The End of the Dream (47 page)

Luckily, the target had leapt out of the way in time. Teenagers in town had told Chief Curtis that Brandon went out of his way to run over animals. Brandon Oakley had five older brothers, the oldest a dozen years older than he was. Since his father had left the home some months before his birth, his brothers had tried to fill in as surrogate fathers. But he had resented their telling him what to do, and he’d been something of a behavior problem since he was ten. Despite his sadistic antics, “Easy” Oakley had friends, most of them a few grades behind him, kids who were impressed with his rebellion against authority. When he wanted to be charming, “Easy” had one of the most winning smiles in Granite Falls, but when The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer he was feeling hostile, he had thought up some fairly rotten tricks to pull. On one occasion in high school, he had deliberately run a board full of nails through a planer in Shop, ruining the planer blade. While Brandon Oakley waited in jail for his arraignment, Doug Engelbretson questioned more of his friends. They had heard “Easy” was carrying a . 45 in a shoulder holster when he returned to Granite Falls from serving overseas in the army. They recalled that he had always carried a guneven in high school. He liked to pull his car parallel with another vehicle on the road and fire at the occupants with his gun, only he had it loaded with blanks.

“Easy” Oakley hadn’t graduated from high school. He had joined the army at the age of seventeen. After basic training he had been sent to Germany, where he was a truck driver. He reportedly enjoyed this duty, but something happened during his second month in Europe that landed him in jail. Oakley’s barracks mate, a soldier named Curran, was found strangled. “Easy” claimed he knew nothing about how Curran had come to be choked to death in their barracks room, but army authorities held him for court-martial proceedings. Six months later, Brandon Oakley was acquitted of the murder charges. Through the efforts of his family and the intervention of Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, he was ordered back to the States and reassigned to Fort Lewis sometime in October of 1973. He had also been granted a thirty-day leave that was scheduled to end on November 6, one day before Barbie Linley was attacked. According to his . family and Fort Lewis authorities he had reported for duty but had been driving home in his new Camaro each night. Now, only two-and-a-half months after his acquittal on murder charges in Germany, “Easy” Oakley was facing serious charges once again.
 
On the early morning of November 8, while Barbie Linley fought for her life in Everett’s Providence Hospital, Snohomish County investigators returned to the lonely logging road where the she had been attacked.
 
They approached the shooting site on the logging road just as Barbie and her attacker would have the night before. As their vehicles moved slowly along the road, they videotaped the scene. When the road narrowed, they parked their cars and walked up the logging road.

It was an area which had been clear-cut and reseeded with small firs, and much of it was still piled with slash. At the end of the logging road, it split into a Y. It was here that the assault appeared to have taken place. In the daylight, they could see a set of small footprints that led from the bloody ditch up the bank through mud and heavy brush.

For 120 feet, the tracks went in a circle and then went back to the road, and finally to the blacktop. These had to be prints Barbie had made as she struggled to find a way out. There were the tire tracks too, extremely wide tire tracks measuring almost seven and a half inches wide.

And they were distinctive. The outer rim of the tread had been worn down almost flat while the inner rim still had thick tread.

The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer The air was so frigid that the detectives had to build a fire before the plaster moulages they made of the footprints and tire tracks would set up. As they worked, sleet drove needles of ice beneath their collars and cut into their faces. It seemed even more impossible now that a terribly wounded girl could ever have made her way out of this deserted area. Two days after she was shot, Barbie Linley’s doctors finally said she was strong enough to withstand a longer interview. Doug Engelbretson and Detective Vivian Griffiths went to Room 425 in Providence Hospital to talk with the 11 0-pound girl. Because she could not yet open her mouth with the slug caught in her jaw, it was painful for her to talk.

But Barbie was able to tell them that she had already completed her high-school requirements and was attending an Everett secretarial school. At six o’clock on the evening of November 7, she had been hitchhiking on the corner of Hewitt and Broadway in Everett. “I was standing there about five minutes and a blue and green Camaro stopped to pick me up.”

“Can you describe anything else about the car? “ Engelbretson asked.

