The End of the Dream (46 page)

Attention, however, can be both positive and negative, and psychological studies show that human beings do better with even negative attention than they do living in a vacuum. The teenager in this case had set off on a desperate journey to find the man whom she believed to be her father. Her mother didn’t want her, she barely knew the man who had long since deserted his family. She was young, and she had led a sad life thus far. But she had a dream and she was willing to risk being cold and hungry and lost to make it come true, she was going to find her father.

Unfortunately, when she met someone who noticed her during her fruitless search, he gave her the worst kind of attention. She was so hungry for any crumb of notice that she was perhaps the most psychologically vulnerable victim that I have ever written about.

It was bitterly cold in Granite Falls, Washington, on Wednesday evening, November 7, 1973. Snow had already begun to fall in the mountain foothills, and soon sleet would whip the barren stretches of frozen farmland of Snohomish County. The frail girl seemed unaware of the cold as she clambered up from the ditch where she had regained consciousness.
 
Her head hurt and she felt dizzy, but she remembered now what had happened to her, and she knew she dare not give in to her impulse to huddle on the ground until she felt better. He might be coming back for her. She felt the blood strangely warm and metallic tastingas it coursed down her face. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew she had to get help. She forced herself to crawl up the muddy embankment, losing one shoe in the process. There was nothing up above but thick brush and blackberry vines, and she ran in circles trying to find a way out.
 
Thorns snagged her clothes and scratched her arms and face. Every so often, she stopped and listened for a sound that might rise above the steady wind. His hopped-up car had a loud muffler, and she thought she would be able to hear it if he came back to see if she was really dead.
 
Finally, she found a dirt road. Far off in the distance, she could see the lights of a farmhouse. Sobbing, she headed in that direction. Her head felt as if it wasn’t even part of her body anymore but a balloon full of air, and she wondered if she would make it. She couldn’t stop to rest. He had wanted to kill her.

She remembered his eyes looking at her over the gun as if she was a rabbit in a trap. All of her begging and pleading had fallen on deaf ears. The last thing she remembered was a loud boom. She tried to focus on the lights ahead, but they blended into a blur of red as blood continued to pour from her head. It was a minute after 9,00 P. M. on that Wednesday night when Snohomish County Deputy Jim Eiden and Detective Roger Johnson responded to a call from the Cascade Valley Hospital in Monroe, Washington. The sheriff’s dispatcher had radioed that a young girl suffering from several bullet wounds had been brought into the hospital a few minutes before. She was in the emergency room, and it was questionable that she would live.

The officers looked suspiciously at the nervous man who had driven her to the hospital. He identified himself as Alf Johansson* and said he was a farmer who lived by himself out near the Jordan River Trail Estates between Arlington and Granite Falls. He said that he’d heard a faint pounding on his door, thought it was his imagination, and then heard it again. “I’m so far out in the country that it startled me, The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer you know? I just don’t get that many people knocking on my door after dark, and I hadn’t heard a car engine or footsteps or anything. Then I heard this little voice crying, I’ve been shot and raped. I looked out and here’s this girl real young girl and she’s got blood all over her.”

“You ever see her before?

“ Eiden asked, sensing truth in the man’s voice. “No, sir.

Never have, “ Johansson said. “But if I had, I wouldn’t have recognized her the way she was. I guess I should have run out and picked her up but I was so shocked myself to see her that way. I grabbed my keys and a blanket and told her to get in the truck. I feel bad about that now, but she was sitting up in the cab of the truck when I came running out. I’ll tell you I just got her in here as quick as I could.” The ER physicians told the sheriff’s men that the victim appeared to have two bullet woundsone in the scalp and one in the right cheek. Amazingly, she was still conscious. “You can talk to her, if you keep it brief.” Johnson and Eiden looked at the trembling young victim. She had suffered a bullet wound in her right cheekbone and there were black powder burns around the wound. This gun barrel debris indicated that someone had held the weapon virtually against her cheek and fired.

She told the investigators that her name was Barbie Linley* and she was fifteen years old, “but put down sixteen because it’s almost my birthday. This guy picked me up while I was hitchhiking.

And then he raped me, “ she said tearfully. “After that, he shot me.

