Empty Promises (20 page)

At 1:58 A.M. on that Sunday in March, Officer Mary Brick was working third watch in Unit 3U6. She had heard Sleeth and Mochizuki calling frantically for assistance from the paramedics. Then, as she turned toward Greenwood Avenue from the I-5 freeway, she listened to the information broadcast about a possible suspect on the loose in the vicinity. She made a mental note to watch for a bearded man driving a small red car, but she hadn't had long to look because the next call
was directed to her unit: "Go to 345 North 133rd. Possible suspect vehicle located at that location. Washington license DBV-624." Brick's patrol unit rounded the corner near that address, and she saw fellow officers Steve Knectel and Andy DePola running toward a maroon Toyota Corolla a block ahead. A tall white male was just getting into the driver's seat. She maneuvered her unit close to the suspect vehicle and heard Knectel and DePola shout at the man, "Get out!"
The man didn't move.
"I said get out!" DePola snapped.
The man finally emerged, unfolding himself from a car that seemed too small to hold him until he stood towering over it. Knectel handcuffed him and walked him back to Mary Brick's vehicle. DePola followed, and the three officers and their suspect crowded into the patrol car. They then advised the suspect of his Miranda rights.
Knectel and DePola had been on the scene as the paramedics worked over the two victims. They had followed the killer's trail, after noting that the elderly witness mentioned "screeching tires." The two officers walked southbound down Bitter Place and saw fresh tire marks leading away from the crime scene. The tire tracks turned onto 133rd Street.
The burned rubber was fading, but at that hour of the morning, they found only one set of recent tire tracks on the rain-slick cement of North 133rd. Knectel and DePola moved forward on foot like Indian trail-cutters until they spotted a red foreign car parked up ahead. It was unoccupied, but when Knectel felt the hood, it was still warm. That was when he radioed for Mary Brick to "sit on" the car while he and DePola went to the nearby houses.
A house-to-house check proved unnecessary. Even
before Mary Brick pulled up, Knectel and DePola observed a large man with a fiery red beard walk toward the suspect vehicle and get in. They were beside him before he realized they were there. Glancing through the driver's window, Knectel and DePola saw crimson stains on the large man's hands and ordered him to get out of the car.
Oddly, the man seemed scarcely disturbed at being arrested. He gave his name as Patrick David Lehn, and his birthdate as March 9, 1952. He was a huge man, well over 6 feet, 3 inches tall, and he looked to weigh about 230 pounds. He had a thatch of curly brown hair and a bright red beard and mustache. He did indeed resemble Portland Trailblazers star Bill Walton.
Mary Brick studied the prisoner. He sat in a relaxed position in the backseat of her patrol car, but sweat continually beaded up on his forehead and rolled down his cheeks into his beard and mustache.
"Do you know who those people are?" Brick asked, gesturing toward the scene of the attack, which wasn't that far away. She didn't say "victims" or "the woman and the boy," but he seemed to know who she was talking about.
Lehn replied quite calmly: "Kathi and Kris… Kathi Jones and Kris Haugen."
"You know them?" she persisted.
"I dated her once," he said. "She worked at a French restaurant in Seattle."
But when Brick and DePola questioned him further, Lehn was adamant that he hadn't seen Kathi Jones the previous evening. He couldn't have seen her, he said, because he didn't know where she lived. "I talked with her on the phone last night, though." Lehn said he'd gone to dinner alone at a steak house in Seattle and then had headed toward his north end home on I-5. He said
he'd left the freeway at the Northgate Mall and gone to a 7-Eleven to purchase a bottle of champagne and a bottle of chablis.
"How did you get those stains on your hands?" DePola asked. "You cut yourself?"
Lehn stared at his hand as if he was surprised to see the cracking red marks, but then he explained that he had gotten into a fight with some "middle-aged guy" outside a Chinese restaurant.
Not surprisingly, the records department listed a number of Katherine, Kathy, and Cathy Joneses in the Seattle area. One of them was a Kathi Jones, who lived in an apartment at 322 North 134th Street— half a block from the attack site. It was also close to where they'd arrested Patrick Lehn.