Barbie gave the two detectives an amazingly detailed description of the vehicle. “The inside of the car was black, “ she said. “And a strap used to pull the driver’s door closed was broken. There was a white scarf hanging from the rearview mirror, and a little stuffed dog. It had bucket seats with a console between them.

He had marijuana in there.” Barbie enlarged upon her first description of her lr S L assailant. “He was tall and thin, and his hair was pretty short. The only part that was long was in the front, and that hung down over his eyes.

“

“What was he wearing? “ Vivian Griffiths asked. “Faded Levis.” Barbie said she had told the man that she was on her way to Marysville, about seven miles north. That was OK with him, but, as soon as they left Everett, he had turned in another direction.

“I know it was dumb, “ Barbie said, “But I liked his car and I didn’t say anything. We talked, and he told me his name was Easy, and then that it was Brandon Oakley. He told me he’d only lived around here for six weeks.”

“Easy” had offered Barbie marijuana and she’d accepted.

“But then he kept telling me to roll more joints, and I didn’t want to.

I wasn’t holding the smoke in my lungsi blew it out quickly so it wouldn’t affect me.” While he drove, “Easy” Oakley had smoked several joints. Barbie realized then that she was way over her head, and getting in deeper. As the Camaro hurtled toward Lake Stevens, Oakley asked her if she wanted some cocaine. She had never had cocaine, but she wanted to appear worldly, so she said, “OK, sure.”

“OK. We’ll go to my house and get some, “

“Easy” had answered. But the drive to his house had ended up on a lonely country road instead.

Explaining again that he hadn’t lived in the area long, “Easy” Oakley backed the Camaro out and turned into an even narrower dirt road. “He said, Oh, heck, I’ve got the wrong road again, The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer when he came to a Y in the road, “ Barbie remembered.
 
But now “Easy” made no pretense of backing out. He turned off the engine and the radio and remarked, “Doesn’t the quiet sound good? “ The quiet sounded frightening to Barbie Linley, and she asked him to turn the radio back on. He did, but then he grabbed her and started to kiss her.
 
She tried to push him away. “I begged him not to, “ Barbie said, thinking back to the moment she realized she had gotten herself into a scary situation. She said that “Easy” had leaned back and she thought that he was just going to sit there for a few minutes. But then he said a strange thing, “Do you like your head? “ She thought he was kidding her in some odd way and mumbled, “Sure.”

Then he was kissing her again, and she felt something moving down the front of her T-shirt.

She thought it was his hand and she reached to move it away. It was a gun. Holding the gun against her, he said, “Do you want to lose your head? No? Well, just be cool.” He had asked her for oral sex and she said, “No. Please, no! “ But he was forcing her down, his hand on the back of her neck. She asked if he was going to choke her, and he said he knew a better way to die and touched her again with the gun.

Sickened, she complied with his request. And then he had peeled off her clothes and pushed her between the seats, where he raped her. It seemed to last for an hour as the icy rain drummed on the top of his car.
 
When he was finally finished, Barbie had asked, “Can you take me home now? I won’t tell anybody.” He seemed to agree and he even offered to let her drive. She got out and started to walk around to the driver’s side. But he met her outside the car, removed her blouse, and forced her back into the car where he raped her for the fourth time. Still he was not satiated. Barbie got out and tried to put her clothes on as she edged toward the passenger seat. Suddenly, “Easy” had snaked out his arm, grabbed her and pulled her shirt over her head.

It was then that she felt a blow on the back of her head. The force knocked her off balance.

She realized he was hitting her with the gun. Desperate, she pretended to collapse on the ground, hoping he would think he’d hit her hard enough to knock her unconscious and would just would go away. Barbie said she’d lain there on her stomach for a long time, with her legs drawn up under her. “It got really quiet, “ she told Griffiths and Engelbretson. “I couldn’t hear him, so I risked a quick look over my shoulder.”

“Easy” Oakley was standing above her, smiling, his legs spread wide apart, holding a large handgun in both hands. It was pointed straight at her head. She said she’d cried out, “No! Please!

