A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  At Madigan Hospital, Detective John Clark was finally allowed to enter the emergency room where Niels Honegger was being treated for his extensive wounds. The youth’s broken right arm was splinted and in a sling, and the thick turban of bandages around his head was stained with still seeping blood. His back was covered with ugly red welts from a beating and burn marks, round and vicious looking, dotted his skin. Honegger’s ankles and wrists had abrasions where the handcuffs and leg irons had cut into the skin.

  While a military policeman stood by, Niels Honegger agreed to a tape recording of his statement.

  He told John Clark that he had gone into Tacoma the previous evening-—Sunday night—to see friends, but he hadn’t found them at home. He had had one or two beers and then gone to an all-night grocery store where he called a cab to take him back to Fort Lewis.

  “I was standing out front, waiting, when this black van pulls up and the driver says, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ ”

  As Honegger had peered into the van, he said the driver had pulled a gun and ordered him inside.

  “He made me lie down in the back and he put handcuffs on me. I wasn’t about to argue with him. He had the gun. He drove for a while and stopped someplace and he put some manacles on my ankles, and then this black leather hood over my head. He tried to put that mouthpiece thing on, but I fought him.”

  Honegger said that the gun the man had pointed at him in the kidnapping had been one of the .44s.

  “My arms were cuffed behind me. I tried to work out of the cuffs, but they were too tight. The manacles had about eighteen inches of chain between them so you could walk, but then he had this little bar with hooks on it and he fastened that on and you couldn’t move your legs more than six inches apart.”

  Honegger said that his captor had driven him around for a long time, until he could see daylight through the eyeholes of his mask. He couldn’t be sure but he thought it had been about 5:30 A.M. when they arrived on the lonely logging road. He had heard the stranger moving his guns around, and then the sound of him uncapping a beer bottle. Next, the man in the black leather suit had come back into the van and demanded that Honegger strip, all the while holding a gun on him.

  “He unlocked the manacles on my feet, took off my shoes and socks, and then pulled my pants off. Then he locked those manacles back up, unlocked my handcuffs, and held the gun to my head, telling me to take my shirt off. Then he handcuffed me again.”

  The man in black leather had then loosened the leg irons so that Honegger could walk and forced him out of the van. He had placed the dog choke chain around his neck, pulling it tight, and prodded Honegger deep into the woods, all the time holding the shotgun to the back of his head. “He made me say ‘sir’ all the time—‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir.’ He told me where to go and I guess we walked about twenty-five meters back into the woods. We ended up right by the other body. I thought it was a dog at first, and then I realized it was a man. He wanted to shock me. I was scared as hell, and shivering from the cold. He told me I was going to die and he kept calling me ‘Punk.’”

  Honegger said that his captor had begun to beat him with the nightstick and that he had been helpless to resist because he was still handcuffed and shackled. Even though he was much bigger and had had combat training, he had been caught and bound up by the little man in black leather before he was aware of what was happening.

  “I thought my arm was broken,” Honegger said. “He hit me on the head too. He hit me a couple of times in the stomach but I’ve been trained how to take a stomach punch and I breathed out when I saw it coming so it didn’t hurt.”

  Honegger said that he had tried to make his captor believe he had passed out from the pain, but that had only infuriated the man in leather.

  “I lay there and he started burning me with cigarettes and cigars. He put them out on my back and on my nipples. I just couldn’t take the pain so I had to get up.”

  During all this time, Honegger hadn’t really seen the other man’s face. The black leather cap was pulled down over his eyes and he had worn dark sunglasses that were like mirrors. Honegger, who was a solidly built 5′5″ tall, said he had thought his abductor was taller when he had been picked up. He realized now that the man had been much shorter than he was. “I guess the guns made him seem taller,” he said, somewhat ruefully.

  Hendricks had demanded that his captive perform fellatio on him, but the plucky youth decided that he would rather die than submit to that. “He hit me a couple more times with the nightstick when I refused.”

