His attorney explained Vinetti’s extreme sensitivity to remarks about his height. He said that Bethany Stokesberry had taunted Paul about the two things that distressed him most: his mother and his height.
In many murder trials, the defendant does not take the stand in his own defense, but Long-tall-Paul Vinetti chose to do so. There, before a courtroom hushed so that spectators could hear his muted voice, he answered his attorney’s questions about the events on July 3.
“I went to Melby’s Tavern at ten thirty Saturday morning. I had about four beers before the others came in.”
(The “others” were an Edmonds, Washington, couple and their nephew who had joined Vinetti in the long day of drinking.)
“Then we went to the Forum Tavern and they waited while I went to my friends to look for some stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Pills. Acid. Mescaline. Speed. But I didn’t find any.”
The defendant told of going next to Smokey Joe’s, Tiger Al’s, The Hideout, Blue Moon—and then back to Melby’s. And finally, to the Frontier. He said he’d smoked almost an entire lid of marijuana—sharing it with a man whose name he couldn’t recall—as the day wore on.
“I staggered—the way I see it—up to the Frontier Tavern. I don’t remember if Bethany Stokesberry was there or not when I got there. I had never seen her before. I don’t remember talking to her although I might have.”
“Do you remember leaving with her?”
“Yes. I remember going in a car and getting out at the Elephant Car Wash. She wanted to go for a walk so we ran across Aurora Avenue. I remember that she had some kind of accent. We went down toward the water and along the gravel path to the dirt path.”
“Did she say anything to you then?”
“When I put my arm around her, she was foulmouthed. She said my dad was a bastard and my mother must have been a terrible person to have a son like me. She made fun of my height. She asked if my brothers were tall, too, and I said we were all over six foot six. Then she said when I was born I must have been dropped on my head and then pulled out and stretched like a string to get to be so tall.
“She kept on and on when I told her to shut up. I felt angry inside. I started swinging on her with my fists. Everything went blank. I felt like I was fighting to stay alive. I didn’t see her while I was hitting her—it was dark out. She fell and got up. I hit her again. Then I threw her against the tree headfirst. Then I kicked her—with the heel of my right boot. I ripped off her clothes with my hands. I just grabbed them at the throat and tore.”
Vinetti vehemently denied throwing Bethany Stokesberry into Echo Lake. “I remember seeing something white on the ground. I picked it up and split. She was lying right by the tree when I left. My foot was next to her when I was reaching for the money. She wasn’t in the lake.”
Vinetti explained that his reaching for the money had been involuntary—a reflex action from the times as a child when he had had to survive any way he could.
Perhaps the most damaging testimony Vinetti gave was his reply to prosecutor Roy Howson’s question about how he could be so sure he had not thrown the victim into the lake.
“I hit her. I threw her against the tree. I used my boots. That’s three different ways—and that’s all I did.”
As in all murder trials, there is one side of the story that is never heard: the victim’s side. Was Bethany Stokesberry a malicious termagant who consciously or unconsciously sought out a man’s weakest side and finally went too far with the wrong man with her caustic comments?
Or were the remarks attributed to her by the defendant the product of his own imagination, which was fueled with beer, marijuana, and possibly other illegal substances?
Whatever the provocation had been, the jury didn’t believe that anything the petite woman might have said excused Vinetti’s brutal attack.
We will never know why she went with him, or if she willingly got out of her acquaintances’ car and walked to a deserted lake at midnight. She may have simply wanted to go home, or Paul Vinetti may have physically pulled her from the car before she could protest.
Nor will we know what she said to her killer at the lakeshore. Why would she have courted disaster by taunting a man twice her size? The words Paul Vinetti recalled might have been from someone else he’d met that day, and, very much under the influence of alcohol and drugs, he could have confabulated the day’s events in his mind.
Bethany Stokesberry never had an opportunity to tell her side of the story. So we have to give her credit for what she could not say. She was a bored housewife who probably dressed too provocatively when she went to the Frontier Tavern that night in July. But I tend to believe her silent voice rather than Vinetti’s drunken recall of what really happened.
We do know that she was not intoxicated at all. She had no alcohol in her blood.
The jurors in Paul Vinetti’s trial seemed to hear her silent plea for justice, too. Paul Anthony Vinetti was found guilty of second-degree murder and grand larceny.
Perhaps he had no choice in life either. When his mother picked a pair of roller skates over her baby son and abandoned him, she may have sealed his fate.
And the fate of Bethany Stokesberry.
THE MOST FRIGHTENING CRIME OF ALL
PART ONE
THE DAYLIGHT RAPIST
In many ways, the crime of rape is always the same—the forcing of one individual’s sexual desires upon a helpless victim.
In other ways, it is always different.
When I worked in the Sex Crimes Unit of the Seattle Police Department, I came to realize that there were no rules or parameters in sexual assaults. Since then, as a true-crime writer, I have covered a dozen or so rape cases that defy imagination.
