No Regrets (35 page)

Sam Jesse admitted he had no partner, and no gang. He waived extradition and was flown back to Seattle, charged now with first-degree murder and first-degree robbery, his bail set at a quarter of a million dollars. It was an ignominious end for a young man who had fantasized a life of
leisure, the fruits of a masterminded plan to rob banks. He had never envisioned jail. Jail was what happened to dummies who didn’t plan things out carefully.

Anyone who looked at the case saw the uselessness of it all. Bill Heggie was dead, even though it was quite possible that Sam Jesse never meant for it to happen. Each of them had reacted irrationally, but a loaded gun is a loaded gun. Anyone who carries one has to be aware that it has the potential to fire. For all intents and purposes both Heggie’s and Jesse’s lives ended in that terrible split-second when the hammer on the .357 slipped into the cocked position, even though the weapon had been intended just to frighten a bank teller into handing over money without question.

Nothing had turned out the way Sam planned on New Year’s Eve. Instead of living it up in Honolulu, he was locked up with hundreds of other prisoners, packed into the antique King County Jail. He was devastated, pacing like a caged animal. More than most men, he simply could not accept a life behind bars. That was the one contingency that had never occurred to him.

Sam Jesse never went to trial. On the evening of March 16, he told his cellmates he wasn’t hungry and they went off to eat supper without him. When they returned, they found Sam hanging from a pipe on the ceiling of their cell. Using his height and agility, he had twisted and knotted his bunk sheets, cinched a loop around his neck, and thrown the material over the top of the pipe.

Medic One paramedics could not bring him back any more than they had been able to bring back his victim, William Heggie, only three weeks earlier.

There may well have been more involved than Sam
Jesse’s horror at being locked up. He had once asked the psychic he considered his mentor, “Is it OK if you kill somebody? What happens to you spiritually? Is there a debt against you?” and the answer had been, “Only if you let it be a debt.”

Sam Jesse may have figured that he owed a debt.

None of it worked out the way he planned. He believed in survival of the fittest, and it must have been a terrible realization for him to find that he was not among the most fit. He had said the world would end in a very short time.

For Sam Jesse, it did.

Sometimes I wonder why I have written about so many homicide cases that either happen during the Christmas holidays or come to the end stage of a trial just when the streets outside the courthouse are lined with brightly colored holiday lights. Inadvertently, I happened to select cases for this collection that had Christmas connections, even though I chose them for entirely different reasons and didn’t even notice the season. Maybe there are more homicides during the holidays; someday I’ll check that out. Emotions tend to run too high at Christmas. I think some of us use the holiday as a watershed point to come to decisions: “If my marriage doesn’t get any better by Christmas, I’m going to file for divorce,” or “I just have to have a job by Christmas or I’ll give up.”

Too often, we expect to relive the same wonderful Christmases we had as children, or, conversely, the memories of a miserable childhood may come rushing back to overwhelm us. There are myriad “triggers” that force us to face recollections of dark things we have successfully buried for years: songs and special food, weather and fragrances, relatives we never see except on holidays (and sometimes wish we didn’t have to), expectations and disappointments. They can all stack up to place an overwhelming burden on our psyches, and we may tend to
believe we are the only ones who feel sadness when we should be glorying in joy and celebration.

Maybe it’s not even that complicated. It might be that we simply remember violent tragedies that happen on Christmas because they don’t fit into the holiday spirit, and the glaring headlines become ghastly counterpoints to stories about human kindness, joyous reunions, and happy times.

The case that follows is one of the most “unholiday” stories I ever came across, as gruesome as a Grimm’s fairy tale. I doubt that anyone who lived near Portland, Oregon, the year it happened will ever forget it either.

