3. Jim said he went alone to Russel Douglas’s apartment in Renton to drop off a present for Brenna—either on that Monday or on Tuesday.
4. There were apparently several phone calls between Peggy and Russel arranging the present delivery on the day Jim said he took it to Russel.
5. Jim drove Peggy’s Lexus to Russel’s apartment.
6. Peggy did not accompany Jim, but stayed at the hotel because she was “tired” after cutting hair all day.
7. Jim’s relationship with Brenna Douglas was because she was Peggy’s friend. “They have a telephone relationship,” he said. “And I’m kinda just a guy in the room.”
8. Peggy’s mother called them in Las Vegas days after the murder to tell them that Russel was dead.
9. Jim Huden and Peggy Thomas were both in deep debt on their credit cards—just as Bill Hill had told detectives earlier.
10. Huden confirmed that Bill Hill was a friend of his and that they had lunch on the Monday before the current interview. “I told him I needed to get back to Peggy in Vegas.”
Who delivered the Christmas gift for Brenna from Peggy—and if indeed there was a gift—might not seem important. But it was. One or both of the two suspects was either failing to recall the details—or lying.
Mike Beech told Jim Huden that his own best friend, Bill Hill, had called the Island County Sheriff’s Department and told Beech himself that Jim had confessed to him.
Huden wilted when he heard that. Until now, he had not asked directly just why he was being questioned. Surely he knew from the direction of the questioning, but he seemed reluctant to say anything specifically, even after Mark Plumberg accused him of being the shooter.
Within a very short time, Jim asked for an attorney. Plumberg assumed he would want to be taken home where he could contact a lawyer, but he remained in the police station, dialing a number of law offices. He had no luck. It was after business hours, too late at night to reach anything but answering machines.
“We even tried to help him find a lawyer,” Plumberg said.
When Jim Huden couldn’t locate an attorney to come to the police station, he asked Plumberg, “What happens next?”
“That’s up to you.”
Huden mulled it over for a while, and then he asked if he could have a ride home.
A Punta Gorda police officer provided that transportation.
* * *
THERE WAS NO QUESTION that the Island County detectives felt they had the person who had either shot Russel Douglas or conspired with someone else to do so—but they couldn’t prove it.
They had no gun. They had a single, battered bullet from Russ Douglas’s brain. They had no solid physical evidence or credible eyewitnesses. And, most puzzling of all, they had no motive. Apparently Huden and Douglas hadn’t even known each other!
It was true that Jim Huden and Peggy Thomas had run through their money and were approaching their credit card limits, but killing Russ hardly seemed a feasible way to get money. He didn’t have much money—certainly not enough to kill for.
All homicides have some motivation, however obscure, but this case was as baffling as anything they had run into before.
Hurricane Charley was getting closer, but neither Mike Beech nor Mark Plumberg was anxious to leave Punta Gorda. They wanted to canvass Jim Huden’s neighbors and friends to see if they could learn anything more about him, something that might help them get an arrest warrant.
The Hudens’ next-door neighbors on Yucca Street weren’t able to provide much information, nothing beyond finding them “nice people.” They had noticed that Jim was not living with Jean for several months in 2003.
“I think he left right before Memorial Day last year,” the wife said. “And then he was back in January or February.”
The detectives contacted a man named Roy Boehm, said to be a friend of Jim’s.
“I know him, and I occasionally went flying with him—but we aren’t close,” Boehm said. “I think I know Jean, his wife, better.”
Mutual friends said that Jim admired Boehm and wanted to emulate his bravery and toughness in some way.
“You ever go shooting with him?” Plumberg asked.
“No! I don’t know if he even owns a gun. I know he left Jean for a while and went back to Washington to visit his brother and a friend who lives there.”
Asked about any other friends Huden might have, Boehm mentioned a local called “The Mayor.” He wasn’t really the mayor, but people called him that.
“Jim liked to play golf—I think he used to work on a golf course. That’s about all I know about him.”