No! “ But “Easy” only squeezed the trigger. “I felt such a tremendous force hit the back of my head, “ Barbie remembered. “It lifted me up off the ground and flipped me over onto my back. I felt like I was flying.” Her ordeal was far from over. She had been The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer knocked into some kind of ditch or depression, but she could see “Easy” looming over her. He was still aiming the big gun at her. She thought she was going to die. Too scared to speak, she watched him slowly squeeze the trigger. A bullet slammed into her face, and a geyser of blood spurted from her cheek.

“It felt as though someone hit me in the face with a hammer, and the pain was so bad I didn’t think I could stand it.

“ Barbie Linley was sure that “Easy” was going to shoot her again.

Maybe she was already dead. It was hard to tell, there was so much blood, and so much pain. “But he walked away from me. He opened the car door and took out my purse and my coat, and he threw them on top of me.
 
I lay there so still. I wanted him to think that I was dead, and he didn’t need to worry that I could tell anybody what he’d done to me.

“ She said she had waited until she could no longer hear the sound of his car’s motor. Then she had struggled to her feet and crawled out of the ditch. “First, I put my coat on, “ Barbie said, her eyes mirroring remembered fear. “I pulled my shirt down and I started toward a light.

I saw the light and I sort of walked toward it, but there were all kinds of tree stumps and everything, little sticks and water and stuff, and I was stumbling over them as I started to walk back to the road.”

“Do you know how far you went out in the brush? “

“Oh, I didn’t walk very far. Maybe seventy-five or a hundred feet. I turned around and started walking back, because it was too hard.

I kept falling and hitting my head. I was scared that guy, Brandon, L The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer would come back. So, when I made the road, I was sort of sticking along the side of the road so he wouldn’t see me if he did.” Somehow, Barbie had made it to the farmhouse in the distance and to safety.

She had stumbled more than six hundred yards. Brandon “Easy” Oakley’s car was thoroughly processed in the impound garage where it was being held. Just as Barbie Linley had described, a white knit scarf and a yellow-and-black stuffed dog hung from the rearview mirror. Detectives found a bag of marijuana, cigarette papers, and matches in the console between the bucket seats. A “roach” was still in the ashtray. In the trunk of the Camaro, they found a somewhat odd item, it was the complete transcript of Oakley’s murder trial in Germany. They did not find the .
 
45 handgun that had fired the bullet into Barbie’s head.

However, on that day, they were about to get some help in that area. A psychology class in one of the local high schools was discussing the vicious assault when one of the students said, “Yeah, and they’ve arrested Brandon Oakley, too.” This was electrifying news to another boy. He hurried home after school and grabbed the evening paper that headlined Oakley’s arrest. He said nothing to his family, he didn’t want to worry them but he had something in his possession that he thought the sheriffbs office should know about. At a quarter to six that evening, he walked up to the front desk in the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office and asked to talk to a detective.
 
“It’s about Easy’ Oakley, “ the nervous teenager said. Doug Engelbretson hurried into the office from his home.
 
He could see the kid was scared. “I’ve got a gun in my car, sir” the boy said. “Brandon Oakley gave it to me last Wednesday night. He handed me the gun and a shoulder holster and said, Can my heater! “

“Did you get rid of that gun? “ Engelbretson asked. “No sir. I still have it. Would you like to see it? “ Engelbretson most assuredly would.
 
The boy handed over a bag. Inside, there was a . 455 six-shot Webley revolver-Mark VI. Ballistics tests would prove that this was the gun used to shoot Barbie Linley. The cooperative teenager who brought the gun in assured Doug Engelbretson that he’d had no idea that a girl had been shot when “Easy” gave him the weapon to dispose of. But he admitted that Oakley had attempted to involve him in burglaries.

“He said all I had to do was be a lookout, but I told him, No way! “ Doctors at Providence Hospital were cautiously optimistic about Barbie Linley’s recovery. They had managed to forestall any infection, and they were considering leaving the bullet in her head because surgery to remove it would be so dangerous. In the end, they had no choice.

Unless they got the . 45 slug out, she would never have normal mobility of her jaw. She couldn’t go through life with her mouth locked half open. They operated and gave her massive doses of antibiotics and gradually she began to recover. At first it had seemed that her cheekbone had .