The shocked woman said that her niece Emily had been visiting her grandparents for the past several days. She had arrived from Texas with her common-law husband, twenty-nine-year-old Terry Ruckelhaus.
When they asked her about Ruckelhaus and where he might have gone, the woman tried to gather her thoughts. “He said he wanted to see the waterfront—that he’d been in the navy at Bremerton once. That’s all I can think of.”
She said that Ruckelhaus drove a maroon 1974 Capri. “I don’t know the license number,” she said, and then looked up, “No—wait. He said something about getting a ticket for a moving violation on the trip up here. Would that help?”
It quite probably would.
Reed called the Washington State Patrol and gave them Ruckelhaus’s name, a description of the car, and the information that it had Texas plates. The WSP computers soon came up with the license number: Texas CXB-808.
Sergeant Ivan Beeson and Dick Reed called the ferry terminals on the Seattle waterfront. If Ruckelhaus really had it in his plans to return to Bremerton, a ferry would be the quickest route. Ferry officials reported that a maroon Capri with Texas plates was on board a ferry departing the Colman dock at 2 P.M. It was due to dock in Winslow on Bainbridge Island at 2:40.
The detectives alerted the Winslow Police, Poulsbo Police, and the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office that a murder suspect was on board the ferry and gave his description. Two police officers and a sheriff’s deputy on the Bainbridge Island side of Puget Sound put on ferry workers’ uniforms and waited at the dock for the ferry from Seattle to hove into sight.
As it eased into the slip, the three officers jumped on board and moved between the vehicles waiting to debark. Their eyes rapidly scanned the license plates as they searched for one from Texas.
They finally spotted it and saw that there was a couple inside. All the vehicles on board had been delayed from driving off the ferry, and drivers and passengers craned their necks in curiosity as the trio of officers surrounded the Capri.
They signaled to the woman passenger to flip up the locks. She looked nervously toward the driver, and then did what they asked. With weapons drawn, they ordered the driver to get out.
As the driver staggered from the car, a strong odor of liquor emanated from him. He wore blue jeans, a yellow shirt, and a leather thong tie. There was a knife sheath on his belt, and the Bainbridge Island and Kitsap County officers found two knives inside the car.
The suspect put up no resistance as he was arrested. He appeared to be concerned about his “wife,” Emily, who trembled with shock.
She identified him as Terry Ruckelhaus.
Handcuffed, he was transported to the Kitsap County Jail in Port Orchard. Kitsap County chief of detectives Bill Clifton read Ruckelhaus his rights and asked him if he knew what he was being booked for.
“No,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“You’re under arrest for murder.”
Ruckelhaus insisted that he had no memory about what had taken place in Seattle.
“I can’t even remember getting on the ferry.”
Ruckelhaus said he was twenty-nine, but he looked younger. He had curly hair that hung close to his face in ringlets, even features, and a thick mustache. His eyes were glassy, almost blank. When Clifton read him his Miranda rights, he nodded and said he understood them.
While Ivan Beeson and Dick Reed were on their way to his Port Orchard office by ferry, Bill Clifton talked to Ruckelhaus’s young female passenger, Emily Borden.
She looked as though she had gazed into hell itself, but she made an effort to describe had happened at her grandparents’ home earlier on this Christmas Day.
Emily told him that Terry had literally kidnapped her, forcing her to travel to Seattle from Texas. Everything seemed to be all right when they got to her grandparents’ home and for a few days afterward. “But then my parents called me from Anchorage, Alaska,” she said. “That’s where they live, and I’ve been trying to get home to them for months now. I spoke to my mother, but Terry was sitting next to me, and he was giving me dirty looks so that I was afraid to say much.”
“What is going on?” her mother had asked.
“I tried to keep my voice soft so he couldn’t hear me. I told her that I would write as soon as I could, and explain everything.
“After we hung up, I went into the bedroom and Terry followed me, demanding to know what my mother said, and what I said to her. I told him my parents just said to say ‘Hi’ to him, and that they had wished him Merry Christmas. But he didn’t believe that was all. He said what we did was none of my folks’ business and he didn’t want them butting in.”
Terry had decided then that they had to leave Seattle, and he didn’t want to go to her aunt’s Christmas dinner. When Emily begged him to let her stay, he became enraged and started tearing her clothes off.
“He ripped off the new white nightie my grandmother bought me for Christmas. And then he tore up my scarf and a shirt.
“My grandmother heard us fighting and she opened the door and told Terry to leave me alone. He yelled at her to get out and slammed the door in her face.”
A minute later, eighty-three-year-old William Borden had opened the door.
“He saw Terry holding me down on the bed, and he came in and tried to make him stop. After that, there was blood everywhere.”
Ivan Beeson and Dick Reed arrived in Port Orchard to take custody of Terry Ruckelhaus and to take Emily Borden back to Seattle. She wanted to go back, but she begged them not to make her see Terry or put her in the same car with him. They assured her she wouldn’t have to. Beeson drove the suspect back to Seattle around the land route that goes through Tacoma, while Reed accompanied Emily on the ferry.
