A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (9 page)

Their precise work kept them from facing the terrible question that kept echoing. Who on earth would shoot Morris Blankenbaker? Everybody liked Morris....

The word that Morris Blankenbaker had been murdered spread throughout town to almost everyone who had ever known him, and that was half of Yakima. Long before the headlines hit, everyone who mattered knew. Olive Blankenbaker will never forget the way she heard the worst news of her life. From the moment he was born, she had worried about her only child, but she had fought her natural inclination to warn him to be careful.

All through his football days, and then when he was in the service, and working in the mental hospital, and climbing telephone poles in all kinds of weather, she had worried, but she had determinedly kept her mouth shut. In the end she had raised a man's man, but a gentle sensitive man too. Olive was asleep early on that Saturday morning after Thanksgiving. She didn't know that the police and Mike Blankenbaker were trying to locate the best person to inform her that her son was dead.

"They finally went and got my sister. Hazel came and got me out of bed," Olive remembered. "She just said it right out, Olive, Morris has been shot." And I said, Is he dead?" and she said, Yes." I just wanted to know, to get it over with in a hurry. l knew he was dead from the moment she took a hold of my hand. l really thought that I was going to die right on the spot. I thought This is to bad. Nothing this bad has ever happened to me before, and I can't take it. I'm not going to survive this. I'm going to die tonight."" Wild with grief, Olive Blankenbaker asked silently why it had to be Morris, her only son. Why couldn't it have been someone else's son someone who had ten kid sit might be easier for them. She knew that wasn't true, and that wasn't the way she usually thought, but she could not bear the idea of living her life out without Morris. She had no husband, her sisters had their own lives, the boss she'd loved to work for was dead in a plane crash. Now the future yawned ahead of her empty of everything she had ever cared about. Olive had no idea who had shot Morris, she couldn't conceive how anyone could have wanted to hurt him, much less kill him. Robert Brimmer returned to the police station, and he and his investigators started their incident report procedure. "At that time," he said, "we started contacting witnesses or people to talk to. They started coming in after eight-thirty that morning." Brimmer, a tall, lanky, laconic man in his forties, whose smiles were infrequent, was in charge of almost every major crime that came into the Yakima detective unit: homicide, arson, assault, armed robbery. ll he was occasionally short tempered, he was always fair and he treated every man who worked for him equally. Some of the information Brimrner had elicited thus far in the Blankenbaker case was no help at all, some might prove to be, and some was startling. It would take a while to check it all out, but first there was the postmortem examination to attend. The word out(Jpsy by definition roughly means to "see for. one's self." Everyone who attended Morris Blankenbaker's autopsy would be there to see what had happened to him medically, clinically, ballistic ally. They could not allow themselves to consider the emotional aspect of this crime. Not now Dr. Richard Muzzall was the Yakima County Coroner. In Washington State, counties can choose whether they want to have a medical examiner or a coroner. Yakima and many of the smaller counties have coroners who are medical doctors but have not had extensive training in the science of death examination.

In the old days, some counties didn't even require that coroners be doctors. Muzzall, however, had more experience than most coroners. He had worked as a deputy coroner in the Minneapolis area before moving to Yakima. By the time he stood over Morris Blankenbaker's body, he had performed approximately 150 autopsies. It was ten o'clock in the morning on November 22, Morris had been dead about eight hours, his body had been discovered only five hours before. Just the evening before, he had been laughing with Jerilee and their children as they ate pizza at Shakey's. Only two days ago, he had sat down to Thanksgiving dinner. And within the month, he and Jerilee would have remarried and the scars of the past two years would have begun to heal over. Now that was not to be.

