Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (40 page)

Marshal 5 investigator Bill Hoppe of the Seattle Fire Department. Hoppe was the first on the scene to probe the rapidly burning fire at the University Towers Hotel.
(
Ann Rule
)

AN OBSESSION
WITH BLONDES

The Candy Store was a neighborhood tavern, and the two young Portland, Oregon, women had been there often; in 1975 it seemed as safe as going to a local drugstore for a Coke. The pretty blondes had a beer or two, talked with friends, and played the pinball machine. They watched and kibitzed with the pool players.

There were a few strangers in the place—one a tall, good-looking man in jeans and a plaid shirt. He seemed to be attracted to twenty-three-year-old Marci Brunswick* and made small talk with her while she played pinball. He offered to buy her a beer, but she refused because she had to get home and she didn’t really know him. She assumed, however, that others in the tavern knew him because she’d seen him playing pool with some of the regulars.

Shortly after 1
A.M.,
Marci left alone and walked to her car, which was parked in the lot behind the Candy Store. She’d had a bad cold for a week and she was tired. As she backed her car from its parking space, she heard someone call to her from the rear door of the tavern.

It was the man she’d talked to earlier. She rolled down the driver’s window and waited to hear what he wanted, and then her car stalled. She tried to get it started again as he walked toward her, but the starter gave only a few halfhearted grunts and then died.

“You’ve probably just flooded it,” the man said easily. “Slide over and let me try.”

He seemed okay and she was in a jam. Marci slid over. He turned the key and floored the accelerator pedal but the starter barely beeped.

“Looks like you’re stuck,” the stranger said. “Tell you what, I’ll push it back into the parking space and I’ll give you a ride home.”

She studied his face. He looked harmless enough, and he didn’t seem at all intoxicated. It was either accept his offer of a ride home, or go through the hassle of trying to get her car started and probably ending up having to take a cab.

Marci accepted his offer and waited while he pushed her car backward into a space against a nearby building. Then she followed him to the red El Camino pickup truck he pointed to.

She was barely seated before she had reason to regret her decision. The man hadn’t seemed drunk at all, but now he was pulling his vehicle out onto a one-way street—and going the wrong way. For three blocks, he raced down the street as she pleaded with him to turn off. She was certain they were due for a head-on collision.

Finally, he turned a corner, and soon they were on the street where she lived. She pointed out her apartment house.

“There—that driveway,” Marci said. “You can just let me out there at that driveway.”

But the man behind the wheel didn’t slow down at all. He kept going until she insisted that he stop his car. At length, he pulled into a gas station, turned around, and headed back to her apartment. She pointed out the driveway again, but the driver not only didn’t stop, he stomped down harder on the gas pedal.

At first she’d been exasperated. But now a buzz of fear rippled along her nerves and started her adrenaline going. This guy was obviously a “cowboy,” playing childish games with an automobile. He seemed determined to keep her in the car with him. At this point, Marci wasn’t worried about being molested or hurt—except in a car accident.

But she knew she wanted out.

She grabbed the door handle on her side and opened the car door partway, preparing to jump. She vacillated a few moments too long, though, and she saw they were going over fifty miles an hour.

The man in the plaid shirt reached out and grabbed her arm, pinning her inside. He read her mind and said quietly, “That would be suicide, you know.”

Marci looked down at the ground rushing by in a blur and agreed with him on that one point. If she tried to jump, she could very well die.

Now she had no choice but to pretend to go along with his perilous games. She just figured he would drive her around for a while to prove that he had her under his control. Then she believed he would let her go.

But the tall stranger had other things in mind. He drove north to the corner of NE 162nd and Glisan and pulled into a darkened gas station. This time he didn’t turn around. He parked on the south side of the station, where they wouldn’t be visible from the street.

He turned to her and said bluntly: “Take off your clothes.”

Her first reaction was disbelief. She had a crazy random thought. She had a bad cold and it was a frigid early November night. She would freeze if she had to take off her clothes.

