by Ann Rule
Polygraph examinations can produce all kinds of results. Four recording “pens” glide smoothly along moving graph paper at the rate of six inches a minute. A subject’s blood pressure, respiration (number of breaths per minute), galvanic skin response (sweating), and pulse are generally good indicators of reactions to stress-producing questions. All polygraph questions are answered either “Yes” or “No,” and the operator establishes his subject’s “normal” responses by asking innocuous questions such as “Do you live in the United States?” “Is it Wednesday?” and “Is your shirt green?” He often will ask a deliberate lie question to check to see how a particular subject will react when he gives a dishonest response.
With every decade, polygraph machines become more sophisticated just as their operators learn to look for more subtle signals. Beyond the accepted physiological reactions, there are minute chemical changes that today can alert a polygrapher that a subject may be evading the truth.
When Tuffy Pleasant went on the polygraph on January 10, 1976, Dick Nesary was using what was then a near-state-of-the-art system: a 1971 Arthur II polygraph machine. Nesary always double-checked the machine beforehand. Nesary explained his checkout procedure. “Well, it’s very simple. You take a pop bottle and wrap the blood pressure cuff around it, pump up the pressure to eighty and leave it sit for five minutes and see if the pressure goes down. If it doesn’t, then there’s no leaks in the system.”
On January 10, as Nesary gave the lie detector test to Tuffy Pleasant, he built up gradually to the vital questions:
“Did you shoot Morris Blankenbaker?” and “Did you shoot Gabby Moore?”
In Nesary’s words, the results were “unreadable.”
“My opinion was that he had knowledge of the situation, but I could not arrive at an opinion as to whether or not he was the actual one involved in it.”
Those January results dampened Vern Henderson’s enthusiasm for Tuffy Pleasant as a viable suspect, at least until he talked again to Joey Watkins. Watkins wasn’t happy about becoming even a long-shot murder suspect, and he was quite willing to talk with Vern. He pointed out that he was not the one who had always been seen with Gabby Moore—that it was Tuffy who was Gabby’s buddy. “Who do you think was running around with Gabby?” Watkins asked Henderson.
“It was Tuffy, not me. I didn’t run around with that man.”
“That’s true,” Vern agreed. “You didn’t.”
Vern Henderson realized, however, that Joey Watkins might be the vital link between himself and Tuffy Pleasant. With every meeting he had with Watkins, Vern learned more. “Tuffy didn’t know what Joey Watkins was saying to me,” Vern recalled. “But from talking with Watkins, I knew that when J eventually got to Tuffy, he would be able to tell me what had gone on.”
Joey Watkins had taken his time about trusting Vern Henderson, and he had debated how much to tell him. Finally, he blurted out information that was of tremendous importance to the double-murder probe.
Vern remembered the moment. “Joey said, ‘Hey, look—Tuffy—I saw Tuffy with a gun.’ “And I said, ‘What kind of a gun?’ and he said, ‘A German-type twenty-two with a long barrel and a long handle that was wrapped with tape.”’
Vern asked Watkins if the gun had been an automatic, and Watkins nodded. “Yeah, one of those German Luger type guns.”
“But I heard you had a gun like that,” Vern hedged.
“It was, in my house, all right,” Watkins agreed, “but it wasn’t mine. It belonged to Tuffy.”
Watkins said he didn’t know where the gun had come from and he had no idea where it might be at the present moment.
Although he desperately wanted to solve Morris’s and Gabby’s murders, Vern Henderson had been halfway hoping that he wouldn’t hear information that placed Tuffy Pleasant squarely as the focal point in his investigation. He would far rather have had the suspect be a stranger. There were too many ties between them, these two young black men in a town where they were in such a minority. Vern and Tuffy were both athletes who had excelled and made their school and their town proud. Vern liked Tuffy, even though he could be a wiseguy at times, and Vern deeply admired Tuffy’s father, Andrew Pleasant, Sr. The last thing Vern wanted to do was humiliate and grieve that man who had struggled so hard to see his children do better in the world than he had. Andrew had worked two jobs all his life and he had just about seen his dreams come true: all but one of Andrew and Coydell’s children were in college by the mid-seventies.
