Lust Killer (11 page)

The call came in to the Benton County sheriff's office, and Sheriff Charles E. Reams dispatched deputies to the Long Tom River. The deputies radioed back that the presence of a body in the Long Tom had been confirmed. It was that of a young woman.

"She's been in the river some time," the officer reported. "And she didn't just fall in. The body's weighted down with a car transmission."

The news that a young woman's body had been found was electrifying to detectives in northern Oregon, and investigators in Salem and Portland waited anxiously to hear who she was and how she had died. Since the body had been found in Benton County, the case was technically and legally under the jurisdiction of Sheriff Reams's department, but Reams and Benton County District Attorney Frank Knight were fully aware of the wider ramifications. If this woman proved to be one of the missing women, it would be the first break—however tragic—in the baffling cases.

District Attorney Frank Knight is what lawmen call a "policemen's D.A.," an indefatigable worker who stays with a case from the very beginning. Stovall would voice his admiration for Knight many times over the weeks that followed. "He's the kind of D.A. we most admire—he's with us all the way, always available. If we need legal input in a hurry, he's there. From the moment that first body was found in the Long Tom, Knight was part of the team. He never got in the way of our scene investigations, but he put in as many twenty-four-hour days as the rest of us did."

The road leading to the Bundy Bridge was cordoned off, and only lawmen and officials from the Oregon State Medical Examiner's Office were allowed to cross the barriers. Reams and Knight stood by as the girl's body was lifted from the Long Tom and carried up the bank.

It was not an easy task; the deputies who had gone into the river were strong, husky men, but the girl, when weighted down by the transmission, weighed almost two-hundred pounds.

She was a short woman, and quite fair. She had ash-blond hair and blue eyes. They had somehow expected that it would be Karen Sprinker, but it was not. Karen had been taller and was a brunette.

This girl was young too, and the waters of the Long Tom had been cold, preserving her body with the heedless tenderness of nature. A beige coat still clung to the body, but many of her garments were gone—either torn away by the current or deliberately removed by the killer who had put her into the river.

William Brady, Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Oregon, was on his way from Portland, and the body would not be moved until he arrived. In the meantime, Reams sent deputies to canvass the countryside to see if anyone might have seen something or someone dumping a heavy burden into the Long Tom.

It was a fruitless task. The closest farmhouse was a good half-mile from the Bundy Bridge. No nearby resident had seen anything suspicious. It was likely that the disposal of the body had taken place under cover of darkness.

Throughout the day, into the night, and for days following, the bridge over the Long Tom would be the site of intense police investigation.

Dr. William Brady arrived to make a preliminary examination of the dead girl. Brady is one of the foremost forensic pathologists in America, a tall, dapper man who dresses more like a visiting ambassador than a working medical examiner. He eschews the coveralls worn by most investigators at a grisly crime scene, and yet he does his work so deftly that he emerges as immaculate as when he arrives.

Brady came to Oregon from New York City. He was a forensic pathologist in the Manhattan office of the New York City Medical Examiner's Office before he set up the most sophisticated state medical examiner's system in the country. Oregon abolished the coroner system in 1956, and today its medical examiner's system is a model for other states.

Because Oregon is essentially a rural state with the bulk of its population in Portland, Salem, and Eugene, Brady feels that law-enforcement agencies in small communities should have the benefit of the expertise of a state medical examiner. No body may be removed in a suspicious death until removal has been authorized by a deputy medical examiner, and thereafter it is not to be undressed, washed, or otherwise prepared before autopsy.

Too many wrongful deaths go undetected in areas without a medical examiner's system, because once vital physical evidence is lost, it can never be recovered. Too many victims of wrongful death are buried without autopsy, and the killers' secrets are buried with them.

Oregon has never had more than 150 murders in a given year, and only one-third of those merit intense investigation. When that murder rate is compared with statistics of cities like Houston, Miami, and Detroit, Oregon seems a safe place to live.

But not for everyone. Not for the young woman who was transported to Dr. Brady's offices to await autopsy.

