Werksman disagreed. “I don’t think he did it.”
But Jean Huden insisted. “He keeps saying he did it.”
Werksman told Jean that this was a very important statement, and she had to be certain. Werksman, too, was concerned that Jim might commit suicide.
“I told her that she ought to call Plumberg. And then I told her that it was very decent of her—knowing the strain she’d been under—to talk to me.”
Werksman said he had Peggy write down a statement about what, to the best of her memory, was closest to what had actually happened during her Christmas visit to Whidbey Island.
Peggy was prepared to sign the one-page statement. Warwick and Beech exchanged glances; how could Peggy sum up everything that occurred on the prior December 26 in just one page?
Asked once again about who had delivered the present for Brenna to Russ, Peggy said that both she and Jim had gone to his Renton apartment.
That, of course, presented a continuing problem with their separate versions of the errand, but the investigators didn’t correct her.
Peggy’s appointment book showed that her last hair appointment was on December 23, 2003, at Just B’s—the day the couple both said they left Whidbey Island and moved to a motel near Sea-Tac Airport.
Peggy told Shawn Warwick that she realized she still had the key to Dick Deposit’s house on Soundview Drive in Langley where they’d been staying for four days.
“We drove back to Whidbey on the twenty-sixth,” she said. “Jim left me at Dick’s house for thirty, maybe forty-five minutes and drove off in my Lexus to get some smokes.”
This was a very important date, the day that Russel Douglas was murdered, and the investigative team from Island County was eager to hear about Peggy’s memories of that day after Christmas.
Dick Deposit’s guest house was about five miles from Wahl Road, where Russ Douglas was shot, but neither detective betrayed any particular interest when they heard this. They listened intently, however, as she recalled the day after Christmas.
She said he had returned in that time period, bringing some Swisher Sweets cigars with him. These cigars were an item that few stores carried. Peggy said she still had the receipt for them. However, she hadn’t saved receipts for gas, ferry tickets, or other purchases she and Jim made on December 26.
Peggy recalled that while Jim was gone, she noticed the sheets from their bed had been washed—but she’d forgotten to put them into the dryer. She rectified that, turning on the dryer and then making the bed.
When he came back about noon, she said they had left the island again, taking the Keystone ferry to visit a friend, Bill Marlow. After that, they had driven to Vancouver, Washington, to see one of Peggy’s sisters.
Heading north again, Peggy Sue said she and Jim stayed at the Marriott Hotel near Sea-Tac Airport.
She had left out one stop on their quick trip down I-5, almost to Portland. Initially, Peggy didn’t mention stopping at the Red Lion in Longview at about 6:30 in the evening of December 26.
Their friend Rick Early verified to Detective Sue Quandt that Peggy Sue and Jim had stopped to share a holiday dinner there, but they had only eaten appetizers and drank coffee, and left before others in the party ordered dinner.
In this second interview with Shawn Warwick, Peggy went into more detail about catching the Keystone ferry on the day after Christmas. She said they had missed the noon ferry, and taken the 12:45 to Port Townsend to visit Bill Marlow. But the Washington State Ferry System said there was no 12:45 ferry; the next ferry would have been at 1:30 P.M.
Detective Quandt reported to Mark Plumberg that she had contacted Bill Marlow in Port Townsend.
“He said Peggy and Jim didn’t come to see him at all during the Christmas holidays. Jim was supposed to meet Marlow and other musicians for a band practice on the twenty-third, but he never showed up. Jim called him instead and said that he and Peggy were in Seattle.”
It appeared that Jim and Peggy had attempted to fill the day of Russ Douglas’s murder full of occasions where they had been with people who would validate them. But some of them simply didn’t mesh.
Peggy’s recall of the vital day placed them around noon at Dick Deposit’s—returning a key, buying Swisher Sweets, drying sheets, and then on the Keystone ferry to see Bill Marlow, next heading south on 101 either to Vancouver (which now seemed doubtful), before going to Kelso-Longview, Washington, to join friends for dinner.
And then the pair had set out for Las Vegas.
As Detective Shawn Warwick interviewed Peggy Sue again before he and Ed Wallace left Nevada, Peggy wanted to correct something she had said earlier. She said she had been mistaken when she said that Jim had been gone from Dick Deposit’s house for half an hour to forty-five minutes. Thinking back, she thought he’d been away only about fifteen minutes.
Any homemaker knows that would not have been enough time to dry a load of sheets and pillowcases.
Odd.
Whenever the interview with Peggy began to veer into areas where Gerald Werksman appeared to feel uneasy, he changed the subject. He went into great detail about the baseball games he’d placed bets on since he had arrived in Las Vegas, or asked the detectives about how they liked the hotel where they were staying.
