Read Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases Online
Authors: Ann Rule
Tags: #General, #Murder, #True Crime, #Social Science, #Health & Fitness, #Criminology, #Programming Languages, #Computers
Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (25 page)
April cried out, “That’s the hill! I know it is.”
Hursh crept along in low gear, turning at her direction onto a road to the left. There were two large mud puddles ahead.
April was pale as she said softly, “That’s the exact place. I remember it perfectly.”
She had to be right on target. The Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts who had searched the area had left small colored flags to mark where Jackie had lain. But April wasn’t looking at those. She seemed to be reliving the attack she had suffered.
“After he took me out of the car,” April remembered, “he cut that strip off my shirt. When he freed my hands, I saw him throw the piece of cloth on the road. I wonder if they found it.”
Of course, they had found it. And that single strip of cloth was one of the most vital pieces of physical evidence the prosecutors planned to use in William Scribner’s trial.
The sun was setting as Hursh drove April and her brother away from the isolated region. April sighed and looked back. Her voice conveyed tremendous stress as she said quietly, “It’s really weird looking at my own grave.”
It most assuredly
would
have been April’s grave. She came so close, and yet somehow she managed to confuse her abductor enough to convince him to let her go.
Sergeant Sam Hicks obtained a search warrant for Scribner’s house. Hicks and Bob La Moria found several utility knives with slots for razor blades and two newspaper clippings describing the automobile accident in which Scribner’s brother was fatally injured, just as he described it to Jodi Lukens. They also found a pair of brown pants and a wine-colored shirt—the clothing that Jodi said her attacker wore—a CB radio, a door panel from the maroon Dodge Dart, and, most important of all, the two pieces of denim cloth that were cut from April Collins’s jeans.
On November 1, two King County deputy prosecutors, Rebecca Roe and Mary Kay Barbieri, a duo known for their determination to convict men who committed violent sexual assaults on vulnerable women, brought formal charges of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and two counts of rape against William Gene Scribner. His bail was set at $100,000.
It seemed right that this man charged with crimes against women face female prosecutors, who would now speak for the dead girl who could no longer speak for herself. Gently, they would elicit testimony from the brave teenagers who had been able to think quickly enough to escape the same fate. Barbieri and Roe had a strong case. They were armed with both physical and circumstantial evidence, brought to them by detectives who spent countless overtime hours to snare William Scribner. They had April and Jodi’s testimony, and both the prosecutors and the detectives deemed them “fantastic witnesses.”
William Scribner’s lawyers based his defense on his alibis. He always had an alibi, no matter how far-fetched it was. Whenever he was accused of beating and sexually assaulting women, he concocted reasons why he was either far away from the scenes of the crimes or why the women could not be telling the truth.
This time, however, his alibis collapsed of their own weight, even though his most recent wife testified that he had been with her a half hour after midnight on the night of May 30–31 when Jackie Plante vanished. She told the jury that Scribner went to bed at her house and was there all night. Testimony by women romantically involved with defendants is rarely convincing, and the ex-Mrs. Scribner had no way to delineate that particular night from any other during the summer.
Scribner had no shortage of intimate female friends, a frequent circumstance with rapists. He was not sexually starved, but he apparently enjoyed the thrill of the hunt and the sense of power he felt when he attacked helpless women. Now, the women who had enjoyed consensual sex with him spoke up on his behalf.
One of his girlfriends testified that he had been with her at her home since six on August 18, when April Collins was attacked at 7:45
PM
. She recalled that he had a headache and had fallen asleep on her couch. She said she was positive that he had remained there until four
AM
.
In rebuttal, the prosecutors produced their own witness, a friend of the girlfriend’s son. He testified that Bill Scribner hadn’t been at the woman’s house at all on August 18. He had been there a day later, on August 19.
The final attack, Jodi Lukens’s case, occured at 8
PM
on September 28. Again, Scribner’s former wife gave him an alibi. She said she had received a collect phone call from him around midnight on that date. The call had originated in Ellensburg, Washington. The defense put forth that Scribner could not have driven across Snoqualmie Pass to Ellensburg in four hours. But that was ridiculous. If it had been winter, the pass might well have been blocked for hours by avalanches, but on September 28, the I-90 freeway was clear, and he certainly could have reached Ellensburg in less than two hours. Ellensburg was only ninety-five miles from the place where Jodi was assaulted. That would have taken about an hour and a half, even driving at the speed limit. Detectives checked traffic records just to be sure. There were no accidents on the pass that night. This alibi had negligible impact.
