by Ann Rule
Vern Henderson, always taciturn, became doubly so as the old year passed away and 1976 dawned. Somebody knew who had shot Morris and who had shot Gabby. It might be the same man—or woman. It might be two different men—or women.
Even though Gabby Moore had begun as the prime suspect in Morris Blankenbaker’s murder, Bob Brimmer and Howard Cyr had established that he could not have killed Morris—not with his own hands.
But then who had?
When Vern Henderson said everybody in Yakima liked Morris, he wasn’t overstating it. Everybody had.
It’s an old rule of thumb in homicide investigation that detectives look for the killer among those closest to the victims. Family first. Then friends. Then coworkers, and out into a continually widening circle. There had been no obvious reason at all for strangers to kill either Morris or Gabby. They hadn’t been robbed. Neither had been involved in a fight or altercation with anyone. Their only “enemies” were one another.
And their main “connection” was Jerilee. All of the witnesses who had seen Jerilee the morning she found Morris’s body agreed that this was a woman in deep shock and excruciating grief. She was never a serious suspect. Why should she be? If she had wanted to be free of Morris a second time, he would have let her go as gently as he had the first time. But she hadn’t wanted to leave the father of her two little children; she loved Morris, and she was looking forward to remarrying him.
She had no gun.
She had no gun debris on her hands.
Her recall of events of the night/morning of November 21/22 dovetailed perfectly with witness statements and with the detectives’ reconstruction of events.
Morris had stuck close to home when he wasn’t teaching, coaching, or moonlighting at the Lion’s Share. Gabby had stayed in his apartment in the last weeks of his life. His closest companions had been his son, his daughters, and the former athletes who had tried to comfort him and to cover for him so he wouldn’t lose his job.
Even in the weeks when he had not been officially assigned to the Blankenbaker case, Vern Henderson had gone over Morris’s last moments a hundred times in his mind. “He knew who it was,” Vern said. “The reason I know Morris knew who it was was because there were no defensive wounds. I looked for that when I was at his autopsy.”
Vern Henderson knew Morris’s habits almost as well as he knew his own. Morris would have driven into the alley behind his house, parked his car next to the carport, and headed for the side gate.
“He had gotten through the gate,” Henderson surmised. “And he was probably shutting it, and someone called, ‘Morris!’ and he turned around. He knew who it was. As good as Morris was, you might have killed him, but not without his having some defensive marks, unless he knew who it was. As close as the shooter was, it made me know it wasn’t an ‘enemy’ who shot him, to get that close to Morris—because Morris was too good at hand-to-hand combat. No, he knew him.”
There would always be times when Vern Henderson regretted that he carried the visual memory of Morris lying on the autopsy table, but that was the price he had to pay. He had needed to know that there were no defensive marks on his friend at all, to know how close the shooter had gotten to Morris. It helped him to picture who he was looking for. “I knew that Morris not only knew the person who shot him—he had to have trusted him—to let him get that close.”
Now, at last, Vern was right in the middle of the investigation not only of Morris’s murder but also of Gabby’s. He had watched Gabby from a distance during the last weeks of his life. “I expected that Gabby had had something to do with it,” he said. “I knew he didn’t shoot him [Morris]—as far as that point, but naturally he was a suspect.”
One encounter kept coming back to Vern. After Morris’s autopsy, he had been downstairs in the radio room just as Gabby Moore was coming down the hall headed for Brimmer’s office on the second floor. “He was coming around there and I wanted to see him, because that would tell me something for my own self.”
“He came down the hall and I’m standing at the end of the hall waiting on him. And he kept his head down. He would not look up at me,” Vern recalled. “And he got right even with me and he says, ‘Vern, I … I … just didn’t do it,’ but he never would look up and look at me dead in the face. And he went on and I kept looking at him. I said, in my own mind, I know he didn’t shoot him, but he had someone do it.”
Vern Henderson shrugged. “And there was no evidence. And all I could think of was when we were back in junior high school and he was our wrestling coach. How he always said, ‘Look your opponent dead in the eye. Let him know what you’re feeling, and that you’re going to beat him.’ But Gabby wouldn’t look at me.”