The girl was Linda Salee. Detectives had suspected that it was she right from the beginning. Decomposition was moderate; it could not have been Linda Slawson or Jan Whitney. They had been gone too long for visual identification. Someone had taken Linda Salee more than seventy miles away from the Lloyd Center shopping mall, killed her, and then had thrown her away in the Long Tom.

Her killer had made a tactical error. He had either misjudged the depth of the lonely river or had been unable to carry the weighted body out into the center of the river, where the depth was so much greater.

Or perhaps he'd been so cocky that he didn't care if her body was found. Perhaps something in him made him seek discovery of his terrible handiwork.

Linda Salee's body had been bound to the auto transmission with nylon cord and copper wire. A reddish fabric resembling a mechanic's industrial cloth was caught in her bonds. That might prove to be a valuable clue. A mass-produced item certainly, but something that must be saved along with the cord and wire.

The cause of death? Dr. Brady found the classic signs of traumatic asphyxiation. There were the petechial hemorrhages (pinpoint hemorrhages) of the strap muscles of the neck, the lungs, the heart, and the eyes, that occur when the lungs cannot take in air. The hyoid bone at the back of the tongue, that fragile u-shaped bone, was fractured. There was the broad, flat mark of some kind of ligature around the slender neck.

And, with these signs, there would be a faint bit of comfort for Linda Salee's family. Death by traumatic asphyxiation, by strangling, is quick. Loss of consciousness occurs very rapidly, and death itself follows quietly.

Had Linda Salee been raped? That was impossible to determine. Long immersion in water dilutes any semen that may be present, so that no absolute tests can be made.

There was something else found during the postmortem on Linda Salee, something that would be kept from the media because it was so bizarre and unexplainable at the moment.

Dr. Brady found two needle marks in the victim's rib cage, one on each side, three or four inches below the armpit. The skin surrounding the needle punctures was marked by postmortem burns. Dr. Brady had never seen anything quite like it before.

There were some bruises, some contusions and abrasions. Linda Salee, the spunky little bowler, had fought her killer ferociously. But she had been too tiny and he had won.

The activity at the Long Tom River continued throughout the weekend. Reserve sheriff's officers—skilled scuba divers—combed the river from shore to shore and north and south of the Bundy Bridge. A half-dozen of the black-rubber-suited swimmers dived again and again into the muddy river to find … what? Perhaps the clothing that was missing when Linda Salee was found. Perhaps her purse. Possibly even something left behind by her killer.

They came up with old tires, junk, and tangled clots of weeds that had felt like cloth in the depths of the water. They grew chilled and exhausted, and still they dived, carefully working the river in a grid pattern, covering every inch of it. It was dangerous, macabre work. Sometimes the divers surfaced and felt the tree snags clutching at them. Sometimes they worked in rat's nests of debris, feeling claustrophobic.

But none of them quit.

What had happened to Linda Salee enraged normal men. Especially police officers. If they could not have saved her, they would now find her killer and hand him over to the judicial system.

On Monday the horror accelerated into nightmare. Fifty feet from where Linda Salee's body had been found, a diver discovered another figure floating beneath the surface. A figure bound to something that held it down.

He headed for the pale light above him and surfaced with a shout, signaling his fellow divers to join him.

There was indeed a second body in the river.

The news was flashed immediately to Salem police headquarters, and Jim Stovall and Salem Detective Jerry Frazier ran for their car and sped toward the Long Tom. They were there when the divers brought up Karen Sprinker.

Karen had been missing for forty-six days. Forty-six days of agony for her parents. Forty-six days of hoping against hope that she might come back to them. With the latest discovery, that hope was gone.

When the divers carried Karen to the banks of the Long Tom, there was no doubt that her death had been similar to Linda Salee's. Her body was weighted down with the head of a six-cylinder engine. It had been lashed to her body with nylon cord and copper wiring like that used to tie the other body to the auto transmission. There was also a red mechanic's cloth tied to the engine head.

