Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (37 page)

“But Bethany and Paul left with you and your girlfriend. Is that right?” Nolan asked.

“I guess you could say that. But it was just because
Long-tall-Paul asked if I’d drive them down to Melby’s. I don’t know if Bethany wanted to go there or not. At first I hesitated because my car’s a sport model that only holds four people—but then my sister and her husband said they’d wait for us in the parking lot, so we drove the two of them down toward Melby’s. When we got to the car wash place, Paul said, ‘This is close enough,’ and he pulled her hand, and they got out on Aurora.”

“You didn’t see them after that?”

“No, sir. We let them off about midnight and drove on home after we picked up my sister.”

The Bethany Stokesberry–Paul Anthony Vinetti case took a backseat to other news in Seattle papers as summer eased into fall. And then, as “Long-tall-Paul” Vinetti faced a jury of five men and seven women in Judge Holman’s court, it once again made headlines.

The huge defendant himself sat placidly in the courtroom, dressed in slacks, a long-sleeved shirt, and sandals. His brown hair was long and he wore a mustache and a Vandyke beard. He was extremely thin.

Occasionally, as he wrote continuously on the yellow legal pad in front of him, the tattoo described by those who had sat with him in the Frontier Tavern was exposed to our view—an ironic combination that drew murmurs from the press bench. It was the image of a devil, under which the words “Love Forever” were inscribed.

Prosecuting the case from King County prosecutor Chris Bayley’s office were deputy prosecutors Roy Howson and Douglas Dunham. Because Vinetti could not afford to employ counsel for his own defense, two extremely
capable lawyers on the permanent staff of the King County Public Defender’s Office were retained for him; they were Frank Sullivan and Rich Brothers. They would not deny that the beating had taken place but they would deny vigorously that Vinetti had thrown Mrs. Stokesberry into the lake, causing her death by drowning. Further, they would attempt to establish proof of “diminished responsibility” on the part of the defendant—the result of a long-standing mental disorder triggered by a daylong drinking marathon and marijuana binge on July 3.

I attended every day of Paul Vinetti’s trial. I remember that I wanted to take a picture of him to include with the article I wrote about the case. He agreed right away—but he said he would pose only if I would stand beside him afterward so he could get a photograph of the two of us together.

It seemed only fair. I recall that the top of my head came just above his elbow. I don’t have the picture I took of him any longer; I don’t know if he still has the image of the two of us smiling for the camera that the court deputy held.

The rail in front of Judge Holman’s bench became cluttered with piece after piece of physical evidence—macabre physical evidence, the tattered and bloodstained remnants of the new outfit Bethany Stokesberry had proudly shown off only hours before her death and Paul Vinetti’s heavy black boots with metal cleats on the heels.

A score of witnesses appeared for the prosecution to recall again the holiday atmosphere in the Frontier Tavern on the Fourth of July weekend. All of them confirmed that Long-tall-Paul Vinetti had appeared sober at that time.

Sheriff’s investigators testified to the bloody scene beside Echo Lake and to the recovery of the victim’s beaten body from deep water not far from shore.

Attorney Rich Brothers made the opening statement for the defense. Brothers, under thirty at the time, was already an accomplished criminal defense attorney. It was obvious that he had spent as many hours preparing for the defense of an indigent client as he would were he in private practice. He would now detail to the jury the events on that day of death and the horrendous life the huge defendant had endured in his twenty-three years.

“We don’t deny that an assault took place,” Brothers told the jury. “But we are going to show you that there was no design to effect the death of Bethany Stokesberry. There was no intent to defraud or to take money.” (Vinetti had also been charged with grand larceny in the alleged theft of the victim’s money.)

Brothers gave the time line of Vinetti’s day on Saturday, July 3. He had begun by drinking several pitchers of beer in Melby’s Tavern well before noon. And he had progressed through more beer in seven other taverns.