Sometimes now, Vern wished he had gone up to Gabby as he stood over Morris’s grave and asked him some questions. Vern hadn’t known how short the time was. He had always thought that there would come a time when he could talk to his old coach—where maybe careful conversation would allow the whole truth to come out. He remembered the old Gabby, and how he had loved his athletes—how he had loved Morris. He had figured that somewhere deep inside, Gabby had to be feeling pangs of conscience. That was why Gabby had driven up to the cemetery in the bitter wind of winter. That was probably why Gabby had increased his prodigious consumption of alcohol. At the end of his life, Gabby Moore had been as self-destructive as any man Vern Henderson had ever seen. Whatever had happened on Christmas Eve, there would never be a time now for Vern Henderson to sit down and talk with Gabby Moore. He would have to figure out a way to tap into the minds of the killer-—or killers—living or dead.
How were Bob Brimmer and Vern Henderson and the rest of the Yakima detectives going to find the concealed fragments that made up the crimes? How were they going to get solid evidence that Jeff Sullivan could take into a murder trial? Tips and leads were called into the office, and Brimmer fielded those. Henderson was more a believer in the gifts of information that could be gleaned out in the streets.
Henderson had made a point to find out who Gabby’s closest associates were when Morris was killed. Now, the Yakima investigator set out to see who Gabby Moore had spent his time with in the last week or so of his life. It didn’t take long for him to find out that Gabby had had almost daily visits from a number of his athletes. Names mentioned to Vern Henderson and Bob Brimmer were Joey Watkins, Angelo “Tuffy” Pleasant, Tuffy’s younger brother Anthony, and Stoney Morton*.
Joey Watkins told Brimmer and Henderson that several of the guys had visited Gabby often in December. He knew for a fact that Tuffy and Anthony Pleasant and Stoney Morton had stopped by to check on him on Christmas Eve.
Vern couldn’t believe that the Pleasant brothers or Joey Watkins or Kenny Marino would have hurt Morris. They were Morris’s friends. Vern had seen Morris teach Tuffy some wrestling moves, and the Pleasants and Joey sometimes visited at the house on North Sixth Street.
“I called all my friends,” Henderson said, “and asked if they had heard any rumors, and my one friend said he had heard that Joey Watkins and Tuffy Pleasant had been in the Lion’s Share talking to Morris a little while before he got off work.”
That information didn’t make much of an impression on Henderson. He knew that both Watkins and Pleasant often stopped by the Lion’s Share; it wasn’t as if they had suddenly shown up someplace where they had never been. In fact, it was Joey Watkins who had gone home with Morris to back him up the night Gabby broke into Morris’s house while he was working and Jerilee had been frightened.
When Vern checked at the Lion’s Share, he learned that Tuffy and Joey had been in on Friday night, probably between nine and eleven, at least two hours before Morris got off work.
Tuffy Pleasant interested Vern more than Joey Watkins, though. “I thought. ‘Now Tuffy hung around with Gabby all the time.’ I’d seen him driving Gabby’s little MG around town.”
Back in November, Vern had turned that information over in his head but he never could make it fit. Sure, Tuffy had tw
o sides to him. He could be the kid with the wide-open grin who was everybody’s friend, but he could also be a fighter. Vern knew that Tuffy had put his own father in the hospital once. “His dad never turned him in,” Vern recalled. “But I knew about it because we worked on the garbage trucks together way back and we got to be friends.”
Joey Watkins was a big guy, but Vern had never known him to be threatening off the wrestling mat. Naaww … he couldn’t see either of those “fools” shooting Morris. He put it out of his mind and concentrated on his own assignments.
But now he was working two homicides and on occasion his thoughts turned back to the tight relationship Gabby and Tuffy had had. Vern wondered if Tuffy had wanted Gabby to be happy bad enough to shoot Morris. That conclusion was too mind-boggling and Henderson shook it away. Tuffy was a hothead sometimes, but Vern couldn’t picture him as a killer.
And then there was the question of who had shot Gabby. Tuffy Pleasant owed everything to Gabby Moore. He loved his coach and his friend. There was no way he would have harmed a hair on Gabby’s rapidly balding head.
