Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (3 page)

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By 8:53

P.M when Oregon State Police Traffic Officer David five arrived, the

paramedics had given up.
 
There was no hope.
 
The victim lay still,

covered partially by a blanket.
 
five walked around the Toyota van and

saw it had virtually no damage.
 
But when he lifted the blanket to look

at the dead woman, he was appalled at the wounds on her head.

How could she have suffered such massive injuries when the van was

scarcely marred at all?

five moved his patrol unit to the west of the scene and turned on his

overheads and emergency lights to warn the drivers who were inching

along the Sunset Highway.
 
They weren't going to get to Portland by

this route, not for a long time.
 
When his sergeant, James Hinkley, who

had been dispatched from the Beaverton substation, arrived, five turned

the immediate scene over to him and pulled out his camera.
 
He took

thirty-six photographs of the victim and the Toyota van, routine for

any accident.

By this time, Senior Troopers Lloyd Dillon and Ray Veal, along with

Washington County Chief Criminal Deputy D.A. Bob Herman, had also

arrived to join the group of investigators at the nightmarish sccnc on

the Sunset Highway.

Tom Duffy and his fellow paramedics had quickly reassured themselves

that the dead woman had been all alone in the van.
 
Just as with Randy

Blighton, breath had caught in their throats when they noticed the

child's carseat behind the driver's seat of the van.
 
They knew the

woman was beyond their help, they did not know if a bah!
 
or a toddler

lay somewhere in the darkest spaces of the van or was, perhaps, caught

beneath a seat.
 
They steeled themselves to feel with their bare hands

all around the inside of the van, running their fingers through the

rapidly cooling blood that had spattered, stained, and pooled there.

Finally they were satisfied that the child who used that safety seat

had not been present in the van when the woman died.
 
The paramedics'

hands and arms came away covered with the blood of the female victim.

"There was a lot of blood," Duffy would recall much later.
 
"A pool of

clotted bloodþa big circular pool on the carpet behind the passenger

seat.
 
There was blood on the ceiling and on the inside of the

windows."

Blood has its own smell, metallic, and that odor clung to the

paramedics now.

No one knew who the dead woman was.
 
No one knew what had happened to

her.
 
But Tom Duffy was certain of one thing.
 
He had seen literally

thousands of car wrecks, and he knew that he was not looking at the

aftermath of an automobile accident, he was looking at a crime scene.

"The mechanisms of injuryþthe damage to this vehicleþcould not have

produced what we found," he said later.
 
"The blood on this person was

dried and clotted.
 
There was absolutely no sign of life."

The Oregon troopers came to a similar conclusion.
 
A slight dent, a few

shards of glass from a broken signal light, and a couple of paint chips

out by the Jersey barriers that divided the freeway were the only signs

that the van had hit anything.
 
The woman hadn't died in an accident.

Her injuries had nothing to do with this "wreck."

There are always acronyms for official records.
 
Those on the scene at

the Sunset Highway used familiar shortcuts now as they filled out

forms: DOSþDead On Scene, MVAþMotor Vehicle Accident, and finally POSS

þPossible Homicide.
 
And because this bizarre incident seemed indeed to

be a "POSS," Oregon State Police Sergeant Hinkley radioed in a request

that detectives from the O.S.P Criminal Division respond to the scene.

In Oregon the state police investigate homicides and otlaer felonies as

well as traffic accidents.

Detective Jerry Finch wasn't on call that night, but he was the first

investigator the dispatcher could raise.
 
Finch ran to his unmarked

Ford and headed for the Cedar Mill home of Detective Jim Ayers.
 
Ayers,

in his mid-thirties, had been assigned to the Beaverton O.S.P station for

three years and was just arriving home from an evening out when he

heard the crunch of tires on gravel and saw Finch's car Turn into his

driveway.

Finch told Ayers they had a "call out" to a possible homicide.

Jim Ayers had investigated all manner of felonies in his fourteen-year

career with the Oregon State Police.
 
Like most officers Ghho hired on

as troopers, he was tall and well muscled.
 
He had thick, wavy hair and

a rumbling deep voice.
 
He had worked the road for eight years,

investigating accidents.
 
And like Tom Duffy, like all cops and all

paramedics, he had seen too much tragedy.
 