Somewhat calmer now, Emily gave Dick Reed a complete statement about what had happened in the Bordens’ home. When William Borden told Ruckelhaus to leave his granddaughter alone, the younger man whirled and shouted, “You’re not going to stop me from taking my wife!”
“I didn’t think my grandfather was stabbed,” she said tearfully, “but he kind of looked down, and then I saw all the blood. Then he was on the floor and Grandma was lying on her back.”
Emily said she couldn’t do anything to help them. Terry had gone to the kitchen with a knife in his hand. His glasses were on the floor and she’d picked them up and washed the blood off the lenses. She didn’t know why she’d done that. It was all so horrible, as if it couldn’t really be happening.
“Terry told me to get the car keys. I saw my grandmother in the kitchen trying to get something to clean up my grandfather. She kept saying, ‘My husband is dead. Emily, don’t leave! I have to get help. Please call the police.’ I wanted to help her, but Terry yelled, ‘Mrs. B., no!’ And he jerked the phone out of the wall.”
Then he told Emily that they had to leave. Shocked and terrified, she went with him.
Emily said she felt guilty because her resistance to leaving with him had set the scene for her grandfather’s knifing.
“I told him that he just couldn’t keep dragging me all over the country. It was the first time I ever really stuck up for myself. My grandparents tried to save me, and they threatened to call the police. But after he stabbed my grandfather, I knew I had to go with Terry to get him away from there—so my grandmother could call for help.”
Emily had called Amber, her dog, and they got in the car.
“Terry was shaking so hard that he had a hard time starting the car. He kept saying, ‘Look what you made me do! Look what you made me do.’ ”
They started driving toward downtown, and Terry saw signs directing them to the ferry terminal.
“He was crazy—he kept babbling and telling me that now we both had to die, but we would meet again ‘in the sea.’ And then everything would be all right. It would all be different then. I was sure he was going to kill me, too. But there wasn’t any way to get away from him once we were out of the house. He was right behind me, and he wasn’t going to let me
go.”
Emily said she had asked Terry to get rid of his knife, but he had only tucked it into the waistband of his pants. She begged him not to use it.
“He was covered with blood,” she said with a shudder. “It was all down the front of him and his hands were red. My shoes were red, too, and I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to clean them off. I tried to wipe the blood off when we waited in line for the ferry, but there was too much—so I slipped them off and put on another pair.”
As their car inched forward in the ferry line, Terry Ruckelhaus had rambled on about how they could get married now and have children. But soon, he would switch to his theory that they would both have to die—to meet again in the sea someday.
Emily said she couldn’t believe that no one noticed Terry, covered as he was with her grandparents’ blood, but people seemed intent on their own errands on this incredibly gruesome Christmas Day. Terry had reached across her to take a bottle of Wild Turkey whiskey out of the glove compartment. He took a deep swallow, and she said she’d encouraged him to drink it, hoping that if he got drunk enough, he wouldn’t be able to hurt her or anyone else after they landed.
“I was just hoping we would land,” Emily told Dick Reed. “With his wild talk about our being together in the sea, I was afraid he might force me to jump off the ferry with him.”
Emily said she hadn’t been able to let herself think about what had happened to her grandparents; she tried to hope that her grandfather had only been unconscious when they left. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could be dead so quickly.
It was twenty minutes to ten that night when Detective Dick Reed and Emily Borden debarked from the Seattle-bound ferry and drove the three blocks to the Public Safety Building and the Homicide Unit. There was no place for the exhausted girl to stay. She couldn’t go back to the bloody house on Myrtle Street, and her relatives were all at the hospital where Florence Borden was undergoing lifesaving surgery; the doctors who operated on her discovered that she had avoided the same death suffered by her husband by a mere fraction of an inch.
The detectives found a safe hotel room for Emily.
Their own day was far from over. It seemed to them that Christmas Day had gone on for a week. There was voluminous physical evidence to log in to the Evidence Room, and reports to type up. Beeson and Reed checked with the hospital at 12:40 A.M. and found that Florence Borden was still in surgery, still in critical condition.
The two Homicide investigators booked Terry Ruckelhaus into jail. The next day, he would be formally charged with one count of first-degree murder and one count of assault in the first degree. The second charge might become another murder charge at any time as Florence Borden was holding onto life by a thread.
His bail was set at $100,000. The booking sheet listed Ruckelhaus as twenty-nine years old, five feet eight inches tall, 165 pounds, with brown hair and mustache, blue eyes. His occupation was listed as “chemist” and he carried a Hawaiian driver’s license.
Ruckelhaus seemed removed from the Bordens’ brutal stabbings, but he still claimed to be very worried about his “wife,” Emily. It clearly hadn’t dawned on him yet that he had committed such savage acts that Emily was lost to him forever.
Early on the morning of December 26, Detective Dick Sanford went to Winslow and processed Ruckelhaus’s car. He found the bloody shoes Emily had removed during their flight to escape on the ferry. There was a large, very sharp buck knife in its case under the front passenger seat. It was similar to the buck knife arresting officers had removed from Ruckelhaus’s belt as they took him from his car the night before. He had been well prepared with backup weapons.
