Juvenile Crimes - Chapter 30

One of Those Days That Scars Your Soul - That Mass Murder On the Oregon Coast...

(WARNING: THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC VIOLENT AND DISTURBING CONTENT DESCRIBING ACTUAL EVENTS. IT IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART.

AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT, THE EVENTS OF THIS CHAPTER TOOK PLACE EXACTLY 28 YEARS AGO THIS WEEKEND, TO THE CALENDAR DATES. IT RUINED MOTHER’S DAY THEN, I DON’T WANT TO RUIN YOURS TODAY, SO PLEASE LET THIS ONE SIT AND COME BACK TO IT WHEN YOU’RE UP FOR A REALLY SAD READ.

THAT SAID, I WISH YOU A TRULY HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!

Wes)

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Coos Bay, Oregon – May 1996 (continued from Chapter 1)…

I awoke from a deep sleep as my alarm clock went off. It was 6:30 AM.  Time to make the doughnuts, or in my case, put the bad guys in jail. Since I wasn't scheduled for court this morning and I had settled the trial scheduled for today at the last-minute yesterday afternoon, I was in no hurry to crawl out of my nice warm '70's style waterbed. Just as I reached past my 9 mm Ruger P-85 and hit the snooze button, the phone rang. Since there was no going back to sleep after that, I stumbled out of bed and rushed to answer. It didn't take long to cross the open space of my one-bedroom apartment. I made it by the third ring and quickly rubbed the sleep dust from my eyes and cleared my throat before answering the phone.

“Hello?”…

…“What did Keutzer say when he called you?” Gwen asked.

“Just that there’s five bodies, and to get out there as fast as I could after court,” I said before screeching around another 20 MPH corner doing 50.

“Do we know how they died?”

“'Stabbing' is all I’ve heard so far.” I paused and slowed just enough to negotiate another hairpin turn in the opposite direction. In my nine months on the job to that point, I had been to two autopsies. Though memory-etching experiences of their own, I knew already that what we were about to see had no comparison in either of our experiences. We were about to find out that there was no comparison in anybody’s experience.

Realizing that there wasn’t much else I could say to prepare Gwen, I told her “Just prepare yourself for the worst thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life...”

…The woman’s shirt, once white, was now entirely dark crimson. After absorbing the shock – and the rotting metallic scent – of all that blood staining her shirt, we could clearly see a large knife lodged to its handle standing perpendicular directly in the upper-middle of the woman’s back (just like you would see in a horror movie, but this was very real). The trailer’s screen door was slowly banging against the head, shoulder and dangling arm of the corpse, pushed by a gentle breeze. Blood slowly dripped from her arm to the step below.

Drip, drip, drip.

The blood pool was massive, both inside and outside the trailer.

Drip. Drip. Drip…

…The screen-door continued to thud against the corpse in the doorway.

Thwank. Thwank. Thwank…

…Gwen couldn’t take it anymore. “Can’t you guys do something about that?” she asked, with more than a hint of irritation and dismay.

Sgt. Dave Sheffield busted out laughing. “Why? She don’t give a fuck!”…

…We waited for over four hours – for the warrants and for the crime lab guys to process the scene - before seeing the real nightmare. All the while spilled blood thickened, drying where the layer of blood was thin enough, like at the edges of the blood pool around the doorway. The stench of gore also thickened, the metallic and rotting organic stench wafting more noticeably by the minute in the warm springtime air. There is absolutely nothing more distinctive - and horrific - than the smell of massive amounts of human blood. The smell of fresh Death.

The crowd grew. The press vultured. The helicopter buzzed overhead repeatedly.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Thwank. Thwank. Thwank…

The warrant for the trailer house arrived shortly after Gwen and I arrived at the scene, allowing the crime scene detectives and lab tech guys to get to work. All the while, a police officer was assigned to log everyone into and out of the trailer, with exact times. The O.J. Simpson verdict was less than a year ago and still fresh in the minds of everyone here. No one was going to allow this case to be procedurally fucked up in any way.

The D.A., Peter Blanchett, was the first from our office to go through the crime scenes, less than an hour after it happened. He locked it down until the warrant came through, then only necessary personnel were allowed in until the scenes were fully processed. Next on site was our Chief Deputy, Steve Keutzer, and he took control of the scene while Peter went back to the office. Peter would be the public face of the State of Oregon and he knew the press would be on this immediately.

Peter was right. The press was swarming all over the crime scene area right after the news broke over the police scanners, arriving right behind cops and ambulances. A news helicopter out of Portland had already made it to the scene, adding to the surreal feeling of it all.

While the crime scene guys gathered evidence and took all their pictures, one enterprising young State Police Officer got the truly bright idea of asking for a ride along with the chopper news crew so he could get good aerial video footage of the entire crime area. It would be very useful at trial. There were two murder scenes – more accurately, death scenes – plus a short chase through some thick nearby brushy forest for about a hundred yards to where the suspect was caught. The news crew was all for it since they would get the chance to ask questions about what happened, most of which were unanswered (he played dumb to deny them any sensationalist angles).

There was a locked outbuilding, or shed, on the far side of the trailer. Based on what was seen inside the trailer when the first cops and Peter walked through, a belief developed that there might be more evidence related to this crime. Specifically, it was clear that sexual abuse of a child had been occurring. Speculation popped up that perhaps kiddy porn, or worse, might be found inside the shed. Being determined to do this case by the book, Ted and Phil went back to the D.A.’s Office to hammer out another warrant for the shed, even though it would likely have been covered by the first warrant. By the book, no fuck ups.

Because this bastard NEEDED the plunger (death by lethal injection in Oregon).

Gwen and I found out while waiting that it appeared the suspect had been raping the five-year-old girl, either before or after he cut her throat. Or worse, both before AND after he killed her. The rest of the victims were her family – her mother, laying dead in the doorway with the knife sticking out of her back; her uncle, dead on the couch; her father, who had his throat sliced across the front and managed to make it out the back door, across the street diagonally to the park manager’s trailer before dying there; and her 16-month-old brother, dead in his playpen in a back bedroom.