Vern Henderson always ended up right back where he’d started with his maddeningly circular theorizing. When it came right down to it, he had no idea who had killed either Morris or Gabby.
Bob Brimmer and Vern had gone to the Pleasants’ South Sixth Street grocery store several times. They now asked Tuffy’s mother, Coydell, if she would have Tuffy contact their office.
On Saturday, January 3, 1976, Tuffy Pleasant came into the Yakima Police Station for an interview. He was not read his rights under Miranda because he was not considered a viable suspect. Yes, he said he had visited with his former coach early on the evening of Christmas Eve. He said he had asked Moore if he’d like to go out someplace and have a couple of drinks and Gabby Moore had agreed and started to clean up; But then, Gabby had received two phone calls and whoever it was had seemed to upset him. Tuffy said he had changed his mind about going out. He wanted to stay in his apartment and have some drinks. And so Tuffy had left to go to some of his own family’s Christmas celebrations. When Tuffy left, he said Gabby had been fine. Tuffy had apparently been as shocked as everyone else to learn the next morning that Gabby was dead.
Pressed, Tuffy admitted that Gabby had been talking kind of crazy about getting rid of Morris Blankenbaker earlier in the fall. He had told Tuffy that he would be willing to pay five hundred dollars, or even more, if someone would shoot Morris. Tuffy had said he wouldn’t even consider killing Morris. To get Gabby off the subject, to placate him for the moment, he had suggested a name he plucked out of the air as a possible hired killer, someone who could furnish “a cold gun.” He said he had described this potential hired gun as someone who “likes leather clothes.”
“The whole idea behind the [proposed] shooting of Morris,” Tuffy told police, “was for the love of Jerilee.”
Gabby was up and down emotionally all fall, Tuffy said, but he seemed to be at his lowest ebb a few days before Christmas. Tuffy told Brimmer and Henderson that he had a strong alibi for the night Morris Blankenbaker was shot, although he couldn’t say just what Joey Watkins had done that night.
He said that he and Joey had gone to the Red Lion and then Joey “split” and went off by himself. Tuffy said he had stayed all night with a girl at the hotel, and then had gone to an address on North Fourth in Yakima and spent the rest of Saturday and Saturday night with the girl there. On Sunday, he said he had moved his belongings out of Joey Watkins’s house and that was the last time he had had much to do with him.
Although the Yakima detectives were not entirely convinced that Tuffy had told them the truth or all of the truth, they had no evidence to tell them differently. Tuffy left their offices.
Tuffy Pleasant’s whereabouts on the night Morris Blankenbaker was shot had to be traced. Hard facts were essential, even though Tuffy made an unlikely suspect. No matter how many questions the Yakima detectives asked, they couldn’t find anyone who said Tuffy had anything against Morris. It was common knowledge that Gabby had been his hero, his mentor, for years.
Bob Brimmer and his detectives had gone over the yard where Morris Blankenbaker had been shot a number of times. They figured that, with three shots, there should be three bullet casings lying somewhere in the area, unless the death gun had been a revolver. An automatic or a semiautomatic would eject the spent casings once the slug had been fired at a target. Morris hadn’t mowed the grass before the snow fell, and there were also tall weeds in a lot of spots. It wasn’t likely that the killer had taken the time to stop and look for bullet casings so he could pick them up before he fled down the alley. The detectives had even used metal detectors, painstakingly working over the grass and parking area in a grid pattern.
And they had found nothing.
With Gabby’s murder, they did have a bullet casing. The .22 shell was crimped on the open end, probably where the killer had stepped on it as he left by Moore’s back door. The casing’s worth was minimal unless or until they found a gun to match it to, or they found a casing from the Blankenbaker shooting to compare to it. At least they knew now they were looking for an automatic .22 caliber weapon.
If they were lucky enough to find a casing on the Blankenbaker property, they could establish what everyone involved in the probe already believed—that both Morris and Gabby had been shot with the same gun. If they could prove that, and if they could somehow locate that gun — a tremendously big “if”—they might just be back in business.