  Honegger had reconciled himself to the fact that he was going to die. He told Clark that he had been an atheist up until that point, but he found himself praying and the face of his grandmother kept flashing through his mind. He was shivering from cold and shock, and he was getting dizzy from loss of blood. At that time, Hendricks had told him he was about to die.

  “He unlocked my arms first,” Honegger recalled. “And then he bent over to unlock the leg irons. I was sitting there watching him and wondered if I ought to do something. He didn’t have any of his guns out. After he unlocked my right leg, I leaned back and kicked him as hard as I could. I tried to aim for his face, but I can’t remember if I hit it. He fell over backward and I jumped on top of him. I hit him with my right arm—and it hurt me pretty bad—but I kept on hitting him until I saw his nose flatten out and start bleeding.”

  Honegger’s combat training and instinct for survival had given him superhuman strength despite his injuries. Hendricks had tried to pull a gun from the holster he wore and it had gone off twice in the struggle. One bullet had come so close to Honegger’s hand that the gunpowder burned it.

  “I hit him first, and then I started shooting him.” Niels Honegger’s eyes closed; he was clearly back once again fighting for his life. “I couldn’t tell if I’d hit him or not. He was still moving. When I got done with the first gun, I picked up another one. I shot every single round into him.”

  Almost hysterical with terror and pain by then, Honegger said he had picked up another weapon and emptied that into his tormentor. He recalled that the man in the black leather suit had assured him quite calmly, “Hey, man, you’ve killed me.” But he had kept on firing almost automatically.

  For a sadomasochist, receiving pain is almost as pleasurable as inflicting pain, but Larry Hendricks had finally gotten more than he had bargained for. When he stopped moving, Niels Honegger said he had scrambled to the van, thrown his clothes on, and headed for help. But first, afraid he would never find the path to the carnage in the woods, he had stopped to leave the six-pack marker so that he could lead police back to the scene.

  Completely unfamiliar with the lonely area, Honegger had driven quite a while before he had seen Brand’s farm and barreled the van through the gate in an effort to get help.

  “Finally I parked the car at the top of the hill and walked down to the house. And the guy—a real nice guy—looks at me, sees I’m all covered with blood, and he let me into the house.”

  It was a chilling account, but Detective Clark had no doubt that the soldier was telling him the absolute truth.

  Honegger had survived, and Hendricks was dead, but the case was far from over. At headquarters, Walt Stout and Mark French met with Chief Criminal Deputy Henry Suprunowski and ID Officer Johnson concerning the identity of the second victim at the scene. Johnson said that he had a tentative identification from fingerprints he’d taken off the body.

  “He only had a minor arrest on a traffic warrant in Port Angeles, but it was enough to get his prints on file. His name is Michael Bertram Zahnle, born June twelfth, 1956. Six feet two, one hundred sixty pounds, red hair, green eyes. His last address is in Tacoma, but they don’t know anything about him there.”

  They agreed that they would give Zahnle’s description to the news media in the hope that someone would have more information about him.

  Walt Stout received a phone call from a retired firefighter who said that he knew Larry Hendricks. �
�I deal in antiques and that’s how I met him. He has a business he called ‘The Merchant Prince’ and he does—did—quite an antique business. I saw him last night about a quarter to one when he came by my place to talk business.”

  “How was he dressed?” Stout asked.

  “Casual … a shirt and slacks, I think.”

  Hendricks had apparently gone home and dressed in his prowling outfit of black leather before encountering his victim in front of the all-night grocery.

  The Pierce County investigative team immediately placed the information on the incident on teletype wires to the eleven western states. They doubted that Larry Hendricks had just begun his bizarre prowlings; the labels on his kinky gear indicated they had been purchased in San Francisco. But there was a lot more they didn’t know about Hendricks. If the case was not already shocking enough, the further revelations into his background would prove almost incomprehensible to the detectives working the case.