Three men stood in the autopsy room with Dr. Muzzall: Sergeant Brimmer, Eric Gustafson, a Yakima County Deputy District Attorney, and a young detective named Vern Henderson. Henderson swallowed hard and fought to maintain a professional distance from the dead man before him. It wasn't easy, Vern Henderson and Morris Blankenbaker had played football together at Davis High School. More than that so much more than that they had been best friends since they were thirteen years old. If any detective on the force had a special reason to want to find Morris's killer, it was Vern Henderson. Brimmer glanced covertly at Vern to see if he could handle this and, satisfied that he could, looked again at the perfect athlete's body on the table. Vern Henderson had long since learned to hide his feelings, and his face was without expression. "I had been to a lot of autopsies by then, even to some where I knew the person. But I'd never been to one where the subject was such a good friend as Morris was. It was hard on me to go, but I wanted to know everything that had happened to him," Henderson said. "Because, see, I knew in my own mind that if they didn't find him [the killer] right away, I was going to have to look. l wanted to know what happened and you can only know if you go to the autopsy. l wanted to know the facts, so when I heard things, I'd know if it really happened that way or not."

Before the body was undressed and washed, photographs and measurements were taken. The four men took notes and observed minute details that would not have been significant to men in other professions. Morris had always had a thick head of hair, and he had recently grown a mustache and a short beard. His face and beard were still stained with dried blood. When he was undressed and examined, it was clear that there were no injuries to his body. All the damage had been done to his head. That he had been shot was evident both in the appearance of the wounds and in the gun barrel debris that was still present in his hair and on his skin. Muzzall pointed to the wound he felt had been the first, a shot fired while Morris was standing. It had pierced the upper lip at the center line and knocked out two front teeth before it embedded itself against the base of the spine just below the spot where the occipital portion of the skull joined the spinal column. The mouth wound itself, Muzzall felt, would not have caused death. However, the area where the spinal cord joins the brain is the control center of the human body. It regulates breathing and heart rate, and a bullet striking there might well have caused respiratory arrest. At the very least, this shot would have knocked the victim off his feet. Morris had been lying on his face when Jerilee found him. Either the shooter had been in front of him, or the force of the first shot had spun him around as he fell. Muzzall pointed out the "freckles" of unburned gunpowder that had tattooed the victim's face. Tiny black dots extended up to the forehead, into the hairline and down into the beard for a distance of about three and a half inches from the lip wound. This meant that the killer had stood quite close to Morris when he fired and hit him in the mouth. The second and third wounds had been delivered when Morris was down. They entered just behind the left ear and traveled horizontally through the brain, causing fatal damage. The second bullet had lodged against the skull on the right side, traveling at a slight upward angle. The third bullet entered the head just below the second and traveled forward and again slightly upward, ending in the frontal lobe of the brain. This third wound had dark gunpowder rimming it, it had almost been a contact wound.

Each of these two shots could be considered "execution style" wounds.

The killer had leaned over the prone man and held the murder weapon very close behind the victim's ear. Each was a fatal shot. Whoever had shot Morris Blankenbaker had wanted to be very sure that he was dead. Morris had probably seen the first shot coming, if only at the last moment, Muzzall explained. He lifted Morris's right hand. It was flecked with dried blood. "This is blowback," he commented. "Here on the back, side, and even the palm of his hand. I would say the first bullet to strike him was the one to the mouth.... He would have had to have been in an upright position, to be raising his hand in front of his face, to get this blowback of blood from the lip wound. If he had been shot behind the ear first, he would have fallen on the ground, and his hand would not have been in a position to catch this blowback." Morris had no other wounds beyond a small scratch on his nose, probably sustained when he fell. There was the characteristic bruising around his eyes almost always present with a head shot quite consistent with the brain damage and bleeding behind his eyes. His knuckles were smooth. He hadn't hit anyone. His clothing wasn't torn. All he had time to do was hold up his hand in a futile attempt to protect his head from the gun he saw in his killer's fist. Morris had been a tremendously strong man, given a chance, he would have put up an awesome fight for his life. Vern Henderson knew that. He had never seen anyone take Morris not in a fair fight. Morris wa shad been, he told himself as strong as a bull moose.

But he clearly had not been given any warning. Brimmer and Henderson knew that the victim was due home shortly after two, and that Jerilee thought she had heard his car about then. She hadn't heard gunshots although others hadand had probably mistaken the shots for "car doors slamming." His dog hadn't barked. Whoever was outside was someone familiar to the victim's black Lab. Hike was a guard dog, but he was as friendly as a pup to people he recognized. Someone must have known Morris's habits, or someone had followed him from the Lion's Share.

