A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Instantly, Tuffy’s face gleamed with relief. “Oh, Cousin, thank you,” he said. “I love you for what you did.”

  Tuffy asked her if she had read in the papers about the little boy who had gone fishing and had pulled a gun from the river. He had been so worried when he read that, afraid it was the .22 she had loaned him. But now he was relieved.

  Softly, Loretta continued her story to the Yakima investigators. “I saw the joy and the love he had for me on his face because he thought I had done this [sent the gun to Florida] and I said, ‘No, Cuz, that’s a lie I told you.’ And I sat him down on the couch and I said I had thrown the gun away in the river.”

  All the relief had drained from Tuffy’s face, Loretta said.

  “How did he act when he found that you had thrown the gun into the Naches River?” Bob Brimmer asked.

  “Time…”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Time. He was talking about, you know, what he was going to have to go through.”

  “Go through?”

  “Time” meant time in prison. Vern Henderson had convinced Tuffy so completely that if that death gun should ever be found, it could be traced directly back to the man who shot Morris and Gabby. And at this moment, Tuffy Pleasant was reacting as if all of his dreams of glory in wrestling, all his hopes and plans to be a teacher would evaporate.

  “All he could see was hard time,” Loretta said.

  Loretta said that Tuffy had told her that a “white boy” had shot Mr. Moore as part of a plan that was supposed to payoff five thousand dollars. She didn’t know if the shooter was supposed to get the money or if Mr. Moore was supposed to—because Mr. Moore wasn’t supposed to be killed: he was only supposed to be wounded.

  The men listening exchanged glances. It sounded like a peculiar plan indeed. Tuffy had mentioned Joey Watkins and Kenny Marino as part of the plan, and he had said Mr. Moore was supposed to sign a piece of paper and give somebody five thousand dollars.

  Tuffy had never admitted anything incriminating to Loretta. He hadn’t told her that he had held the gun himself or that he had shot it at anyone.

  And who did he mean by the “white boy” who had shot Mr. Moore? Kenny Marino? Or someone they had never considered before?

  It was time for more lie detector tests.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Olive Blankenbaker tried to keep busy, but the walls of her mobile home were closing in on her. She waited for Vern Henderson to come and tell her that he had solved Morris’s murder. It wouldn’t bring Morris back, but it would help some.

  Morris’s half brother, Mike, who resembled Morris and Ned, their father, so much around the eyes that he made Olive catch her breath whenever she saw him, was very good to her. He stopped by often to see if she was managing all right, even though he knew she would never really get over losing her only son.

  In the early months of 1976, Olive thought about how Mike had sold his car so he could go to Hawaii and comfort Morris when Jerilee divorced him. When was that? It seemed to her that a dozen years had passed, but she realized it had been less than two years ago. That was hard to believe when so much had happened.

  Olive arranged to buy Morris’s Volkswagen from his estate. She wanted Mike Blankenbaker to have it; it would make up for his giving up his first car for Morris, and it would be something of his big brother’s that he could cherish.

  Jerilee Blankenbaker-Moore-Blankenbaker, in some ways a double-widow now, kept working at the bank. If she moved through her days in a blur of shock, no one could fault her. She was brilliant on the job; it was a way to shut the world out for a while. Her children were small and they needed her, her own family was supportive, and so the months rolled by. She was very lonely at first, adrift really. She had been married since she was eighteen years old, albeit to two men, but she had never been truly “single” during the past dozen years. One marriage had moved so seamlessly into the next that she had never learned to live alone.

  There was—there had to be—a distance between Morris’s family and Jerilee. Although no one ever said it aloud, the thought was always there: If Jerilee had not fallen in love with Gabby and gone off with him, if he had not become obsessed with her, Morris’s family believed that Morris would be alive. They had no proof. Even the police had no proof. But it was just common sense. Except for the normal problems everyone has from time to time, all of their lives had moved along so smoothly until Gabby Moore moved in with Morris and Jerilee. In time, maybe they could work out their differences with Jerilee, but it was hard for Olive to look at her and not think of losing Morris.

