Empty Promises: And Other True Cases

  Both bodies were partially nude. Bradley Lyons lay on his back, the striped T-shirt pulled up under his chin, his trousers lying across his chest. A venetian-blind cord, used as a ligature, was knotted tightly around his neck.

  Scott Andrews was lying facedown, his Jockey shorts twisted around his ankles. A bloodstained T-shirt had been knotted around his neck. What looked like knife wounds marked his chest and neck. It was apparent the boys had been dead for some time.

  As daylight faded, floodlights were brought in. Dashnea and Caldwell removed the items of clothing found at the scene and placed them in sealed plastic bags. Joe Henry took a series of photographs leading from the entrance to the trail down to the body site.

  Assured that searchers had not approached the bodies closely except for the team leader's one cautious check for signs of life, the detectives were intrigued by a set of large footprints left in a distinctive circular pattern around the bodies. They immediately made moulages of the prints.

  They began an intensive search for a knife or other weapon that might have been used on Scott Andrews, but neither their eyes nor metal detectors located one.

  Early the next morning, the detectives from Renton attended the postmortem examinations on the small victims. The investigation of the murder of a child is always the hardest assignment any homicide detective can have. The cops braced themselves and tried to think clinically, fighting back the normal emotions that any father would have felt in the same situation.

  Six-year-old Bradley Lyons had died of asphyxia secondary to ligature from the venetian blind cord. He also had bruises on his lips. Based on the contents of his stomach and the progression of rigor mortis in the body, Dr. Wilson estimated that Bradley had died between 12:30 and 1:30 P.M. on April 20, the last day he was seen. Although there were no overt injuries to his genitals, Dr. Wilson found a twig and a hair in the rectum.

  Scott Andrews had contusions on his forehead, left cheek, and lips. There were fabric imprints on his neck from the knotted T-shirt, but the underlying tissue had neither hemorrhaging nor constriction enough to cause suffocation. He had sustained three knife wounds. One, just beneath the left collarbone, had penetrated only 1.5 centimeters. The other two wounds, however, were fatal wounds where the knife had slashed through the lung and heart to a depth of 4½ inches, ending at the vertebrae just below the skin of the boy's back.

  Death would have been virtually instantaneous. There was no evidence that Scott had been sexually molested. Like Brad, he had been dead since shortly after noon on Tuesday.

  With the massive media coverage that followed the discovery of the two six-year-olds, tips flooded in. Doctors in the ER at Valley General Hospital in Renton reported that a rather bizarre forty-year-old man with a long beard had presented himself to the emergency room on the afternoon of April 20 and asked for help with mental problems. He feared that he "might harm children" and told a rambling story where he compared his emotional problems to Charles Manson's.

  ER personnel said the man had numerous scratches on his arms, lower legs, and forehead. He explained that he had scratched himself while running through the brush. Still, at the time, he seemed harmless enough. He was released from the hospital and he vanished. Was he the killer or was he just another compulsive confessor?

  After yet another request for help from the public, Renton detectives learned that the bearded suspect had asked for a drink of water at a home and at a business some three to five miles from the body site around 4:30 P.M. on April 20. Then he had checked into the ER at 5:22 P.M.

  He seemed the perfect suspect in a pedophiliac homicide. Detectives located him in Tacoma. His name was Antoine Bertrand,* and he was forty years old. Bertrand was interrogated about the murders of Brad and Scott, but either he truly knew nothing about them or he had experienced a complete memory block. He looked baffled and said he had no idea what they were talking about. He hadn't seen any little boys.

  The King County prosecutor's office charged Antoine Bertrand with two counts of murder, based on a mass of circumstantial evidence, his proximity to the crime scene at the time Scott and Brad died, and his own feeling that he might hurt children. However, any prudent prosecutor wants physical evidence, and there was nothing concrete linking Antoine Bertrand to the young victims.

  The search for the knife that had caused Scott's death continued. On April 28, an Explorer search-and-rescue scout, Emmett Husa, age seventeen, combed the ravine on his hands and knees some 150 feet from the spot where Scott and Bradley were found. And there it was— a bowie knife with a heavy curved blade— nestled beneath the salal and vine maple leaves. The handle of the knife was wrapped with black friction tape.

  Renton detectives examined the handle. They could barely make out a name scratched lightly into the surface. They contacted the young man whose name was on the knife.

  "Yeah, I used to own that knife," he said. "I bought it for a dollar fifty and kept it until August of 1970. Then I sold it to a friend of mine."

  Officers Wally Hume and Jim Phelan talked to the friend. He said he owned the knife for only a couple of months. "I traded it to this guy."

  "Who?"

  "Some guy. He gave me a pea coat for it."

  Wondering how long this trail was going to be, Hume and Phelan located yet a third teenager.

  "Yeah, I had a bowie knife," he said. "But I only had it for about two weeks. Around Christmas of 1970 I left it in my friend's truck."

