A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Joey Watkins, an extremely tall young man, took the stand. He recalled knowing Tuffy since grade school and living with him for six weeks in the fall of 1975. Tuffy, he said, was back and forth from college classes in Ellensburg, helping coach Gabby Moore’s high school wrestlers.

  “Did you know Morris Blankenbaker?”

  “Yes. I knew of him when I was in school because he was like assistant coach to us.”

  “So you knew both Morris Blankenbaker and Gabby Moore; is that right?” Sullivan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you going up and assisting at the wrestling practices?”

  “Angelo asked me to go up to get ahold of the heavy-weights and teach them, because they were kind of slow in learning things…I was helping him out.”

  “Angelo was up [at wrestling practice] all the time. Is that right?”

  “Yeah, I believe he was.”

  Joey recalled going up to Morris’s house the night Gabby broke in. Gabby was outside when they got there and he was “bamming” on the windows.

  “What happened? Was there any kind of a fight or anything?”

  “No.” Joey shook his head. “Morris got out of the car and went over there. He says, ‘Man, Watkins, you know what? I would hit him’ but he says it was his coach … They just started talking and I guess Morris told him something and he just left.”

  Joey was the friend who had been with Tuffy in the Red Lion in the Chinook Hotel on the night Morris was murdered. He remembered it extremely well. “Me and Angelo were at the Lion’s Share messing around. We went to the Red Lion. That’s where he met these three people. We were sitting down drinking … Angelo looked over and saw these people sitting over there, so he went over and talked to them. So Angelo came back over to the table and told me that he was going to be with these people tonight— and so he took me home.”

  “Now, once you got home, do you remember what you did?”

  “Well, I just stayed at the house and laid back on the couch. Then my woman came by and we just sat and talked.”

  “Did you ever leave home again that night?”

  “No.”

  “How did you find out Morris Blankenbaker had been killed?”

  “Well, Angelo’s mother and father were going fishing to Moses Lake … Me, Anthony, and Angelo were all out at his parents’ house cleaning up the yard, and I just happened to see the newspaper and saw his picture in there.”

  “What day was that?”

  Joey wasn’t sure. He knew it was on the weekend, and thought it was probably on the Sunday— November 22.

  Back to the Friday night/Saturday morning when Morris died— the witness said he had gone to sleep between twelve or one a.m. and he hadn’t seen Tuffy-Angelo at all that night.

  “Now, Joey,” Sullivan’s voice was strong. “Did you have anything to do with the death of Morris Blankenbaker? Were you there when he was shot?”

  “No.”

  “Did you drive the car for Angelo?”

  “No.”

  “You had nothing to do with it? You were nowhere near the scene?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see Gabby Moore give Angelo money?”

  “When we were wrestling, he probably gave him say, about thirty-five, forty, fifty dollars.”

  Joey didn’t know what the money was for, or exactly when Gabby gave it to Tuffy. “I imagine he gave it to Angelo for helping him out with the wrestling practice.”

  As for the Christmas Eve when Gabby was shot, Joey testified he was down at the home for handicapped children with his girlfriend— down in Harrah.

  “Had you been down there before?”

  “Yes.”

  “You worked for a while at another place that took care of mentally retarded children, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, the Yakima Valley School.”

  “Last year … and what did you do with these small kids?”

  “I was a rec leader and what we did with the kids was have recreation planned like carnivals and games with them.”

  “And you worked in that capacity for six or eight months?”

  Joey Watkins came across as a gentle giant and the least likely of the wrestling squad alumni to have committed two murders.

  On cross, Chris Tait elicited answers from Joey Watkins that showed the last time he had seen Gabby Moore on Christmas Eve was in Kenny Marino’s apartment.

  Tait wanted to hear more about the change that had come over Gabby Moore in the months before he was killed.

  “How long had you known him?”

  “Since I was a sophomore in high school.”

  “You had known him for five years or so?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ever experience any change in Mr. Moore?”

  “Well, the only time I really saw Mr. Moore was the first time when I was in the Lion’s Share and he was wild—”

  “Can you tell us what you mean by that?”

  “He was— I mean— like he was just changed from the coach that I used to see— because he was strict on us.”

  “Are you saying he wasn’t the same coach— you mean he wasn’t the same kind of person?”

  “He wasn’t the same person.”

  “How was he different?”

  “Well, for one thing his hair was longer and he just didn’t dress like he used to.”

  Joey recalled a coach who had demanded strict adherence to training rules from his athletes.

  “Do you know if Mr. Moore was the sort of person who drank quite a bit?”

  “No. I never knew him to drink that much until I saw him in the Lion’s Share.”

  Joey had been baffled by a longhaired, intoxicated coach who kept trying to grab his beer. He had been horrified to see Moore trying to break into Morris’s wife’s window, so drunk that he couldn’t walk a straight line.

  With one more witness denigrating Gabby Moore, Chris Tait moved on to show that Tuffy and Joey had known Morris too as a coach.

  “How close were you to Morris Blankenbaker?”

  “Not really close. I didn’t really know him because he was like an assistant coach when I was a sophomore and he taught me little things— moves and stuff in wrestling.”

