Kiss Me, Kill Me and Other True Cases

  They knew from autopsy findings that the contents of Victoria Legg’s stomach indicated that she had eaten Chinese food within two hours of her death. Teams of detectives talked to the proprietors and waiters of every Chinese restaurant from the University District northward. It was a tremendous undertaking: Chinese food is very popular in Seattle, and there seemed to be Chinese restaurants in every block. The detectives visited dozens of them.

  It was the team of Nat Crawford and Don Dragland who found an important witness. They located a counter girl in a Chinese drive-in on Lake City Way who immediately picked Cal Lansing’s photo from the ten-mug-shot laydown they showed her.

  She pointed to his picture and said, “Yes, I’m sure. This man was here on Friday evening just before closing. He came in about a quarter to ten and he was in a hurry. I can’t remember just what he ordered, but it wasn’t a large order—only about enough for two people.”

  But just as the two detectives got their hopes up, the witness said she hadn’t seen whether Lansing had a girl with him or not.

  “From my counter,” she explained, “I can’t see the whole parking lot. There could have been someone with him, but when he headed for his car, he walked out of my line of sight.”

  Still, it was another important circumstantial piece of evidence. Vicki died two or three hours after she had Chinese food, and Lansing had bought an order for two around ten P.M.

  As Monday ended, the investigative crew, which by this time included almost every member of the department’s seventeen-man Homicide Unit, had reconstructed the events of Friday evening—but only to the point where the couple had presumably visited the Chinese drive-in.

  Just as important, or perhaps more compelling, was what they had found out about Cal Lansing himself. He wasn’t the friendly, All-American athlete he sometimes pretended to be. In reality he was nothing like the man Victoria thought she was dating.

  The homicide investigators learned that Lansing was a brilliant—if erratic—scholar. He had been in and out of college, but never came close to getting his degree. He had also been in and out of mental hospitals. He had been in a hospital recently—just as he told Victoria—but it wasn’t for a football injury: he had voluntarily committed himself to Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, Washington, twice in the past.

  Cal Lansing was in the Seattle area, detectives knew, because he had called the home of relatives twice more. He had been informed during those calls that the detectives wanted to talk with him, but he told his family, “I didn’t do it—and I’m not going to sit in jail for a year until they find the guy that did it.”

  When they asked where he was, he hung up.

  The investigators continued to drive by each address where he might show up. They also visited every tavern Lansing had been known to frequent in the past—all with negative results. Their gut feeling was that he wasn’t far away, but so far he was only a shadow to them, someone whom they felt was thumbing his nose at them just beyond their peripheral vision.

  On Wednesday, July 22, Sergeant Ivan Beeson, Fonis, Baughman, and Strunk staked out the Washington Employment Security office in the early morning in the hope that the elusive Lansing would appear for his appointment at 9:45. Hours passed, but he didn’t show up. They dropped their stakeout temporarily, sure that he was too smart to try to get his unemployment check. An hour later, the manager of the office called the police radio operator and whispered that Cal Lansing had just appeared in the office.

  Detectives were in the building within only minutes, but the suspect had become suspicious and left.

  “What’s he wearing today?” Don Strunk asked, disgusted to learn they had missed Lansing once again. He was beginning to feel as though Lansing was watching them and knew exactly where his trackers were at all times, instead of the other way around.

  The employment counselor said he’d never seen Lansing before, but recalled that “he was wearing a gray shirt, gray pants, and horn-rimmed glasses. He’s got several days’ growth of beard. The gal that usually checks him in wasn’t sure it was him, so we told him that he would need a more extensive interview, and asked him to wait for a few minutes. He sat down in the chair I pointed out, but then I saw him get up and leave in a hurry. He’s very antsy.”

  Outside the employment office, a cordon of squad cars with their bubble lights flashing surrounded the area, but a half hour’s search failed to turn up Cal Lansing. Foot patrolmen and patrol officers were instructed to arrest him on sight.

  The detectives were sure that Lansing had somehow slipped through their fingers. He was like a fox, sniffing the air, catching their scent, reading their minds. They kicked themselves for not realizing that sooner.