Dismissing all the arrows that pointed again and again to William Scribner in the three cases, the defense attorneys maintained that it was all a case of mistaken identity. Scribner was a good-looking man, who dressed for court in conservative clothes. In this venue, he looked harmless, even sympathetic.
But the jurors didn’t buy it. On March 8, 1980, they returned verdicts of guilty of first-degree murder, attempted murder, and two counts of rape.
Lieutenant Frank Chase commended his detectives and gave credit to the prosecutors, Mary Kay Barbieri and Rebecca Roe. He particularly singled out the survivors.
“I can’t say enough about those two teenage girls. They were smart and were two of the best witnesses our detectives had ever encountered. They were a major part of solving this case. They remembered everything—
everything
—and they helped us to find the guy and bring him in.”
And yet, some twenty-five years after the terror, so much damage remains. As so often happens, victims of long-ago crimes contact me, still needing something to free them from their nightmares. The teenage girls that William Scribner attacked are now women in their early forties. Even though he is still locked behind prison walls, the horror of what he did to them hasn’t gone away. It clings like silky cobwebs to an old brick wall.
Jodi Lukens never hitchhiked again after the night that Bill Scribner picked her up. Although her memory was perfect shortly after she was attacked and during his trial six months later, her recall gradually clouded over, the mind’s own defense.
Some twenty-five years later, Jodi is still fearful of Bill Scribner, but she remembers only scattered bits and pieces of the actual attack. She recalls that he forced her onto the floor of his vehicle and that somehow she managed to get the passenger door open, fall out, and run for help.
She can no longer remember where the woods are where she got away from him. However, she was recently driving with friends when a terrible feeling of dread washed over her. Although she could never have retraced the route to the place where she almost died, she
knew
that they must inadvertently have stumbled upon that awful site where he had taken his victims. It brought the nightmares back again.
Jodi remembers Bob La Moria, the King County detective, now retired, who along with Sam Hicks was responsible for catching Bill Scribner. “He was the only one who told me that none of it was my fault,” she says today. “His caring about my feelings meant so much to me.”
One of Jodi’s close friends has signed on to Washington’s Victims Watch Program so that she can be aware of where Bill Scribner is at all times. It is important to Jodi to know that he is not out on the streets, trolling for more victims.
Scribner is now fifty-three years old and still in prison, currently at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. His earliest parole date is June 14, 2047. If he is still alive by then, he will be in his nineties and presumably no longer much of a danger as a sexual predator.
Most of the King County detectives who tracked William Scribner have retired. Tragically, on June 17, 1982, Sam Hicks and Leo Hursh walked into a fusillade of bullets as they approached a farmhouse in Black Diamond to question the resident there about the murder of a Seattle rock musician. The man inside had sworn he would never go to prison. Caught in the open, Hicks was killed instantly and Hursh was wounded.
Dave Reichert, one of Hicks’s closest friends and a frequent partner on investigations—as on the night they staked out William Scribner just before they arrested him—was grief-stricken. Many years later, Reichert went on to become the sheriff of King County, and he was also one of the prime investigators into the Green River murders for which Gary Ridgway was eventually arrested. Today, Reichert is a Republican Representative from Washington State.
Ironically, Scribner’s crimes were very like those that Ridgway began to carry out two years after Scribner was convicted. They operated in the same general area, took their helpless victims to lonely spots, and trolled the Pacific Highway south of Seattle. Fortunately, William Scribner was caught before he could run up a toll as high as Ridgway’s.
This case
came to me almost accidentally. I happened to be signing books in a Sam’s Club in Denver, Colorado, when Captain Joseph Padilla of the Denver Police Department stopped to introduce himself and have his copy of
Green River, Running Red
signed. Like all cops and former cops, we started telling “war stories,” and Padilla told me of a strange shooting he and his officers were involved in the year before. They didn’t have to go out on the streets of Denver to investigate; the situation came to them on their own turf, literally in their parking lot.
