Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (52 page)

Before Bren could run, he was on her, his breath hot against her neck. She wasn’t going down without a fight, and the spunky flight attendant pulled away from him and kicked her assailant hard where it would do the most damage. As he grunted, bent over with pain, Bren, too, escaped.

All the women who had been approached and/or attacked by the “Sea-Tac Stalker” had given very similar descriptions of the dangerous stranger, and when the Port of Seattle detectives learned about the double rapes in the Mount Rainier National Park, they saw a number of similarities to their cases.

Furthermore, as they checked out airline manifestoes, they discovered that Mark Rivenburgh had passed through Sea-Tac on the very day that Ginger LeMay was abducted.

On July 31, Port of Seattle detectives arrested Mark Rivenburgh and charged him with first-degree kidnapping, second-degree assault, and second-degree attempted rape in the case of Ginger LeMay on April 4, when the would-be rapist was playing “Good Samaritan” in the fake hijack scheme. Bail was set at twenty thousand dollars and he was scheduled to go on trial on those charges in September.

But the prosecution case against Rivenburgh did not run smoothly. The day before the trial was to begin, charges were dropped against him. Army authorities said that the times didn’t mesh. Although Rivenburgh flew into Sea-Tac on April 4, their records showed that he arrived at the airport a few hours
after
Ginger LeMay was assaulted. According to their records, the Ranger had been training in Georgia at a special survival school for some weeks prior to April 4.

Possibly. And possibly not.

The charges from the dual attacks on Rose Fairless and Kit Spencer on Mount Rainier remained, however. On September 25, Mark Rivenburgh went on trial in U.S. district court judge Jack E. Tanner’s packed courtroom in Tacoma.

The handsome Ranger, dressed in a brown suit with a brown and orange checked shirt, clutched Francie O’Brien’s hand as he entered the courtroom. Francie still believed every word Mark said, and she gave him a hug and a kiss before she found a seat in the gallery.

But Francie didn’t stay there long. The bailiff tapped her on the shoulder and told she would have to leave. She was on the defense’s witness list, and she wasn’t allowed in the courtroom until after she testified. Francie sat outside her fiancé’s trial, reading a paperback book and chain-smoking.

She had stuck by Mark since he was arrested, and she told reporters that she would remain loyal to him. “I have faith in my fiancé,” she said proudly. “I know he is innocent.”

She vowed that she would marry him as soon as he was cleared of the charges against him. She simply could not imagine that Mark would harm a woman, much less rape her. The army appeared to agree with her. Rivenburgh had remained on duty at Fort Lewis until his trial.

Kit Spencer and Rose Fairless each took the witness stand for the prosecution, although it was clear they were frightened. Their voices wavered and they kept their eyes tightly shut as they related the details of the violent sexual attack on the Rampart Ridge Trail. Mark Rivenburgh sat calmly at the defense table as they identified him as the sadist who had tormented them.

Kit told the jurors that she and Rose had submitted to his demand for bizarre sex acts only because they were convinced he would kill them if they refused.

FBI agent Richard Rudy and the park rangers testified about their encounters with the defendant after the attack. The park rangers said they had found a pair of olive, army-issue socks partially burned at the Paradise River Campgrounds after Rivenburgh’s arrest. They believed that these were the socks the rapist had worn over his shoes as he crept up on his victims.

To counter that, however, Captain Richard McCreight and Colonel Downing testified that army Rangers were not trained to wear socks over their shoes.

“They don’t need to do that. They can move without making a sound without taking such precautions,” Downing said.

“Our men are not trained to burn their gear,” Mc-Creight added. “They are instructed to
bury
anything that might give them away.”

Mark Rivenburgh’s sergeant, the man he’d sought out after he escaped from the park, testified for the defense, too. Kit Spencer and Rose Fairless had identified a Gerber Mark II hunting knife as the weapon Rivenburgh used to threaten them into submission, but the sergeant disagreed.

“He didn’t have that knife with him,” the sergeant declared. “It was at our house all the time. He left it with us when he went to Georgia in March for training.”

