Couples Who Kill (15 page)

Chuck was trading outside the high school one day when he saw Marlene sitting crying on the grass, lost in the middle of her first bad acid trip. For the lonely and inadequate boy, it was love at first sight.

Marlene wasn’t impressed by Chuck’s looks or personality – but she loved the drugs that he could offer. For the first few months of their relationship she used him as an unpaid driver, drug supplier and a companion to take her to rock concerts. Meanwhile Chuck at last had the motive to lose weight. He slimmed right down, bought some fashionable clothes and treated himself to a good haircut. Marlene began to see him in a less embarrassing light. Their relationship would never be healthy as she was too damaged by her upbringing to maintain a quality relationship, seeing people as users or objects to be used.

It was immediately obvious that Chuck fell into the latter category, as he told Marlene he was happy to be her slave. She took him at his word, and would bite him during arguments. She also continued to bite herself when her fights with her increasingly disturbed mother got especially bad.

Marlene took Chuck home to meet her parents and their initial impression of the polite boy was understandably favourable. Chuck honoured Marlene’s embarrassingly early curfew and talked to Jim Olive about the older man’s work.

For the first time, the sixteen-year-old girl had an ally that she was allowed to bring home – but she was a child who’d grown up with discord. She now recreated it by going on numerous shoplifting binges, during which she
would drop items into Chuck’s pockets or bags. Soon he was impressing her by walking out of the region’s top boutiques with several outfits in his arms. The couple wore some of the clothes they stole but left others in their wrappers in the boot of Chuck’s car, the main reason for their spree being a combined need for excitement and an adolescent cry for help.

Inevitably, the couple were caught and sent to juvenile hall. Chuck was swiftly released (to be sentenced at a later date) but when the social workers saw the extent of Naomi Olive’s mental illness, they wanted to keep Marlene in the hall for her own wellbeing. Marlene, though, was homesick and begged to go home. Meanwhile the police had discovered a sawn-off shotgun in Chuck’s bedroom so he was also charged with possessing an illegal weapon. His law-abiding parents were shocked.

As is often the case, both families blamed the other. The Olives told the authorities that Marlene had been fine until she met Chuck. It was a lie as Marlene had been wetting the bed and self-harming for years, and had asked to go into foster care before she even met Chuck. Similarly, the Rileys said that Chuck’s problems stemmed from being in love with Marlene – but Chuck was addicted to food and drugs and had dropped out of school before he even met his first girlfriend.

Naomi now made it clear that Chuck wasn’t good enough for her daughter because his mother was a nurse’s aid and his father drove a truck. (This was ironic as the Rileys were industrious whereas Naomi had spent most of her life watching television in her bedroom.) The Olives
banned the working-class youth from their home and when he tried to sneak in to spend time with Marlene, Jim Olive threatened to kill him. The teenage boy believed the threats and stayed away.

Sometimes Marlene sided with her parents and finished with Chuck. On two of these occasions he tried to commit suicide by overdosing. On both occasions he slept for twenty-four hours but suffered no other harmful effects.

Grounded at home, Marlene’s life became even smaller than before. Determined to have some freedom, she started playing truant from school in order to see Chuck. Often they rented a motel room and Chuck was so lovesick that he kept every motel room key as a souvenir.

For the first time, sixteen-year-old Marlene had control over someone, a sense of power. She masturbated with Chuck’s hunting knife, acted out bondage and rape fantasies and even shared him sexually with another girl. Each act drove her previously-virgin boyfriend into paroxysms of desire. Chuck’s love for her intensified and he told everyone that he would do
anything
for Marlene.

He even believed her when she said that she was a witch who had special powers. She gave him a bracelet through which she could allegedly communicate with him, and talked about casting spells.

