A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  “The season was about half over,” Tuffy remembered, “and I saw him at certain matches, but I still wasn’t wrestling varsity until after Christmas. I finally made the first string and then a couple of people on the team told me that he was the coach at Davis High School and he was down looking for prospects for the years coming.”

  Tuffy had planned to go to Eisenhower High, but Gabby changed that. “He was down there to talk to me as a coach and asked me to, you know, wrestle for them—that I had potential and to give him a chance as a coach.”

  Actually, Gabby wasn’t the first coach who had tried to recruit Tuffy Pleasant. Even in the ninth grade, the kid had something extra. It wasn’t that he was that big; he grew to be 5’7” and he only weighed 138 pounds in his sophomore and junior years in high school, but even way back then he just wouldn’t quit.

  From the beginning, Tuffy liked Coach Moore. Gabby seemed to take an interest in his wrestlers not just as athletes but also as people. “You know, it kind of went beyond a coach and a student. It’s kind of hard to explain,” Tuffy said many years later, half-smiling. “But [it gets so] you know you are pretty good … you are pretty good, and you just get pretty tight with that coach, especially if you’re one of the main starters and he had a lot of interest in you. You want to do good for your coach and your school.”

  Tuffy did remarkably “good” for his school and his coach. He and Gabby had a truly symbiotic relationship. Gabby could see that Tuffy was the most outstanding wrestler on a squad of top-grade athletes and that Tuffy would represent him well. A coach’s “work product” is the athletes he brings along. Tuffy Pleasant had one of the best wrestling coaches in the state, and a friend/father-figure who had been there for him for years and who would continue to be there. Tuffy already had a wonderful father in Andrew Pleasant, but Gabby painted pictures of a future for Tuffy that Andrew might never have imagined. Gabby promised Tuffy the whole world.

  Gabby was Tuffy’s football coach too. “He was our head coach on defense.” Tuffy had the most challenging position on the football team. “I played ‘monster back’ the toughest position on defense,” Tuffy remembered. “You can get trapped sometimes. They double-team you, they triple-team you—and you got to be tough to handle the position. I was mostly on the off-side of center—either on one side or the other of our defensive tackle.”

  Tuffy played football two years at Davis High School, but wrestling was his real love, his avocation, and the very center of his existence. He didn’t mind the strict training rules Gabby Moore laid down.

  “No drinking,” Tuffy recited the forbidden activities. “No late hours whatsoever, and, if you can restrain yourself from it, no ‘physical contact’ with any type of lady.”

  Gabby didn’t like his athletes to have girlfriends. “I tried to observe his requirements,” Tuffy said with a grin. “To the best of my ability.” Since Tuffy had always been a ladies’ man, the “best of his ability” was none too pristine when it came to sex.

  It was probably natural that Tuffy Pleasant and Gabby Moore were already more than coach and athlete while Tuffy was in high school. Gabby visited a few times at the Pleasant family home, and he still dropped by the Shopper Market often. The man and the boy went out to dinner where Gabby preached to Tuffy about what his future could be. “He talked to me,” Tuffy said. “He told me to keep on moving. ‘Don’t let your education stop here,’ he said. He told me to carry it on through, and I could probably be the head coach here at Davis myself.”

  Head Wrestling coach at Davis! The very thought of something so wonderful made Tuffy’s chest swell. That became Tuffy’s ambition, the goal he looked toward all through college. One day, he would pick up the torch that Gabby handed down.

  Looking back, Tuffy said he considered Gabby a “second father,” who was always there for him. “I would go over to his house. I would get the best treatment, and I felt like he just treated me like one of his own kids.”

  During Tuffy’s senior year in high school, he was wrestling in three or four matches a week. Gabby, Gay, and their three children shared a big two-story house, and Tuffy was often invited to stay in the basement guest room. There was a wrestling mat down there, and after a workout, the young champion and several of the others on the squad—Kenny Marino and Joey Watkins, and some of the others—would head for Gabby’s house where they would go through another workout. They were young, in peak form, and tireless. They and their coach were eating, breathing, and sleeping wrestling.

