavern,” he explained. “I found the 1979 Dart and I tried to clip the wires, but it was too dark to find the leads, so I gave up, for fear I might be noticed.

  “I asked Sara to move her car several times, and I made several reconnoitering trips around the neighborhood on foot. I saw the alley between the health center and the Bounty Tavern and figured that would be the best place…. I would just stand there and wait for Art. Sara would wait for me at the other end of the alley. After the shooting, I was going to take off my makeup as we drove away.”

  “Why did you leave the area that one time and drive through Windermere?” Homan asked, curious. Windermere is one of Seattle’s poshest neighborhoods.

  “Oh, that?” LeClerk said. “Well, this woman who worked for me had relatives there. I told Sara, ‘It should be him I’m killing.’ See, this Brenda left the week before, and she took money from my tavern and left a note. It said, ‘Try to understand—this is all I can do. I’ll get in touch.’”

  (Bennett LeClerk certainly led a complicated life. Two wives, numerous mistresses, and one woman he wanted as a mistress, Brenda Simms, who would one day give detectives a good deal of background on him.)

  “Tell us about the shooting,” Homan said.

  “Well, the class got out a little after nine. I saw the man I’d seen in the photographs Nancy showed me. He was talking to other people in his class. I walked up to him and said, ‘Are you Art?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ and I fired. It was a misfire, and I fired again. But at the last minute, I turned the gun to avoid a fatal shot.”

  DePalmo and Homan looked at each other. Since Art Stahl had suffered a through-and-through wound to the dead center of his chest, it was hard to believe that Bennett LeClerk had really turned his weapon away. You couldn’t aim with much more fatal intent than he had.

  Bennett LeClerk pleaded guilty to first-degree assault and on March 5, 1975, was sentenced to up to twenty years in prison by Judge William C. Goodloe. Deputy Prosecutor Lee Yates had recommended that LeClerk be sentenced for “up to life” in prison, and Goodloe suggested that the minimum should be the same as the maximum—twenty years. “You are not a contract man flown in from Chicago with a violin case,” he said scathingly to LeClerk. “You are a citizen of this state who made a decision that turned to mud.”

  LeClerk was uncharacteristically humble. “There is no question that my judgment was poor beyond description. The act is repugnant to me and leaves scars I am going to bear for a very long time.”

  It was a classic sociopath’s statement; those with this personality disorder always think of events in terms of themselves. While Art Stahl had barely escaped with his life and bore real scars on his neck and chest, Bennett LeClerk talked of his scars.

  LeClerk remained in the King County Jail so that he could serve as a material witness against another suspect. The investigation, of course, was far from over. That very afternoon after the sentencing of her old friend, Nancy Brooks was arrested.

  Detectives Homan and DePalmo obtained a warrant for her arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. They arrived at the Brookses’ Bellevue home at 4:17 P.M. Nancy Brooks seemed only a little surprised when she saw the warrant for her arrest. Otherwise, she maintained the same calm demeanor they had always seen. She quickly made arrangements to have her children and her dogs cared for and then walked with the Seattle investigators to their car.

  She talked a little with detectives Homan and DePalmo at headquarters.

  She told them that Bennett LeClerk had “haunted” her since 1970, remarking, “I don’t know why I am even telling you this, because you won’t believe me. LeClerk is so strange you will think I made it all up.”

  They knew LeClerk was strange from personal experience with him, but the fact remained that Nancy Brooks was the thread that bound shooter and victim together.

  Nancy denied any connection to Art’s shooting. She told Homan and DePalmo that she did go to Bennett’s house on Halloween and that he had insisted on giving her a “tour” that included even his shower. “I was afraid,” she said, “because I kept thinking of that movie, Psycho. But I only met him, as I told you before, because he was upset and said he needed to talk to me.”

  Nancy Brooks was released a few hours later on $10,000 bond. A week later she pleaded innocent to the charges against her.

  For three months the Stahl-Brooks-LeClerk case faded from the media. Nothing would be happening, at least on the surface, until Nancy Brooks’s trial in June. Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor Roy Howson and Deputy Prosecutor Les Yates would represent the state, and Defense Attorney Gerald Bangs would attempt to show that Nancy Brooks had no connection to the near-murder of Art Stahl.

  It was ironically fitting, perhaps, that Bennett LeClerk was the first witness for the prosecution. He made a striking figure as he left the jail elevator. His wrists were manacled, but he wore an expensive suit, a crisp white shirt, and a silk tie. His head was shaved, and he had grown a goatee and mustache. (This time, his facial hair was real.)

  As he was led toward the courtroom through the marbled corridors of the courthouse, LeClerk passed his would-be victim, Art Stahl, who by now had recovered. Suddenly LeClerk whirled, and the court deputies’ hands moved to their guns. They need not have been concerned. LeClerk merely leaned down and presented a very surprised Art Stahl with an expensive book about Buddhist philosophy. He had carried it in one hand, ready for this meeting.

