Empty Promises: And Other True Cases

  Stout listened quietly, appearing to consider the job. He sighed and shook his head. "A job like that wouldn't come cheap— it's risky. That would cost you in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars."

  Sandra didn't flinch.

  "It would have to be twenty-five hundred up front," Stout said, explaining that no hired gun in his right mind would pop someone for nothing. What assurance would he have that she wouldn't run and spend her insurance payoff in some foreign country?

  Sandra nodded.

  "And it would have to be twenty-dollar bills."

  From what she'd read in books and seen on television, this was the way it was done, and she nodded eagerly. After all, if her husband was killed, she would have the insurance, and two homes. She could easily afford the $5,000. It was a bargain. "But it will take me a week or so to get twenty-five hundred together," she explained, "and I don't know if I can get it all in twenties, but I'll try."

  Now that she felt the financial terms were set, Sandra began to set her ground rules. As for the murder itself, she didn't want her husband killed in their home. "I have children at home," she said, "and Burt's hardly ever home alone. I wouldn't want them to see it."

  She had a plan, however. Her mother had died recently and left Sandra and Burt a home in the Oakbrook section of Tacoma. The house was full of valuable antiques. It was a sitting duck for burglars, so the family made sure someone was there all the time. Sandra's daughter, Claudette, had lived there for a while but had recently moved out. To protect the antiques, Sandra and Burt had been taking turns sleeping there until they could find a trustworthy tenant.

  "I'll see that it isn't rented again until Burt is killed," she promised Walt Stout. That would make it very convenient for Burt to be taken care of on one of the nights when he was sleeping at the Oakbrook house. "We can drive by there now," she said, "so you'll know where it is, and you can get familiar with the floor plan."

  Walt Stout, who knew every inch of Pierce County by heart from his days on patrol, pretended to need Sandra's directions to find the Oakbrook neighborhood. It must have been Sandra's night to sleep there because the house was empty. She led him through the rooms that were indeed packed full of armoires, fragile-looking chairs, tables, paintings, china, and figurines. Stout wasn't an expert on antiques, but the stuff looked valuable. He wondered to himself if she was going to warn him not to accidentally put a bullet hole in any of these treasures when he shot Burt.

  Even though Walt Stout had been in law enforcement for many years, it felt almost surreal for him to be in this house, which still had the sense of the old woman who had lived here and who had obviously cherished it. Listening to Sandra Treadway outline her plans, he found it hard to believe that she could be plotting her husband's violent death so casually and coldly.

  There was no doubt in Stout's mind that Sandra Treadway intended to have her husband killed. She told him she would have the money by August 15, and they agreed to meet again at the Villa Bowl in the Villa Plaza. She promised to bring along a picture of Burt Treadway and detailed information about him so "Doug" could begin his plans to murder him.

  Walt Stout breathed a sigh of relief. For the time being, at least, Burt Treadway was safe. Until the fifteenth, anyway. Sandra believed she had hired a real killer.

  Their next meeting was set for 10:00 P.M. on the fif teenth. Early that evening, Stout met with Chief Criminal Deputy Henry Suprunowski, whom his men called Ski, and Detective Terry Murphy, at the Pierce County West Precinct. They would coordinate their movements so there would be three witnesses to Sandra Treadway's plan to kill her husband.

  Stout would drive the Chevy convertible, the same car he'd used during his first meeting with Sandra. There was a relatively thin barrier between the trunk compartment and the backseat. Detective Terry Murphy would hide in the trunk where he would be able to hear every word of the conversation between Stout and Sandra Treadway.

  Suprunowski would park a short distance away where he could observe the car. On Stout's signal— a light touch on his brake lights— Suprunowski would be alerted to the fact that the money for the hit had actually been exchanged, and Ski would then move in for the arrest.

  At a quarter to ten, Stout and Murphy pulled up behind a hardware store near the Villa Bowl, and Murphy crawled into the car's trunk. Then Stout drove to the meeting place where Sandra Treadway would be waiting— if she hadn't changed her mind.