Was this all a case of faulty identification? Francie O’Brien thought so. “Mark is a gentle man who could never have done what he was accused of,” she said passionately. “It is absolutely
impossible
that he could have done it.”

Defense attorney John Henry Browne was in his early thirties at Mark Rivenburgh’s trial, at the beginning of a career that would one day make him one of the most recognizable criminal defense attorneys in America. He questioned Francie gently.

“Do you and the defendant have an adequate sexual relationship?”

“Yes,” she murmured, bowing her head in embarrassment.

Would the jury feel that a man with a fulfilling sex life was immune from aberrant sexual lust? A layman might. Browne hoped so. But anyone familiar with the peculiar compulsions of a rapist would find Francie’s testimony unconvincing. Many rapists have enviable sex lives with willing women—and still they
do
force sexual perversions on other women. And the man who raped Kit and Rose had told them he was doing it “for kicks.”

On September 28, the tall Ranger took the stand in his own defense. His version of the incidents in the park after the attacks was bizarre, to say the least. He admitted that he had come across FBI agents and park rangers on three occasions, and run from them because “their unprofessional manner” had caused him to fear for his life.

“After Alan Showalter gave me a ride to the park, I hiked cross-country,” Mark Rivenburgh explained to the jurors. “And I camped in a clearing near the Paradise River Campgrounds. That night—the third night—I hiked down to the lodge at Longmire to eat, but the restaurant was closed. I stopped to look at the stars. And then these two park rangers flashed a light in my face as I was crossing the parking lot.

“I had a .25-caliber automatic pistol with me, and I was worried because I knew that guns were not allowed in the park. So I kept my hand inside my shirt so the gun wouldn’t show. I asked them for directions to Paradise. But they backed off,” he testified. “It seemed like they didn’t want to talk to me.”

Assistant U.S. attorney Bob Westinghouse cross-examined Rivenburgh aggressively.

“Didn’t you really go to the Longmire parking lot that night to see if the heat was on you?”

“Walk into the middle of the plaza like that?” the defendant replied indignantly. “Of course not!”

Mark Rivenburgh said that he’d seen his friend Alan Showalter give him the “danger” signal the next day. “He looked scared. I figured the park rangers were going to snag me for camping in a nondesignated area.”

The defendant next described FBI agent Richard Rudy as being “nervous” and “out of control” when he pulled his gun. “I was afraid I was going to be shot,” Rivenburgh said gravely.

“He said he was the FBI and he wanted to talk about some hikers—but not there. I called him obscenities and told him we’d discuss whatever it was right there. I told him to put that fucking gun away.”

Rivenburgh said that neither the park rangers nor the FBI agent would tell him what they wanted with him. “They came on too strong, too fast, and tried to push me against a rock wall. I said, ‘You guys are fucking crazy!’ ”

According to his testimony, the defendant was clearly the victim of police abuse. “I was threatened with being shot, and, yes, I swore at them and took off into the woods.

“I wanted to get to the park headquarters for professional help. At that point, I thought that something must have happened at the park, a murder or something.”

That was a curious non sequitur. Mark Rivenburgh evidently assumed the jury would believe that he continually dodged the lawmen who wanted to talk to him because he was an innocent, rational man, a man afraid for his life.

He did not appear to sense the effect his string of obscenities and his odd story of hiding out in the woods was having on the jury. He apparently expected sympathy; he was getting just the opposite. Nor did it apparently seem strange to him that he had chosen to be a fugitive on the mountain for a week because he thought he’d be punished for camping in a nondesignated area.

If he thought he was swaying the jury panel to his side, he was wrong.

Mark Rivenburgh’s two rape victims had identified him, and his testimony and actions had only accentuated that this was a man filled with lies.

The jurors deliberated only a short time before they found Rivenburgh guilty of rape and robbery. He was sentenced later to up to twenty years in federal prison.

The investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Joyce Lee Sparks Kennedy O’Keefe from Sea-Tac Airport continues to this day, more than three decades later, as does the probe into the many attempted rapes in the spring of 1978.