Despite what Lehn was saying, he had to have seen Kathi Jones the night before. There was little question that he was the man she had been frantic to get away from, but he stonewalled, insisting that he had only spoken to her on the phone.
In a sense, the case seemed to be over; in another sense, the investigators knew nothing at all about the relationship and the emotions that had provoked the savage beatings on the grassy slope. What were Patrick and Kathi to each other? Was the dead child theirs? Like so many homicide investigations, this one started at the end and they would have to work backward until they discovered some sort of semirational explanation for what seemed to be complete chaos.
Pat Lehn was taken first to the Wallingford Precinct in the north end of Seattle. At DePola's instruction, he removed his clothing and it was bagged into evidence. His hands were swabbed with sterile water and the traces of blood obtained would be tested for type. He
didn't seem to be wounded. He was given a blanket to cover himself, videotaped to show his demeanor at the time of his arrest, and then driven to the fifth-floor offices of Homicide in the Public Safety Building for further questioning by detectives.
It was 4:55 A.M. when Mike Tando and John Boatman introduced themselves to the hulking suspect. Tando was a wiry man with a quick grin and bushy blond curls; Boatman had a round, pleasant face and ruddy cheeks. Neither looked like a homicide detective, which proved to be an advantage in a number of cases. The man before them had massive shoulders that protruded from the blanket he clutched around him. He would have been a formidable opponent for anyone. The detectives were tremendously curious to know about what could have made him angry enough to beat a woman and a child. But of course they couldn't let him know how anxious they were to understand his motivation. They began slowly, asking him blandly general questions about his background.
Pat Lehn said he was currently living in Lynnwood, a small town about fifteen miles north of Seattle. Before that, he had lived in Seattle for most of his twenty-eight years. He had graduated from Shoreline High School and had attended one year of junior college. He worked as a field supervisor for a construction company building a skyscraper in downtown Seattle. That was a good job, a high-paying job that carried with it a good deal of responsibility. Lehn explained that he had no criminal record, except for a few minor charges. He read the Miranda rights form thoroughly and signed it, but he didn't seem eager to share any details about the previous evening with them.
"Do you want an attorney?" John Boatman asked.
Lehn seemed to debate this in his mind. "I don't know," he said, slowly. "I've watched a lot of television and I know an attorney would be mad at me if I told you guys the whole story."
The detectives waited. At length, Lehn decided he didn't want an attorney, and he did seem to be under some inner pressure. He clearly wanted to talk; he even said he wanted to discuss not only his arrest but what he knew about the victims. "But I don't want to get into it any deeper than that," he said.
The two detectives agreed to take this tack. At this point, they would have been grateful for anything that might shed light on the deadly attack on Bitter Place.
Lehn gave them Kathi's name again, and spelled it. He spelled Kris's name, and said he thought Kris was about three. He said that Kathi and her son lived just around the corner from where the "incident" happened.
This spontaneous statement was interesting, since none of the police or the investigators had yet told Pat Lehn where "the incident" had happened— or even what "the incident" was. It was he who was offering the information, apparently unaware that he was implicating himself.
And yet there was much that Lehn did not want to discuss; he claimed that it was "such a long story" and would take a long time to explain his relationship with Kathi Jones.
Boatman and Tando assured him they were not trying to trick him or trap him— he could stop talking at any time, and he was under no pressure to discuss anything that he didn't wish to. "But I have to remind you," Boatman said, "that if you make any oral statements, they can be used against you in court."
"Was it jealousy?" Tando ventured. "Did it all start because you were jealous— or was she jealous of you?"
Lehn nodded his head slightly. He spoke generally of the treachery of women. As far as he was concerned, none of them could be trusted. When the detectives didn't disagree with him, he took this to mean that they went along with his theories.
"You were jealous of her?" Tando asked. "She betrayed you in some way?"
If the suspect admitted to that much, at least they would have some kind of motive for what he had done. Lehn agreed that there had been jealousy in his relationship with the woman who was now fighting for her life.
"Were you lovers?"
Lehn said that he had been intimate with Kathi Jones in the recent past— but then he drew back into himself again. "I don't want to discuss that anymore."
The detectives waited. The silence in the cramped interview room with its faded green walls grew almost louder than words.
"Her father didn't like me much," Lehn finally offered.