  Stahl, bemused, accepted it and thumbed through it as he waited to testify.

  As a witness, LeClerk seemed intelligent and responsive, if more than a little eccentric, as he discussed his wives, mistresses, Buddhism, the temple of worship in his basement, and his small collection of shrakin (Japanese weapons), which included a manreiki, a chain with weights on the end.

  “The Imperial Guards used [the chain] on assassins,” he explained to the jury, “so that they could disarm them of samurai swords without spilling blood in the palace.”

  LeClerk spoke of his long friendship with Nancy Brooks and of his revulsion when she told him about a man named Art who was cruel to his children. Nancy had told him that Art was a sadist. He testified that she had finally convinced him that Art would have to die so that the children could be safe.

  The jury would have to choose between this flamboyant witness and the prim, sweet-faced woman at the defense table whose skirts hung discreetly below the knee, whose makeup was barely visible, who was a registered nurse, and who had no criminal background at all.

  Defense Attorney B
angs hit hard on LeClerk’s many affairs and his religious “disciples,” but the witness appeared to enjoy jousting with Bangs. He went into minute detail about his Buddhist shrine and the Buddhist symbol—a water dragon, or miziechi. He denied that he considered himself the eye of the dragon, or so-ryugn.

  The words might as well have been Greek, but the man on the stand radiated charisma, and something more—perhaps a thin sheen of madness? Nevertheless, his genius was apparent to the jury and the gallery. No one listening would have denied that.

  Nancy Brooks, sitting at the defense table, showed no reaction at all as LeClerk gave his version of the events of the previous fall. He said that his “conscious intent was to kill the man” but that a “subconscious intent” had made him attempt to turn the gun. So, in effect, he had saved Stahl’s life.

  LeClerk’s mother, Claire Noonan, testified that she had called Nancy Brooks as soon as she read about the shooting in the newspapers. That would have been the day after—November 6. She said Nancy claimed to know absolutely nothing about it. Next, Claire had called her son in the hospital, where he was recovering from his neck wound.

  “Why did you shoot that man?” she asked, and he replied that he “had done it for a friend of mine.”

  The witness said the only friend she had in Seattle was Nancy Brooks. “I asked my son if Nancy was the friend, and he said, ‘That’s right.’”

  Art Stahl, the intended victim, was the last witness for the state. He recalled that the “violence” in his marriage had come not from him but from his estranged wife, Rose, who was furious over the way he spent his trust fund. No one except Rose and two friends at the university had known that he attended reflexology class on Tuesday evenings.

  Stahl testified that he didn’t see the stranger with a gun until a moment before he was shot in the chest. He also said he had filed for divorce from Rose as soon as he was well enough to leave the hospital.

  Sara Talbot, the young woman who had driven the hit car, testified for the defense, but not in person: she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in the months between the crime in November 1974 and the trial in June 1975. Her image appeared in the courtroom on videotape as she recalled the frightening evening she had spent with Bennett LeClerk. She had been told he had cut his “kill fee” because he was going to shoot a man “for a friend,” but she had never heard the name Nancy Brooks.

  Rose Stahl testified in support of her close friend Nancy. Rose admitted that she and Art had had a marriage marked by ups and downs, but she denied ever threatening to kill him. She certainly had not offered to pay $1,000 to have him shot. She had never discussed any of her financial problems with Nancy. “My husband would not have approved of that,” she said calmly.

  Although it is rare for defendants in cases of murder or attempted murder to take the witness stand, Nancy Brooks’s attorney evidently felt she would make a good impression on the jury. Dressed modestly, as always, Nancy Brooks squeezed her husband’s hand as she rose to defend herself.

  She testified in a soft voice, recalling that Bennett LeClerk had come back into her life a few years before. She had met him at a shopping center in 1973 and gone to see his house. She’d met “both his wives.” They had confided that they had difficulty deciding who should answer when a caller asked for “Mrs. LeClerk.”

  Nancy Brooks said that the last time LeClerk had come to her house he’d worn all black and had carried a gun and a syringe full of poison meant, she said, for the husband of one of his mistresses.

  Bennett’s lengthy visits to the Brookses’ Bellevue home had become a nuisance. She said she’d finally had to tell him not to come again because the neighbors were talking, but she said he could phone her. “You’re making it up because your husband is jealous,” she said LeClerk had raged. “All men are jealous!”

  Asked by her attorney to try to remember all her contacts with twenty-eight-year-old Bennett LeClerk, Nancy Brooks said he had called her in the fall of 1973—twenty months before this trial—and he had said that one of his wives was pregnant and the baby was due in January. He thought Nancy might like to come and visit his mother when she came to Washington.

  “And the next time?”

  “It was probably in May—May of 1974.” Nancy Brooks said she was just out of the hospital after having a neck fusion. Bennett was once again calling her and begging her to meet him, asking if he could come over and see her. “I told him he would have to call first—but he never called.” She said he was very upset over a woman named Brenda Simms—“the one woman he could really love.”