  And then, suddenly, their police radios crackled: “Suspect Calvin Lansing is presently in the Washington Mutual Savings Bank on West Market Street.”

  Somehow, he had made his way many miles from where he had last been seen. He was attempting to pick up his $1,000 check. If he got that, he would have enough money to leave Seattle far behind.

  “Tell the bank to stall him,” Don Strunk told the radio operator. “Do whatever they have to do. We’re ten minutes away.”

  Several teams of detectives headed for the bank. En route, the radio operator’s voice reassured them by saying that Cal Lansing had been apprehended at the bank by patrol officers.

  He had already been advised of his constitutional rights under Miranda by the arresting officers. He refused to tell them much more than his name. If he had a vehicle nearby, he wasn’t saying. Sergeant Ivan Beeson and Don Strunk drove him to homicide headquarters in the Public Safety Building.

  Detectives Roy Moran and Owen McKenna began an immediate search of the area around the bank in an effort to locate Lansing’s Oldsmobile sedan. McKenna had a set of keys that bore General Motors markings that the arresting officers had found in Lansing’s pocket. He and Moran suspected that the missing sedan was probably parked within walking or jogging distance, and it might well contain physical evidence connected with Victoria Legg’s murder.

  As they drove slowly around the area of the Washington Mutual Bank, McKenna spotted a middle-aged man sitting alone in a small foreign car parked near the bank. He glanced at his watch frequently, as if he was waiting for someone. In response to McKenna’s questions, the man said that his name was Matthew Wrigley* and that he did know Cal Lansing.

  “I drove him to the bank as a favor to a friend,” he said. Wrigley seemed bewildered at the turn of events that had ended with Lansing’s arrest. “He’s been staying at my place for the last four days.”

  “Do you know where his car is?” McKenna asked.

  “Sure,” Wrigley replied. “It’s parked right out in front of our house.”

  Wrigley told McKenna that Cal Lansing had come to his north end home well after midnight on Friday night and asked one of his stepsons if he could spend the night.

  “I woke up Saturday morning and there he was on the couch, asleep. His face was dirty and his right hand was bruised and bloody,” Wrigley recalled. “So was his arm just above the wrist. I asked him what had happened and he said that he’d been in a fight over by Alki Beach—told me he got jumped by four guys, but he said he ended up ‘beating the hell’ out of them.”

  Wrigley said he’d known Cal Lansing for about a year. “After Friday night—er, Saturday morning—Cal just stayed on with my family. He seemed kind of lonely and we were planning a trip up into Okanogan County, so we asked him to come along for the weekend and he accepted. We didn’t come back until about noon on Monday.”

  That would explain why Matt Wrigley hadn’t heard about the Victoria Legg homicide; Okanogan County was far northeast of Seattle, on the Canadian border. Lots of vacationers went up there to get away from the city and didn’t read Seattle papers. Radio signals from the coast disappeared after cars reached the summit of the Cascade mountain passes.

  As for the Oldsmobile, Wrigley said Cal Lansing had asked if he could leave his car parked
at their home for the summer because he had “lost his driver’s license and didn’t want to be tempted to drive.”

  They had no problem with that. A day later, he had offered them a bargain price on the Olds if they wanted to buy it from him. “We told him we didn’t need another car,” Wrigley said.

  With Wrigley’s statement, too, came the explanation of the mysterious “escape” of Lansing from the Employment Security Office. Lansing himself hadn’t even been there; he had told Wrigley that he had another appointment for a job interview, and asked the older man to sign in for him on the unemployment line. But when personnel there saw the name he gave, and advised Wrigley that he would need an interview, he had become nervous and fled. So officers looking for Lansing had had no chance of catching him. It had been Wrigley—who bore no resemblance to Lansing—who had slipped through the police cordon, himself unaware of the circumstances.