  Olive didn’t know exactly what had happened, but she vowed she would find out before she died. And Olive had learned that she probably would die soon. At sixty-five, she had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Wasn’t that just her kind of luck? She didn’t even smoke. Sometimes Olive wondered why she had had to take so many heavy hits in her life. She had lost her only husband, her only child, the best friend-and-boss she had ever had, and now it looked as if she were going to be one of the small percentage of nonsmokers to die of lung cancer.

  Yet there was a strength in Olive Blankenbaker that few women have. Maybe it was rage, and maybe it was only an ability to accept the unthinkable and go on. She planned her little garden for spring and was pleased that her cat was going to have kittens.

  Olive loved life and she was not going to give up easily. She knew what the odds were—the doctors had told her—but it didn’t matter that much to her any longer. “I just figured I wasn’t going to live to be an old woman,” she said quietly.

  Olive was determined, however, to stay alive long enough to attend the trial of Morris’s murderer—whoever that turned out to be. Vern Henderson wasn’t telling her anything specific; he just kept reassuring her that he was working on the case and for her not to worry.

  “I didn’t sit around and cry,” Olive said. “I went back to work. As it turned out, I worked for years after Morris was killed. If I hadn’t had my work, I don’t know what I would have done because when I wasn’t busy, I sat around and thought about Morris. I went back to work as a court reporter in federal court cases. They brought a lot of them down from Spokane, and I was kept busy.”

  Olive was completely unaware that Jerilee had begun to date again. Had she known, she would have been shocked, even though she expected that one day, in the future, Jerilee would remarry since she was only thirty. Olive certainly did not consider that her ex-daughter-in-law would even think of another marriage anytime soon.

  While the Yakima Herald-Republic was barely mentioning the Blankenbaker-Moore murders anymore, there had been a great deal going on below the surface. District Attorney Jeff Sullivan, Sergeant Bob Brimmer, and Detective Vern Henderson had been working feverishly to build the strongest case possible against the man they now believed to be the shooter in at least one of the murders. And that was the man who had borrowed the death gun shortly before each of the killings: Angelo “Tuffy” Pleasant.

  Brimmer, Henderson, and Jeff Sullivan were about to make a move. With the visit from Loretta Scott and her linking of the .22 to her cousin, Sullivan agreed that they had probable cause now to arrest Tuffy Pleasant. On February 27, 1976, Sullivan issued a warrant charging Tuffy with aiding and abetting first-degree murder, and for committing second-degree murder.

  The warrant was sent up to the Ellensburg Police Department with a request to arrest Tuffy Pleasant and to inform Yakima County detectives when he was in custody. It didn’t take long. Tuffy wasn’t hiding. He was going to class during the week, and he was coming home to be with his friends on weekends. It was that same Friday, in the late afternoon, when word came that Tuffy Pleasant had been arrested and was being held in the Kittitas County Jail in Ellensburg.

  The weather was bitter. Snoqualmie Pass, the main route through the Cascade Mountains between Seattle and Yakima, had already been closed down twice and motorists who were finally allowed to risk going through were warned to watch for av
alanches and rolling rocks. There were twelve inches of snow on the ground in Yakima and more coming down.

  Bob Brimmer and Vern Henderson checked out a city car and headed north in the roaring blizzard to pick up their prisoner. When Tuffy saw Vern and Brimmer, he half shrugged. Whatever the game was, it was over—or it had entered another phase. Brimmer advised Tuffy of his rights under Miranda. This time, Angelo “Tuffy” Pleasant was a suspect. He got in the backseat of the patrol unit with Vern Henderson while Brimmer drove. The snow was so thick as it pointed icy darts at the headlights that it was hard to see the road. But all of them were used to this kind of weather. It was a typical February in eastern Washington.

  Just to be doubly sure that his prisoner understood his rights, Vern pulled the little Miranda card from his pocket and read the warnings again. Tuffy nodded that he understood he didn’t have to talk to them, but he was willing to do so.

