The End of the Dream (48 page)

shattered irreparably, but she had been lucky. Although she would always have a scar to remind her of the awful night on the logging road, her face healed. The detectives who had found her assailant were unaware that Barbie had an overwhelming need to find out why “Easy” Oakley had wanted to hurt her. Secretly, she wrote him a letter in jail. And he wrote back. Oakley was a challenge for jailers in the Snohomish County Jail. Soon after he went in, he met another prisoner who had once been committed to Western Washington State Hospital for a mental evaluation.
 
Oakley set out to learn how to appear insane. He told his cellmates he planned to go “the crazy route.” He spent one whole day staring at the ceiling of his cell, then remarked to another inmate, “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to just sit and stare at the ceiling all day and not talk to anyone? “ Evidently the catatonic imitation was too much of a bore, so he tried active disruptions.

He set fire to his mattress and started fights with other prisoners.

At various times he announced that he was James Bond, a Communist agent, and, later, an American spy who had gone undercover to fight foreign powers. He insisted to his fellow prisoners that he could not remember what had happened with Barbie Linley because he’d been “out on window-pane” (LSD). Oakley decorated the back of another prisoners’ jail coveralls with a grotesque ink sketch of a skull with a bullet hole cracking the bony structure. Underneath, he signed his handiwork, “Easy.”

“Easy” Oakley was not popular with his peers. He was derisive and ridiculing. But little Barbie Linley, The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer who had no one in her life who had acknowledged her existence in any real way, had had “Easy’s” full attention for hours on the night he raped and shot her. When she contacted him in jail, he had been pleasant to her. He, of course, had every reason to be, she was the prime witness against him. It was easy for him to convince her that he hadn’t meant to hurt her that he had been so attracted to her that he lost control of himself. She, on the other hand, blocked out the memory of the gun in his hands.

In order to even begin to understand her self-delusion, it is necessary to remember that Brandon Oakley came upon Barbie when she had left a home where she wasn’t wanted in a pitiful attempt to find a father who had never wanted her. She was cold, broke, lost, and miserable. And “Easy” had talked to her and given her a ride. She remembered the good part about that evening in November and pushed the awful part away.

Barbie continued to write to him. Why “Easy” Oakley raped and shot the slender fifteen-year-old is a mystery. He already had a girlfriend who told deputies that they had traveled all over the state and spent nights in motels together. And he had never touched her sexually.

It may have been that his sexual desire was aroused only when a female was terrified. Barbie Linley had certainly been afraid of him. When he was satiated, shooting Barbie may have been no more upsetting to him than swerving off the road to run over an animal.

A forensic psychologist diagnosed Oakley as a classic antisocial personality. After spending hours talking with the prisoner, he wrote, The Girl Who Fell in Love with Her Killer He unknowingly depicted a callous, hedonistic relationship with his peers. He was totally unappreciative of what his mother and brothers did for his well-being when he was confined in Germany and unappreciative of efforts to get him reassigned, as if this was all his obvious due. He felt himself innately lucky and deserving of continued good luck. He was blind to what he did not wish to see and flared to aggressive anger to terminate attempts to point out issues he did not want assessed. He was smoothly able to rationalize all of his behavior so that it appeared to him warranted, reasonable, and justified. He felt laws did not apply to him. He was incapable of guilt and felt himself a uniquely special individual.

In other words, “Easy” did what he wanted when he wanted and felt completely within his rights in doing so. He not only fit within the parameters that define an antisocial personality, he also had facets of the narcissistic personality disorder and the histrionic personality disorder. He wasn’t crazy, he simply thought he was special and he loved attention, and it didn’t matter who got hurt for him to have his own way always. While awaiting his trial for rape, sodomy, first degree assault with intent to commit murder, and commission of a felony while armed with a deadly weapon, “Easy” Oakley continued his insanity charade. He cut a gash in his forearm, it bled profusely but it wasn’t deep enough to do him much damage. He tied his neck to the bars with a towel and pretended to be hanging, but jailers could see that the terry cloth noose was not cinched tightly and that he was breathing quite comfortably. “Easy” was often angry with his jailers. Once, he screamed at a guard, “I’m going to get even with you just like I did Curran [the victim in the strangulation killing in Germany]! “

“Easy” Oakley went on trial during the third week of January 1974.