  They were not particularly surprised to find that Hendricks had been arrested for robbery, assault, and sodomy by the Seattle Police Department in 1969 and sent to the Sexual Offender’s program at Western State Hospital. A man who had refined his prowling to a fine art had not done it overnight. He had the van equipped to take prisoners and was well supplied with bondage gear.

  What absolutely stunned the case-weary detective veterans was that Larry Hendricks had “graduated” from the Western State Sexual Offender’s program after two years only to be hired as a therapy supervisor by the same institution.

  There was no question that Larry Hendricks was brilliant. He had graduated with a degree in English literature from the University of Washington, and his friends described him to the detectives and the press as personable and articulate. He had evidently been adept at keeping his straight life separate from his secret world of stalking and sexual aberration.

  Larry Hendricks had passed an extensive battery of psychological tests and had been deemed “completely reliable” during his six months work-release period from the mental hospital before he was given the job as counselor.

  As a counselor rather than a patient, Hendricks had been promoted steadily until he reached a position where, as a therapy supervisor, he was responsible for a group of twelve to fifteen patients. He monitored their progress, sat in on group therapy sessions, and was responsible for recommending patients’ promotions from one stage to the next.

  According to hospital spokesman Sidney Acuff, Larry Hendricks’s patients were rapists, child molesters, and voyeurs. Embarrassed, the hospital’s administrators stressed to the press in a rather obvious statement that Hendricks would never have been employed at Western State for six and a half years if they had known of his bizarre activities.

  “Of course, you never know about the private lives of individuals,” Acuff said. ” But there was never any indication of anything like that.”

  However, there were those who claimed that there was, indeed, evidence that Larry Hendricks was absolutely unsuited to be a counselor. Even though he had reorganized the hospital’s drug treatment program and become director of the new unit he had established, Larry Hendricks behaved inappropriately both at his job and in his private life.

  Several residents of the drug program signed sworn affidavits that were released to the media on May 2 when the news of Hendrick’s suspected crimes hit the press. One eighteen-year-old patient, who had been transferred to Western State after being raped several times in Alabama State Prison, stated that Hendricks had read about his background in his file. “As soon as he saw the data on the rapes, he started rubbing my leg. Once, he started feeling me all over. I got upset and Larry said if I did that one more time, I would be sent back to prison.”

  A twenty-two-year-old patient said Hendricks had made a pass at him, telling him he had dreamed of putting his arms around him.

  One outspoken critic said, “I threatened to quit if (administrators) didn’t deal with Hendrick’s rapacious verbal attacks on other staff members.” He claimed that instead Hendricks was given even more power and responsibility. Two months later, the employee who had complained about Larry Hendricks resigned in disgust.

  Larry Hendricks wasn’t particularly unique in his “qualifications” to work as a therapist. At least five members of the paid drug unit at the hospital were reported to have been graduates of the sexual psychopath program.

  Larry Hendricks had left his job at the hospital of his own accord in September of 1977 when the drug unit was transferred out of Western State. He had gotten married, but it hadn’t lasted. In March of 1978, he returned to his former position of Therapy Specialist III and worked as a ward attendant until the end of July when he started his antique store, “The Merchant Prince.”

  The Pierce County Sheriffs detectives didn’t have to wait long to hear from detectives in other areas. On May 2, they received calls from Captain Bill Cashdollar of the Tehama County Sheriffs Office in California and Sergeant John Robertson of Napa County. They had two unsolved homicides that fit the pattern.

  One California victim had been Tom Gloster, a comptroller of the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco. His nude body had been found on February 9 in a remote area of Tehama County. Witnesses said they had seen a black van speeding from the scene. Gloster had been shot many times with either a Colt .38 or a .357 Magnum.

  The second victim was Larry Harland Niemeier, thirty-two, who had disappeared on February 5 and been found in Napa County. He had been shot with the same gun as Gloster, although the exact caliber and make would have to be determined by microscopic ballistics tests. He too was found naked. A piece of orange carpeting and a cigarette butt were found at the scene. The latter was the same brand found at the scene where Hendricks attacked Niels Honegger.