The two Island County detectives next located the musicians who had played in Jim’s band, Buck Naked and the X-hibitionists.
“We’ve started a new band we call Buck Naked II, and we play in a place called Tallulah’s in Sarasota,” one member told them.
The man gave them the names of three other band members, including Bill Hill, but his answers were terse and he didn’t seem to want to discuss Huden. He did tell them, however, that Jim had told someone he might be leaving the area soon, and they wouldn’t see him again.
Bill Hill couldn’t fathom why the Jim he knew would have killed anyone. On August 8, 2004, hearing that the Washington State detectives had talked to Jim and that they had drawn quite a bit of information from him, Hill provided Mike Beech and Mark Plumberg with a taped statement of what he had told them earlier on the phone.
While Hill was doing that, another of the Buck Naked performers dropped in to his house.
The drummer said that he’d known Jim since 1994 or ’95, but they hadn’t been very close since Jim came back from Las Vegas.
“Lots of people are angry with him,” the drummer said. “About a week ago last Sunday, he announced he was leaving town and our band again!”
“Does Jim have a gun?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know about any firearm and I’ve been to his house many, many times.”
It was beginning to look as if Jim Huden had already left town. When Beech and Plumberg knocked on Jean and Jim’s door, no one answered. A neighbor said he had seen Jean come home in her Corvette, but she left again in Jim’s red car.
Jean’s brother, who had no particular love for Jim, said that he hadn’t seen Jim but that Jean had said she was getting out of town for the weekend, going to the beach to lie in the sun. She didn’t say which beach she planned to visit.
“She said she had asked Jim to move out.”
Jean had known about the other woman in Las Vegas for some time, but she had hinted that there was “another problem.”
“I asked her if it was a legal problem, but she didn’t answer,” her brother said. “Jean doesn’t tell about other people’s business or personal problems.”
Jean told her brother only that the other problem was why the Washington State detectives were in Florida at the moment.
Many people knew that Jean was leaving for a few days during the prior week, but no one recalled having seen Jim for a week to ten days. Jean had returned to their house and continued her usual routine and neighbors expected Jim to drive up at any moment.
Almost everyone the investigators talked to said that Jim had been “a different man” or “not himself” since he’d come back from Las Vegas months before. He had seemed depressed and distracted. Some even thought he might be ill.
Jean’s brother didn’t know what to make of it all. When he spoke to Jean on the phone, he sensed that Jim might be listening in, but she swore he wasn’t with her.
She told her brother that she had hidden her gun so Jim couldn’t find it; he was so depressed. They all knew about Jean’s gun, but no one was sure Jim had a gun of his own. They doubted it.
“Jean told me that Jim needed to see a shrink and that he was having problems,” one female acquaintance recalled.
One thing was clear: Jim Huden wasn’t in Punta Gorda. Surely someone would have seen him, but it appeared that he had left Punta Gorda
shortly after he gave a statement to Mark Plumberg and Mike Beech.
Most people who knew him believed he had flown to Las Vegas, and the two detectives weren’t that worried about finding him as they headed west just in time to escape the hurricane. He had been quite cooperative with them.
But Jim Huden was not nearly as predictable as everyone thought. At least at the moment. He wasn’t in Las Vegas, although he was in touch with Jean. They had plans to meet in a hotel miles away from Punta Gorda after the investigation simmered down a bit.
Whether Jean Huden had somehow aided her husband in his vanishing act was hard to tell. According to their close friends, they had been having marital problems, and she was considering divorce. Since Jean obviously knew about his obsession with Peggy Sue Thomas, it wasn’t surprising that their marriage might be in big trouble.
Jim had left Jean once before. This time, he hadn’t been home in Florida with her for more than four or five months, and now he was gone again.
Jim had told Bill Hill that he was going to try to get Peggy Sue back. Jean Huden would have to be a saint to want to help him evade the Island County investigators, especially after Peggy Sue had come to Florida and Jean had seen her husband and his lover together. Even so, if she still loved him, Jean might have delivered his red sports car to him.