There was the case of a rapist who insisted that his victim fix him a pork chop dinner—after he had assaulted her! He gobbled it down and left without hurting her further. And one sex criminal was so violent that he “raped” his victim with a .32 caliber pistol, actually firing it into her vagina. Miraculously, she survived and was even able to bear children after this happened to her. Another dangerous felon arrived at the apartment of three young women with a note of recommendation from one of their friends—which he had forged. A still more bizarre case involved a fastidious offender who demanded that his victim take a long bath before he raped her.
I remember a paroled felon who had his college tuition paid by the state—to help him succeed once he was out in society. Sex crimes detectives discovered he was skipping class at least two times a week so he could commit rapes in the university neighborhood. One of his victims was the daughter of a police officer.
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised by the peculiar obsessions and actions of sexual criminals. Although most look like ordinary people, they are very different from law-abiding citizens.
It is virtually impossible to teach women how to avoid and/or survive the crime of rape; what works for some puts others in terrible danger. We all know the basics, although we don’t always adhere to them:
• Lock your doors securely.
• Lock your car even when you run into a store “just for a minute or two.”
• Don’t pick up hitchhikers.
• Don’t meet an absolute stranger in your home—or his.
• Arrange to meet in a public place and let someone know where you are.
• Don’t walk alone in bad neighborhoods after the sun goes down. Or any neighborhood!
• Don’t believe everything prospective dates list about themselves on internet dating sites.
• Check out someone you don’t know as carefully as you can.
• Don’t open your car door or your home’s door to someone you don’t know. If it’s an emergency, tell them you will call the police for them.
Most of this is simple common sense. Rapists don’t all look daunting. Nor do most serial killers. Often, they are quite handsome, charming, and persuasive—until they manage to get a woman in a lonely pl
ace far from anyone who might help her.
Experts advise women to do anything they can to alert others that they are in trouble. Scream, shout, kick, and fight. Sadly, more bystanders react to “Fire!” than they do to “Help!”
Anyone over sixty remembers Kitty Genovese of Queens, New York, who screamed “Help!” on the frigid, pitch-black night of March 13, 1964. Kitty, a petite, dark-haired twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, encountered a sex killer at 3 a.m. as she got out of her car and headed for her apartment. Thirty-eight people heard her cries and ignored them, not wanting to get involved, believing someone else would save her.
Winston Moseley, twenty-nine, had set out to kill a woman that night—any woman—when Kitty saw him approaching in her Kew Gardens neighborhood. Without saying a word, he stabbed her twice. She called out, “Oh, God! He stabbed me. Please help me!”
Windows lit up and a few people looked out. One man even called out, “Leave that girl alone!” Still, no one called police or rushed downstairs to help her. Moseley was alarmed by the lights going on, and was preparing to drive off when the windows darkened again. Like a cat stalking an injured mouse, he followed Kitty to the doorway of her apartment house. Once more, she cried out, “I’m dying! I’m dying!” He stabbed her again—and raped her.
Finally, a neighboring apartment dweller called for police and paramedics, and then bravely ran downstairs to rock Kitty in her arms. But Kitty was dead.
Arrested, Moseley admitted to detectives that he had killed another woman. He escaped custody for a short time and raped a pregnant woman. Kitty Genovese has become a tragic poster girl for the apathy of people who look the other way when they see someone in danger.
If Kitty had yelled, “Fire!” would she still be alive? Psychological studies have shown that when a number of people witness an accident or a crime in progress, it’s easy for them to believe someone else will help.
A few years ago, I spoke at a rape prevention seminar in Nashville, Tennessee. One of the other presenters was a detective who told of a case he’d worked on—a story I’ve never forgotten. A young woman was kidnapped in broad daylight, and her abductor told her to sit quietly in the passenger seat of his car. To make sure she did, he held a hunting knife against her ribs, and he promised her he wouldn’t hurt her if she just did what he said.
They stopped at a red light. The kidnapper’s car was in the left turn lane, and a marked patrol car pulled up beside it to the right. It was a hot day, and both vehicles’ windows were down. The kidnap victim was barely a foot from the uniformed officer in the patrol unit.
“If you say anything,” the abductor warned, “I’ll stab you right here.”
She said nothing. The police car went straight ahead when the light turned green, and the car she was in turned left. A few miles down the road, the man with the knife pulled off into an orchard. There, he raped her, and then cut her throat.
If she had screamed or cried out for help, she might have lived—but she trusted the promise of a psychopathic killer.
Legal definitions of rape state that it is any penetration of an unwilling victim’s body—from intercourse to sodomy. And yet rape is difficult to categorize; each sexual assault is different from others. Some rapists are cautious, seizing their victims in dark and deserted places where there is only a slight chance that any cries for help will be heard. Others, like the crimes of a man who prowled two counties in Washington State for almost a year, are blatant; he took such incredible risks that it seemed he was crying out to be caught. Perhaps it was the extreme danger of possibly being discovered that enhanced the sexual excitation he felt.
One factor is invariably true, however. Rapists—like almost all criminals—have clearly defined MOs. They repeat their crimes with little variation.