But the spells made no difference to her unendurable home life. Naomi continued to shuffle about in an alcoholic daze during the day, calling Marlene a whore whenever the teenager wore fashionable clothes. Jim’s response was still a curt ‘try harder to support your mother.’ Marlene continued to steal, was arrested again and faced spending
the summer in juvenile hall. Worse, her father said he was going to send her away to boarding school and that she’d never see Chuck again. The tension escalated and her father began to shove and slap her, whilst Marlene alternately wept and shoved him back. When she became so desperate that she spoke to a counsellor, Jim Olive berated her for washing their dirty linen in public. He dressed neatly for work and went to church every Sunday, determined to give the impression of an orderly life.

On the final day of Naomi Olive’s life – Saturday 21st June 1975 – she argued again with Marlene, calling her adoptive daughter a tramp and telling her that her biological mother was a slut, that the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Moments later, the familiar insults still ringing in her ears, Marlene phoned Chuck and told him that it was time to shoot Naomi dead.

Chuck went off to collect his Ruger which he’d lent to a friend. Meanwhile Marlene fetched a hammer and stood over her sleeping father, but she couldn’t bring herself to kill him. Instead, she waited until he woke up then agreed to accompany him on a supermarket shopping trip. She left the door unlocked, knowing that Chuck would sneak in to kill her sleeping mother. Leastways, that’s the statement he originally gave to the police…

What’s certain is that someone battered a hammer into the woman’s skull, blood spurting everywhere. The hammer cut so deeply into the bone that it was hard to get it out. Naomi was still alive so her attacker stabbed a steak knife into her chest, but the badly injured woman continued to gasp for breath so her killer picked up the pillow and began to smother her.

Meanwhile Marlene’s father returned to the house and
found his dead or dying wife in the bedroom and Chuck trying to hide behind the furniture. He lunged at Chuck – and Chuck raised his pistol and fired four times at the man in what he later claimed was self-defence. Chuck then apologised to Jim Olive’s corpse and attempted to shoot himself but Marlene knocked the gun from his hand.

Afterwards, the nineteen-year-old was in shock – Naomi’s death rattle was still audible – but
sixteen-year-old
Marlene reassured him and gave him beer and Valium. They made love then took her parents’ jewellery and credit cards. Both teenagers scrubbed the blood from the walls, Chuck still feeling shaken but Marlene triumphant. For the first time in her life, she was free.

The lovers went shopping, briefly visiting Chuck’s brother at the shop where he worked as an assistant. Chuck was incredibly pale and Marlene didn’t say a word.

After a Chinese meal and a trip to the cinema they returned to the death house, put Naomi and Jim’s corpses in the family car and drove to the nearby China Camp State Park. The couple then set the bodies alight in a barbeque pit, returning hours later to restart the fire until there were only ashes and small pieces of leg bone remaining. Ironically, the double homicide would become known as The Barbeque Murders, reduced to a sense of place. The location would eventually be listed jokily in tourism articles, the moniker giving no clue to the murders’ desperately sad cause and effect.

For the next week Marlene and Chuck led a schizophrenic life. She frequently phoned home and
half-expected
her father to answer. When business colleagues called for him, she dutifully wrote down their messages. But on one occasion she left the house at a run, convinced
that she was in the presence of her mother’s ‘ghost’. Chuck also managed to blank out the horrors of the double murder, taking a job in a waterbed factory. His employers were incredibly impressed by his dedication which went beyond his allocated assembly-worker tasks and extended into impromptu customer sales. The teenager talked endlessly to his family about the merits of waterbeds and no one had any idea that he and Marlene were responsible for two ugly deaths.

But after a week of relative normality, one of Jim’s colleagues reported him missing. Marlene was taken into police custody and told the police that she’d had visions of her parents’ deaths, that they’d been killed by burglars. Later she decided the murderers were hired gunmen or Hell’s Angels. Later still she decided they’d simply gone on holiday. A child psychiatrist found her neurotic but sane, intelligent but deeply troubled. Eventually one of her friends told of the woodside cremation and led them to the remains.