But the word was out that Tuffy Pleasant might be a suspect in the two shootings—not officially, but in an undercurrent of gossip—and Andrew, Sr., came to Vern, just as Olive Blankenbaker had once come to him. They were each pleading for justice for their children, and their requests left Vern Henderson torn in two.
“When Morris’s mother asked me to find who had killed him, I told her that I would,” Vern said. “I didn’t know what else to say. It was very emotional and I just wanted to hug her. It was the same with Tuffy’s father.”
“Tuffy’s father came to me and he said, ‘Look. Vern, you’re working this case. I want to know if my son actually did this or not. I know we can trust you.’ I knew right then that I was going to be in trouble because who really wants to know that his son committed murder? I knew right then that if I found out Tuffy had something to do with it, our friendship would be over.”
It was a solid friendship going back to when Andrew Pleasant came to watch Vern play football and continuing when they worked in the Sanitation Department while Vern was going to Yakima Valley Community College.
Vern didn’t know Tuffy Pleasant as well as he did Tuffy’s father, but he was about to. He drove up to Ellensburg and went to the rooming house where Tuffy was living while he was going to Central Washington University. Tuffy met him outside, and the two began what would be a tentative, edgy, continuing dialogue.
From that point on, Tuffy Pleasant would always sense that someone was waiting and watching his movements. He could count on seeing Vern Henderson often. He suspected—correctly—that Vern was somewhere around, even when he didn’t see him. It didn’t matter that Tuffy had walked out of the lie detector test with an unreadable graph, leaving the polygrapher Dick Nesary shaking his head. It didn’t matter that Tuffy felt he had aced his meeting with Brimmer and the other detectives in January. He still felt uneasy. It seemed to Tuffy that Vern knew too much about him, and that he wasn’t ever going to leave him alone until he proved it.
The hell of it was that Tuffy kind of liked Vern Henderson. In other circumstances, he would have been glad to talk with him, but, for the moment, Vern made him nervous.
And that was exactly the reaction Vern was trying for.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Morris’s big old house on North Sixth Street had renters again, and life went on. Every time Vern Henderson passed the house, memories came back, good memories of visiting with Morris and Jerilee, of being welcome in their home and of his own pleasure at seeing Morris happy again. But in the end the bad memories always prevailed. Vern had not seen Morris lying there in the snow on that awful night when he died, but he had seen the pictures. He could half close his eyes and see just the way it had been. There had to be some evidence left in Morris’s yard or in the alley, something that hadn’t been found yet.
The pressure to come up with enough evidence to charge a suspect had been incredibly hard on Sergeant Bob Brimmer. It was Friday, January 16, when he took his first day off in a long time and prepared to go fishing for three days just to get away from the case for a short time.
Sitting in the detectives’ office alone, Vern Henderson felt an overwhelming urge to do something. He threw on his coat and headed out to North Sixth Street. He knew from talking with Joey Watkins that Tuffy Pleasant had had the German automatic in his possession during November and December. If Tuffy was the guilty man, and if he had used that gun to shoot Morris, there would have to be some casings somewhere near where Morris had fallen. Henderson decide
d to literally put himself in the shoes of the shooter.
He walked south on Lincoln down the alley behind the apartment house at 208 North Sixth Street where Gerda Lenberg had heard the sound of someone running the night of November 21. Her duplex was right where the sidewalk on Lincoln met the alleyway.
Several houses down, Vern came to the parking area behind what once had been Morris’s house. The little Volkswagen would have been in the carport, and the Chevelle that Morris had driven to work that night had been pulled right up onto the grass of the backyard. There were different cars there now, but Vern saw only the way it had been in November.
The new apartment house where Rowland Seal and Dale Soost lived was very close to Morris’s yard, probably not more than ten feet from the property line.