  At headquarters, Cal Lansing was advised again of his rights. He stated that he did not wish to discuss the case, but he did want to talk with an attorney. He was given a pair of jail coveralls to wear and the investigators noted that both his knees were badly bruised and scabbed, his right hand had a deep cut, and his right arm was inflamed and hot to the touch. It looked as though it was infected. He declined to accept treatment for the infected wound on his hand and arm and continued to do so in spite of the advice of a jail physician.

  Detectives talked to Matthew Wrigley’s wife while McKenna examined the suspect’s sedan, which was still parked in front of the Wrigley home. Mrs. Wrigley substantiated her husband’s account of Lansing’s coming to their home during the early-morning hours of July 18. She had noted that he was nervous and upset about his “fistfight on the beach at Alki.” She had observed “skid burns” on his knees and what looked like fingernail scratches on his side.

  He had asked her to wash some of his clothes—including a yellow sweater with bloodstains on it. She had washed some of his clothes but she put the sweater aside because it would need special treatment to get the blood out. In view of his story of a fight at Alki, she thought little of the fact that the sweater had blood on it. She assumed it was his own blood.

  She turned all of Cal Lansing’s clothes and possessions that he’d left in the Wrigley home over to detectives.

  As he went over the Oldsmobile sedan, McKenna noted what appeared to be bloodstains on the steering column and on the registration holder. As he peered closely at the seat covers, McKenna saw what looked to be flecks of dark red. However, final determination would have to be made by criminalist George Ishii, as the covers were of a “speckled” red and silver design that made it impossible to tell with the naked eye what was part of the pattern and what might be dried blood.

  As the Oldsmobile was hoisted by a tow truck to be impounded in a police holding garage, McKenna noted a dried holly leaf clinging to the underbody of the right front section. He removed the leaf and placed it in an evidence bag. Later, in court, this single leaf would become the subject of hours of cross-examination by Lansing’s attorneys.

  The Oldsmobile’s trunk held several pairs of men’s shoes, various articles of male clothing, and a filthy blanket. The blanket was covered with dirt, twigs, and bits of leaves, and stained profusely with what appeared to be dried blood.

  At the crime lab, criminalists Dr. George Ishii and Kay Sweeney, tested the blanket’s stains. They were, as suspected, human blood, and the blood was of two types: Cal Lansing’s and Victoria Legg’s. Again, thirty years ago, forensic science could not yet identify a person by examining blood for combinations of enzymes, and although Ishii was aware of research on DNA matching, his tests were done sixteen years before that process would be used in solving a crime—and that, a single case in a Scottish village.

  Just before noon on July 23, a citizen reported to detectives that he had been searching for a hubcap the previous evening along a parking strip on Ravenna Avenue when he found what looked to be a bloody T-shirt. This was the street that was a direct route from the slaying site to the Wrigley residence.

  Detectives went at once to Ravenna Avenue and searched the parking strip. They recovered the red-smeared T-shirt, a pair of socks, an almost full pack of cigarettes, and a quantity of dried holly leaves—leaves just like the single leaf McKenna had removed from the underbody of Lansing’s vehicle.

  Holly leaves were hardly alien vegetation. The entire Northwest coastal area has ideal climate and soil to grow the red-berried bushes and trees that are seen only at Christmas in most states.

  Driving a police vehicle with a Stewart Warner calibrated speedometer, one of the investigators began a mileage check from the spot where the bloody clothing and tire marks had been found to the Wrigley residence. The distance was three-tenths of a mile.

  Within a week of Victoria Legg’s murder, the Homicide Unit detectives had, through extensive legwork and meticulous gathering and cataloguing of physical evidence, built a tight case against Cal Lansing. Over a hundred pieces of physical evidence and a number of extensive witness statements were noted in the growing case file.

  Cal Lansing was formally charged with first-degree murder. However, the actual trial of the stocky suspect would be delayed for a full year. In October of 1970, Lansing was declared mentally unfit to participate in his own defense and was transferred to the Western State Hospital for the third time.