  At 10:00 P.M. Sandra drove up in a Ford LTD and parked facing Stout's convertible, their front bumpers almost touching. Stout saw her set a thick envelope on the dashboard of the car. Then she picked it up and walked over to sit in the passenger seat of Stout's car.

  "I didn't know whether you'd be here or not," she said.

  "Well, you showed up," Stout replied. "That must mean you still want your husband killed."

  "That's right," she said. "I have the money right here in my lap. It's all in twenties, but it might be one bill short. If it is, I'll make it up to you. You can count on it."

  "Did you bring his picture and info about the places he hangs out?"

  Sandra Treadway was canny. He could see that she was wary of leaving her fingerprints on something. She handed Stout a piece of paper and pen and told him that he could write down the information she dictated. "You ask what you want to know," she said. "I'll tell you and you can write it down." She dictated a description of Burt Treadway's car, gave Stout the license plate number, and told him about her husband's general physical appearance.

  "I have decided I want it done on Wednesday night, the seventeenth," she said briskly. "I've got the schedule all figured out. If he dies on Wednesday, I'll have the memorial service here on Saturday and then ship his body back to Michigan for burial on Sunday." Sandra said she planned to fly to Michigan on Sunday morning and be gone for about a week. "I might have the other twenty-five hundred for you before I go… but I'll have it for sure by the time I get back."

  She had thought about other locations, but now she was sure she wanted her mother's house in Oakbrook to be the scene of the killing. Wednesday was Burt's night to house-sit there, and he would be alone— he understood that Sandra didn't like him taking his girlfriend to her mother's house. "He probably won't get there until late, though, because he spends most evenings with his girlfriend," she added.

  She cautioned Stout that there might be a few hitches in her plan, but she felt she had most of them covered. "There might be a little problem because my daughter wants to spend some time in that house earlier in the evening," Sandra explained. "But I'll be baby-sitting for her, and I'll just tell her she has to pick up her baby by ten P.M."

  "Do you have a key to the house I could have?" Stout asked.

  "Yes… I'll give you one."

  "How about if I call you Wednesday evening at your house, just to check and see if your daughter's back home?"

  "Sure," she agreed. "That would be better." Sandra handed Stout one of her cards, which read, "Sunrise Enterprises Firewood," and told him he could reach her any time at the phone number on the card. Then she gave him a picture of Burt.

  "Will you count out the money for me?" Stout asked, but Sandra refused and told him to do it himself. He took the money, which was in an envelope inside another envelope. She had done everything possible to keep her prints off any of the paper. He counted the bills out loud, laying them on the seat of the car. There was only $2,480 there, and Sandra reached in her purse and gave him a single twenty to make it an even $2,500, as promised.

  For the first time, Sandra questioned her own motivation and murmured, "I guess I'm not a very nice person for doing this?" And then she chuckled and commented, "But then, you're not any better for agreeing to it, are you?"

  The deal was set, the money had changed hands, and Sandra Treadway was about to have the surprise of her life. Walt Stout lightly pressed the brake pedal of his car to signal Suprunowski.

  Ski slowly pulled his car up beside Stout's, so close that Sandra Treadway couldn't op
en her door wide enough to get out. She looked up, startled, and blurted, "What's this? What's going on?"

  "I'm not really Doug," Stout said quietly. "I'm Walt." He identified himself as a sheriff's detective and showed her his credentials. "You're under arrest, Mrs. Treadway."

  Suprunowski removed Sandra from the car and advised her of her rights, while Stout let Detective Murphy out of his cramped hiding place in the trunk. Sandra Treadway, red with indignation and shock, refused to say anything at all as she was driven to the West Precinct.

  There the detectives counted the money again. There were 125 twenty-dollar bills, half-payment to end a man's life. Sandra Treadway was transported to the Pierce County jail. She was allowed to call her attorney and was then booked for criminal intent to commit murder in the first degree.

