Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (51 page)

After walking awhile into the deep woods, Rudy, Wilcox, and Showalter heard footsteps approaching. Army Ranger Showalter had the code of Rangers deeply ingrained in him; Rangers protected each other reflexively. A tall man wearing camouflage apparel, a man with a crew cut and a mustache, appeared on the trail. Ranger Showalter quickly lifted one hand and drew it across his neck in a “throat-cutting” gesture, a “danger” signal to Rangers.

Rudy and Wilcox spotted the signal and dropped to a crouch, guns drawn. They could not be sure if Showalter was helping them or a danger to them. And then the man coming toward them stopped like a fox who had caught the scent of danger. In a heartbeat, he disappeared into the almost impenetrable brush along the trail.

The FBI special agent and the park ranger could hear him breaking through the trees, and then the camouflaged man appeared on the trail below them.

He shouted at them, “You stupid bastards—you could be dead now if I’d wanted to shoot you!”

“We want to talk to you!” Rudy called as he neared the man. Rudy reached out to frisk the suspect, but the man they sought instantly jerked away and was gone. One thing was certain: his actions were certainly not those of an innocent man.

Showalter admitted that the man who had once again vanished into the woods was his friend Mark Rivenburgh. Rudy chastised him for warning Rivenburgh with the Rangers’ danger signal when they’d spotted him. Showalter spread his hands in apology.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted. “That was just reflex. We’re trained to always protect each other.”

Alan Showalter positively identified the man who was playing cat-and-mouse with the Mount Rainier park rangers and the FBI special agent. They were longtime partners and friends.

“Yes,” he said, sounding puzzled. “That was Mark. There’s no question. But I don’t know why he’s acting this way.”

All Showalter could figure was that, somehow, his buddy’s mind had slipped a cog.

“He’s acting as though he’s still in the jungle in Vietnam, escaping from the enemy,” Showalter suggested. “He might be having some kind of a flashback.”

Maybe he was right; it was possible that Mark Rivenburgh was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Honed as he was for jungle warfare, he was as comfortable in the forest as the animals who were born to it. Even the park rangers and FBI special agents’ training wasn’t equal to that received by the carefully picked army Ranger unit. Rivenburgh had been taught to survive—to walk on little cat feet. But if his mind had cracked under pressure, he was as dangerous as any rabid cougar on the mountain.

*   *   *

As the day progressed, Agent Richard Rudy again encountered the elusive suspect, this time on the Wonderland Trail. Once more, Rivenburgh screamed out obscenities. Rudy knew he and the park rangers were confronting a perilous situation. Too many law enforcement officers who have to deal with a psychotic subject don’t survive. Rivenburgh appeared to be on the edge of psychosis, trigger-happy and furious. If they tried to rush him, he was likely to shoot, and the park was still alive with tourists despite all efforts to find them and warn them away. At any moment, a family might come around a bend in the path and be caught in crossfire.

Loath to risk that, Rudy watched helplessly as Rivenburgh again disappeared into the thick cluster of fir trees. This time the men who tracked him were afraid he had made a clean escape.

It seemed so. The manhunt in the park continued for a solid week without a sign of Rivenburgh.

Mark Rivenburgh was assigned to Fort Lewis, and a check with officials there brought the news that he was AWOL (absent without leave) from the sprawling base. If he had managed to slip past the park’s gate stakeouts, he could be anywhere. Or he might still be somewhere on the mountain, using his physical strength and training to avoid detection. Despite the manhunt on Mount Rainier, he had escaped as easily as fog vanishes from the treetops when the sun appears.

As long as the sexual marauder remained free to wander the secluded trails, the investigators worried for the safety of other women in the park. It wasn’t as if they had a public address system that could ring out warnings. Cell phones hadn’t even been invented yet.

The park rangers, FBI agents, and police officers from nearby towns and counties braced for word that Mark Rivenburgh had struck again. They were relieved when the only reports of problems came from some women campers who said they’d been “annoyed” by a bunch of soldiers who were “aggressively flirting” with them.

At Fort Lewis, Mark Rivenburgh’s superiors were stunned to learn that he was the prime suspect in a vicious rape attack. Colonel Wayne Downing, his commanding officer, shook his head as he described the missing Ranger.