Only then did she face the reality of what he meant to do to her.

“I won’t!” she said firmly.

His response was to grab her around the neck. She still had her car keys clutched in her hand, and she thought of scratching him in his eyes with them. But she quickly dismissed that idea, afraid he’d hurt her more if she tried to resist. There were no lights on in the area around them and she realized that probably no one would hear her if she cried out for help.

But she did scream, an ineffective croak because of her laryngitis.

Her captor’s face twisted as his expression showed his rage. “I will hurt you if you scream again or try to fight me.”

Brutally, he pushed her down on the seat of his pickup and pulled her bra and blouse up. He began kissing her breasts, then he yanked off her jeans and fondled her crotch.

Marci Brunswick prayed out loud; there seemed to be no way to get away from him, short of divine intervention. Her prayers irritated the rapist.

“Why do you keep yelling for God?” he asked harshly.

“I hoped maybe there was one,” she whimpered.

“Well, there isn’t. And even if there is one, He’s not going to help you now.”

He continued to kiss her naked body. Perversely, he told her he loved her.

That was too much. Marci hissed, “No, you don’t!”

“How do you know I don’t?” he demanded.

“Because if you did, you wouldn’t be doing this to me.”

The rapist seemed insatiable, and now he demanded that she fellate him, but she protested that she couldn’t, that she’d get sick if he put his penis in her mouth. She was seized by a violent coughing fit, and the man relented on that particular sex act.

Marci Brunswick was a slender five foot six and 118 pounds. She estimated that her attacker was over six feet tall and probably weighed two hundred pounds. If she fought, she believed he would kill her. Of the two evils, she decided she would rather be raped than murdered. So she submitted.

He was offended because she lay passively with gritted teeth while he forced himself on her. He complained that she wasn’t responding to him like he wanted her to. But she couldn’t; it was all she could do to keep from vomiting.

When he ejaculated, his attitude changed radically. He suddenly became apologetic. He tried to explain away his brutality.

“Being nice to girls doesn’t work.”

He told Marci that he’d been married for five years and learned that women didn’t appreciate kindness in a man, so he had decided to be mean.

“But that doesn’t work, either, does it?” she asked.

“No,” he admitted.

Marci lied to her rapist and said she wouldn’t go to the police. She just wanted to go home and forget about what had happened.

Reassured now, he allowed her to get dressed. She couldn’t find one of her shoes, and he even lit matches to help her look for it inside the pickup. She’d noticed earlier that the ceiling light in the vehicle wasn’t working. She had been able to see him only as they passed under streetlights.

Her shoe mattered little to her; getting away from him was the important thing. As he was busy looking for the shoe, she quietly edged farther and farther away from the El Camino. She wanted to run, but she thought he would chase her if she did, so she forced herself to walk slowly. His moods were so mercurial that he might change his mind about releasing her.

She heard the pickup’s engine start up and was tremendously relieved to see its taillights disappearing down the street.

It was after 1:30
A.M.
and she had several blocks to walk to her apartment. She cut through yards and walked in the shadows as much as she could in case he came back looking for her. Only when Marci finally got back to her apartment did she allow herself to break down and cry. And then she called her girlfriend who’d gone to the tavern with her. She told her what had happened, and her friend immediately called the Candy Store and asked them who the man was.

No one knew.

Candy Store bartenders and waitresses hadn’t seen him before, but some of them felt they might be able to identify him in a police lineup.
If
he could be found.

Marci Brunswick called the Multnomah County Department of Public Safety, and deputy O. R. Pollard responded. He took her at once to the Holladay Park Hospital, where the frightened woman was examined and treated. The ER doctors found motile semen in her vagina, and she had dark bruises on her inner thighs indicating that she had been raped.

Marci was met at the hospital by a member of Portland’s Rape Victims Advocates—volunteers who stand by the victims of sexual assaults from the moment a complaint is made throughout the entire investigative and court procedures, giving them emotional support and explaining what they can expect.