“First, I walked up to the fence where I knew—where I thought Morris would have been standing,” Vern remembered, his eyes focusing on some time long ago. “I knew how the body was, because I knew how the bullets had entered—from seeing the autopsy … and I’d seen the photographs. “
Now Vern Henderson became the shooter. He never doubted that there had only been one killer; Mrs. Lenberg was positive she had heard only one set of feet in clunky shoes running down the alley, and then, after the “firecrackers,” back up the alley. Vern stood where the man whose face he couldn’t yet know had stood facing Morris.
It was almost as real to Henderson at that moment as if he had actually been there two months earlier. “I knew it was an automatic. I said to myself, those guns will kick to the right. I’d read in a book that the casings could kick up to fifteen to twenty feet when they eject out of that thing depending on what kind of spring it had in there. That shell could pop fifteen to twenty feet and it could go in either direction, directly back or out to the side. Well, so I said to myself, let’s do a triangle. You’re standing here when you shot him, so it went over to the right.”
Vern turned his head slowly and looked to the right. He saw the four-foot-tall chicken-wire fence that separated the apartment grounds from the lawn of Morris’s house. There was a cement path with a curb just beyond the fence. He figured the fence was about ten feet from where he stood. Almost as if some hand were guiding him, Vern drew an imaginary arc in his mind to the right, and then he walked over to the fence. To himself, he muttered, “It should have landed right here.”
He looked down at a spot between the path and the fence on the apartment house side. And there it was. The shell lay in a puddle in the shadow of one of the cement posts, its shiny surface dulled now from lying out in the weather.
Vern Henderson felt his heart beat faster as he crouched and picked up the single shell casing. It was more precious to him than if it had been made of solid gold. He knew in his gut that it had been there all along-—from the very moment Morris died. The slug from this casing had entered his best friend’s head and shattered, and the casing had sailed through the freezing night air and landed so that it was hidden in plain sight.
Cradling the shell carefully, Vern Henderson slipped it into an evidence envelope and drove to his sergeant’s home. There, Bob Brimmer looked at it and said that he thought it would turn out to be almost identical in make and in markings left by the firing pin, extractor, and ejector to the casing found on the kitchen floor of Gabby Moore’s apartment on Christmas Eve. They would have to send it to the state lab to be sure.
Both men were excited but cautious. They didn’t have a gun yet, but if the casings matched; they would know that the two shootings were connected. However, they still wouldn’t know whose gun had fired them.
Vern Henderson took the shell back to the Yakima Police Department. He compared it to the casing from the Moore murder. That shell was shinier, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the extractor and ejector marks made by the gun mechanism—and the firing pin mark.
“They both had that moon-shape on the bottom,” Vern remembered. “Just alike.”
He tagged the casing from the apartment fence and locked it in his desk. On Monday, Bob Brimmer would send it to the lab to verify what both he and Henderson had seen with their naked eyes.
When—and if—the murder weapon was located, the casing from the bullet that had killed Gabby Moore could be matched to the lands and grooves inside the barrel. Not so with the weather-beaten shell Vern had found ten feet from where Morris died. But the marks left by the gun on its base would be enough.
Henderson suspected that the other two casings from bullets fired at Morris had ejected to the right too, but had traveled farther than this one; they probably had landed on the well-traveled path and been stepped on or kicked aside long ago by residents of the apartment house. He didn’t need them. Even so, he and another detective returned to North Sixth Street with a shovel and a screen. They pulled up grass and weeds and dug up shovelfuls of dirt and sifted them through the screen on the off chance they would find the other shell casings.
They didn’t find them. They never would.
The chance of finding the gun that had killed both Morris Blankenbaker and Gabby Moore was minute. Whoever the killer was, he would have been a fool not to have gotten rid of it after the second murder. There were so many places around Yakima to dispose of a weapon. Canyons, endless miles of barren desert, mountains, rivers. There was a huge military training reservation east of town where thousands of Washington State National Guardsmen, reserve officers, and troops from Fort Lewis went on maneuvers. For that matter, the gun could have been sold or given to someone on “The Coast”—a term residents of eastern Washington use when referring to Seattle.