Because the principals had acted out an age-old dramatic end to a once-passionate affair, it sounded routine at first. Then I realized that the story Padilla was telling me was not at all the usual scenario of love gone sour.
When I got home to Seattle at the end of my book tour, I decided to research the case. The more documentation I read, the more interesting the case became. And so I returned to Denver, one of my favorite cities, to learn more about the story of a sensually beautiful young woman who was dumped by a withered old man.
Her name was Teresa, and she probably could have crooked her finger and had any man she wanted. But she didn’t want just any man; she wanted Justyn, who was nearly 80 while she was barely 40.
And Teresa was not prepared to just let him walk away from her. As many males have said about the women who try to leave them, “If I can’t have her, nobody can,” Teresa felt the same way.
If she couldn’t have Justyn, then nobody would.
Denver,
the mile-high city, has air so thin that it causes some sea-level tourists arriving at its Bedouin-tent–shaped airport to run out of breath, at least until they acclimate. Although the Denver International Airport’s unique design seems more a mirage than an actual structure, its tough, translucent cloth roof is perfectly designed and withstands summer heat and winter blizzards, welcoming planes that often bounce in the turbulent air currents familiar to Denver. The trip into the city offers glimpses of prairie dogs. They seem like cuddly rodents to strangers, and they maintain a very complex and caring society beneath the ground, even burying their dead. The locals, though, aren’t always as entranced by them.
Denver is full of history and the ghostly presence of early citizens. The Brown Palace Hotel is scarcely changed from its early days; piano music soars upward through the hotel’s central atrium to the corridors ringing it several stories up. LoDo (Lower Downtown) has been restored to a trendy district, and the Cherry Creek neighborhood is a most desirable place to live. The Tattered Cover Book Store is a must destination for authors on tour.
Indeed, there are few spots in Denver or in all of Colorado that don’t offer history and beauty to the natives and the increasing number of people who move there.
Teresa Perez was one of the thousands who came to Denver hoping, more than most, to find a new start. Although her final surname was Hispanic, Teresa’s biological parents were not, and she looked more Irish than anything. Looking at her, one would think she had everything in the world. Sadly, her early years had been chaotic, marked by neglect and abandonment. Her parents, Sonya and Jerry, divorced when she was just 3 years old. They lived in California then. For some reason her mother either didn’t want to raise Teresa and her older sister, Monica, or was found unsuitable in custody disputes.
Their father took the little girls with him when he moved back to Zanesville, Ohio. He soon remarried, but his new wife had no interest in being a stepmother. Their father turned the little girls over to foster home care, and they moved into a house with no running water, a house where ten children lived. Teresa and Monica entered the world of foster care children, a world where they never knew for sure how long they would stay with each new family. If the foster care families had children of their own, youngsters placed with them by public agencies were sometimes made to feel second class. Often, they had to change schools in the middle of the year. Occasionally, Teresa and Monica were placed with families they grew attached to, and that made it worse when circumstances made them move on yet again.
Teresa particularly longed for a stable father figure she could count on. Of the two sisters, she was the tomboy who loved sports. If someone teased Monica, it was Teresa who stepped up to defend her, even though Monica was older. They were “welfare children,” and there were always cruel kids and bullies to remind them of that.
Teresa cut her hair short, wore baggy overalls, and loved to ride horses and shoot baskets. Before she reached puberty, sometimes it took a close look to tell whether she was a girl or a boy. The more vulnerable she felt inside, the tougher her facade grew. She didn’t want anyone to know when she was hurt or disappointed. She was a fighter, something she continued to be for the rest of her life. If she felt cornered, she didn’t cower; she lashed out.
“She had a very tough childhood,” a woman who knew Teresa for a long time said. “She was never parented. She didn’t grow up surrounded by love and encouragement as other children are. That was the root of her problems.”
By the time she was 14 and blossoming into young womanhood, Teresa was no longer mistaken for a boy. She was too pretty and had a lovely figure. Fortunately, at that point she found someone who truly cared for her.