He continued his temper tantrums in the courtroom. During jury selection, it was necessary to handcuff him to his chair. When this didn’t work, the judge warned that if he didn’t stop misbehaving, he would be barred from his own trial. Three days later, “Easy” promised to behave himself and the cuffs were taken off. During his trial, court watchers also saw flashes of Oakley’s charming smile, which he could turn on at will. “Easy” had reason to smile, he had stolen the State’s chief witness against him. Incredible as it might seem, Barbie Linley had married him. As his wife, she could not be forced to testify against him. The sixteen-year-old without a home had grasped at the only chance she had ever been offered to become part of someone else’s life. The investigators shuddered at the thought of what her life would be like if her bridegroom should be acquitted. But that didn’t happen. Brandon Oakley was found guilty on all charges. His face turned scarlet with fury and he looked as if he were about to explode. Court deputies quickly slipped handcuffs on him for the long walk back to jail. He faced two life sentences to run concurrently (which meant a minimum of thirteen years and four months), a ten-year sentence on the sodomy charge and a mandatory five-year sentence on the deadly weapon charge.
 
Brandon “Easy” Oakley was released from prison after seventeen years. He is now in his early forties. No one was surprised when his marriage did not last. An Unlikely Suspect Although this case happened more than two decades ago, it might well have come out of the headlines of today’s newspapers. The suspect was the last person the victim’s family and the police suspected. He was someone who seemed totally incapable of violent murder. He was to have been part of the dream of a reunited family. In truth, he turned out to be the destroyer of that dream..
 
It was shortly after midnight on Wednesday, October 2, when Deputy Mike Butschli was dispatched to a residential subdivision in the southeast part of King County, Washington. The only information he had was that there was a “possible dead body.” He wasn’t overly concerned as he headed through the night to the address given.

Such a report can turn out to be anything, a pile of leaves or rags, a drunk sleeping it off who looks as if he’s dead, a “natural” death, suicide, or, only rarely, a homicide. The neighborhood where the call had originated certainly didn’t look ominous, and the neat, two-story white house with gray trim appeared peaceful enough from the outside.

Inside, it was another story entirely. A distraught middle-aged man met Butschli at the front door and apologized for his delay in answering. He said his dog was going nuts, and he’d had to put it in the garage first.
 
He identified himself as Milton English, * the owner of the home, and he beckoned to the officer to follow him as he started upstairs. Now expecting to find a dog-bite victim or even a dead animal, Butschli followed English to a bedroom on the west side of the upper story.
 
English said it was his son’s room. The door to the room was open and the deputy could see a partially clad woman lying face up on the floor.
 
He hurried over to her, and knelt beside her to feel for a pulse in the carotid artery in her neck. There was none. And hers appeared not to be a natural death. There was an ugly cluster of wounds on the top of her head and blood had soaked her hair and the blanket beneath her. Deputy Butschli backed carefully out of the room.

He asked the ashen-faced man to take a seat in the living room and to refrain from touching anything until homicide detectives arrived.

Sergeants Sam Hicks and Jerry Van Horne were already en route to help secure the scene. In a broken voice, Milt English told Butschli that the dead woman upstairs was his twenty-nine-year-old wife, Vera. He said he’d found her on the floor when he returned from work at midnight. He worked the swing shift, and he had left for work as usual about three-forty that afternoon. Everything at home had been completely normal. His wife’s two little girls by a previous marriage were playing outside and his son by a former marriage, John English, fourteen, was off somewhere on his bike.

“I kissed my wife, picked up my lunchbox, put on my jacket, and left, “ English said. “Like I always do.” He had called his wife’s name when he came home and received no answer. He said she worked two nights a week in a gift shop at a nearby shopping mall, but the store closed at 9:00 P. M. Worried because she should have been home by then, he’d started to look for her. Then he’d noticed that her car was missing from the garage and assumed she’d been held up at work. “Where are the children? “ Butschli asked.

“The girls are here.” English said that he’d checked on the little girls when his wife hadn’t answered him. They were sleeping soundly in their room. “Since my son would have been baby-sitting if she was at work, I went to his bedroom to ask him where she was. But on the way, I saw my wife on the floor.” His teenage son was not in the house, and English was afraid that something had happened to him, too. The boy was always very conscientious about caring for his seven- and eight-year-old stepsisters. It just wasn’t like him to leave the little girls alone in the house.