  "What's his name?" Hume asked wearily.

  "Gary Grant. He gave me a ride and I absentmindedly left it on the seat of his truck. When I asked him about it, he said his father had found it in the truck and put it in his room and that he couldn't get it back right away. I never did get it back."

  On April 30, Hume and Phelan drove to the trailer park where nineteen-year-old Gary Grant lived with his parents. Gary wasn't there. His mother said he was getting a haircut.

  "We want to talk to him about a knife he owns."

  "He'll be home pretty soon. You can wait for him if you want to."

  It wasn't long before a pickup truck pulled in front of the mobile home. A tall, skinny teenager stepped out and walked toward the detectives.

  "You're Gary?" Jim Phelan asked.

  "Yes, sir."

  "We understand a friend of yours left a bowie knife in your truck not too long ago," Phelan said.

  Grant nodded a little nervously. "I had it, but I guess I left it out in the woods— out back of the park here."

  He was neither cooperative nor antagonistic, but the pimply-faced teenager wasn't sure if he would be able to find the knife in the woods. He did, however, agree to go to Renton Police headquarters to talk with the detectives about it.

  Once there, Phelan pulled out a photograph of the bowie knife where it lay in the underbrush near the crime site.

  "That look like yours?"

  Phelan and Hume watched the suspect's face as he stared at the photo. "It looks like that knife I had," he said finally.

  Gary Grant was wearing tennis shoes. Jim Phelan tried to appear casual as Grant rested one foot on his knee and the sole came into view. It had a circular pattern that was very similar to the prints found surrounding Brad's and Scott's bodies.

  The configuration was close enough for Phelan to ask Gary Grant to take his shoes off so they could be compared to the moulages locked in the evidence room.

  Wally Hume advised the quiet teenager of his constitutional rights and asked Grant if he recalled April 20. Grant said he remembered it because it was a school holiday. Odd that he would recall that, since he was no longer in school himself. He said he worked that morning at his part-time job at a Renton golf course. "After that," he said, "I stopped in to see one of my girlfriends."

  "After that?"

  "I went looking to buy some shoes. I must have been to about three stores. Didn't find what I wanted."

  From there Grant said he walked along the Cedar River. Wally Hume studied Grant. He was kind of an ungainly ki
d, slow-talking and average-looking except that he slicked down his dark hair with water or hair cream and combed it straight back from his forehead without parting it.

  Grant said he also remembered that day in April well because he had a close call. "I was standing close to the river to watch the salmon, but it was really muddy on the bank and I slipped and fell in. I floated down the river for about forty feet until I could get my footing and climb on shore. I was soaking wet and I stopped at the grocery store and called home. I wanted a ride, but my mom said my dad was taking a nap and told me I had to walk home. So I did."

  Wally Hume was a thirteen-year veteran of the Renton Police Department. Amiable and soft-spoken, he was a deceptively low-pressure interrogator. He talked to Gary Grant about why they were interested in his lost knife, quietly moving closer and closer to the vital questions. Approaching the subject from varying angles, Hume asked Gary Grant four or five times if he knew anything about the deaths of the two boys.

  Gary Grant was adamant that he did not. He insisted that he was very fond of children and would never hurt them. He didn't even know Brad and Scott and he seemed shocked that anyone would think he would kill two little boys.

  They were at an impasse. Hume asked Gary if he would be willing to take a lie detector test, and he said he would.

  Dewey Gillespie was respected as one of the most accurate polygraphers on the West Coast. Called at his Seattle Police Department office, he told Hume that he would give Gary a polygraph examination if they would bring him into the city. Wally Hume, Jim Phelan, and Gary left at once for Seattle, but when they got there, Gillespie sent word that he would be tied up in an emergency session for some time.

  The Renton detectives felt they were at a breakthrough point with Gary Grant and they certainly didn't want to turn him loose now, so Hume and Phelan headed for a restaurant, where they ordered hamburgers for all three of them. Gary ate heartily. Spinning out the time, they drove out to the University of Washington and through the Arboretum. They might have been three friends out for a pleasant drive. Neither detective brought up the subject of the double homicide. Instead, they spoke of innocuous things— the weather, sports. The next questions should come from Dewey Gillespie.

  By the time they returned to the waiting area outside Gillespie's office, the two detectives could see that Gary was nervous and apprehensive. Several times he murmured half aloud, as if arguing with himself: "I couldn't have done something like that."

  Hume and Phelan were thinking only of the murders of two little boys. Even though Antoine Bertrand was already under arrest for the killings, there was something about Gary Grant and his missing knife that made them wonder if they had arrested the wrong man. If Gary was holding something back, Gillespie would know. The polygraph machine was a formidable device for anyone to face. To the uninformed, it looked as if it could zap its subject with a jolt of electricity if it detected a lie. Leads would measure respiration, blood pressure, pulse, galvanic skin response, perspiration. A number of people are convinced it can somehow read human thought. It is certainly an intimidating machine.