The Oregon investigators, working their individual cases—but conferring with one another—had begun to think that the girls' disappearances might be part of a common plan, and had approached their probe that way. But the knowledge that they had been right was more alarming than reassuring; they did, clearly, have a maniac loose in the state, a lust killer, moving undetected, the worst kind of killer because he does not stop killing until either he is apprehended or is himself dead.

Karen Sprinker's body was autopsied by Dr. William Brady, and on preliminary examination the cause of death seemed the same as Linda Salee's: traumatic asphyxiation.

The term "autopsy," loosely defined, means "to find out for oneself." Homicide detectives and forensic pathologists must set their minds on two levels. Their job—and their duty—is to consider their cases scientifically, to maintain a kind of objectivity into which none of their own emotions intrude. If they are not able to suspend feelings, they cannot do their jobs. What they have to cope with is too tragic. Later, when the killer has been caught, they can afford the luxury of rage and tears. While the search for clues is going on, they must be clinical and detached.

It was extremely difficult to be detached about Karen Sprinker, the innocent young woman whose dreams of becoming a doctor had been wiped out by the killer who left her body floating in the Long Tom.

Lieutenant Jim Stovall and Lieutenant Gene Daugherty of the Oregon State Police—who would work closely together in the intense probe that lay ahead—were present at the postmortem examination of Karen Sprinker.

From this point on, Jim Stovall and Gene Daugherty would be the two investigators at the head of the probe into the search for the killer of Linda Salee and Karen Sprinker—and perhaps of other young women still missing. Daugherty, stationed at the Oregon State Police headquarters in Salem, is a big man, well over six feet, muscular, with the sandy hair and ruddy complexion of a true Irishman. Like Stovall, he was one of the best detectives in the state of Oregon. They would work exceptionally well together, sharing a belief in the power of physical evidence and the necessity to find some common denominator that would link a suspect to the crimes. Neither of them would see much of their wives and families for a long time to come. Nor would Jerry Frazier, the dark-haired, compactly built Salem police detective who had been assigned to work with Stovall. Other detectives in many Oregon jurisdictions would be drawn into the probe as it moved inexorably forward, but Daugherty, Stovall, and Frazier would continue to be at its center until the end.

Any reputable pathologist insists that reverence for the dead be maintained during autopsy; although the body must be examined to determine cause of death and to search for possible vital physical evidence, those in attendance never forget that the deceased deserves respect. Dr. Brady is a stickler about this, and Stovall and Daugherty agree with him. The men were silent as Brady began.

Although Karen Sprinker had also succumbed to asphyxiation, the ligature marks left on her neck were somewhat different from those on Linda Salee's throat. In Karen's case, the ligature had been a narrow band—probably a rope. Again, it had been a rapid death; young women do not have the throat musculature to stave off strangulation. And, again, it was small comfort.

Karen Sprinker had been fully clothed when she was discovered in the Long Tom. She wore the green skirt and sweater that her mother had described on the missing-persons report. She wore cotton panties, but, surprisingly, the simple cotton bra she usually wore had been replaced by a waist-length black bra that was far too big for her.

Odd.

The bra could not have been Karen Sprinker's; her mother had inventoried all of her clothing to see what was missing when Karen had vanished, and she owned no underwear such as this. Further, Karen's bra size was 34 A or B, and this long-line black bra had to be at least a 38 D.

As Brady removed the brassiere, sodden lumps of brown paper toweling dropped out.

Karen had no breasts; her killer had removed them after death.

And then he had fashioned the illusion of breasts by stuffing the cups of the black brassiere with wadded paper towels.

There were indications that Karen Sprinker had been sexually assaulted by her killer, but, again, it was impossible to tell absolutely because of her long immersion in the river. There were no other obvious wounds on her body.

The results of the autopsy on Karen Sprinker were withheld from the press. Again, only the terse "death by traumatic asphyxiation" was given to the media.

Karen Sprinker and Linda Salee had been stalked and abducted by a lust killer. Stovall and Daugherty had little hope that Linda Slawson and Jan Whitney would ever be found alive. They stood by while the divers continued their combing of the depths of the Long Tom, half-expecting a shout of discovery that meant those girls too were hidden there.