  “Was Morris older than you?”

  “He was thirty-two.”

  “And you are twenty-two. So he was ten years older?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said that Morris was the assistant coach?”

  “He just came in there to show us things.”

  “He wasn’t formally the coach?”

  “No.”

  “He just showed up at the practices and kind of taught you things? Was that when you were playing football or wrestling— or both?”

  “Wrestling.”

  “Tell us, if you can, a little bit about the wrestling experiences that you had with Angelo.”

  “Well, Angelo was— to me— the best on the team.”

  “Did he win most of his matches?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you remember going to tournaments together?”

  “No, because I never made it to the tournaments.”

  Joey said that Angelo-Tuffy had, and that he usually took firsts. Tuffy Pleasant had been the best there was; Gabby Moore had coached him to be a champion.

  Tait asked Joey about playing football. He said he had had bad experiences, losing experiences in that sport. He and Angelo had been the best players on the Davis squad.

  “Were you the biggest?”

  “Well, I was the biggest,” Joey said, “but Angelo was the tough man for scrape linebacker.”

  “No further questions.”

  Jeff Sullivan rose to ask some questions on redirect.

  “When you say Angelo was tough, was he a good linebacker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He liked to hit people?”

  “Yeah, he stuck people.”

  Sullivan half smiled. “If he’s going to be a good linebacker, you have t
o stick people, don’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  There was a sense of regret in the courtroom as the afternoon lengthened. Tuffy had lived years of sports glory. He had almost always been first, and now he sat hunched over the defense table, his huge shoulders at their muscular peak. Like Morris before him, Tuffy was a perfect physical specimen. One could imagine him and Joey in the arena— the huge gentle witness— and the scrappy defendant.

  No more.

  Fifteen-year-old John Klingele and his father, Wayne, were the last witnesses of the day. John told the jury how he had found the Colt Woodsman .22 in the Naches River under the Twin Bridges. His father testified that he had put it up on a shelf and told the Yakima Police Chief about it the next day.

  Judge Loy dismissed the jury at 4:30 and reminded them not to watch television, read the papers, or discuss the case. The Seattle media had begun to report this murder trial in more depth with every day that passed. It had transcended a hometown story in Yakima, Washington.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  At 9:30 the next morning, Judge Loy said he was prepared to rule on Jeff Sullivan’s motion to grant immunity to Loretta Scott and her brother, Charles “Chucky” Pleasant for their involvement with the murder gun. “The state’s motion to grant immunity from prosecution to Loretta Scott and Charles Pleasant in return for their testimony in this case is granted.”

  It was a big boost for the state’s case.

  Loretta Scott, a beautiful woman, wore a white tunic dress, a wide-brimmed dark hat, and giant gold hoops in her ears for her day in court. She did not mind the cameras in the hallway and smiled for James Wallace, the Herald-Tribune reporter who was covering the trial and doubling as a news photographer.

  Loretta’s memory was excellent, and she was a compelling storyteller as she recalled her cousin Tuffy’s two visits to her home to borrow the gun and her horror when she realized what it had been used for.

  Her recall of the hysteria she and her brother, Chucky, had felt as they tried to throwaway a gun that kept bouncing back off the bridge made the Christmas Day event sound like a Keystone Kops episode.

  Chris Tait asked her if Tuffy had ever told her what had happened, and she said he had told her about the death of Gabby Moore.

  “Well, he told me a white boy did the shooting.”

  “Okay. What did he tell you happened?”

  “I’m just trying to gather my thoughts. He told me that Mr. Moore and he had a plan that he was supposed to have been shot, but he wasn’t supposed to be killed. He said that he was supposed to get five thousand dollars out of this— that he was just supposed to wound Mr. Moore, but he wasn’t supposed to die and that the white boy did the shooting.”

  “Did he tell you where it happened at Mr. Moore’s?”

  “They were in the kitchen.”

  “Did he tell you about anybody else being involved in these two killings?”

  “He mentioned a Joey Watkins and Kenny Marino.”

  “And what did he tell you about how they were involved?”

  “He didn’t actually say. He just said Blankenbaker, Moore, [somebody was] driving a car, and Joey Watkins and Marino…He told me that Joey Watkins was on the list of suspicion for murder.”

  “Now, who was going to get this five thousand dollars? Was Angelo to get it or was Mr. Moore going to get it?”

  “I don’t know who all was supposed to get this money. He said they were supposed to receive five thousand after he was supposed to have been shot. He was supposed to sign a piece of paper and supposed to get five thousand dollars … When he died, everything went.”

  Tait sounded as mystified and confused as the gallery. “But when Mr. Moore died, it all went down the drain?”

  “Right.”

  Loretta had a few skeletons in her own closet, facts that Chris Tait dragged out of her over her extended time on the stand. He wondered why Tuffy would think to go to her for a gun.

  “Well, if you want to know the truth about it, when I lived in Seattle a long time ago, he used to come over and we were always having revolvers around the house.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tait said, “I can’t hear you.”

  “When I lived in Seattle, we always had revolvers around the house.”