Mark Plumberg’s search into Peggy Sue’s background was unearthing tangled and complicated secrets.
Were it not for the vicissitudes of fate, karma, and even sheer coincidence, Peggy Sue Stackhouse Thomas might never have been born.
And, some said, that would have been a good thing . . .
CHAPTER NINETEEN
* * *
ON AUGUST 18, 2004, the Island County Sheriff’s Office authorized a press release, hoping that might encourage someone to come forward with information. They officially named Jim Huden and Peggy Sue Thomas as “persons of interest” who might be connected to the unsolved murder of Russel Douglas.
The story was carried by print, radio, and television media that night.
It paid off, and it led to the most important piece of physical evidence the Island County investigators retrieved since the night Russel Douglas died.
At a quarter to one the next day, Commander Mike Beech received a call from Investigator Boeglin of the Doña Anna County Sheriff’s Office in New Mexico.
“We just had a weapon turned in,” Boeglin said. “A citizen named Keith Ogden brought in a .380 caliber Bersa pistol. He thinks it might have been used in the homicide up your way—victim might have been a guy named Russel Douglas.”
It seemed almost too easy. If this was the death gun, the murder probe might be coming to a successful conclusion. It had been a frustrating eight months for the investigators.
But if they thought they were home free, they were mistaken.
Commander Mike Beech and Ed Wallace were on a plane for Las Cruces, New Mexico, early the next morning. They took custody of the possible murder weapon from the Doña Anna County sheriff. Keith Ogden had turned in a two-tone Bersa Thunder, .380 caliber—serial number 573168. Its manufacturer and the caliber could well be a match; the Bersa was one possible gun pinpointed by ballistics experts.
How it ended up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, was a mystery.
Mike Beech and Ed Wallace phoned Keith and arranged to meet him and his wife, Donna, at their home in Radium Springs, New Mexico.
They learned that Ogden’s connection to Jim Huden was through Keith’s cousin, Preston Collier.* Ogden was a retired police officer from Multnomah County, Oregon. He and Donna had known Huden when they were living in Las Vegas.
“My cousin called us after he read information in a press release,” Ogden said. “He told us that there was a search on for a Bersa that was missing after a homicide up in Washington.”
It took less than twenty-four hours before Keith Ogden went to his local sheriff and handed over the gun. “Keith hated to do it—we both liked Jim,” Donna said. “But we both agreed that we had to go to the police with that gun.”
The Ogdens weren’t positive about when they met Jim Huden, but believed it was sometime in mid-2003.
“Let’s see,” Ogden said. “We met Jim about three weeks before the Johnny Rivers concert at a casino in Henderson, Nevada.”
(Mike Beech contacted the concert promotions manager for casino artists, and was able to pin down the date of the Rivers concert as August 29, 2003.)
“Several months after that,” Ogden continued, “might have been six months, maybe less—Huden called me and asked if I had any guns to sell because he was looking to buy one.”
Keith Ogden didn’t have any guns for sale, but Jim Huden had shown up at his house in Las Vegas a few days later with a .380 Bersa pistol he’d purchased.
“I taught him how to clean it and operate it.”
The two men had then taken it to the Ogdens’ backyard near Las Vegas where Keith and Donna test-fired it into the dirt there.
“We fired it into a pillow to cut down on the noise.”
“Do you recall just where that was in your yard at your last place?” Beech asked.
“I do,” Donna Ogden said. “You walk out the back patio door. There’s a pool facing you. Then you would turn left onto the grassy area, past two clumps of ornamental grass plants set in gray gravel. Just about two feet beyond that was where we were firing into the ground.”
Asked to isolate the time this happened, Keith and Donna Ogden thought it had been more like four months rather than six after Huden was first looking for a gun in August.
They were positive the test-firing had occurred before Jim and his girlfriend, Peggy, had left to go to Washington State in December.