Within minutes, the gray and white house in the quiet neighborhood was alive with King County police cars. A deputy was posted at the door of the bedroom where Vera English lay, they didn’t want her small daughters to see her body as detectives carried them to a neighbor’s house. The county homicide detectives surveyed the body of Vera English. Even in death, it was apparent that the slender woman had been extremely attractive.

It looked as if she had been the victim of a violent sexual attack, her bloodied yellow sweater had been yanked above her full breasts, her bra had been ripped open, and her legs were splayed in the classic rape position. The lower half of her body was naked except for knee-length nylons. The dead woman’s panties lay near her body tied in knots.

There was a belt and a multicolored garment of some sort tied tightly around her neck. A blue claw hammer just to the right of her shoulder was covered with congealing blood.

Undoubtedly it had caused the terrible wounds to her head. Her purse’s contents were dumped all over the floor. Despite the fact that the thermostat in the house read seventy-four degrees, Vera English’s body was cool. She had probably been dead for several hours. While the patrol officers searched the exterior of the home and yard, Detectives Ted Forrester and Rolf Grunden photographed, measured, and processed the home’s interior. They noted that someone had piled pillows taken from the master bedroom beside Vera English’s body. This kind of attempt to make the body “comfortable” usually indicated that the killer had been someone close to the victim. It was a puzzling case.

Had a burglar known that Milt English worked late and that this was Vera’s night to work? He might have come in to rob the home and been surprised by Vera English and attacked her with the hammer in a panic.

It was possible that the boy hadn’t even been home, he could very well turn up at a friend’s house but that possibility seemed less probable as it got later and he neither came home nor called.

Concern grew for fourteen-year-old John English. The little girls would have been no particular threat to a killer. They had probably slept through the whole attack, and he might not even have known they were in the house. But a teenaged boy would have tried to = defend his stepmother when she ran to his bedroom for help. He would have been able to identify the killer, and the chances were good that he had been abducted by the murderer when he made his escape in the dead woman’s car. The King County detectives tried to calm Milt English, but they all knew there was a good possibility that his son had been killed too. He wasn’t anywhere in the house or the rain-soaked yard.

Police radio broadcast a bulletin at once asking for reports on any sightings of the missing 1974 bronze Chevy Nova with Washington plates, IEG-508.

Soon every lawman in the seven western states was watching for it, but the car didn’t turn up. There were so many places in the Northwest where a car with a dead boy in the trunk could be hidden, bottomless bodies of water, old mines, almost impenetrable forests. Milt English had already lost his wife, and now he was frantic with worry about his only son. He was not, however, out of the woods as a suspect himself.

The first rule of thumb in a homicide investigation is always, “Look at the people closest to the victim.” Only after detectives clear family, lovers, friends, and work associates do they look for stranger killers.

And they usually don’t have to go that far down the list. As Ted Forrester and Rolf Grunden processed the crime scene in the English home far into the wee hours of October 2, they discovered some bizarre items that seemed out of place in a nice suburban neighborhood. John English’s bedroom was not the usual boy’s room with sports posters and equipment.
 
There was a mobile hanging over his bed, but it wasn’t made of colored disks or birds or butterflies, this one had anatomically correct naked dolls hanging from nooses around their necks. The two detectives lifted the boy’s mattress and found a profusion of pictures of nude women in various provocative poses, pictures obviously cut out of girlie and sex magazines. And they weren’t Playboy centerfolds, they were hard-core pornographic photographs that included bondage and discipline. As Grunden and Forrester proceeded through the home, they figured they had found the source of the kid’s photo collection. There were a plethora of sexually oriented magazines in several rooms. The parents had obviously made no effort to hide them from the children. It wasn’t surprising that John had collected dozens of pictures that depicted women as the objects of what could only be called kinky sex. It appeared that fourteen-year-old John English had been bombarded with sexual stimuli pretty heavy for an adolescent male. Grunden and Forrester had seen some unexpected twists in homicide cases over the years and nothing surprised them much anymore. They continued to peek into closets and behind furniture, hoping to find some clue to what had happened in this house.
 
When they pulled out a drawer in the bedside table in the master bedroom, they found all manner of ropes, handcuffs, and leather thongs fashioned into loops. Although they exchanged glances at the bizarre collection, they weren’t there to pass judgment on the Englishs’ sex life.