  As a cop, Vern Henderson was elated; they had hooked a big fish. As an athlete a black man, and a human being, he pondered how sad this all was. Andrew Pleasant had been so proud to see his son get a hero’s welcome when he came back from Japan in 1972. Tuffy Pleasant was never going to make “State” now, and he was never going to the Olympics. He wasn’t going to get a college degree in education and become head wrestling coach at Davis High School. He had had the whole world almost in his grasp.

  That was all gone now.

  “I didn’t shoot anyone,” Tuffy told Vern. “The only thing I did was furnish the gun.”

  “Who did you give the gun to?”

  “To Gabby. I picked it up from him a week after Morris was shot.”

  “What about Christmas Eve?”

  “I … I went and picked the gun up again and gave it to Gabby.”

  Vern Henderson asked him how he got the gun back after Gabby was shot and Tuffy said that the “shooter” and he had agreed on a rendezvous spot” where he would retrieve the gun on Christmas morning.

  “And where was this rendezvous spot supposed to be at?”

  “Over by Eisenhower High School by the golf course.”

  Vern said nothing, but none of it made any sense. All that nonsense about Tuffy running around borrowing a gun and picking it up and borrowing it again. And why was Gabby Moore sending out for a gun to have himself shot, and then arranging to have Tuffy pick it up? Why would he care what happened to the gun after he was dead? Had he so wanted to convince Jerilee that he too was the victim of an unknown stalker that he was willing to literally die to do it?

  The winter wind howled around their patrol car and it felt as though they were being lifted off the road and set down again. They barely noticed; the questions on their minds preoccupied them. But Vern Henderson and Bob Brimmer were going to have to wait to find out the rest of the story—if they ever did. Tuffy didn’t want to talk about the murders anymore.

  Ordinarily, they could have made the drive back to Yakima in about half an hour, and it took them only a little longer in the snowstorm. Tuffy stared out the window at the white on white on white. Vern wondered what he was thinking about.

  Time, probably. That’s what his cousin Loretta said he was afraid of, doing time.

  And he had good reason to be afraid.

  As they drove into Yakima, Vern realized that it was too late for Tuffy to get anything to eat at the Yakima County Jail. He asked his prisoner if he was hungry.

  “Yeah … ”

  “Well, the best you might get in the jail this time of night is a cold sandwich,” Vern said. “You got any money on you?”

  Tuffy shook his head.

  “The only people I treat to free meals are pretty women, and that’s not you,” Vern kidded him. “I’ll loan you the money for a hamburger and a Coke.”

  They stopped at a drive-in and Vern bought the food for Tuffy. It was dark and late when they booked him into the Yakima County Jail. It was too late to start an interrogation into what they knew were two very complicated murder cases. Tuffy was placed in a single cell.

  Brimmer and Henderson had waited three months to find out why Morris Blankenbaker had been murdered, and two months to solve the riddle of Gabby Moore’s death. They felt they were right on the brink of knowing, but one more night wouldn’t make any difference.

  “You want to call anyone, Tuffy?” Vern asked.

  Tuffy shook his head.

  The two detectives left him there and walked away from the jail smells of stale cigarette smoke, sweat, urine, and Pine-Sol disinfectant out into the blessedly cold, clean air. Their feet crunched on the snow. They didn’t talk. Both Brimmer and Henderson felt as if they were in a state of suspended animation.

  Tomorrow would—tomorrow might—bring the explanations that had eluded them. They both felt they had the right man-at least on Morris’s murder. They still didn’t believe that Tuffy could have killed his hero, Gabby Moore, but they figured he knew who had.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  At 9:30 on Saturday morning, February 28, Bob Brimmer and Vern Henderson took Tuffy Pleasant from the Yakima County Jail back to their offices. Again, Brimmer read him his rights and explained that Tuffy could waive his rights to have an attorney present during questioning. The detective sergeant was careful to assure himself that his prisoner understood what ‘waive’ meant. Tuffy did and said he wanted to talk with Brimmer and Henderson.

  But if they had expected that he would tell them what they had waited so long to hear right away they were disappointed.