  There was no drinking. Not even beer. The teenagers on his squad got caught drinking beer once and Gabby had a fit. “He just wouldn’t allow it,” Tuffy said. “Because you get to messing with all of that stuff and you can’t get in as good a shape as you need to be for that type of sport.”

  Gabby himself wasn’t drinking then either. None of them could even picture Gabby drinking. When his boys had to “cut weight,” he did too. Tuffy smiled again, remembering. “He would have him a little stomach too, you see, and he would lose weight right along with us. We had to have our hair cut; he would cut his.”

  Sometimes the wrestlers, including Tuffy Pleasant, had trouble with their grades. Gabby saw to it that they had tutors to help them. And if they needed extra credits, he made them “assistants” in his driver-training classes. How much actual work they did is questionable, but they made up for lost credits. It wasn’t that he made life too easy for them though. It was more that he was always there to solve their problems, to make them feel confident, and to tell them that their hopes for the future were attainable. He was a benevolent tyrant, far more benevolent than tyrant.

  In 1971 and 1972 Gabby Moore seemed to his athletes to have it all, everything that they hoped to have one day. He had a beautiful wife and a long-standing, apparently happy marriage. He had three great kids and a nice house. And he had the job that most of them thought would be the best job in the world.

  Most of them wanted to be just like him.

  The peak experience of Tuffy Pleasant’s life and his athletic career to date was in the summer of 1972. He had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to college. Four wrestlers—the best in the state of Washington—would be chosen to go to Japan and Hawaii in the exchange program that Gabby had worked so hard on. Tuffy yearned to be one of them.

  Tuffy had put on some weight—not much. By his senior year, he was wrestling at 158 pounds. There would be only one wrestler in that weight category chosen for the Japan trip. It was going to be difficult to pick the best from the whole state of Washington. All the contenders went to wrestling camp in Moses Lake, Washington. Tuffy roomed with his best friend and teammate; Kenny Marino, knowing how much both of them wanted to win the trip to the Far East.

  Kenny made it to the semifinals and then he was dropped. Tuffy made it all the way. He was on top of the world. He had a memorable time in Japan and Hawaii, and then came home to a hero’s welcome in Yakima.

  He was proud—and happy. No matter what happened to him later in his life, he would always talk about his shining moments in the summer of 1972. “(I was) very happy and always will be too,” he would say, almost defiantly.

  Tuffy soon came back to earth after the glory of his triumph in Japan. The rest of the summer of 1972 he worked for the Yakima City Sanitation Department hauling brush, to save money for college. With Gabby’s hearty recommendation, he had been recruited by the wrestling coach at Columbia Basin College in Pasco, Washington.

  Tuffy attended Columbia Basin from September 1972, through the winter quarter in 1975. His best friend, Kenny Marino, started his freshman year at the University of Washington in Seattle. Tuffy’s brother Anthony was still in high school.

  Gabby kept track of his “boys” even after they were in college. “He would come down and see me,” Tuffy said. “He was interested in how I did. When I left high school, he called my college coach and asked ‘How’s Pleasant doing?’ If ‘Pleasant’ was not doing this well, [he’d say] ‘Have him do this,�
�� or if ‘Pleasant is not responding to that, well then, have him do that—and he’ll respond.’”

  It was as if Tuffy had team coaching. Gabby was always around or on the phone to be sure that he was wrestling to his peak ability. It made Tuffy happy to know that his old coach was still guiding him. They were as tight as ever.

  Tuffy had not cut himself off from Yakima ties, even though he was living in Pasco. He made the 160-mile round trip twice a week—once in the middle of the week, and again on the weekends.

  Kenny Marino, who hadn’t gone back to the University of Washington after his freshman year, was living in Yakima. “As soon as I would hit town, he [Kenny] would probably be the first person I would look up,” Tuffy remembered. “Before I even went to see my family.”