Brothers described Vinetti as a man who was “a loner, moody, depressed,” who had been deserted by his own mother at the age of six months. The defendant’s father told him once: “Your mother had a choice between you and a pair of roller skates, and she took the roller skates.”

His attorney explained Vinetti’s extreme sensitivity to remarks about his height. He said that Bethany Stokesberry had taunted Paul about the two things that distressed him most: his mother and his height.

In many murder trials, the defendant does not take the stand in his own defense, but Long-tall-Paul Vinetti chose to do so. There, before a courtroom hushed so that spectators could hear his muted voice, he answered his attorney’s questions about the events on July 3.

“I went to Melby’s Tavern at ten thirty Saturday morning. I had about four beers before the others came in.”

(The “others” were an Edmonds, Washington, couple and their nephew who had joined Vinetti in the long day of drinking.)

“Then we went to the Forum Tavern and they waited while I went to my friends to look for some stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“Pills. Acid. Mescaline. Speed. But I didn’t find any.”

The defendant told of going next to Smokey Joe’s, Tiger Al’s, The Hideout, Blue Moon—and then back to Melby’s. And finally, to the Frontier. He said he’d smoked almost an entire lid of marijuana—sharing it with a man whose name he couldn’t recall—as the day wore on.

“I staggered—the way I see it—up to the Frontier Tavern. I don’t remember if Bethany Stokesberry was there or not when I got there. I had never seen her before. I don’t remember talking to her although I might have.”

“Do you remember leaving with her?”

“Yes. I remember going in a car and getting out at the Elephant Car Wash. She wanted to go for a walk so we ran
across Aurora Avenue. I remember that she had some kind of accent. We went down toward the water and along the gravel path to the dirt path.”

“Did she say anything to you then?”

“When I put my arm around her, she was foulmouthed. She said my dad was a bastard and my mother must have been a terrible person to have a son like me. She made fun of my height. She asked if my brothers were tall, too, and I said we were all over six foot six. Then she said when I was born I must have been dropped on my head and then pulled out and stretched like a string to get to be so tall.

“She kept on and on when I told her to shut up. I felt angry inside. I started swinging on her with my fists. Everything went blank. I felt like I was fighting to stay alive. I didn’t see her while I was hitting her—it was dark out. She fell and got up. I hit her again. Then I threw her against the tree headfirst. Then I kicked her—with the heel of my right boot. I ripped off her clothes with my hands. I just grabbed them at the throat and tore.”

Vinetti vehemently denied throwing Bethany Stokesberry into Echo Lake. “I remember seeing something white on the ground. I picked it up and split. She was lying right by the tree when I left. My foot was next to her when I was reaching for the money. She wasn’t in the lake.”

Vinetti explained that his reaching for the money had been involuntary—a reflex action from the times as a child when he had had to survive any way he could.

Perhaps the most damaging testimony Vinetti gave was his reply to prosecutor Roy Howson’s question about how
he could be so sure he had not thrown the victim into the lake.

“I hit her. I threw her against the tree. I used my boots. That’s three different ways—and that’s all I did.”

As in all murder trials, there is one side of the story that is never heard: the victim’s side. Was Bethany Stokesberry a malicious termagant who consciously or unconsciously sought out a man’s weakest side and finally went too far with the wrong man with her caustic comments?

Or were the remarks attributed to her by the defendant the product of his own imagination, which was fueled with beer, marijuana, and possibly other illegal substances?

Whatever the provocation had been, the jury didn’t believe that anything the petite woman might have said excused Vinetti’s brutal attack.

We will never know why she went with him, or if she willingly got out of her acquaintances’ car and walked to a deserted lake at midnight. She may have simply wanted to go home, or Paul Vinetti may have physically pulled her from the car before she could protest.

Nor will we know what she said to her killer at the lakeshore. Why would she have courted disaster by taunting a man twice her size? The words Paul Vinetti recalled might have been from someone else he’d met that day, and, very much under the influence of alcohol and drugs, he could have confabulated the day’s events in his mind.