"Why was that?"
Lehn made a dismissive gesture with his hand, but then he said cryptically, "You have to understand there have been things in the past that have continued to be a problem."
Quite sure that this was a massive understatement, the two detectives waited to see what the suspect would say next. His conversational style had fallen into a pattern of denial, followed by bursts of information.
Lehn told them he had recently spent a night with Kathi at her condominium. He said he thought everything was going fine, but then he left for a while.
When he came back, Kathi was angry with him. "Everything changed," he said. "She discovered that somebody had vandalized her Mazda RX7. I came into the condo parking lot and she immediately accused me of doing the damage. I kept telling her that I hadn't touched her car, that I wouldn't have had time to do that much damage, but she didn't believe me. She always thought that I trashed her car." He said Kathi prized her car highly. He couldn't come up with any reason someone else would have set out to destroy it.
Boatman and Tando had their own ideas about who had damaged the Mazda, but talking to Pat Lehn was like trying to drive parallel to another car that kept veering off the road. He picked certain incidents out of the air, but they were remote in time and had nothing to do with the terrible attack that had happened just four or five hours before the interview. He hadn't seen the victims the night before; he hadn't hurt them, he insisted. He took the stance of an innocent man who was being blamed for things he didn't do.
Lehn was vague when Boatman and Tando asked him the hardest questions. He said he hadn't been with Kathi in the early part of Saturday evening because she was working. "She was a hostess at L'Tastevin."
They knew the restaurant. It was a very popular, very upscale bistro on Lower Queen Anne Hill.
"You didn't go there to eat?"
"No," Lehn said. "I ate at El Gaucho."
El Gaucho was another top restaurant in Seattle, a place that had mink-lined booths, thick steaks, and the best martinis in town. Lehn had been drinking on Saturday night. He told them again about buying champagne and white wine at the 7-Eleven. He must have been sav
ing the wine for later because he also said he went to a Chinese restaurant for a few drinks after dinner.
"You said you talked to Kathi early last night on the phone?"
Lehn nodded. He said he was supposed to meet Kathi after she got off work. It would have been usual for her to pick up Kris from his baby-sitter on her way home.
"You went to her place to meet her?"
He shook his head. No, he hadn't met her at her condo. Rather, he said he had encountered Kathi and her little boy near her home as their cars both approached Bitter Place North, "where it happened," Lehn said, again unconsciously referring to the attack. "I just bumped into them." He was giving his version of their meeting, but it was so obvious that this was his agenda. "We just happened to meet there, and we stopped our cars about three feet apart, and rolled down our windows… and then she just started to jump all over me."
He said Kathi brought up the trashing of her Mazda. Lehn said she had accused him once again of messing with her car. "She said somebody had taken all the lug nuts off of her front wheels. I got out of my car, and sure enough, there were lug nuts missing, one from each front wheel."
"You didn't do that?"
Lehn looked mystified. He denied being anywhere near her car on Saturday night. "She started to scream at me. She said she was going to file a police report about it and have the cops watch her condo so I couldn't come near her anymore."
The big man before them insisted that he hadn't been staking out Kathi Jones's condo, stalking her, waiting for her to get home. He did admit that he was getting angrier and angrier as she screamed at him and
accused him of following her, tampering with her car. She kept telling him to leave her alone.
It was a tragically familiar story to the detectives— a man who wouldn't take no for an answer, a suitor who wouldn't go away. Nevertheless, Lehn maintained the stance of an innocent man, a man falsely accused.
"I finally just gave up fighting with her at one point and tried to reach inside and kiss her on the cheek, but she was so angry at me. That's when things started." Lehn said he had no memory of getting into Kathi's car. He could not remember how her clothes had come off, but he thought they might have come off inside her car. He claimed no recall of how their argument had ended.
"Where was Kathi— and Kris— when you left?" Boatman asked.
"I don't remember."
"Do you remember if you hit Kris?"
"I don't— but he could have gotten in the way."
Lehn said he left the scene after "everything just sort of happened," and he drove his car around the corner. Then he went back and drove Kathi's car to a supermarket parking lot a few blocks away. He left it there and returned on foot to retrieve his own car. It was at that point that the officers had arrested him.