  “Loretta, isn’t it a fact that you used to live with a man who dealt in stolen guns?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Tait homed in on her drinking habits. “Do you drink often?”

  “When I feel like I want to indulge, I will.”

  “How many drinks does it take before you start to feel the effects?”

  “About three.”

  “Isn’t it a fact that you had four drinks on Christmas Eve?”

  “That was the beginning.”

  “How many was it in the end?”

  “I wasn’t counting.”

  “Were you intoxicated?”

  “I was feeling nice.”

  Loretta said she had made a Christmas punch of McNaughtons and vodka.

  “It must have been quite a punch,” Tait said with a smile.

  Loretta Scott was on the witness stand for a very long time, much of it while the defense attorneys and the prosecutors wrangled over what areas the defense could cover. Loretta had had a gun because she was afraid of an old boyfriend, but that had nothing to do with this murder trial. She was a colorful, often humorous, witness, but she was not swayed from the central testimony about her cousin Tuffy and the borrowed gun, or about throwing it in the Naches River when she learned it might well be a murder weapon.

  On redirect, Sullivan asked Loretta once again the specific questions that mattered and only those. She was positive that:

  She gave the .22 to Tuffy in October 1975.

  That she took it back from him on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

  That he came to borrow it again on December 24.

  That he told her she would read about this in the newspaper.

  That he brought the gun back to her late on Christmas Eve.

  That he came to her house on February 26, 1976, to ask what she had done with the gun.

  Nothing else really mattered as far as the outcome of the trial. Mike McGuigan questioned Chucky Pleasant, who was a last-minute participant in getting rid of the gun. Chucky proved to be the kind of witness who scarcely needs an attorney’s questions to elicit information. He began by playing both roles.

  “What did Loretta ask of you?”

  “Well, she came in and she said, ‘Chuck. I think I know who killed Mr. Moore.’ And I said, ‘You do! Who?’ And she told me that it was Angelo. And I said, ‘No, you are kidding.’ I just couldn’t believe it. And then she said, ‘Yeah, it’s true.’ And I said, ‘How do you know?’ and she said, ‘Because I gave him the gun.’ ”

  Chucky Pleasant said he had been totally shocked. He testified that he had gone along with pitching the gun in the Naches, which proved to be more difficult than it looked. On the day before his cousin Tuffy was arrested, Tuffy had called him in his dorm in Ellensburg.

  “He just said. ‘Chuck, are you sure that you threw the gun in the river?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Did you have gloves on when you did it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I had some gloves.’ And he had asked me, ‘Don’t you know you might get involved in all this stuff?’”

  The plan that the state alleged Gabby Moore had forged had clearly spread its poison until it infiltrated the Pleasant family, a tightly connected extended clan. Even so, Loretta and Chucky’s testimony was almost lighthearted in contrast to what the afternoon witnesses would say. Much of the rest of that day would be taken up with forensic pathology and toxicology, and the evidence found at the autopsies of the two dead coaches. The participants in the Pleasant trial— the attorneys, law officers, witnesses, and the defendant himself— were in a strange city, in an unfamiliar courthouse, yet the halls were becoming familiar and so were the jurors’ faces. The trial had taken on its own rhythm now, as all trials eventually d
o. The case had found its flow.

  Olive Blankenbaker’s sister lived in Seattle, so Olive had planned to stay with her, but the trip to downtown took so long in the morning and the rush-hour traffic going home was so bad that they rented a hotel room in the center of the city so they could walk to the courthouse. There was such a sense of urgency, a kind of anxiety that they might miss something, some bit of information, that could never be found and then there would never be any closure.

  Although this was a trial marked with many sidebar arguments— one where the jurors were often banished to their chambers for an hour or more at a time— it moved along. Court started promptly each morning at 9:30, with a 10:15 midmorning recess, a noon to 1:30 lunch hour, an afternoon break, and then dismissal by 4:30 P.M. Because Judge Loy had noticed that the jurors often rode the same elevators as the gallery and were sometimes blocked by corridors thick with spectators, reporters, and family, he had ordered that the jurors were to arrive first and leave first.

  Thursday afternoon began with Dr. Ted Loomis, who was the Washington State Toxicologist. Loomis testified that he had had occasion to analyze blood samples taken at the postmortem examinations of both Morris Blankenbaker and Gabby Moore. He said that Morris had had “essentially no alcohol” content in his blood. Gabby, on the other hand, had had .31.

  Asked by Jeff Sullivan to comment on what impairment this much alcohol in the bloodstream would cause, Loomis answered, “All people with a blood alcohol level of point thirty-one would have very significant impairment with respect to judgment and reasoning, with respect to vision, with respect to hearing. They would have some impairment with respect to speech, but it might not be particularly noticeable. Some people, but not all people, would be impaired significantly with respect to their gross body muscle activity; that’s walking, turning, standing, or sitting. Some people are so affected at .31 that they are actually out of contact with reality— they are in a comatose state.”

  “But it is possible that somebody in that condition would be able to speak … and somebody else not feel that they were intoxicated? Is that correct?”