Sauvie Island,
the largest island in the mighty Columbia River, appears to drift in the river about ten miles west-northwest of Portland, Oregon. Its northern tip juts into Columbia County, but most of it lies within Multnomah County. The large part of Sauvie Island is either farmland or devoted to wildlife refuge, and only about a thousand people live there year-round. There are riverside beaches there, some for family picnics and even some that are “clothing optional.” The island also has miles and miles of flat road for bicyclists. Until a bridge was built in 1950, a small ferry served Sauvie, and even today it is an out-of-the-way spot, virtually unknown to anyone but Oregon residents. In the summer, Sauvie Island is alive with activity, but the shorter days of winter and relentless rain shutter it down as the holidays approach.

Two days before Christmas, the island was bleak and cold, its brown beach grass and leafless trees grating and rattling in the winter wind. Most people stayed inside by their fireplaces, or, if they had to go out, hurried about their errands with their heads bent against the stormy weather.

It was the job of two tugboat operators for the State Log Patrol to venture out on the Columbia River and search for logs and driftwood that might foul the engines of boats. That day, as they edged their craft along the east boundary
of the island, one of them suddenly pointed toward the shoreline and cried out, “Oh, my God! Look! Look over there!”

What looked like a large doll or a small child lay facedown on the beach near the river as it lapped against the beach. As they drew closer, they realized with sinking hearts that it was a little girl. She was fully clothed, and it looked as if she had drowned, as unlikely as it was that she could have wandered so far out on this lonely shore. And she certainly wasn’t dressed suitably to be on a boat’s deck, but she must have somehow fallen overboard.

The tugboat men radioed the St. Helens office of the Oregon State Police to tell troopers there about their sad discovery. Corporal H. D. Watson and Lieutenant Benninghoff were dispatched at once to the scene. The child still rested where the witnesses had found her, her face in the shallow water. Drowned. But when the state police investigators rolled her over, they saw a large jagged cut in the middle of her forehead. There was blood in the sand where her head had rested. Eighty-one feet south of the child, Watson and Benninghoff observed a large, pink, oblong bundle near the water’s edge. The condition of the child and the shape of the bundle were ominous enough for them to put in an immediate call to the State Police Crime Lab for assistance before they proceeded further. Evidence that might be there could easily wash away in the river water if they weren’t extremely careful to preserve it.

At 4:38
P.M.
, Lieutenant Robert Pinnick and his crew of criminalists arrived at the desolate spot. The sun was a pale shadow in the western sky as it set, and they carried auxiliary lights to help them explore the windswept beach.

Bob Pinnick unwrapped the large bundle on the sand
only enough to see what was inside. And it was what all the men there suspected. The blankets were a shroud hiding the nude body of an adult female. As unlikely as it might seem, the child might have drowned accidentally, but the discovery of the woman’s body meant they were now working a homicide.

Oregon State Medical Examiner Dr. William Brady joined the first investigators on the beach, and knelt to pull the blanket further apart to view the woman. Then he looked up at the circle of investigators and said rather quietly, “She’s been decapitated.”

Within a matter of minutes, it was completely dark. Only two days had elapsed since the shortest day of the whole year, and the murky shoreline was probably one of the more difficult crime scenes the officers would ever be called upon to process. However, they set to work, using their powerful floodlights to illuminate the grim job before them.

They found no identification papers at all near the two bodies, but they felt confident that they would eventually be able to identify them. The child’s clothing was apparently intact, and her garments bore some manufacturers’ labels. Although the woman was naked, her body was wrapped in sheets and blankets with distinctive patterns that could probably be traced. In addition, they found a white towel near the woman’s body and a pink plastic necklace on the sand near the little girl.

After they had spent many hours in the frigid December air gleaning every bit of physical evidence they could, the investigators released the bodies to be taken to the Multnomah County Morgue in Portland to await autopsy.

It was now early in the morning of Christmas Eve. The gruesome task before the detectives was completely incongruous
with the spirit of the season. Who could have taken the lives of the young woman and the little girl and then tossed their bodies away so heedlessly? Whoever it was, he (or they—or perhaps even her) had left precious little behind of himself. There seemed to be no question about the criminal intent on the part of the person who had disposed of the bodies. While it was possible that the child had drowned accidentally and that her head wounds had come from the rocks along the shore, there was no plausible explanation for the woman’s body being in the state it was—other than homicide.