Teresa was taken into Patricia Wietzel’s Ohio home. For the first time she found a foster mother who was almost like a real mother. “She was a good kid,” Wietzel remembered. “She really was.”
For two years, Teresa had a home, but then her father decided to have a reunion, and he moved her to Denver. Too much time had passed, however. Teresa couldn’t get over the sense of abandonment she felt when she was a little girl and her father picked his bride over his daughters. If he expected a perfect daughter, he too was disappointed. Their reunion didn’t take, and soon Teresa was on her own in Denver.
She kept in touch with Patricia Wietzel, but she couldn’t go home again to Ohio. She wanted to have the kind of life she had never known, and she wanted a nice house, expensive clothes and a car. She soon realized that her looks attracted men, men with money and the means to give her what she wanted so badly. Almost all of her life, people had looked down upon the “welfare kid.” Teresa wanted to show them all.
Inside her, a ferocious anger burned. She could have crumpled under the weight of her lonely, neglectful childhood. Instead, she directed her resentment and the feeling that she deserved much better to achieving her goals. And she did well—except when someone rejected her. She could not bear that; it infuriated her, probably because it brought back her bleak response to being deserted and reinforced it.
Teresa was attracted to older men. It wasn’t something she faked. All of her life, she’d looked for a “good daddy” to replace the “bad daddy” who disappointed her. It was natural that older men appealed more to her than callow youths who didn’t have anything to offer her. They weren’t mature enough to care about her feelings, and they didn’t have the financial means to buy her much more than a hamburger and a movie. Still, ultimately, she took out her anger on the last “good daddy” she found.
When she was 17, Teresa moved in with Bob Costello. He was fourteen years older than she was but at 31 still a young man. According to his statements to police many years later, they were married in 1981 and divorced in 1983. On October 2, 1983, Teresa bore Costello’s child, a daughter they named Lori.* Even after they divorced, the couple were together sporadically for a long time. Costello became someone Teresa could always turn to when she was troubled.
But Teresa moved on. She was 25 in the fall of 1988 when she married Vincent Rieger, who was 66 and a successful real estate developer. He was a navy pilot in a war that ended long before Teresa was born. Rieger shot down a half-dozen enemy planes in World War II and had the medals and the documentation that proved he was a hero when he was only in his early twenties.
At the time they married, Teresa was three months pregnant with Rieger’s child. That may have been why he went through the ceremony with her or he may have hoped that her temper—which he had seen flare before—would calm down once they were married. At any rate, he paid for the lavish wedding she wanted.
Not even three weeks had gone by before the newlyweds separated and filed for divorce. Shortly before Teresa gave birth to a son, she and Rieger decided to give their marriage another try, but it didn’t work. Their son, Brent,* was born in June 1989; by October, they were again seeking a divorce.
Along with Denver Police detectives, reporters from the
Rocky Mountain News
and the
Denver Post
carried out an exhaustive research of Teresa Garrett Costello Rieger Mansfield Perez’s background. There was a lot of information to be gleaned from the Arapaho County divorce court files about the end of the Riegers’ short-lived marriage.
As loving and seductive as she sometimes was, Teresa made a manipulative enemy. While living with Rieger in their high-end neighborhood—just south of the Denver city line—the couple had several drinks one evening. Teresa decided she didn’t want to cook, so she demanded that they go to a restaurant. While Rieger was getting ready to go, she sneaked away to a phone out of his hearing and called the police. Pretending to be a neighbor, she reported that a drunk was about to drive. As a good citizen she felt she had to report it. She gave her husband’s license number and described his car. As they headed out to eat with the children in the car, an officer pulled them over. Rieger refused to take a Breathalyzer test, which meant an automatic arrest. This led to his losing his driver’s license.
In an affidavit filed during their divorce proceedings, Rieger also claimed that Teresa broke into his office to read his diary and steal documents, and that she had beaten him with one of his golf clubs. She sought ownership of their home but didn’t get it. She reportedly took her revenge by taking Rieger’s war mementos, medals, and log books, all that he cared most about from his glory days.
Sometime later, Vincent and Teresa fought over Brent’s custody. Although no one who knew them—including Rieger’s grown daughter—ever said that Teresa didn’t love the boy, the Court felt she was not stable enough to be the custodial parent.