The latter assumption seemed the most likely. The Yakima Herald-Republic reported that Yakima County authorities were arranging for divers to search for the missing .22 in rivers and lakes on “The Coast.”
As it turned out that wasn’t necessary. Some unseen force seemed to be dictating that there would be justice in this murder puzzle. The discovery of the missing weapon was too perfect; any editor in his right mind would have penciled it out of a fictional murder mystery. But this was real life.
On February 21, five weeks after Vern Henderson had walked unerringly to the shell beneath the fence, John and Paul Klingele, aged fifteen and sixteen, went off to pursue their favorite hobby—fishing. They headed for the Naches River just where it flowed into the Yakima River right under the Twin Bridges, two double green steel arches over both the north and south lanes where Interstate 82 now heads north toward Ellensburg out of Yakima, or south into Yakima itself.
John Klingele would remember that day for a long time, not because of the fishing, but because of what he found in the river. The rains and melting snow runoff had been heavy that winter and the river had actually rushed in a tumult over a little island that sticks out into the Naches beneath the Twin Bridges. But now, the water had receded until it was very shallow and John was able to wade underneath the bridges from the west side to the east. It was about noon when he looked down and saw a cylindrical metal object in the water. Peering closer, he realized it was the long barrel of a handgun. He called to his brother, Paul, who was fishing about fifteen feet away.
The boys pulled the gun from about three inches of water and saw that the grips were wrapped with white masking tape. The gun was a .22 caliber automatic. They washed it off in the river and Paul checked to see if it was loaded. The clip was empty. Still curious, they unwound the tape.
John Klingele was more interested in fishing than in guns, and he gave the .22 to his brother to take home. They would ask their dad about it when he came home for lunch. Wayne Klingele, a printer for the Yakima Herald-Republic, knew a lot about guns. He was a hunter and a trapshooter, and he kept his own guns in good shape.
The elder Klingele was not too happy to hear that his teenaged sons had been fiddling around with a gun. He looked at it, saw it was unloaded, and recognized it as a .22 Colt Woodsman with a six-inch barrel. It was an older model, somewhat rusted from being in the river. He supposed it could have been in the
Naches for years.
Klingele had to go back to work, but he was dead serious when he instructed Paul to put the gun high up on the Klingele trophy shelf and to remember that neither he nor John were to touch it. Wayne had no idea where it had come from, but he knew what he was going to do about it. Wayne Klingele kept guns in the house—shotguns and rifles—because he was such an avid trapshooter. In fact, he would be trapshooting the next day, Sunday, with Jack La Rue, the chief of police of Yakima.
When Klingele mentioned the gun from the river to La Rue, he found the chief was extremely interested in seeing it. Klingele promised to bring it to the station the next morning. “I took it down on Monday morning and Chief La Rue was waiting for me and took me right up to the second floor to see Sergeant Brimmer. I handed the gun to him.”
Brimmer and Henderson were fascinated with the gun that had lain in three inches of water where the Naches lapped up over the island. The caliber was right. The long barrel was right. It was an automatic. When they heard that the Klingele boys had unwrapped white tape from the grips, they began to grin. But cautiously.
Now they had two casings from two murder scenes- casings that had scenes—casings tested as having been fired from the same gun—and a .22 caliber, long-barreled automatic Colt Woodsman with vestiges of white tape on the grips. The crime lab would be able to tell them if the river gun had fired those bullets.
They also had to try to trace the peregrinations of that weapon before it landed in the river. Whoever had tossed the gun into the Naches had probably been headed toward Ellensburg or was coming back from Ellensburg. And they surely had not known about the way the little island below projected out into the river. Had they known, they would have pitched the gun with a lot more force.
Instead, the rusty old gun had just been waiting there for someone to find it, its barrel moving slightly with the tug of the current. It was almost eerie, when one considered how the bullet casing had been waiting for Vern Henderson to discover it. And now the gun had been found almost as easily. Murder sometimes does will out, after all.