On December 27, Emily Borden gave Sanford a taped statement about her life with Terry Ruckelhaus, detailing the romantic beginning that had disintegrated into an endless ordeal of beatings and terror. She recalled how many times she had tried to get away from him but had found it impossible. Terry told her continually that she belonged to him—in mind, body, and soul. He had told her he would always find her—and he had, tracking her down until the last, fatal trip to Seattle.
Would she agree to testify against Terry in a murder trial?
YES!
There was an icy resolve in Emily now. It was as if she had become so completely terrified that she had passed over into a place where Terry could no longer make her afraid. He was locked up, and she intended to see he would stay behind bars.
Florence Borden did not die. She beat all the odds and slowly recovered her strength. There would be some years left for her, but years without Papa, who had died before her eyes as she tried to save him. Still confused and unbelieving, she gave detectives a statement about what had happened. It coincided exactly with Emily’s.
Terry Ruckelhaus underwent observation to determine if he was mentally competent to participate in his own defense in a court of law. He was found to be sane, and able to stand trial. That trial began on March 29, 1976, in Judge Jerome M. Johnson’s courtroom in King County Superior Court. Lee Yates, a King County deputy prosecutor, presented the state’s case in the nonjury trial.
Terry Ruckelhaus had an exceptional defense team. Two of the area’s best-known criminal attorneys, Anthony Savage and Michael Frost, argued in his behalf. Many years later, Savage would defend Gary Ridgway, the infamous Green River Killer.
Savage argued for acquittal on grounds of mental irresponsibility, but Lee Yates’s questioning of Emily Borden elicited a portrait of a man consumed with compulsive jealousy. Although Terry Ruckelhaus’s obsession with her seemed psychotic, he had been fully capable of formulating carefully thought-out plans to kidnap her and keep her captive.
Emily’s grandparents had gone out of their way to be kind and welcoming to Terry. They had protested only when he began to hurt Emily.
And he had turned on them in a maniacal frenzy.
On April 6, Judge Johnson made his decision. Terence Roger Ruckelhaus was convicted of second-degree murder with no premeditation but with conscious intent to kill, and first-degree assault. He would not serve life in prison, although there were many who knew of this case who felt he should.
Thirty-two years later, Terry Ruckelhaus has vanished into society, leaving no records behind him with which to trace him.
Emily, too, has moved on. Today, she would be fifty years old, and Ruckelhaus, if he is still alive, would be sixty-one.
Emily Borden’s liaison with Terry Ruckelhaus is a classic example of love slowly killed by sick jealousy. If Terry had ever allowed himself to trust her, to accept the affection she’d given him so willingly at the start of their relationship, untold tragedy could have been averted. But he smothered her love, binding her so tightly to him that she was suffocated and repulsed by his possessiveness. He spent years in prison while Emily picked up the frayed ends of her life. One thing was certain: she never wanted to see him again.
What Emily suffered at Terry’s hands was, sadly, not unusual, and certainly not something that has stopped happening as women have won more rights over the decades since. Indeed, women who strike possessive men as uppity and too strong for their own good often invoke abuse. Except for the date of this murder, nothing has really changed. Every day, women are trapped in what domestic violence experts term the “circle of abuse.”
A startling diagram designed to demonstrate how domestic violence occurs in an endless, seemingly inescapable circle is rimmed with the words “Physical Violence—Sexual—Physical—Violence—Sexual—Physical Violence.”
Inside the ring of virtual terror are the behaviors that foreshadow domestic violence for women in every single demographic level of society:
Jealousy and possessiveness
Isolation
Emotional abuse, belittling comments
Intimidation and insults
Coercion and threats
Minimizing and denying the man’s behavior
Blaming the woman
Using children as hostages
Demanding “male pr
ivilege”
Economic abuse
Many women who read Emily’s story and the checklist above are going to recognize danger in their own relationships. I hope sincerely they will rethink their own engagements or marriages, and extricate themselves before they are caught too tightly.
It is never too late, though, even if they are legally bound to someone who treats them badly.
One factor has changed since 1976; there are far more groups and agencies where women who are afraid can turn. I hope that they will seriously consider contacting the closest domestic violence organization in the areas where they live. For those with Internet access, go to www.google.com and type in “domestic violence” to locate places that offer help.
At some point, the circle of abuse must be broken. I don’t want to keep writing books and stories about women who have been hurt—or killed—by someone whom they once loved.
Let’s all work together to break the circle.
The
Painter’s Wife
Every decade or so, Hollywood produces a movie with a story line that is all too familiar but whose theme is so chillingly intriguing that moviegoers flock to see it. When ordinary people become the victims of a home invasion, we all feel a sudden doubt: we may not be as safe as we thought we were. There are few thoughts more frightening than the possibility of someone hiding in our home—someone who really doesn’t care if we live or die.
I always think of a particular movie when I read about actual cases of home invasion: The Desperate Hours. It first hit theaters in 1955. Humphrey Bogart starred as the villain who invaded Fredric March’s home and threatened his family. In 1990, the same scenario starred Mickey Rourke and Anthony Hopkins in those roles. Both movies were based on a suspenseful novel by Joseph Hayes.