  Burt Treadway was at the Oakbrook house when the phone rang. It was Sandra, calling to tell him that she was in jail for attempting to have someone killed.

  The astonished man asked, "Who?"

  "You."

  When Walt Stout interviewed the bemused Burt Treadway later, he acknowledged that it was true that his marriage was one of convenience rather than devotion, and that he did have a great deal of life insurance with triple-indemnity clauses. Sandra also stood to inherit two homes with mortgage payoff clauses that would be covered by insurance in case of his death.

  But Burt Treadway had had no idea that Sandra wanted him dead. He told Stout that she had tried to persuade him to put off their divorce, giving various ex cuses for the delay. He had put it down to sentiment on her part, wondering if she really loved him after all. "Now I think I'll file for divorce as soon as humanly possible," Treadway said. "Like yesterday."

  * * *

  Sandra Treadway was released on bail to await trial. On November 13, 1977, however, her own life almost ended in what some might call poetic justice. She had been spending the evening at home with her daughter, Claudette*— the same daughter that Sandra had wanted to be sure was not in the Oakbrook house back in August.

  Claudette was separated from her husband, Benny Bowes,* and the rift was far from friendly. Benny Bowes was terribly jealous of Claudette and he hated her new boyfriend with a passion. They had all noticed Benny's car circling the house several times during the early evening. As Sandra sat eating her supper, Claudette ran to the window and cried, "He's here— he's coming up to the door!"

  Claudette ran to throw her weight against the door and Sandra joined her, the two women desperately trying to keep Bowes from coming in. But he shattered the door with one kick and strode in through the splintered wood. He had a gun in his hand. Claudette and her new boyfriend ran for the back door, leaving Sandra to face Benny alone. She tried to get away, but Benny Bowes caught her and knocked her to the floor. Screaming epithets, Bowes fired directly at Sandra's chest, and she writhed on the floor bleeding, crying "Benny, you've shot me!"

  The gunfire wasn't over. Now Bowes aimed at Claudette's new boyfriend, who stood in the kitchen, hurling bottles at the gunman. Then he ran into a rear bedroom and cowered there. Bowes kicked open the doors of all the bedrooms until he came to the locked room where his rival hid. He fired two shots through the door, and then walked in, shouting, "Take your glasses off, you bastard— I want to shoot you right between the eyes!"

  The gun roared several times. The would-be home wrecker wasn't shot between the eyes, but he was shot almost every place else. As his latest victim lay bleeding, Bowes put the gun to his own temple— but he didn't shoot. Benny was still standing with the gun to his head when sheriff's deputies arrived. They were braced for a standoff, but Benny's suicidal gesture had been only that. The deputies quickly wrestled the gun away from him.

  Sandra Treadway and the wounded man were rushed to the hospital, where her chest wound was found to be serious but not fatal. Claudette's new boyfriend was in critical condition, however.

  Ironically, Sandra had wanted to kill her husband for money. Jealousy hadn't even entered into it. Her son-in-law, however, had attempted murder out of jealousy alone. They were rapidly becoming the poster family for the old joke: "The family that slays together stays together."

  Sandra recovered in time to plead guilty to a reduced charge of solicitation to commit murder in the second degree and was sentenced to serve ten years in the women's prison at Purdy, Washington. Purdy is one of Washington's plusher prisons, but it is still a far cry from the life Sandra had planned for herself once she got her hands on $150,000 in insurance money.

  Claudette's boyfriend almost died of his wounds, but he eventually recovered. Benny Bowes pleaded guilty in the shooting and went to prison.