  In September 1974, Nancy Brooks said, Bennett called again. He told her he had been drinking saki and taking Valium, Empirin, and codeine for a back injury. He asked her if she wanted to invest in something, and she had said no.

  In October he called again, threatening suicide because everyone had deserted him.

  “I believed him,” she told the jury earnestly. “He was begging for just one hour of my time.” She testified that she had agreed to meet him in Everett on October 25 only because he told her he was so depressed that he would kill himself if she refused. “I didn’t want his suicide on my conscience.”

  Bennett wanted her to intercede with Brenda, who was leaving him. Nancy refused, but suggested he get counseling. She mentioned the name of a psychiatrist, she testified, and he became enraged. She then said she had friends who had gone through counseling and that it had helped them a great deal. No, she said, she “thought” she had not mentioned the Stahls by name.

  Oddly, though, Bennett had referred to the Stahls as if he knew them.

  Nancy Brooks blushed as she said LeClerk “got fresh” and put his hand beneath her blouse during the meeting in the cocktail lounge. After three hours he walked her to her car and threatened her by saying: “I’ll run the show. You will meet me again. I know where your daughter rides, and she’s beautiful. If you want to keep her face in that condition, you’ll meet me.”

  He also threatened her husband, she testified. “He told me that if he couldn’t get him, someone else would.”

  She had been terrorized by Bennett LeClerk, she told the jury. But had she told her husband—or the police or her attorney? No, she had not. “I was so scared,” she explained to Prosecutor Roy Howson.

  Asked if LeClerk had scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin during their meeting, she said she could not recall.

  Despite her terror, Nancy Brooks said she had met LeClerk again on October 31. This time, she embellished what she had told Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo. They listened, amazed. They had been led to believe her visit to LeClerk’s home had happened much earlier and in the presence of his wives.

  Now she said that Bennett had forced her from the Holiday Inn to his home at gunpoint. He had shown her his shrine, his shower, and his bedroom. He had subjected her to sadistic teasing, laughing hysterically. He had shown her the Buddha downstairs and told her the orange dragon was modeled after him.

  “He wrapped the chain…around his arms, legs, waist,” she told the jury, “and he did barefoot karate kicks. He threw the chain toward me, and I jumped back and it fell on the floor.”

  As the jury leaned forward, Nancy Brooks continued her story of her secret visit to the home of a man she claimed to be afraid of. She said he took her into his bedroom and then into the shower, explaining how “sexy” it was. He told her, she said, that he had brought “many women” there. He’d asked her if she could tell what was so special about the shower. When she shook her head in bewilderment, he showed her how he’d had the shower head mounted so that he could direct the spray wherever he wanted it.

  Hesitantly, Nancy said that Bennett had pushed her down on the bed and tried to kiss her. She looked beseechingly at her attorney, “Do I have to say it all?”

  “Try to paraphrase,” he said gently.

  “He pushed me on the bed and tried to kiss me. He told me over and over what an exciting lover he was…a lot of rubbish like that. He showed me a bottle
of cinna-mony liquid and put liquid from it on his finger and made me taste it, and he said it was part of his sex rituals.”

  The defendant insisted that she had not had sex with LeClerk. Finally, she said, he let her go and drove her back to her car. Again she failed to tell her husband of her frightening ordeal.

  She was positive that she had never mentioned the Stahls while she was with Bennett. Positive that she had not said a word about Art’s being brutal to his children.

  She certainly had never contracted to have Art killed.

  As Prosecutors Lee Yates and Roy Howson questioned Nancy, there was a hard edge to her answers. The softly modulated voice was gone now. She denied over and over again that she had been a go-between for LeClerk and Rose Stahl, the facilitator of a planned murder. She refused to look at the attorneys for the state as she answered them.

  It was a lengthy trial. In his final arguments, Yates pointed out that Washington statutes declared that anyone who “aids, assists, abets, encourages, hires, counsels, induces or procures another to commit a crime is guilty and shall be treated the same as the person who actually commits it.”

  Yates stressed that Nancy Brooks had known exactly what strings to pull to make LeClerk do what she wanted. She was Rose Stahl’s close friend. The women shared every confidence with each other. Nancy Brooks had known about the inheritance and the threatened divorce.

  And she had also known just where Art Stahl would be on the night he was shot. She had known all the facts found on the napkin that Bennett LeClerk had carried. Who else would have provided him with the address and the description of the intended victim, right down to his license-plate number?

  In the end, Yates asked the most salient questions: “Why Art Stahl? Why would LeClerk shoot Stahl, a man he didn’t even know?”

  And that was the question that the jury could not answer satisfactorily without finding Nancy guilty. There was no other way to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Rose didn’t know Bennett. Bennett didn’t know Art Stahl. But Nancy Brooks knew everyone, and she knew just which buttons to push. The prosecution team didn’t deny that Bennett LeClerk was a bizarre man, a man who professed to have great power and strength, but he was also a man who could not stand rejection from women.