“Mark is a good soldier,” Downing said. “He has a good reputation and a bright future in the army. No one but the cream of the crop is chosen for Ranger training in the first place.”

Back home in Beacon, New York, Rivenburgh’s fiancée, twenty-two-year-old Francie O’Brien,* was stunned to hear that Mark had been AWOL for almost a week. The pretty, dark-haired woman caught a flight to Tacoma with Mark’s sister, and the two of them waited anxiously for some word of him. Rather than doubting him, Francie was worried sick that something must have happened to him to make him behave so erratically.

Mark Rivenburgh had not come from a family where breaking the law was either expected or accepted. His father, a prison supervisor, had been killed in a boating accident ten months earlier. His mother was also a prison supervisor—at a women’s facility—and he had five younger brothers and sisters. Rivenburgh had grown up with Francie in Beacon, a town on the Hudson River one hundred miles north of New York City. She was totally bewildered and had never known him to be unfaithful to her or even to lie to her.

Still, if Mark was innocent of the charges waiting for him, why hadn’t he come forward?

*   *   *

Why indeed?

On June 10, the seventh day, Mark Rivenburgh
did
come forward. He walked and jogged for many miles until he arrived at the Lakewood, Washington, home of his sergeant. He said he was turning himself in for being AWOL and asked to be taken to Colonel Downing. He had quite a story to tell, and seemed almost proud of his ability to evade detection for almost a week.

Although most of the lawmen searching for him believed he had slipped through their dragnet, Mark Rivenburgh said he’d remained inside the Mount Rainier Park boundaries all the time. Hidden in plain sight behind a veil of trees, he had used all of his survival skills to stay underground as he watched the men and dogs who hunted him.

For the first fourteen hours, the Ranger said, he’d hidden near a service station inside the park’s boundaries. He was waiting, he claimed, to make a phone call to Fort Lewis and arrange to turn himself in. But everywhere he turned, he’d found roads blocked with police cars.

“So I headed cross-country until I came to Silver Lake and I broke into a cabin there. I changed from my Ranger camo gear into some olive-colored trousers and a blue sweatshirt I found inside.

“Food wasn’t much of a problem,” he bragged. “I knew which berries and roots to eat, and there were some supplies in the cabin.”

“Did the dogs get close to you?” someone asked. “Were you concerned about them?”

Mark Rivenburgh shook his head. “Nope. There were enough streams I could wade through, and they lost my scent.”

As Rivenburgh appeared at the army Ranger headquarters where Colonel Downing waited, he suddenly seemed extremely worried. Still he insisted that was because he’d been AWOL, and he didn’t want to be brought up on charges about that—he wanted to keep on being a Ranger.

“You have much more serious charges to worry about than being AWOL,” Downing informed him. “They want you for rape.”

Rivenburgh appeared shocked at that. He categorically denied that he had raped anyone.

“The only thing I’m guilty of is being away from my duty here,” he insisted. “I know I should have reported in.”

Colonel Downing and Special Agent Rudy didn’t believe him, not unless he’d suffered a psychotic blackout, and that was an excuse for committing crimes that suspects used so often that it had little merit. Moreover, there were living victims and other witnesses who placed him where Kit Spencer and Rose Fairless had been terrorized.

Rose and Kit picked Rivenburgh’s picture out of a photo lay-down and they also identified him in a lineup. As much as they wanted to forget him, they had tried to remember everything they could about him. They had no doubt he was the man who raped them. They told investigators that they recognized his voice and his New York accent. He had the army crew cut and the chipped teeth that both of them felt as he forced his kisses on them.

Mark Rivenburgh was arrested and charged with two counts of rape and one of robbery. He was allowed to remain free on fifteen-thousand-dollars bail until trial.

But the story of the stalking army Ranger was far from over.

*   *   *

Some thirty miles north of Fort Lewis, detectives in the Port of Seattle Police Department read follow-up reports on Mark Rivenburgh with great interest.