During the time I was a Seattle police officer, I worked for months in the Sex Crimes Unit—then called, oddly, the Morals Division. The rapists seemed to be considered to have “bad morals.” Some people believed that that meant the victims were immoral, too. I took many statements from victims of sexual assault. Later, as a true crime author, I have written a few dozen articles about more recent cases. I don’t think laymen realize how terrifying sexual attacks can be—most of them involve far more than “missionary position” intercourse.
Some of these cases stand out in my memory. This story of a serial rapist is one I won’t forget. His series of sexual assaults shared a plotline so consistent that they must have been carefully planned and scripted. As always, I have changed the names of victims to spare them any more invasion of their privacy.
It was the fourth day of August, 1976, an uncommonly steamy day in Edmonds, Washington. Edmonds is a picturesque town a half hour’s drive north of Seattle, and it hugs the shore of Puget Sound.
Ashley Varner,* twenty-three, was typing some quarterly reports in the office of a church in Edmonds. It was shortly after two in the afternoon. Surely, there could be few safer places than a house of God on a sunny summer afternoon.
The pretty young woman heard the main church door open and then footsteps approaching the office where she worked. She looked up to see a tall man in workman’s clothes. There were some repairs under way at the church, so it wasn’t at all unusual to have workers come into the office. Ashley thought that he probably needed to use the phone.
That wasn’t it at all. She was startled when the man pulled a knife from his pocket and began to extract the blade. She was horrified by his rough command: “Take your clothes off!”
“What?” she asked, still unable to believe her own ears.
“I said to take your clothes off!”
There was nothing for her to do but comply, and pray that someone would enter the church to help her before it was too late. She removed all her clothing except her bra, and the man barked, “That, too.”
He remained fully clothed, but he unzipped his trousers and ordered the terrified girl to perform oral sex on him.
She bent to obey, still incredulous that this could be happening. She was afraid of the sharp knife he held, and realized that he was at least sixty pounds heavier than she was. She was trying to survive, hoping someone would see what was going on. After a few minutes, the intruder, still fully dressed except for his open fly, attempted to rape her. Although he had achieved a full erection, actual intercourse proved impossible; Ashley was a virgin and that, combined with her utter terror, made penetration impossible. Disgusted, the man ordered her to perform oral sex on him again. He ejaculated in her mouth as she choked and vomited with revulsion.
“That’s all there is to it,” the man said airily. “If you report this to the cops, though—I’ll come back and kill you.”
He walked from the church and she heard a car start, and tires squeal. Quickly, she threw on her clothes and locked the church. Once safely home, she didn’t know what to do. Like many sexual assault victims, she was ashamed. And she also believed that the man would come back and kill her if she called the police.
Ashley took a bath, desperately scrubbing away the scent of the rapist, but also unintentionally washing away semen that might have been matched to any suspect’s bodily fluids. After spending a sleepless night, she felt she had to tell someone. Ashley confided in a friend who urged her to tell the minister of their church. “You can’t just let it go—he’ll hurt somebody else.”
The reverend counseled her to call the police.
Detective Marian McCann, a longtime veteran of the Edmonds Police Department, gently elicited the details of the attack and assured Ashley Varner that she had done the right thing in reporting it. Ashley described her attacker as a white male about twenty-five, quite tall, with dark curly hair and a two-day growth of beard. She said the man wasn’t bad-looking; in other circumstances, she would have said he was handsome.
Forensic artist Robin Hickok drew a composite picture based on Ashley’s description and copies of the composite were distributed to all of the area police departments.
There was lit
tle more McCann and Hickok could do at that point. The victim hadn’t seen her attacker’s vehicle—if he even had one. She was positive that she’d never seen him before. The detectives knew from long experience that the man was likely to attack again, but where or when was impossible to guess. They checked with nearby jurisdictions, but none of them reported similar sexual assaults. No one recognized the composite picture.
Two months later, on October 7, an eighteen-year-old bride who lived in rural Snohomish County, was mowing her lawn at two in the afternoon. As it was in the case of the first attack, it was a weekday afternoon, a Thursday. Dressed in jean cutoffs and a beige top, she concentrated only on the task before her, mowing both the front and side yard. Then she went into her house through the side door to check on clothes she had in the dryer. Finding them dry, she carried the load into the kitchen to fold. She turned the stereo on, not terribly loud, but loud enough to drown out quiet noises—stealthy noises.
The young housewife, Jill Whaley,* was sitting at the kitchen table with her back to the door, going over her grocery list, when suddenly, muscular arms encircled her neck. She felt the blade of a knife against her flesh. Rigid with shock, she stared straight ahead, and heard the deep voice saying, “This is a rape!”
“What?” she cried. Later she would tell Snohomish County detectives, “Then I just went crazy and kept begging him not to do that to me.”
She realized that the knife was not actually cutting into her neck. By dropping her eyes and using peripheral vision, she could see it was a small pocketknife with the blade open. The man’s hands were more frightening: he seemed very strong.
“Go into the bedroom,” he ordered, and she obeyed. Once in the room, he said, “Take your clothes off.”