  Since January 3, they had both been convinced that Tuffy knew the motivation for the two murders, and now they knew, from talking to his cousin, Loretta Scott, that he had arranged not once, but twice, to furnish the death weapon. What they wanted to know was the entire story, and the name of the actual shooter.

  Tuffy talked around the subject for an hour or more. It was obvious that he wanted to tell them the real truth after all the false starts and half-truths he had told before. It was also obvious that he knew that once he told them what was fighting to get out, there would be no going back.

  Half an hour past noon, Tuffy Pleasant agreed to dictate a statement about the death of Gabby Moore. The long descent of what had once been the finest example of a coach-athlete relationship into a sinister manipulation would be caught on the slowly turning tape recorder.

  Tuffy gave his birthday, January 28, 1954, and his address, 1501 Glen Drive, Ellensburg, Washington, Apartment 12, Executive House.

  He listened quietly, poised to speak, as Vern Henderson once more read him his Miranda rights. As the last clause echoed in the room, and after Tuffy had indicated that he understood every one of his legal options under Miranda, he declined to have his attorney present. He looked at Vern Henderson and he began to talk.

  “Christmas Eve night,” Tuffy said, “after I did a little visiting, I decided, you know, to go up and see Mr. Moore … Okay, so apparently he had just gotten home. He just got home so we just started talking and I asked him if he would like to go out—you know, get a drink, go visit, whatever. And he said, ‘Yeah—we’d go check it out after he got cleaned up.’ But then the phone rings. I think it was Kenny Marino on it and he said I was there. … Okay, then he hangs up and we start talking … about everyday things, mainly about wrestling. About half an hour later, there is a second phone call. And then I notice something pretty strange about it.”

  Tuffy explained that Mr. Moore usually told him who was on the phone, but on this night, he hadn’t explained anything about the second call, and the call had seemed to upset Moore.

  “Then,” Tuffy continued, “he started acting strange and then he broke out his bottle. He started drinking—drinking everything straight. Then he started to talking crazy. He started saying. ‘Tonight’s the night.’ He asked me if I could go get the gun … I told him no. Then he said, ‘Look, if you don’t go get that gun, I’ll see to it that your neck is on the chopping block for Morris Blankenbaker’s death.’ And I says, ‘It don’t make no difference because I didn’t do it
.’”

  ” … Then he ran it down to me. He said, ‘It’s not that you did it or not; it’s just that you did have a part in it because you committed [sic] this gun to me the first time.’ And unaware, myself unaware the gun was going to be used.”

  Tuffy said he had resisted Gabby’s plan. “So then I says, ‘Well, look—that gun is a long ways from here.’ And he says, ‘Well, can you get it tonight?’ and I says, ‘No.’ He says, ‘Well, we can gas up my car and we can go get it wherever its at because I want to have it tonight.’”

  Tuffy Pleasant’s face glistened with sweat as he relived that last ghastly Christmas Eve in Gabby Moore’s apartment. “And then I told him I wasn’t going to do it. But then he threatened me again, and he showed me the police department’s number on the phone book, and he dialed all four numbers—four, five, and then four numbers—and he said, ‘You sure you don’t want me to dial this last number? Think about it.’ And then he went on and dialed that last number.”

  There was remembered desperation in Tuffy’s voice as he stared at Vern Henderson. He sighed. “Then I told him I could get the gun. That was the end of the phone call to the police department, so he said, ‘Well, you go get that gun.’ He gave me fifteen minutes to get that gun.”

  His coach, whose word had always been law to him, had ordered him to do something he dreaded doing. But Tuffy had finally said, “All right.” Gabby told him to get the gun and come back with it. “I was supposed to come back and honk twice—to let him know I had the gun.”

  Vern Henderson thought he knew what was coming next; Loretta Scott had told them about Christmas Eve, but he wanted to see if Tuffy’s version of the evening meshed with her recall.

  Just at that instant, the tape recorder ground to a halt, and tensely Henderson and Brimmer checked it out, while Tuffy waited, wanting—and not wanting—to continue his statement.