Chief Neil Moloney’s department had been investigating a series of frightening incidents involving women employees at the Sea-Tac Airport, on Old Highway 99, located halfway between Seattle and Tacoma. Between February and May, flight attendants and women who worked at the counters for a number of airlines had grown increasingly afraid. Their jobs meant that they often had to walk through parking areas at all hours of the day and night. And several of them had been accosted, molested, threatened, or sexually attacked. Although they tried to walk to their cars in pairs, that wasn’t always possible.

On March 20, 1978, the investigation took on an urgency. Joyce Lee Sparks Kennedy O’Keefe, forty-five, worked as a ticket agent at the Pan Am desk and she was unfailingly on time for work. Some fellow employees reported that Joyce didn’t show up at all for her 2:30 
P.M.
shift. Others recall that she worked that first day of spring, and
left
at 2:30. It’s most likely that she ended her workday in mid-afternoon. Whichever it was, Joyce disappeared completely in the misty rain. That was less than three months before the mountain stalker attacked.

When relatives and friends became worried that she didn’t answer her phone or her door, Port of Seattle police officers searched the many levels of the Sea-Tac parking garage. They located her car. Its doors were unlocked and her purse and keys were lying on the front seat. There was no sign of a struggle, and the car started immediately when they tried the key.

Joyce had red hair and bright blue eyes, and she was petite at five feet, three inches and 130 pounds. She usually wore glasses and they were not found in her car. The last coworkers to see her recalled she was wearing a red blouse and tan slacks. She had on an expensive gold ring set with diamonds and featuring the engraving “Love.”

Joyce Kennedy was an attractive, well-adjusted woman who family and friends insisted would never disappear voluntarily. Although her marriage was strained, she cared too much about her family, and especially her mother, Virginia Beach Sparks, who had been widowed a decade before. And Joyce had four children: Mark, Sherry, Michele, and Matthew. She would never have left them voluntarily. Coworkers said Joyce worried about their problems a lot.

Chief Neil Moloney divided the massive airport into grids and assigned his officers to search every inch of it. All to no avail. No one they talked to recalled seeing or hearing anything unusual on March 20. It would seem that the missing woman had left the airport complex in someone else’s vehicle, or that she—or her body—was hidden someplace within its confines.

And yet, from that day to this, no one has seen Joyce Kennedy. The siege at Sea-Tac continued. On April 4, Ginger LeMay,* a slender twenty-year-old woman who worked at a catering company, Servair Incorporated, which was located on the Sea-Tac grounds, left work at about 10:45
P.M.
As usual, she headed toward her parked car. She wasn’t particularly afraid; the airport never really sleeps and giant jets were taking off regularly, while vehicles arrive constantly to deposit or pick up passengers. There were other people around, although their number diminished as she moved out of the brightly lit area.

Tired and eager to get home, she was lost in thought. She slowly became aware of a utility van that was keeping pace with her. The male driver suddenly pulled up alongside her and stopped.

“Miss? Miss—would you stop a moment?” The driver’s voice was polite as he called to her.

She walked a little closer to the van, figuring that he needed directions.

“We’ve got an emergency going on here,” he explained. “There’s a hijacking going on right now and I’ve been sent to move people into a safer area. Hop in and I’ll see you’re taken to a spot where you’ll be out of danger.”

The young, dark-haired man seemed in earnest and Ginger Lemay believed him. But once she was inside the van, she realized to her horror that the hijacking story had been only a ruse to get her into the vehicle. The driver didn’t seem to be taking her anywhere except to an isolated area of the airport.

She reached for the door handle, but she couldn’t unlock the passenger door. Once they were in a really dark area, her abductor stopped, set the brake, and began to tear at her clothing. Ginger, filled with the adrenaline of fear, fought back with all of her strength.

Finally, she was able to break away from him. She ran as fast as she could to a lighted area. She told Port of Seattle officers that the stranger had been Caucasian, probably in his twenties, and that he had very short hair and well-developed muscles. She wasn’t sure if she could identify him because the interior of his van was almost pitch-dark when he began to attack her.

The unsettling assaults on young women continued. On May 8, Bren Forsell,* a twenty-eight-year-old flight attendant, was heading for her car in the multitiered parking building adjoining the main airport structures when she heard footsteps behind her. When she got off the elevator, there were no other drivers retrieving their cars. Now she was all alone—except for the man whose footsteps behind her were growing closer and closer.