  Kenny Marino was like another brother to Tuffy. “I loved him just as much,” he said. But neither Kenny nor Tuffy’s brother Anthony seemed to have the ambition that Tuffy did. He and Kenny Marino had a social life together, but they didn’t talk much about the future. And Tuffy saw that his younger brother Anthony’s main ambition was to “become another Jimi Hendrix.” Anthony was very good with the guitar, but Tuffy knew what the odds were and sometimes he thought his younger brother was a dreamer.

  Anthony had dropped out of school and both Tuffy and Gabby were trying to get him back in. “Gabby was talking to the principal and some of his teachers trying to get some of his grades straightened out, and the classes straightened out.”

  In college, Tuffy’s road suddenly developed detours. Although he had been a phenomenon in high school, Tuffy Pleasant never quite saw his dreams of wrestling championships in college come to fruition. “I did good,” he said of his career at Columbia Basin. “Except that I never did finish up at ‘State’ because every time it got right down to it, something all the time happened to me—not grades—it was either injury or sickness.”

  But his grades weren’t superior; Tuffy had a hard time in college, and he didn’t have Gabby close by to find tutors for him.

  In the spring of 1975, as Jerilee Blankenbaker Moore was trying to get up her courage to leave Gabby, Tuffy Pleasant had decided to drop out of college for a quarter. He stayed on in Pasco, though. He had a job with the Washington Fish and Game Department. “We planted fish, salmon, and steelhead at certain dams,” he explained. “We would go up the river and plant fish, and then we would go down the river to a lower level dam and wait and count how many came through.”

  Tuffy planned to continue his college at Central Washington University in Ellensburg. He had enough credits to enter as a junior. He planned to bring his grades up so that he really would have a shot at being a teacher and coach back in Yakima. Gabby had told him he could do it. In September 1975 Tuffy would move to Ellensburg and share an off-campus apartment with two roommates at 1501 Glen Drive.

  With the new freeway between Ellensburg and Yakima, Tuffy could be in Yakima in thirty-five or forty minutes. And he had a number of reasons to make the trip often. For one thing, he had never been able to adhere absolutely to Gabby’s “no girlfriends” rule. Tuffy was engaged to a young woman named Rene Sandon*. More than engaged, really. They had a three-year-old daughter and Rene was pregnant again by late fall 1975, due to deliver in June.

  Tuffy’s second reason to travel often to Yakima was that he realized that Gabby Moore needed him. Gabby had been keeping an eye on Tuffy’s college wrestling, but Tuffy had not visited Gabby’s home as he used to. He knew that Gabby and Gay were divorced, and he knew about the merry-go-round involving Morris and Jerilee and Gabby, but he was shocked when he moved back closer to Yakima to find that Gabby had completely fallen apart after Jerilee left him.

  Beginning in August 1975, Tuffy saw Gabby more often. “Usually,” Tuffy said, “I started seeing him other summers toward the end—seeing how he’s doing and talking to him about his team for the coming year, and about football.”

  But this summer was different. Sometime in August, Tuffy went by the house that Gabby had bought to share with Jerilee and her children. He was surprised to find that Gabby didn’t live there any longer. He set out to find him.

  “I kind of felt he would be the same old Mr. Moore,” Tuffy recalled. But he had heard rumors that Gabby’s teams weren’t doing well at all, and some of the wrestlers had told him, “It’s Mr. Moore—it’s not us.”

  Tuffy had wanted to see for himself, and he found that the scuttlebutt was all true. Gabby was doing a lot of drinking, sitting there in front of Tuffy and the other guys and pouring one drink after another. Gabby had always told Tuffy and the other athletes, “I don’t care what you do out of season, but during season I care a lot what you do.”

  Now, Tuffy tried to tell himself that it wasn’t as if school had started. Gabby wasn’t really coaching yet, and when September came and the wrestlers turned out, he would shape up. Tuffy was sure Gabby would quit drinking then.