  It was July 1971 when Cal Lansing would face a jury of his peers in Superior Court Judge James Noe’s courtroom. Some of the most bizarre and shocking testimony ever heard in a King County courtroom would be brought out as his attorneys: Wesley Hohlbein and Lowell Halvorson fought to show their client as a profoundly disturbed individual. Under the M’Naghten Rule, the standard that most states use to delineate the fine line between sane and insane under the law, they had to show that Cal Lansing did not know the difference between right and wrong at the time of Victoria Legg’s murder.

  Patricia Harber, a veteran in the King County Prosecutor’s Office who was the assistant chief criminal deputy, and deputy prosecutor Douglas Duncan would hold that Lansing was quite aware of his crime against Victoria.

  The State maintained that Lansing had deliberately led his victim into the deep and isolated park so that he could attack her, and that he had most certainly made adequate provisions after the murder to facilitate his own escape.

  Judge Noe presided over one of the largest courtrooms in the King County Courthouse, and most of the varnished oak benches were full each day. Many court sessions stretched long into the evening hours as Pat Harber presented the physical evidence to the jury.

  Wes Hohlbein was known as an attorney from the school of Richard “Racehorse” Haynes and Gerry Spence, sometimes a bombastic actor and at others a relentless jackhammer who wore the Court’s patience thin. He was definitely a showman, and regular court watchers tried never to miss a trial where Hohlbein appeared for the defense. Now, he cross-examined prosecution witnesses vigorously.

  At one point in the trial, when the blanket alleged to have been present at the murder site was unfolded and held up in the courtroom, Hohlbein, who had been vehemently against the State’s introducing the single holly leaf caught in the undercarriage of Lansing’s Oldsmobile, demanded that the courtroom be swept so that “evidence” would not be lost on the chamber’s floors.

  Those of us covering the trial waited while the floor was swept. But the first sweeping did not satisfy Hohlbein, and he himself bent to sweep the floor with a whisk broom, taking at least fifteen minutes to be sure “no evidence is lost.”

  None of the histrionics appeared to touch Cal Lansing. Throughout the sessions, the defendant sat stolidly, betraying little emotion.

  Dr. Richard B. Jarvis, testifying on the mental competency of the defendant for the prosecution, stated that he believed Lansing had a schizophrenic personality disorder but was not psychotic, and able “before, during, and after the crime to carry on a normal pattern of social activity . . . He was quite able to make a moral
distinction about the concept of degradation on the victim, able to take steps to avoid detection and apprehension.”

  Asked by Wes Hohlbein if it was not possible for a person to suddenly become psychotic during the commission of a crime, Dr. Jarvis replied: “This idea of someone going out of one’s mind with devastating swiftness just does not happen, in my experience.”

  For the first time, the checkered background of Cal Lansing became known to the general public as nightly newscasts reported each day’s courtroom events.

  Cal Lansing had been a popular, serious student, the vice president of his senior class in high school. In a battery of IQ tests, he had scored at vastly superior levels. One test indicated he was brighter than 85 percent of the population, another that he was more intelligent than 99 out of 100 people. He had attended two colleges.

  And yet, Cal Lansing’s family background made for a very negative case history. His parents testified that their marriage had been marked by hostility and fighting. His mother showed the jury scars she had received when her husband attacked her with a can opener and subsequently broke her leg. She also said that he had hit her on the head with a baseball bat and that she had chased him with a machete. As a child, Cal had witnessed these battles between his mother and father.

  Calvin Lansing Sr. confirmed the stories and told the jurors of criminal activity he and his son had engaged in. The senior Lansing said that he had survived the Bataan Death March during World War II and still kept a scrapbook of his war experiences and the atrocities committed—a scrapbook in which his son had evinced much interest.

  Both parents discussed an alleged incident that had occurred in a California jail where Cal claimed he had been raped by several men in a cell. This incident had seemed to have a lasting and damaging effect on Lansing.

  On July 21, 1971, Cal Lansing took the stand in his own defense. In a flat voice, he recited details of his life and the crime he was charged with—details that shocked even veteran courtroom habitués. He admitted that he had had sexual relations with relatives, with his dog, and, on the very day that Victoria Legg was murdered, with a 4-year-old girl.