But he had also learned what

was "normal" tragedyþif there could be such a thingþand what was

"abnormal" tragedy.

Ayers had become an expert in both arson investigation and psychosexual

crimes, and he had investigated innumerable homicides.
 
Jerry Finch had

a few years on him, both in age and in experience.
 
Together the two

men drove to the scene at 79th and the Sunset, not knowing what to

expect.

The best detectives are not tough, if they were, they would not have

the special intuitive sense that enables them to see what laymen

cannot.
 
And Jim Ayers was one of the very best.
 
But like his peers,

he usually managed to hide his own pain over what one human can do to

another behind a veneer of black humor and professional distance.

It was two minutes after 10

P.M. when Finch and Ayers arrived at the scene, and as Ayers gazed down

at the slender woman who lay on the freeway shoulder, her face and head

disfigured by some tremendous force that had bludgeoned her again and

again, he was still the complete detectiveþcurious and contemplative.

The two detectives walked around the blue Toyota van and saw the minor

damage to its right front end and where a turn signal lens was broken

out.
 
There was a "buckle" in the roof of the van on the right.
 
That

could be explained easily enough, it was unibody construction, and a

blow to the front end would ripple back along the side.
 
Randy Blighton

was still on the scene and he told Finch and Ayers how he had found the

van butting against the median barrier of the freeway.
 
That would have

broken the signal light.
 
They found the signal lens itself lying on

the freeway in the fast lane.
 
And they also saw the beige purse that

had been forcing the accelerator down before Blighton kicked it away.

It would have been enough to keep the engine running while the car was

in gear.

With flashlights Finch and Ayers looked into the van, playing light

over the child's carseat, the blood spatter on the ,nterior roof, the

splash of blood on the hump over the transmission, and the pools of

blood on the f,oor behind the front seats.
 
A white plastic produce bag

f,uttered on the passenger-side f,oor.
 
It too bore bloodstains.

The van would have to be processed in daylight, but Jim Ayers had

already come to a bleak conclusion, based on the physical evidence he

saw, and on Blighton's description of how he found the victim and his

recollection that the driver's-side window had been rolled partway

down.

"I felt the victim had been beaten while she was in the vehicle," he

would say later.
 
"My conclusion was that whoever had beaten her had

intended to send it [the van] across the eastbound lanes of the Sunset

Highway so that it would be hit by other vehicles."

Had that happened, the cars approaching at fifty-five to sixty-five

miles an hour would have rounded the curve and smashed into the

driver's side of the Toyota van.
 
Even if the van hadn't burst into

flames, that would have destroyed every bit of evidence on the woman's

body and in the vehicle itself.
 
The massive head injuries she had

suffered would have been attributed to the accident.
 
Worse, in all

likelihood, she would not have been the only fatality.

State policemen have seen too many chain reaction accidents in which a

dozen or more people die.
 
Met by the horrifying sight of another

vehicle directly in front of them, drivers cannot stop or even take

evasive action.
 
Usually chain reaction pileups happen on foggy nights

or when smoke from burning crops drifts across a highway.
 
But this

van, deliberately left crosswise in the fast lane of the Sunset, would

have been like a brick wall appearing suddenly in the night.
 
Clearly,

whoever had bludgeoned the woman to death had not given a thought to

how many more might die.
 
All he or she had cared about was that the

crime of murder would be covered up in a grinding collision of jagged

steel, flying glass shards, and broken bodies.

The dead woman's purse contained her driver's license and other

identifying documentsþor, rather, it contained some woman's

identification.
 
This woman, lying beside the road, was so disfigured

by her beating that it was impossible to be sure that she was the woman

whose picture appeared on the driver's license.
 
However, given the

laws of probability, Ayers and Finch were reasonably sure that the

purse belonged to the victim.
 
The address on her license was 231

N.E. Scott in Gresham, a suburb about as far east of downtown Portland

as the accident scene was west.

Ayers and Finch had just dispatched Senior Trooper Al Carson to the

Gresham address to notify the victim's next of kin of her death when

Finch carefully lifted a checkbook from her purse.
 
"Look," he

commented to Ayers.
 
"These checks are personalized, and the address is

different than the one on her registration."