Whoever it was Morris hadn't been afraid when his killer came up to him He was probably carrying the open bottle of beer in his hand, a bottle that fell at his feet when he was shot. He hadn't shouted out a threat or a warning. He hadn't called out for help. Muzzall routinely took a blood sample, which he would send to the Washington State Toxicology Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle for analysis.

Muzzall removed some battered slugs and a number of bullet fragments from the victim's skull. Their combined weight suggested strongly that they were. 22s. Robert Brimmer marked them into evidence and locked them in a file cabinet in his office until he could mail them to the Washington State Police Crime Lab for testing. The casings (or shells)

that had once held them had not been found. If the murder gun was a revolver, the cylinder would have retained the casings until the shooter deliberately tipped them out. If the gun had been an automatic, it would have ejected the shell and slid a new bullet into firing position after every shot. They couldn't be sure which kind of gun they were looking for. If the gun was an automatic, there should be shells at the crime scene. The investigators hadn't found any yet, but they had had to search in dim light in high grass with patches of snow on the ground.

For all they knew, the bullet casings were still lying somewhere on the Blankenbaker's lawn. Sergeant Brimmer had locked the Budweiser bottle and the Lincoln log in the evidence vault on the second floor of the Yakima Police Department. He dusted the brown bottle now with light fingerprint powder, but he could bring up nothing but smudges, there were no distinctive loops, ridges, or whorls that might give him the information that either the victim or the killer had held that bottle.

One of the most convoluted murder investigations the Yakima detectives had ever knownan intricate murder probe that any big city detective would have found baffling was just beginning. One of the people Brimmer talked to early on was a staff member at Davis High School. For the first time, he learned that there "was an indication of hard feelings between Morris and Mr. Moore." It was like the first little wisp of smoke from a smoldering hidden fire. Brimmer knew Gabby, and he couldn't imagine the beloved coach would do something like shoot a friend in the face and the back of the head. But he would have to look into it. When Jerilee came out of the worst of her shock and hysteria, she thought of the only person she knew who had resented Morris. As impossible as it seemed even to hershe began to wonder, and she felt she had to mention her doubts to the police. Gabby had always told her that she would come back to him, if it weren't for Morris. She knew that Gabby didn't just love her, he was totally obsessed with her. He had let his job slide, he had let his athletes down, and his relentless drinking had made him turn on his own children. He blamed it all on her, and then on Morris. She didn't even want to think what she was thinking. Gabby had threatened so many times to kill himselj in front of her, but he had never said anything about hurting Morris. Morris had always been so kind to Gabby.

Even after what she and Gabby had done to him, Morris still treated Gabby with respect. He still called him "Coach," and he had told her he couldn't bring himself to hit Gabby a week before when he had broken into their house. No, she couldn't imagine Gabby Moore killing Morris.

But then, she couldn't imagine anyone else killing Morris. Of all the things she had been afraid might happen, that was one eventuality that had never crossed her mind. Sergeant Brimmer called Gabby Moore and requested that he come down to the police station, asking him to bring any firearms he might own with him. Gabby did come to the station on that first Saturday afternoon, but he did not come prepared to talk to Brimmer. Instead, he said that anyone who was interested in talking to him would have to talk to his attorney. He had nothing to say. Detective vernon Henry Henderson had broken through barriers of one kind or another all of his life. Like Morris Blankenbaker, he had grown up in Yakima. But Morris was born there, and Vern arrived at the age of five coming from the South to a world entirely different from the one he had known. "My mother, my sister, and I came from Shreveport Louisiana," Henderson said. "My grandfather was living up here already, and he called and told us to come on up here that it was a better life. He owned some houses in Yakima and told my mother she could probably get a home up here. We moved up, and we were able to get a home." It wasn't easy, Vern's mother, Leona, would work in a Yakima cannery her entire life. She was everything to her son just as Olive was all things to Morris. Henderson's sister, Joanne, died when she was only twelve, and he was working by that age thinning apples in the orchards, picking fruit when the trees grew heavy with ripe produce. As hard as they all had to work, the move did bring Leona Henderson's family a better life.