Fortunately, there are many such programs in the country, and Portland’s is one of the very best.

The preliminary investigation began at once. Multnomah County utilized the team-policing system. Deputy Pollard questioned Marci initially, then passed on all information he gleaned to detective Robert Walliker. Walliker was in charge of following up on all sex offenses. All of Marci Brunswick’s underclothing was preserved for lab testing, along with slides from the hospital that might allow the semen stains to be correlated with the yet-unknown rapist’s blood type.

In 1975, DNA matching was only a brave new world of forensic science, as yet unknown to criminalists.

But Marci was a good witness. She described her assailant as a white male, five feet, ten inches to six feet tall, weighing between 175 and 200 pounds. He’d had no facial hair and fairly short dark hair, and his plaid shirt was blue and gray, his jeans faded. His El Camino pickup was red to maroon in color, and she picked the 1965 to 1970 models out of a car identification display. She had seen a tape deck in the glove compartment, along with several music tapes.

The shoe that she abandoned in her flight was a well-worn lace-up type, known as a “Get There” shoe. And Marci recalled losing something else—a distinctive hammered brass earring, square-shaped and very large. She recalled the rapist’s facial characteristics for a police artist, who put together a composite picture. This was immediately dispatched to all county patrolmen so they could be on the lookout for anyone resembling it.

Marci Brunswick had no idea what the rapist’s name was, what he did for a living, where he lived—or any details about him. He had been careful to be only a shadow person.

Detective Walliker’s files on recent attacks didn’t turn up another suspect with a similar MO or description. Either this was the assailant’s first reported rape or he was new to the county.

Unfortunately, the Multnomah investigator didn’t have long to wait before he heard reports of similar sexual attacks in Portland.

It was very early on the morning of November 8, just after 1
A.M.,
when someone knocked on the door of an apartment house not far from the site of the attack on Marci Brunswick. Eleven-year-old Hank Jenner,* his thirteen-year-old sister, Nadine,* and four-year-old sister, Reecie,* were home alone. Hank woke first and went to the door. He’d been warned not to open the door to strangers, but he was half-asleep and too short to peer through the peephole high up on the door. His mother was out for the evening and he just assumed she had forgotten her key.

As the door swung open, he saw a man standing there, a man he didn’t know. The stranger seemed to be in a hurry as he asked if Hank’s parents were home.

“No,” the drowsy youngster answered.

“Is there anyone else here? Anyone older?”

“My sisters are here.”

The man explained that it was very important that he talk with the older sister and the little boy let him in. He strode past Hank into a bedroom where Nadine lay sleeping. Reecie was sound asleep beside her.

Nadine woke to find the stranger hovering over her bed.

“Your parents have been in an accident,” he said bluntly. “Your father is in very bad shape, but your mother’s only slightly hurt. I’ve been sent to take you to the hospital. Your mother needs you there.”

It is one of the oldest—and cruelest—ruses used to lure children into the hands of attackers. This is also one of the examples used most often by teachers and parents to warn children.

But Nadine Jenner had been awakened from a sound sleep and the man’s words filled her with anxiety. If her mother needed her, she would go.

“I’ll get dressed,” she told the strange man. And he left her room as she threw on her clothes. As she stood half-naked, preparing to put on her bra and blouse, the man walked back in. She was peripherally aware that he was watching her, but her concern for her parents overrode any feeling of uneasiness she had. She knew her mother had gone with a date to a business dinner, and not out with her father. The Jenners were divorced. Nadine figured that the hospital probably thought both the injured people were her parents.

She fumbled for her shoes and the man said, “Never mind your shoes. Your mom wants you down there
now
!” Stocking-footed, she followed him to a red El Camino pickup parked at the curb in front of her apartment house.

Nadine looked older than an eighth grader. Even though she was only five feet tall and weighed just 103 pounds, her body was quite well developed. As the El Camino hurtled through the dark streets, she tried to question the man at the wheel about the accident.