In the meantime, Vern Henderson continued his “playing tag,” as he put it. He talked to his friends who had talked to their friends who had talked to others. Everyone seemed to have his or her own slightly unique hypothesis about who the killer was.
Vern kept hearing Joey Watkins’s name. Vern’s gut still told him that it wasn’t Joey Watkins he was after. Joey was talking too much for a man trying to hide something, and Vern just couldn’t see him as a double murderer.
But Joey Watkins and Tuffy Pleasant were friends, and they had occasionally shared living quarters. In fact, they had lived together right up to the night Gabby died. Tuffy and Gabby had been “tight.” Both Tuffy and Joey Watkins had been seen with Morris within hours of his murder, and over the last few months of his life they had been regular visitors to Gabby’s apartment.
Joey Watkins and Tuffy Pleasant had been close friends since grade school. Joey nodded when Vern asked about that. Yes, Tuffy had lived with him on and off during the previous autumn when Tuffy came home from college on the weekends, except when he was staying at his girlfriend’s house. Joey told Vern Henderson that he was with Tuffy for the first part of the evening on November 21, until Tuffy joined some people at the next table in the Red Lion—two women and a man.
Joey said he had gone home, visited with his girlfriend, and then gone to bed. He said he really didn’t know when Tuffy came home, or if he came home during the night. Tuffy often went to his girlfriend Rene’s house to stay overnight. He had his own key to Joey’s place, so Joey couldn’t say yes, no, or maybe about where Tuffy had been after he last saw him at nine P.M. on the night of November 2l.
However, Vern found it interesting that by Christmas Eve, Tuffy no longer stayed with Joey Watkins on weekends. In fact, Joey said they rarely saw each other after Morris’s death.
Joey agreed that he had seen Gabby Moore on Christmas Eve. Moore had come over to his house around 6:30 or 7:00 that evening. He had been looking for Tuffy and Kenny Marino because they had his sports car. The coach had sat down and watched a football game with Joey for a while, and then Joey said he had driven Moore down to North Fourth Street where Kenny Marino lived. “Gabby’s car was parked out there.”
Joey said that was the last he saw of Gabby: he had picked up his girlfriend and gone out to Harrah, a tiny hamlet south of Yakima, where she worked at a halfway house for mentally disturbed adolescents. “We stayed there until Christmas morning,” Watkins said.
Joey said he had no idea that Gabby Moo
re had been shot until the next morning. “I stopped at Mrs. Pleasant’s store and I was going to get something to eat and I just saw his picture in the headlines.”
In January, Sergeant Richard Nesary, the Yakima Police Department’s polygraph examiner, ran four lie detector tests on Gabby Moore’s associates—including Tuffy Pleasant—in an effort to see if red flags might pop up. Nesary read the resulting strips and came up with only inconclusive readings.
Despite Tuffy’s protestations that he had no idea who had shot Gabby Moore, Vern Henderson had heard enough through the grapevine to be more interested in the results of Tuffy’s polygraph than in the others. Tuffy had been the closest to Gabby Moore by far. Tuffy Pleasant had always called Gabby Moore “The Man.” And that was exactly what Gabby had been to Tuffy for the greater part of their relationship—the perfect example of what a man should be. If Tuffy had wanted one thing in this world, it was to go to college and graduate and be just like Gabby Moore. Vern heard that often enough as he asked around town. “It wasn’t Joey Watkins who was driving around in ‘The Man’s’ car all the time,” Vern said. “It was Tuffy in that little MG.”
Then how could it be Tuffy who had killed his hero? Everyone Vern talked to said that Tuffy would have done anything to help Gabby. Vern Henderson realized that might be the answer to only half of the puzzle, and that if Tuffy had killed Morris for Gabby, it made some kind of bleak sense. The other half didn’t make any sense at all. Tuffy might have killed for Gabby, but he would have died, Vern thought, before he would kill Gabby himself.
Vern had begun following Tuffy’s car occasionally as he drove through Yakima. He knew that Tuffy had gone up to Gabby Moore’s grave—just as Gabby had been seen standing silently over Morris’s grave. Was Tuffy’s grief a normal sense of loss or was it combined with regret and guilt?