  * * *

  Not all females are as inept as Carole, Teri, and Sandra. An intelligent, determined female sociopath is as dangerous as any black widow spider. Women kill for different reasons than men, and they employ dissimilar methods. There are really only two reasons why the vast majority of women kill: for love— very broadly defined to include passion, revenge on a faithless lover, jealousy, or a desire to clear away obstacles to an affair— or for money. The promise of riches tends to bring out wickedness in some women. Whether it be for love or money, women plan murder with far more care than do men. They seem to be able to delay gratification longer than their male counterparts. One might say that, even in homicide, women enjoy more foreplay than men.

  Perhaps all marital insurance policies should read, "And to my beloved wife, the proceeds of my life insurance… with the express exemption that this policy is null and void if she kills me."

  The Conjugal Visit

  The social science of penology has come a long, long way since prisons were hellholes unfit for any living thing. No rational person today would wish that another human being should serve out a sentence with torturous punishment, in cells that are filthy and dark, and yet questions remain as to just how comfortable and civilized is too comfortable and civilized for those who deserve to be locked up. There are three main reasons to lock someone behind bars: (1) to punish him or her for a crime; (2) to protect society from the criminal; (3) to rehabilitate her or him. In our enlightened era, there are prisons where convicts enjoy a lifestyle some free men might envy. Prisons now have gyms and libraries. Cells have bars, but they also have television sets and radios, and prisoners may hang whatever posters and "art" they like on the walls. A number of penal institutions provide quarters— often mobile homes— where married and engaged prisoners may enjoy conjugal relations with their wives and lovers.

  Keeping a prisoner in touch with his family isn't necessarily bad, and it keeps a lot of paroled felons from returning to a life of crime when they are released. But there are cases where too much compassion for convicts ends in tragedy. A handsome prisoner named Carl Cletus Bowles played such a progressive system as if it were a fine old fiddle and he a fresh bow. Bowles serves as a sobering example of what can happen when concern for a prisoner's sensitivities blinds authorities to potential danger. This consummate con man hoodwinked some of the most experienced prison administrators in the country. A little luck, a disregarded warning, and a beautiful woman willing to throw away her life for him, and Bowles walked free of the bars meant to hold him for life. In retrospect, anyone who believed Bowles's promises needed a refresher course in abnormal psychology.

  Carl Cletus Bowles was born in Amarillo, Texas, in 1941. He was a wild boy and teenager who always walked just at the edge of the law, sometimes slipping over it. He wasn't very tall, but he was handsome, with a full head of wavy blond hair and perfectly aligned features. Girls and women were always drawn to Carl, and he was a lusty young man. He began his serious criminal career at a young age. He was just past twenty when he served time in Colorado for larceny. Barely free from jail in Colorado, he was convicted for a larceny and breaking-and-entering rap in Oregon in the early 1960s. At the Oregon State Penitentiary, he formed an unlikely liaison with Norbert Tilford Waitts, a man six years his senior. Waitts was a native of Brunswick, Georgia, but his criminal
activities had afforded him a tour of the inside of America's jails. He had done time in New York State and was sentenced to prison for assault with a deadly weapon during a robbery of a motel in Tigard, Oregon.

  Neither Carl Cletus nor Norbert took well to the rehabilitation aspects of imprisonment; they merely bided their time until they could get out and make up for the lost years. Waitts got out first, on June 1, 1965. He waited impatiently for Bowles's release four weeks later. It was Monday night, July 5, and wisps of leftover smoke from Sunday's fireworks still floated in the air. The woman working the desk at the same Tigard motel Norbert Waitts had robbed before— which had landed him in prison— was startled to see a customer walk in so late. She thought to herself that he was one of the homeliest men she had ever seen in her life— bald with a long, dour horse face. His arms were covered with garish tattoos. He didn't want a room, he explained, as he stuck a pistol in her face. She handed over the twenty-five dollars in the cash register, but that wasn't all he wanted. She looked desperately around for someone she could cry out to for help, but the parking lot was quiet and the people in the units that spread out from the office had long since gone to sleep. The man with the gun raped her, but he apologized, saying, "I'm sorry to force you to do this… but I haven't had a woman in two years."