“
 
It seemed impossible that she was still alive, and the Snohomish County investigators were careful to keep their own horror at what had happened to her out of their voices. She could go into shock at any moment. “You didn’t know this man? “ Johnson asked. “You’re sure it wasn’t the man who brought you into the hospital? You’re safe here, Barbie. You can tell us the truth.

You’re sure you’ve never seen him before? “

“No, “ she shook her head faintly. “That man was helping me. The other guy stopped when I was just hitching a ride up to look for my dad in Marysville. And he picked me up.” It was a familiar story to the Snohomish County officers, as it was to almost every lawman in the country. The first thing most parents teach their youngsters is, “Never get in a car with a stranger.” Yet, in the seventies, America’s teenagers had embraced hitchhiking wholeheartedly. In most states, hitching was legal, and the kids translated that to mean safe. In many cases, they got into cars with exactly the kind of people their parents had warned them about. One detective sighed in frustration. “We’re working on the murder of a teenager who was last seen hitchhiking. We put out a teletype asking for information on cases with similar MOS. We got back a dozen answers just from the Northwest. It’s an epidemic. But the kids keep right on hitchhiking. They don’t think it’s going to happen to them. There are guys out there just cruising around looking for a girl hitching.” The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer Barbie Linley was lying on her stomach in the emergency room as the deputies talked to her. The doctor treating her pointed to her wounds and said that, despite the copious blood, there were only three. They all looked as if they had entered from the front.

“One bullet’s still lodged in her cheek and the others exited out the back of her head.” He showed them the X-ray film, and they could see the large bullet probably a . 45 caliber slug clearly.

Barbie’s right cheekbone was shattered. Detective Jerry Cook arrived at the hospital and joined the investigators talking with the critically injured girl. “Do you know who shot youi mean, do you know anything at all about him? “ Cook asked. “Yes, “ was the amazing reply. “He told me his name was Easy. I laughed, and he said people called him that, and then he said his regular name was Brandon Oakley.

He picked me up in Everett, but then he drove me down a dirt road out in the country.” Barbie turned her face away and took a deep breath.

“Then he he raped me, and he shot me. I remember I felt three bullets.

“ Barbie Linley was very brave and very observant. By all rights, she should have been dead, but almost miraculously none of the . 45 slugs had struck her in a vital spot. She said that the man called “Easy” drove a fairly new Camaro and that it was either green or blue. “I think he’s about eighteen years old, probably about six feet one inch tall, and he has a big nose.” The doctors ended the interview then.

Barbie had L to be transferred to Providence Hospital in Everett for surgery. The sheriff’s men had heard the name Brandon Oakley before although he usually used his nickname, “Easy.” Brandon Oakley had been arrested only a week before on a burglary charge and promptly bailed out of jail. Why would he have told Barbie Linley his real name? The only answer was a terrible one, he had never expected her to live to report him to anyone. Eiden and Johnson headed to Granite Falls to see if they could locate Oakley. Granite Falls’ population was only twelve hundred, and they figured Police Chief Charles Curtis probably knew everyone in town. If Brandon Oakley lived there, Curtis probably knew his life story all the way back to kindergarten. They asked radio to locate Chief Curtis. While Barbie Linley was en route to Providence Hospital, Snohomish County Chief Criminal Deputy Glen Mann and Detective Doug Engelbretson were notified at home. The message was cryptic, “A girl’s been shot and rapedshe may not live.” Engelbretson and Mann rushed to the hospital. Reserve Deputy Leslie Miller, who worked full time as a laboratory technician at the hospital, assisted the detectives as they recorded a statement from the injured girl. Barbie told the same story that she’d whispered to deputies earlier. A nurse gave the detectives the clothing that Barbie Linley had worn to the hospital. They bagged the blood-soaked items into evidence, dark blue velvet jeans, a T-shirt imprinted, somewhat ironically, with The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer “Try it, you’ll like it”, a zodiac pendant, a bra, panties, and a one-dollar bill. Although she was in amazingly good condition for someone shot three times in the head, surgeons said they couldn’t operate on her without endangering her life. The bullet which had shattered her cheek had lodged in the hinge of her right jaw, making it impossible for her to open or close her mouth completely.

