Juvenile Crimes - Chapter 34
Friends, Deceptions, and Consequences
Coquille, Oregon, July 1996 continued…
“Look at this guy!” Bev said with genuine kindness. “All tanned and fresh, back from vacation with his girlfriend with the million-dollar smile!”
“Oh, stop it,” I blushed. Bev had witnessed my misery in the months prior, and she was truly happy to see me happy for once. Selena blushed, too, and laughed. She had stopped by my office to go to lunch, and we caught Bev’s eye. “You’re way too kind.”
Bev (the Office Manager) had always been kind and professional toward me from the first, when I had to tell her my dad died, and I had to delay my start date. While Bev was one of the most vocal of my supporters, the complete change I had noticed in the rest of the staff following the mass murders had held up. I was now treated like a respected friend by nearly everyone. Selena and I were finally invited to hang out with my peers every now and then – I was no longer treated like persona non grata. It was a welcome change. The attitude toward me had changed so much so that even Kevin, months removed from working in Coos County, gave me a last-minute verbal invitation to his wedding in Portland (I figured it was because everyone else in the office was invited). I guess someone told him he was wrong about me. Selena and I had prior plans, so I didn’t make it.
Ring!!! Ring!! Ring!! Another goddamn 2:30 AM phone call. Since Tami left, I had been averaging about four per week – or rather, four episodes per week. Usually, they would call back two or three times in a row until I unplugged the phone. Always dead silence on the other end of the line. I had exhausted myself too many times screaming at the low-life piece of shit on the other end, so now I went straight to the wall plug after picking up the voiceless receiver.
“Who was that?” Selena asked sleepily from my waterbed.
“Oh, probably the same asshole as always,” I replied. “I’m sorry that happened again. Somebody just can’t give up messing with me.” I went back to bed.
A new murder case came in over the weekend, and it became a juicy one. An 18-year-old local kid was shot in the back of the head, execution style, with a small caliber gun. The body was found in a Coos Bay city park overlooking the Bay on Saturday, apparently the morning after he was murdered. His body was in a lot better shape than the last body found in that park. We called that guy the “wolfman” because he had been laying face up in the sun for three days - the sun burned his skin brown and his mouth and eyes were thick with white “hair” that was in fact, maggots. The autopsy on the wolfman turned out to show that it was a death from natural causes.
Gus Morton, our assistant medical examiner and Sheriff’s detective assigned to our Office, was by far our most experienced homicide investigator. Having his office next to mine, and us both being smokers, I had a lot of opportunities to listen and learn from him. Gus had recently been to a training seminar on “victimology,” or the study of a murder victim’s life – their personality, habits, friends, associates, etc. - in order to figure out “whodunit?” This new case was an excellent and simple example of it.
“Our victim was an 18-year-old, just graduated from high school, right?” Gus said before taking a drag off his smoke. “So we knew he probably had a lot of local buddies. After a little asking around and looking through a yearbook, we figured out who his group of friends were, then we started pressing them one by one. We got after it immediately, the same day the body was discovered. That gave us the shock value before it hit the TV news.”
“Did you get anything?” I asked, taking a drag off my own cigarette.
“Hell yeah,” Gus confirmed. “The first two gave us the same basic story – the victim’s best friend, some asshole named Jesse who just happens to call himself ‘Jesse James’ was pissed off at the vic because he thought the vic was banging his girlfriend.”
“Top of the suspect list,” I acknowledged.
“You got it!” Gus shot back. “So next, I talked to the girl in question. She was rattled and scared. She’s positive it had to be her ex-boyfriend, good ole Jesse James, right? Who else? The girl thinks Jesse's got a not-so-hidden dark side.”
“I’ve met a few of those,” I offered.
“Me too,” Gus said with a huge grin.
“Did Jesse ever hit her?” I asked.
“No, but he always played the tough guy in his buddy group, at least according to her,” Gus said. “She says he’s kind of idolized by some of these idiots. ‘The leader of the pack of clowns,’ she said.”
“Do we have enough for a warrant yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Gus replied. “We’re still doing interviews and trying to press the ones we can. At least four of his buddies are in the system already, two still on probation, so we’re going to apply the appropriate amount of pressure to where we can to see what pops.”
Another of my occasional smoking buddies, Sheriff’s Deputy Sergeant Collins, once gave me his analogy of putting the pressure on a suspect/witness: “You twist theirs nuts up in a vice-tight grip and ‘flick!’ (making the flicking gesture with the middle finger of his other hand) until they start singing!” It was an analogy…really. But it made the point vividly. When you find the weak spots and hit those the hardest, or credibly threaten to, most people break quickly.
As luck would have it, one of Jesse’s asshole buddies was locked up in adult jail for a drug charge. This mental midget got pressed by Gus about what he knew about Jesse killing his own best friend. The fool claimed complete ignorance and didn’t directly give anything away. However, he did go into panic mode. He talked all about the police interview to another mutual friend the first chance he had – on the jail phones! That’s a spectacularly bad idea because ALL of the phone calls from the jail were recorded. The guy he talked to was close to Jesse and acknowledged that Jesse admitted killing his best friend to a few of his buddies. Mostly to look tough and act cool, I guess. None of them would talk.
The arrest warrant followed. When it was served, the cops found Jesse at a park basketball court with some of his friends. Just as the cops pulled up, Jesse took off his shirt and placed it to the side of the court. The dumb fucking cops who arrested him took Jesse straight into custody without searching the shirt he had just placed on the ground a few feet away.
We found out later, via the jail phone again, that Jesse had pulled the gun out of his front pocket and bundled it in his shirt. He was relying on one of his friends to ditch the gun, which they did.
The big problem for us became finding the murder weapon. None of his worthless friends would testify against him, so our case got a lot thinner without the murder weapon. It would become a big deal, soon.