Joyce’s parents are deceased. Her first husband, John Kennedy, died in 1990, and her estranged widower, John Thomas O’Keefe, passed away in 2010. Joyce’s son Mark Kennedy died on Valentine’s Day 2008, at the age of fifty-three. Her granddaughter, Tia Kennedy, posted photos of a young Joyce on the Internet a few years ago.

“Joyce Lee Kennedy is my grandmother on my Mom’s side,” Tia posted. “I never got to meet her because she went missing two years before I was born. Please join me as I embark on a journey into the history of my Grandmother Joyce’s life, disappearance, and, hopefully, solving her case.”

So Joyce Kennedy is not forgotten. Descendants she never knew still care about her and long to learn what her fate was. Was she another of Mark Rivenburgh’s victims? That may well be something that can never be proved. Still, I have been able to write the conclusions of many cases of the seventies that were unsolved when I first covered them.

Perhaps Joyce’s story will be one of them. I hope so. But her abductor may not turn out to be Rivenburgh. Some of those closely connected to her case believe that it was her last husband who had a motive to want her gone. They had an extremely contentious relationship. Until her remains are found, it is impossible to determine whether she died at the hands of a stranger—or someone she knew.

*   *   *

Army Ranger Mark Rivenburgh had everything on his side when he encountered two vulnerable victims on the densely wooded trail in Mount Rainier National Park; he was trained to stalk, to kill, and to cover up his tracks. He got his “kicks” but the diligent work of the FBI and the Mount Rainier park rangers made
him
the quarry in the end.

Mark Rivenburgh served fifteen years in federal prison and was paroled in the mid-nineties. He returned to Ulster County, New York, where his four brothers and one sister lived. He moved in with a girlfriend, got a job, and started life as a free man.

That should have been the end of this story. But it wasn’t.

On May 26, 1998, twenty years—less a week and a day—since Kit Spencer and Rose Fairless were assaulted in faraway Washington State, Rivenburgh, now forty-six, lived in Marlboro, New York, in Ulster County about halfway between New York City and Albany.

One of his neighbors, Jeffery Hurd, forty-three, was newly married, and he had a very prestigious career as a research physicist at IBM.

As usual, Hurd went for a walk in the woods shortly before eight on that Tuesday evening. It was a soft spring night, still warm, and the air was redolent of honeysuckle and roses. But he hadn’t returned to his home by full sunset, or for hours afterward. His worried wife asked neighbors for help in finding him.

Sadly, they did locate Jeffery Hurd. By 11:45
P.M.
, New York State troopers responded to their call for help. The “man down” report listed a location at the end of Reservoir Road in a very remote area of Marlboro.

Hurd was dead. He had suffered several fatal gunshot wounds. They appeared to have come from a relatively large-caliber weapon, and ballistics experts for the New York State Police identified the projectiles removed from Hurd as being from a .38-caliber revolver.

The state police investigators spoke to nearby residents, including Mark Rivenburgh, and asked them what they might have heard or seen during the evening, and what their own activities had been. Hurd’s murder was entered in their reports as an “unwitnessed crime,” except, of course, by Hurd’s killer.

If they hadn’t actually seen the murder happen, the investigators hoped that one or more of the victim’s neighbors might have seen or heard
something
that would help them locate possible suspects.

The concerned neighbors all agreed to voluntarily accompany the detectives back to the state police barracks for further questioning.

It was shortly after 1
A.M.
when Mark was led to an interview room. He was not a suspect at this point—no more than any of the residents who lived near Reservoir Road. He wasn’t handcuffed, frisked, or accused of any crime. He was free to move around freely in between questioning.

When he was asked about how he’d spent the early part of the evening, Mark recalled that he’d left home to go to the store around twenty minutes after seven. When he got there, he realized that he had lost his wallet.

“I went to my mom’s to look,” he said, “and then to my job—but I didn’t find it. I finally went back home. That’s when I heard that Jeffery Hurd was missing.”

It was close to 3:30
A.M.
on May 27 when Rivenburgh admitted to the state police detectives that he owned several rifles. This was, of course, in violation of his parole, and he knew it. Still, he agreed to sign a written statement agreeing that he did own those rifles. As a federal parolee, he nodded as he listened to his rights under Miranda, and he stated he was quite familiar with the warnings and understood them.