Judge Lynne Hufnagel found Teresa to be self-absorbed, emotionally needy, lacking in empathy, and slow to forgive. “Her profile,” the Court wrote, “reflects a person who has difficulty in maintaining close relationships, who is reluctant to trust others, and a person who is vulnerable to feeling victimized.”
Rieger’s daughter commented that the boy touched Teresa’s tender side. “She totally loved Brent, and she was as good a mother as she could be. She wanted only the best for him.”
But Teresa had never had parenting models, and she herself was as hungry for nurturing as a child. It was too late for her to ever catch up. Try as she might, her emotional outbursts made her a less-than-perfect mother.
In the end, Vincent Rieger was given custody of their son, although Teresa was allowed visitation.
In 1993, Teresa took another husband: Mike Mansfield, a realtor, twenty years older than she. That union survived for three and a half years. A year later, she married her fourth husband, Mario Perez, 42.
Teresa was 32 now, but her weaknesses had only been exacerbated; her temper was more likely to erupt than ever. Perez made a good living as an expert in finance who worked for an oil and gas corporation.
Teresa drank a little too much and may have started using drugs at that point. She also had another, much stronger addiction that took over her life and signaled trouble for her marriage. She had discovered the rush that came to her when she gambled. She owed almost $10,000 to more than a dozen casinos before she married Perez. Armed with his credit cards, she became an even more frequent sight at the casino tables and machines. She was out of control, and before Perez realized it, she had maxed out his cards and put him in debt to the tune of $42,000. She also forged his name on checks and was looking around for a way to embezzle even more money.
Within two hours one day, she withdrew $1,000 in each of five ATM transactions. Always an addictive personality, Teresa was obsessed with making a fortune at the casinos, enough that she would not need to depend on a man to survive. But at every casino, the House always has the advantage, and her chances of becoming independently wealthy through her gambling were almost nil. The judge warned her that she was in way too deep and that she had a serious problem, advising her to enter rehab to deal with it.
She didn’t listen. Although her marriage to Perez had come to the end of the road, she had a backup plan. Her husband may not have known that Teresa had been unfaithful to him for two years before they ended up in divorce court. She was seeing an older man—a much older man.
This time, her lover was
forty
years older than she was. And he was rich. He couldn’t marry her; he was already married and had been for decades. Still, Teresa believed that becoming his mistress would give her the status and the kind of life that would make up for everything she had missed out on. When she began with him, she didn’t know that she wasn’t his only lover. Would it have mattered to her? It’s impossible to say now. Their affairs were like a French movie, lovers in a circle with each one betraying the next.
Justyn Rosen, also known as J.R., was in his early seventies when Teresa was hired as a salesperson at one of his car dealerships. He was extremely wealthy.
As a young man, Rosen started with a used-car lot, one of thousands around Denver. He was a natural salesman, and his business thrived. He had been married to Marian Novak since they were just 18. She was beside him as he worked his way up from nothing, and they raised their two daughters together.
His father-in-law taught Justyn the automobile sales business, and Rosen honored him by using Novak’s name in his businesses long after the old man was gone.
When he was 35, Justyn bought Phil Reno Ford and soon turned it into Rosen-Novak Motors. He worked for three decades to build up Rosen-Novak Motors into the thriving Cadillac-Ford dealership it became in the nineties. He and his businesses were well known in the Denver area, and he had a staff of a hundred people, many of whom had been in his employ for three decades. He was known for his contributions to good causes and memberships in both Jewish organizations and businessmen’s clubs. A number of people saw him as a businessman with a heart.
Although he was past retirement age when Teresa met him in 1996, Rosen was still a vibrant, youthful-acting man. He wasn’t particularly tall, and his hairline had long since receded. He looked a little like the actor Ben Gazzara. And he had what Teresa needed: money to spend on her and the maturity to be yet another surrogate father.
When Teresa went to work for Rosen-Novak, she caught her boss’s eye, even though he was already involved with another woman besides his wife, a woman he called “Angel.” With Teresa in his life, Angel was soon unceremoniously dumped.