It was an obvious ploy to take some of the heat off of Peggy Sue’s answers.
* * *
THE DETECTIVES HAD HEARD about that Christmas trip many times.
They listened patiently, detecting slight changes. And then they showed Peggy a photograph of the death gun found in Radium Springs, New Mexico, only two weeks earlier.
Peggy Sue denied ever having seen it before, but the stunned look on her face spoke for itself. After this first day of interviewing and finding more items listed on the search warrant, the detectives called it a day. They wanted to give Peggy Thomas time to mull over the fact that the Bersa had been found and perhaps wonder which of her documents and files had been taken into evidence.
She had also appeared shaken when her prize car was impounded.
After they left, Peggy immediately called Jean Huden. She said she was shocked when the detectives showed her a picture of a gun.
“I was thrown for a loop,” she said. “My car was impounded. I have to find Jim and see what in the hell is going on.”
Peggy Sue told detectives the next day that the only possible phone contact with Jim Huden would be at the house he shared with his wife, Jean, in Punta Gorda.
“I called Jean and told her what had happened—and asked if she knew anything about it. She put Jim on the phone. That was a first, ’cause I never talked to him.”
“Yesterday,” Shawn Warwick cut in, “you kept mentioning that you had been talking to Jean—but you didn’t mention talking to Jim.”
“I hadn’t talked to him when you were here yesterday,” she explained. “I didn’t think he’d been home since Detective Plumberg was down there. But Jean was with him yesterday so I got to talk to him. He got on the phone and asked how I was doing. I said, ‘How do you think I’m doing? My car’s been taken—what’s going on?’ And he just said, ‘I’m sorry, I love you. I never meant for you to be involved in this—but I did it. I did it when I went for cigarettes.’
“I said, ‘It can’t be!’ And he said, ‘Just know I love you, and you’re never gonna see me or hear from me again.’ That was it. He hung up.”
Peggy Sue said that she was hysterical, shocked at what Jim confessed to her—so she had called Gerald Werksman, her attorney, who advised her to call the Island County Sheriff’s investigators.
Gerald Werksman validated what his client said, and that he had urged her to call the sheriff’s office.
“This was the first time she ever called with tears [in her voice]. And I was naturally most interested in not only did he say he did it—when did he say he did it? She told me when he went out for smokes.”
Mike Beech finally asked Peggy an obvious question: “The first thing that struck me last night—a
nd again this morning—is nowhere in here do you go, ‘Why? Why did you kill him? Why did you do this?’ That’s a pretty normal human response, I would think.”
“If you would have seen my demeanor yesterday, I couldn’t even hardly function,” Peggy explained.
“Before your phone call with Jim yesterday—or after?”
“No, when I got the phone call.”
“You mean when you made the phone call,” Shawn Warwick corrected.
“Yeah, I mean when I got to talk to him [Jim]. I mean, I called up very frank and ended up with the phone being hung up on me, and I’m left in hysterics.”
“Well, what do you think—about why he might have done it—killed Douglas?” Warwick pressed.
“I don’t know anyone who would do that,” Peggy said.
Peggy’s attorney reminded her that she had told him about Jim’s growing up in an abusive household. And that Bill Hill had told Werksman that Jim believed Russ was abusing Brenna.
Peggy Sue denied that she had ever told Werksman anything like that.
It seemed that they were mapping out a scenario right there in front of the detectives—one that would totally absolve Peggy and point fingers at Jim as the shooter.
Gerald Werksman’s explanation for the “why” of Douglas’s inexplicable murder grew more convoluted.
“Now we start speculating,” he said. “And this whole thing is speculation.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Mike Beech mumbled, not giving away his own opinion.
“But I came away from where—either I read or what you said, as now you’ve switched, at first, you—” Werksman fumbled. “I was told that the motivation for this was insurance. I don’t know where I heard that, but now I’m sayin’ to myself, now, because motivation seems to, you know, be an obvious question, maybe in his own sick way, Jim was avenging the abuse he—that he may have heard from Brenna that she was getting or her kids were getting from Russ.
“Okay. And from what I’ve heard about Huden, he’s wacky enough to—to somehow, in his own mind, thought he was a…an avenging source or something, that as, as far-fetched as that may seem.”
“Well, everything in the past two years has been far-fetched,” Peggy cut in.
“Well, regardless of his motive, would he and Brenna—would Jim and Brenna have had a chance to have a discussion?” Shawn Warwick asked.
“I don’t think so,” Peggy said.
“Do you know that Brenna is driving a new SUV?” Warwick asked.
“No.”