She would have to be treated vigorously with antibiotics to prevent infection before surgery began. One wound in the back of her head had not penetrated her skull, and the other proved to have come from a ricocheting bullet, and it was neither an entry nor exit wound.

However, both had caused severe bleeding. Barbie was fortunate that she had an unusually thick layer of bone in the back of her skull. She had, indeed, been raped. Detectives wondered how anyone could have treated such a skinny little kid so brutally.

There was no logical reason that she should be alive. Now, physicians worked to prevent an infection that might well be fatal if it reached the brain itself, which was only inches from the bullet in her cheek.

After talking with Barbie Linley, Mann and Engelbretson were satisfied that there was probable cause to arrest Brandon “Easy” Oakley on charges of first degree assault with attempt to commit murder and for armed forcible rape. They radioed detectives who waited in the Granite Falls vicinity. In the meantime, Deputy Ron Cooper and Detective Dick Taylor tried to find where the attack itself had taken place. It was full dark and finding physical
 
evidence would be a challenge in the black and frigid November night. They found a spot that matched Barbie Linley and Alf Johansson’s directions. It was off the Jordan Way Road and along an old logging road. With flashlights, they found recent tire tracks about five hundred feet up the road. The tracks were extremely wide and were from snow tires. Next, the investigators located a purple-and-white knitted stocking cap and four hundred feet farther a small shoe imprint.
 
There were two cigarette butts on the ground, along with a gum wrapper.
 
All of these items were dry, although the road was wet and muddy. The bank that Barbie had crawled up had seemed steep to her, but the ditch was really quite shallow.

Now Cooper and Taylor found her purse at the bottom. It had fringe and two shades of brown suede squares sewed together. They figured the victim had lain in the ditch some time because there was a pool of blood next to the purse. They could also see where Barbie’s hands had dug into the mud of the bank as she crawled out. Carefully, they retrieved the items in the ditch, slipped them into bags, and labeled them.

Nearly three miles away from the bloody ditch, Snohomish County

detectives approached a farmhouse on a twelve-acre farm near Granite

Falls. They noted the customized metallic-green 1969

Camaro in the driveway. It had orange and black “Happy Faces” glued to the back windows. It was five minutes to ten that night when they The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer knocked on the door and a woman answered. She looked distressed when they asked to talk to Brandon Oakley. “He’s home, “ she said. “But he’s in bed asleep. He just went back to duty at Fort Lewis today, and he was tired when he came home.” Chief Curtis and the Snohomish County deputies followed the nervous woman to Oakley’s room. When she switched the light on, a lanky young man sat up in bed, his eyes were bleary as if he’d been asleep for hours, and he appeared confused. The officers advised Oakley of his rights under Miranda and informed him that he was under arrest. He stared straight ahead at the wall, refusing to acknowledge the rights’ warning until Eiden asked him several times if he understood.

Finally he nodded his head scornfully. Asked if the clothes hanging over a chair in his room were the same ones he’d worn during the evening, Brandon Oakley nodded. The detectives took the clothes for evidence, and told him to put something else on.

Oakley gave verbal permission for a search of his car. The woman homeowner said that they could search his room. This initial search turned up nothing that could be linked to the attack on Barbie Linley but Brandon “Easy” Oakley was transported to jail.

His flashy Camaro was impounded and hauled to a local towing company, where it would undergo a thorough processing later.

Before they handcuffed him, the arresting officers cracked open a GSR (Gun Shot Residue) test kit and swabbed Oakley’s hands to see if he had fired a gun recently. The tests were positive. s E _ The “Easy” Oakley that Barbie Linley had described was, indeed, the same Brandon Oakley who had been arrested on the Halloween just past for second-degree burglary, and then released on his own personal recognition. Although just past his eighteenth birthday, Oakley already had had more bizarre run-ins with society than many men three times his age. Chief Chuck Curtis knew “Easy” far too well. A Granite Falls citizen had once muttered to the chief, “He’s going to kill someone if you cops don’t do something.” Around town, Oakley’s classmates had described him as “immature, “ a “show-off, “ and “a creep.” He had always been fascinated with fast, eye catching cars and he bragged that he’d driven 130 miles an hour on the freeway and gotten away with it. There had been an incident where he’d deliberately swerved his car at a pedestrian.