After the couple came back from their Christmas trip, Keith said that Jim had contacted him again. Now that he thought about it, Jim said he was worried about having a gun in their house because of Peggy’s young daughters.
“He asked me if I would take care of the gun for him, and I agreed,” Keith said. “We were over at Jim and Peggy’s house for lunch, and I remember that Peggy’s mom called that day to tell her that someone on Whidbey Island had died or was killed. Come to think of it, it was right after that that Jim called me and asked me to keep the gun for him.”
As far as Keith knew, the test bullet rounds that were fired were still in the ground at their former home.
“We moved to New Mexico on July 6, 2004,” Ogden said.
“Did you do any landscaping in the backyard before you moved?” Detective Ed Wallace asked.
“No, sir. But, if anyone dug a shovel in there, they might not even touch the rounds. They penetrated several inches down.”
The gun that Jim Huden had left with Keith Ogden might be worth its weight in gold. If it was the right Bersa Thunder. Mike Beech treated it tenderly as he hand-carried it back to Whidbey Island for ballistics tests.
Mark Plumberg delivered the .380 Bersa pistol to the Washington State Police lab. There it was swabbed for DNA testing. That didn’t yield a match, but within a day, he received a fax from criminalist Evan Thompson.
The gun that Keith Ogden had turned in microscopically matched the extractor and ejector marks on the shell casing recovered from Russ Douglas’s yellow Tracker. Moreover, the lands and grooves striations on the single bullet recovered from the victim’s brain also matched the Bersa’s barrel!
This, at last, was a vital piece of physical evidence. The link between Jim Huden and the death weapon had been made.
It should have been enough to arrest Huden, if they could find him.
Jim was proving to be extremely elusive.
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
ON AUGUST 31, 2004, Commander Mike Beech and detectives Shawn Warwick and Ed Wallace from Island County arrived in Henderson, Nevada. Accompanied by Detective Daniel Leath of the Henderson Police Department, they served a search warrant on Peggy Sue Thomas.
Beech, Wallace, and Warwick talked to Peggy Sue for two days. They saw that
she was a very tall, striking woman with long, reddish-tinted hair. She would certainly stand out in any crowd.
Peggy Sue explained that she was working for a limousine service in Las Vegas. Her day planner and appointment book verified that. She kept very precise records on her clientele. She saved business cards, and jotted down her regulars’ favorite snacks and drinks. She also put in the hourly base rate for the limousine and noted tips. One group might leave her a five-hundred-dollar tip, while others left ten dollars. Of course, when she drove a celebrity, she mentioned that, too.
Peggy Sue’s attorney—Gerald Werksman of Los Angeles—was present when the Washington State detectives interviewed his client.
She was accommodating and didn’t seem upset when they removed the hard drive from her computer, five sealed and labeled bags of possible physical evidence, and a laptop computer in a gray case. The items were shipped securely back to the sheriff’s office on Whidbey Island.
Peggy’s business cards featured a photo of her draped over a luxury limousine, wearing a clinging black dress that was open almost to the waist.
Apparently, Peggy’s fortune had risen since Jim left for Florida; some of her tips were a thousand dollars or more! Hers was a transportation business that attracted high rollers—many of them men, but she also had glowing thank-you notes from couples who had visited the Vegas Strip.
Her Henderson, Nevada, home was upscale, the golden stucco of the southwest with lavish landscaping of palm trees, cacti, and paloverde trees.
Peggy Sue had good recall of the Christmas season now eight months in the past. She had flown to Seattle, she said, with one of her daughters.
“Jim drove my Lexus up before I got there, and he picked us up at Sea-Tac Airport.”
Werksman wanted Jean Huden’s phone number, but Peggy said it would be better if she had Jean call him.
When Jean called Peggy’s attorney a short time later, she verified that she’d heard Jim say that he had shot Russ Douglas. It happened while he was going out for cigarettes.