Bethany Stokesberry never had an opportunity to tell her side of the story. So we have to give her credit for what she could not say. She was a bored housewife who probably dressed too provocatively when she went to the
Frontier Tavern that night in July. But I tend to believe her silent voice rather than Vinetti’s drunken recall of what really happened.

We do know that
she
was not intoxicated at all. She had no alcohol in her blood.

The jurors in Paul Vinetti’s trial seemed to hear her silent plea for justice, too. Paul Anthony Vinetti was found guilty of second-degree murder and grand larceny.

Perhaps he had no choice in life either. When his mother picked a pair of roller skates over her baby son and abandoned him, she may have sealed his fate.

And the fate of Bethany Stokesberry.

In many ways
, the crime of rape is always the same—the forcing of one individual’s sexual desires upon a helpless victim.

In other ways, it is always different.

When I worked in the Sex Crimes Unit of the Seattle Police Department, I came to realize that there were no rules or parameters in sexual assaults. Since then, as a true-crime writer, I have covered a dozen or so rape cases that defy imagination.

There was the case of a rapist who insisted that his victim fix him a pork chop dinner—after he had assaulted her! He gobbled it down and left without hurting her further. And one sex criminal was so violent that he “raped” his victim with a .32 caliber pistol, actually firing it into her vagina. Miraculously, she survived and was even able to bear children after this happened to her. Another dangerous felon arrived at the apartment of three young women with a note of recommendation from one of their friends—which he had forged. A still more bizarre case involved a fastidious offender who
demanded that his victim take a long bath before he raped her.

I remember a paroled felon who had his college tuition paid by the state—to help him succeed once he was out in society. Sex crimes detectives discovered he was skipping class at least two times a week so he could commit rapes in the university neighborhood. One of his victims was the daughter of a police officer.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by the peculiar obsessions and actions of sexual criminals. Although most look like ordinary people, they are very different from law-abiding citizens.

It is virtually impossible to teach women how to avoid and/or survive the crime of rape; what works for some puts others in terrible danger. We all know the basics, although we don’t always adhere to them:

• Lock your doors securely.

• Lock your car even when you run into a store “just for a minute or two.”

• Don’t pick up hitchhikers.

• Don’t meet an absolute stranger in your home—or his.

• Arrange to meet in a public place and let someone know where you are.

• Don’t walk alone in bad neighborhoods after the sun goes down. Or
any
neighborhood!

• Don’t believe everything prospective dates list about themselves on internet dating sites.

• Check out someone you don’t know as carefully as you can.

• Don’t open your car door or your home’s door to someone you don’t know. If it’s an emergency, tell them you will call the police for them.

Most of this is simple common sense. Rapists don’t all look daunting. Nor do most serial killers. Often, they are quite handsome, charming, and persuasive—until they manage to get a woman in a lonely place far from anyone who might help her.

Experts advise women to do anything they can to alert others that they are in trouble. Scream, shout, kick, and fight. Sadly, more bystanders react to “Fire!” than they do to “Help!”

Anyone over sixty remembers Kitty Genovese of Queens, New York, who screamed “Help!” on the frigid, pitch-black night of March 13, 1964. Kitty, a petite, dark-haired twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, encountered a sex killer at 3 a.m. as she got out of her car and headed for her apartment. Thirty-eight people heard her cries and ignored them, not wanting to get involved, believing someone else would save her.

Winston Moseley, twenty-nine, had set out to kill a woman that night—any woman—when Kitty saw him approaching in her Kew Gardens neighborhood. Without saying a word, he stabbed her twice. She called out, “Oh, God! He stabbed me. Please help me!”

Windows lit up and a few people looked out. One man even called out, “Leave that girl alone!” Still, no one called police or rushed downstairs to help her. Moseley was alarmed by the lights going on, and was preparing
to drive off when the windows darkened again. Like a cat stalking an injured mouse, he followed Kitty to the doorway of her apartment house. Once more, she cried out, “I’m dying! I’m dying!” He stabbed her again—and raped her.