  A thorough search of Larry Hendricks’s apartment had turned up credit card slips indicating that he was in the San Francisco area at the time of these slayings, his van had orange carpeting, and he smoked the same brand of cigarettes. Several packs of that brand were found in the apartment wastebaskets. Oddly, each pack was thrown away with a single cigarette remaining—apparently a compulsion with the man.

  Mark French contacted an auto body shop whose business card had been found among Hendrick’s belongings. The shop confirmed that Hendricks had had the van in the shop from April 16 to April 19 to have bullet holes repaired. Bullets had been fired into the left front door post, the left rear double door, the left side of the van, and the left side of the driver’s door.

  “He had covered them with black electrical tape,” the owner said. “He told us he got into a beef in a parking lot of a bar in San Francisco.”

  On May 4, Captain Cashdollar and Sergeant Robertson arrived from California to discuss their cases. Both of their victims had last been traced to a bar in San Francisco “The Brig,” an S-and-M-oriented bar—and both men had been dressed in “leathers” similar to Hendricks’s outfit when last seen.

  Larry Hendricks had apparently suffered a grazing bullet wound sometime before the first of May. Detectives had found eight used bandages in his apartment. And, on autopsy, a similar bandage was found on his body. Dr. J. Cordova said a bullet had grazed the suspect’s back on the right side.

  It left a question. Had the bullet holes in the van occurred during the killings of Gloster and Niemeier or had there been another victim yet unaccounted for?

  On May 6, the results came back from ballistics. Hendricks’s Colt Python .357 matched the bullets used in the California killings. He was now linked absolutely to three murders and one attempted murder.

  The saddest of all was the murder of Michael Zahnle. On May 3, Detective Art Anderson had received several calls from relatives of Zahnle. They said his parents lived in California and that he had come up to live in Washington about two years earlier. Zahnle was married, and his relatives knew he lived in the Tacoma area but they didn’t have his present address.

  At 6: 15 P.M., after Zahnle’s driver’s license pi
cture had been shown on the evening news, Anderson received a call from his wife’s sister. She said that Michael Zahnle had been missing since April 27, and her sister had moved in with her while waiting for word of his whereabouts.

  On May 4, Zahnle’s widow came in to talk with Detective John Clark. The grief-stricken woman had had to bear more tragedy in a short time than any young woman should.

  On April 20, the Zahnles had lost their baby son, who was only eleven days old when he died. The grieving parents had been coaxed to go out with relatives on Friday, April 27, to try to forget for a while. But a few drinks had made Michael Zahnle more morose than ever. In tears, he had left the restaurant in Puyallup, Washington, on foot. Zahnle, a carpenter, had been unemployed. The young couple had no car of their own.

  “He hitchhiked a lot, but he was very good at martial arts,” his wife said. “And he always got himself out of any situation he got into.”

  She said her husband had been wearing a yellow pullover, a shirt with “California” on it, blue corduroy pants, and black zip-up boots when he left the restaurant. He had a ninety-two-dollar income tax refund check with him, and a key ring with a picture of their baby on it.

  She was adamant that her husband had never shown any homosexual tendencies at all. Moreover, he had been scornful of anyone who was “into weird sex.” If Michael Zahnle had gotten into Larry Hendricks’s van, it would have been because he needed a ride home. He might not have been as alert as usual because he was upset about the loss of the baby.

  The Pierce County detectives talked to others who had known Larry Hendricks, or who thought they knew him. The woman who had bought out his interest in “The Merchant Prince” said he was very knowledgeable about antiques but was somewhat strange. “Two or three weeks ago, I went to his apartment on a Saturday,” she said thoughtfully. “When he opened the door, I saw two spots of blood on his forehead that had run down from his scalp. His face was flushed and his eyes were glazed. He said he’d been looking at an apartment to buy and he’d struck his head on some nails in the basement. I didn’t believe him. I suspected he was into some kind of sexual deviancy, but I let it drop.”