  Gary Grant was far from sophisticated, and he was already sweating and mumbling.

  When the tests were evaluated, however, it would be the detectives who were shocked. They had no idea when they brought Gary in for a lie detector test that they had netted a much bigger fish than they could have imagined.

  In the jargon of the polygrapher, Gary Gene Grant "blew ink all over the walls."

  When the information he gave Dewey Gillespie was followed up by more questioning from Renton detectives and a careful reconstruction of his whereabouts in the prior eighteen months, they realized that one man and one man alone was probably responsible not only for the murders of Scott Andrews and Brad Lyons but also for the violent deaths of Carol Adele Erickson and Joann Marie Zulauf.

  Grant was not a flamboyant suspect, and that may have made it easier for him to move about Renton without being noticed. He was not in the least memorable. He was something of a loner who had few close friends and who worked at a low-profile job. What rage he carried within himself— and he did carry rage— he kept carefully hidden.

  After his encounter with Dewey Gillespie and the polygraph, nineteen-year-old Gary Grant was charged with four counts of first-degree murder. As far as the public knew, he was initially arrested and held only as a material witness in the tragic murders of two six-year-old boys. They would have to wait until his trial to learn the whole story.

  In the meantime, charges against Antoine Bertrand, the bearded and rambling man who had walked into the ER at Valley General Hospital, were dropped.

  Grant's trial was set for July 6, 1971. Because neither he nor his parents could afford to retain criminal defense attorneys, two of King County's most able lawyers were appointed to defend him. One was C. N. "Nick" Marshall, who had been the senior deputy prosecuting attorney in the King County prosecutor's office until six months before. He was now a partner in his own firm. Marshall had successfully prosecuted some of the most infamous homicide cases in Washington State. The other was James E. Anderson, also a former deputy prosecutor with a solid conviction record. Now the onetime prosecutors would be on the other side in a very challenging defense case.

  Judge David Soukup would preside over the trial. His black Abraham Lincoln beard made him look very judge-like, but spectators were sometimes surprised to see him before court began as he jogged to trials from his home. Racing through the marble halls of the courthouse in shorts and Nikes, Judge Soukup looked more like a marathon runner than a superior court judge.

  Gary Grant's trial was a battlefield of legal experts all trained in the same school. Besides Marshall and Anderson, Judge Soukup, and both prosecuting attorneys— Edmund P. Allen and Michael T. Di Julio— were all either current or former deputy prosecutors. There was an expectant air in the courtroom as the gallery waited to see how the five men, trained to work together, would act in their new roles.

  Gary Grant was noticeably thinner than he had appeared in early press photos, and he sat stoically beside Nick Marshall as the prosecution built its case against him. He was gaunt and pale. He gulped silently, his breathing rate increased, and he would occasionally lower his forehead to his hands.

  A great deal of the testimony in the Grant trial was painfully explicit. The prosecution produced witness after witness who detailed the last hours of each victim's life. As they spoke, the victims came alive in the courtroom, and the enormity of their loss brought tears. Even Defense Attorney Marshall, who had a five-year-old son of his own, walked quickly from the courtroom during a break and ducked into one of the myriad marble niches to hide the tears streaking his face.

  Over the defense's strong objections, the prosecution introduced graphic pictures of the victims' bodies. Medical Examiner Gale Wilson's testimony was lengthy, and Nick Marshall cross-examined him vigor ously, particularly on the alleged sexual motivation of the killer. In the Carole Erickson case, he disagreed with Wilson on how precisely the age of sperm can be pinpointed. Wilson replied that it could be done within certain limitations, but he was adamant that viable sperm can be present in the vagina from thirty-six to forty-eight hours after intercourse.

  In an attempt to suggest to the jurors that Carole had intercourse with someone else before she went to the library the December evening she died, Marshall asked, "Then how can you say whether these sperm found in the Erickson girl were there just before or just after death?"

  "If they had been there sometime before death they would have migrated further up the vagina," Wilson said flatly.

  "How many did you find?"

  "Five or six… on the labia at entrance [to the vagina]."

  "Could they not have been deposited up to twenty-four hours earlier?"

  "No. They would have been further up."

  "Then how could you classify this as rape with so few sperm deposited?"

  "Imperfect penetration," Wilson answered succinctly.

&n
bsp; It seemed a fine point— and it was— but Nick Marshall was trying to save his client from the death penalty; murder committed because the killer had rape in mind tended to influence a jury far more than murder with other motivation.

  Again, Marshall took particular issue with Dr. Wilson's statement in direct testimony that Joann Zulauf had succumbed to "asphyxia and attempted rape." He asked for a mistrial because Wilson had included the rape attempt as a cause of death. Judge Soukup denied the mistrial, but during cross-examination Dr. Wilson qualified his statement by saying that the attempted rape was a "condition associated with death."