Meanwhile Marlene appeared completely remorseless for the crime, writing a note to Chuck which said ‘I have no guilt feelings about my folks. None. Neither should you. Relax…’

But Chuck couldn’t relax. When he heard that Marlene’s friend had led police to the Olive’s ashes, he blurted out ‘I did it…Marlene made me do it. She kept begging me and begging me for months, telling me to do it or she wouldn’t love me any more.’ He wrote her letters, telling her how much he cared for her and signing them ‘your slave’. He spent hours reading his Bible, his father telling him that there would be an ultimate judgement in an afterlife.

In turn, Marlene – who also remained fixated on the
supernatural – reaffirmed her love for Chuck. Like most damaged people she loved the
idea
of love and found that absence made the heart grow fonder. She read the tarot and they showed her that she’d marry Chuck and have his children. ‘You’re my man for the future’ she wrote to him.

But Marlene was sent to juvenile hall where she soon reinvented the past, referring to Chuck as ‘the man who killed my parents…broke my heart.’ She soon found herself a new boyfriend. At other times she cried for hours, wailing ‘I want my daddy’ and she wrote poems for her parents as she still believed in life after death. She had nightmares, spoke in her sleep and continued to wet the bed. She also lost her puppy fat and increasingly relied on her sexuality to make friends.

Chuck, for his part, remained in love with Marlene for many months. Meanwhile his heartbroken father tried desperately to support him, visiting often and writing his oldest son long, supportive letters. Oscar couldn’t believe that Chuck had battered Naomi’s skull in with a hammer, as the image didn’t fit with the gentle, animal-loving boy he knew. He – and Chuck’s friends – suggested to Chuck again and again that he was covering up for Marlene. Eventually the easily-led boy seems to have believed their version and he decided to publicly revise events.

Chuck now said that Marlene might have killed Naomi so his lawyers arranged for him to be hypnotised and he told a story of finding the older woman close to death. He said that he’d walked into the room to find a bloodspattered Naomi with a hammer embedded in her skull so he’d pulled the hammer out to spare her further
pain, whereupon he’d heard Jim Olive walking down the hall. Panicking – after all, Jim had previously threatened to kill him – the teenager had attempted to hide but had been confronted by the horrified husband. He’d then shot Jim Olive dead in self-defence.

Chuck told this story several times under hypnosis and also passed a lie detector test. The implication was that Marlene had killed her mother and Chuck had killed her father – but the jury found him guilty of the double homicide and he was put on San Quentin’s Death Row.

The case will always have unanswered questions. Why did a boy who was a first class shooter kill Naomi Olive with a hammer rather than with his gun? But it’s unlikely that Marlene carried out the murder as she returned from a visit to the supermarket with her father to find Chuck in the house as planned. Marlene would have had to bludgeon Naomi then immediately accompany her father on his shopping trip – but she had no blood on her and witnesses said that she looked glum but not traumatised.

In December 1977 Chuck Riley’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He’s still incarcerated at the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, where he spends most of his time keeping fit, telling author Richard M Levine that he ‘takes one day at a time.’ He has been turned down for parole ten times, his chances hampered because he claims to have only killed Marlene’s father rather than both of her parents. The hypnosis may have fixed this second version of events in his mind and he genuinely believes it to be true.

Chuck has led an exemplary life in prison and has been
made a clerk, a job which has various privileges. Nevertheless he admits the regime is still very dull. He jogs and lifts weights to help pass the time and is determined to leave prison in a healthier state than when he went in.

Marlene escaped from the California Youth Authority to be with another female juvenile offender, recently released, with whom she’d fallen in love. But the relationship soon ended and Marlene fled to New York where she acquired a pimp and became a high class callgirl. As she herself once said, she was called a whore so often by her adoptive mother that it felt the right ‘career’ move for her. She was captured a few months later and served out the rest of her sentence, being released in 1980 at the age of twenty-one.

She visited Chuck once in prison and they spoke for five hours, but the fact that he was bettering himself by studying psychology and keeping fit seemed to unnerve her. In contrast, she lacked goals and her life was continuing to go downhill.

For the next few years she injected heroin and used speed, sometimes supporting herself through prostitution, then in 1986 she was arrested on suspicion of being part of a San Fernando Valley counterfeiting ring. Found guilty, she was sentenced to five years in jail.