  From the moment Tuffy Pleasant renewed his contacts with Gabby Moore in the summer of 1975, he saw him every day for a month. It seemed essential to Gabby that Tuffy be there—to listen. Gabby was morose; all the old spark had gone out of him. He told Tuffy that he was selling the house he had just bought the year before. No reason to keep it. He had only bought it for Jerilee and her kids. He couldn’t live in it alone. He thought it would sell quicker if he put in a concrete driveway. Laying concrete was at least something solid Tuffy could do to help Gabby, so he and a couple of his cousins put the driveway in. “We finished it off after Labor Day.”

  School started and Gabby kept right on drinking.

  Tuffy and Kenny Marino and some of the other members of Gabby’s earlier teams talked it out and set up a schedule where they could cover for him at after-school practice and even at wrestling meets. They knew that if they weren’t there to oversee things, the school administration would see how bad things really were with Gabby.

  There are few things more shocking for the very young than to discover that their heroes have feet of clay. Gabby Moore had been everything to them, and he had had it all. Now, their old coach didn’t have the perfect life any longer. Both his marriages were history. His first wife, Gay, was married to one of the football coaches at Davis. Gabby’s marriage to Jerilee had been over before it began. And soon his athletes heard that, despite their help, Gabby’s job was in jeopardy. This news only made them redouble their efforts to save it for him.

  Sometimes Gabby showed up for practice, and sometimes he didn’t. It was really better when he didn’t—better than the occasions when he had liquor on his breath, or when he went out to his car to sneak a drink from a bottle he kept there. He just hadn’t seemed to care anymore about anything except getting Jerilee to come back to him.

  Gabby’s athletes had tried to save him. If it was a matter of trying and wanting and wishing on their parts, he would have somehow come around to being his old self again. Right up to the end, they had been visiting him and trying to cheer him up.

  But now Gabby Moore was dead, and none of that mattered anymore.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Vern Henderson had not been officially assigned to the Morris Blankenbaker murder case, but now, with Gabby Moore’s murder, Vern was transferred to the homicide team investigating both the Blankenbaker and Moore murders. There was no way that Vern could keep from working on the growing mystery. He couldn’t stand on the outside any longer. He had to be there to find the answer to what was proving to be a more and more inscrutable puzzle. But first, he needed some key to find his way in—some piece of physical evidence that could start him in the right direction.

  The loss and grief Vern had felt when Morris Blankenbaker was murdered had not diminished, and it never would until he found his friend’s killer. “I don’t have many friends,” he said. “No, that’s not what I mean—I know lots of people—but people who really know me, know how I’m feeling, no … I don’t let many people get close to me. Morris was like that. Rucker was like that too. We had bonds. Just some people you get th
e feeling with and others you don’t … I always learned you can’t let people get that close to you because then they know your weaknesses. In a fatherless home, you learn to grow up quick; you don’t really have a childhood…Morris’s mother and my mother kept telling us, ‘You gotta do something with your life. You can’t just be running around the streets.”’

  Both Morris and Vern had been aware that people said mothers couldn’t do a good job of raising sons, and they strived to excel to prove them wrong. “I always wanted to do something to make my mother proud of me.” Vern Henderson said.

  Now Vern would never be proud of himself, not really, until he found Morris’s killer. Morris had been so kind to everyone. “If Morris Blankenbaker liked you, he would do anything for you. He was like a bull on the football field,” Vern said. “He could run right over anybody. He could have whipped half the school, but he wasn’t a bully; he wasn’t like that.”

  Everyone on the Yakima Police Department wanted to solve the bizarre double murders of the two popular coaches, but not one of them felt the impetus to do so in his gut the way Vern Henderson did. In that dismal period between a bloody Christmas and a cheerless New Year, Vern thought about all that had happened and wondered where to start. Which brick could he remove from the wall that a killer had built up around himself? How could he make that wall tumble?

  Bob Brimmer was Vern’s sergeant upstairs in the detectives’ office. He was an old-school investigator with decades on the job. He would work the case his way, and Vern would work it his. He knew what his strengths were. He was a “listener” and he had spread out a network that snared information during his years investigating juveniles. He counted on his network now, Yakima was a small town, and people talked. Sooner or later, some names were going to work their way back to Henderson. At a time when he had the least inclination to be patient, that was just what he was going to have to be.