At the Medical Examiner’s Office, forensic pathologists estimated that the woman had been between seventeen and thirty years old. She was probably in her twenties. She had been between five feet two, and five feet, four inches tall and had weighed about 125 pounds. Clearly, her killer had wanted to delay any identification of her body—which seemed to suggest that she had some connection to him. The severing of her head from her body had been accomplished neatly, so neatly that it was possible that the killer had had some special knowledge of anatomy. Her legs were bent at the knees and her feet pulled up behind her buttocks and tied around her hips with a one-half-inch cotton rope. Her left ring finger had been removed at the third joint—probably to remove any rings, which would have led to her identity. The only pertinent scar on the headless body was an old three-inch surgical scar just over the tail bone. She had given birth to at least one child.

Her body had been wrapped in six bedsheets and two blankets, the bedding tied with half-inch cotton rope identical to that around her legs.

This information was sent out on teletype wires at the
Oregon State Police station in Milwaukie, Oregon. The clues to the child’s identity followed: “White female child, approximately four to six years old, forty-three inches tall, forty-five pounds, brown eyes, brown armpit length hair in one small ponytail tied with red rubber band. Wearing reversible ski-type jacket, lime green on one side, other side yellow and pink flowers with no brand on jacket. Jacket had hood and pull string. ‘Zipper Sim Co.’ brand. Light blue dress with green and white rickrack in color, six green buttons and rickrack tie with lace in bodice. No brand. White all cotton slip size four with three ruffles around skirt, label marked ‘exclusive of decoration.’ Also shows 3100 R and Manufacturers number 3139. White undershirt with safety pin ties, the type used on smaller youngsters. No brand. White underpants size six, Eiderdown brand, almost new. Has four wounds on head but cause of death unknown at this time.”

Although the wording of the notification to the thirteen western states had no emotion in it—just the pure facts— the investigators didn’t feel that way. This was a little girl who should have been waiting for Santa Claus to come, but somehow she had become entangled in an adult situation that had ended in horror. Some of the detectives brushed away tears as they read the description of the little dress with the green and white rickrack; it might have been her Christmas dress.

There had to be someone along the route of the teletyped alert who would recognize the description of the dead toddler and woman who’d been found on the lonely beach. They had not been dead long, probably no more than a day. If they were expected someplace for Christmas Eve, someone would be worried. Someone would call a police agency somewhere and give a description.

Multnomah County Detectives Tom Sawyer, Orlando “Blackie” Yazzolino, and Darril MacNeel, along with Portland Police detectives, watched the development of the case closely. Although the northern tip of Sauvie Island where the bodies were found is in Columbia County, there was no evidence to indicate that the murder of the victims had occurred on the island itself. It was quite possible that they had been killed in Multnomah County or even within the city limits of Portland.

Dr. Brady, one of the outstanding forensic pathologists in the Northwest, performed the postmortem exams on the nameless victims at 8:30
A.M
. on Christmas Eve. It was impossible to pinpoint cause of death in the woman. Of course, decapitation itself would have been fatal, but Brady felt that had occurred after death, even though that was impossible for him to ascertain. He found some abrasions and bruises on her neck, but any bludgeoning, cutting, or other wounds delivered to the woman’s head were, of course, missing.

The little girl had succumbed to head wounds. While the adult woman (her mother?) had not eaten for many hours before her death, the child had partially digested food in her stomach—which appeared to be cookies, candy, and french fries.

Was it possible that the dead woman and her child had been attempting to hitchhike into the Portland area for Christmas and were picked up by a maniac? Had he decided to rape the mother and ended up killing her, only to realize he had to get rid of her child, too? A possible theory, but why would a killer have felt compelled to destroy all vestiges of identification if the victims had been strangers to him? No. Detectives were convinced that the pitiful victims were somehow linked to their killer. He (or
she) did not want their identity known because that might send police to his door asking questions.