Peggy Sue said that Brenna’s plan to buy her house hadn’t materialized. She had told Werksman that it was against Brenna’s financial interest for Russ “not to be around.”
“Yeah,” Werksman added. “When Russ was alive, there was the hope that she, Brenna, would buy the house.”
The interview wound around and around like a spinning top, the lines at the top disappearing into the vortex, but they came out changed. Peggy Thomas insisted that she and Jim had taken the Keystone ferry to Bill Marlow’s house on December 26—after they left Dick Deposit’s house.
“He and his wife were the only ones there,” she said. “They must have forgotten.”
One thing was clear to the three detectives. For a woman who had allegedly been passionate about Jim Huden, Peggy Sue Thomas had no compunction about throwing him to the wolves, trying to find reasons he was “wacky” and impetuous and capable of murder.
* * *
AS HE WENT OVER all the reports that came across his desk, Mark Plumberg was accounting for every time, every minute that Peggy and Jim had been on Whidbey Island during the 2003 Christmas season. He was also ferreting out seemingly insignificant slips, different versions of the same situation, and peculiar comments. It was akin to stringing a line full of tiny Christmas lights. Every once in a while, something didn’t match. That tended to make the entire rope of “lights” go black.
Taken separately, those jarring mismatches didn’t matter all that much. As a whole, Plumberg believed that someone had to be lying.
This was most assuredly not a slam-dunk case. The circumstantial evidence was mushrooming, but it wasn’t enough to arrest anyone on murder charges.
The homicide case on the shooting death of Russel Douglas remained open.
PART SEVEN
* * *
The Stackhouse Family: 1963–2002
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
JIM HUDEN WAS MISSING, and could possibly be dead—a suicide. That was what his wife, Jean, said she was afraid of. Back on Whidbey Island, Mark Plumberg moved along a winding path toward what he hoped would be the truth. He had met all of the principals who might have even a sliver of knowledge about Russ Douglas’s murder.
All except Peggy Sue Thomas. He had spoken with her on the phone and found her easygoing and accessible—unlike Brenna Douglas, whose emotions were so erratic that they were almost impossible to chart.
Plumberg had heard talk on the island that Peggy Sue’s very large family, fathered by Jimmie Stackhouse, had suffered many tragedies in the past. Indeed, there was an almost “Kennedyesque” sense about them, a black cloud of violence, misfortune, and sudden death that seemed to stalk them.
If Peggy Sue Thomas did have any complicity or guilty knowledge that would help close the Russel Douglas homicide case, Plumberg needed to find out as much as he could about her.
A vicious, sadistic murder that occurred two states away and forty years earlier had made Peggy’s father, Jimmie, a widower with six children to raise.
The tragedies that Jimmie Stackhouse and his family endured had nothing whatsoever to do with Peggy Sue. She was born on September 2, 1965—two years and three months after Mary Ellen Stackhouse, Jimmie’s first wife, was murdered at the age of thirty-two.
Jimmie Stackhouse would surely have remained with his original family—his wife and six children—and he wouldn’t have been a single man when he met the woman who would bear his seventh child.
That baby, of course, was Peggy Sue Stackhouse.
Almost every family, traced back generations, reveals startling and disturbing events, some best left unexamined. If ever there was a family damned to tragedy and pain, it was Jimmie Stackhouse’s. I share that family surname, although I haven’t found any direct connections—for which I am thankful. Again and again, those on the family tree underwent unbelievable losses. Jimmie Stackhouse suffered so many.
* * *
IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 1963, despite the many blows in Jimmie Stackhouse’s early life, he had some happier times. Jimmie spent his adult life serving in the navy as a chief petty officer, service he was proud of. By the time he was thirty-one, his life was complete with everything a man might wish for. A perfect family. A career he loved.
Jimmie met the girl he would marry on Whidbey Island. Mary Ellen Hower came from a very wealthy extended family back in Findley, Ohio. The Howers started the Quaker Oats company, and lived in a mansion that they eventually donated to the city of Akron. Now known as the Hower House, locals and tourists alike flock to view its historic luxury.
Mary Ellen’s branch of the Hower family wasn’t particularly wealthy, however, and she went to high school in Coupeville, Washington, rather than an exclusive finishing school for girls.
Jimmie Stackhouse met her there, and felt lucky to have won such a beautiful bride. As Jimmie was stationed from one base to another—in Hawaii and California—Mary Ellen gave birth to six children in eight years. Both she and Jimmie welcomed them, and they were very happy.
And then, a horrifying crime in San Jose, California, stopped Jimmie Stackhouse’s world, changing his family’s future in untold ways.
Stackhouse was stationed at the Naval Air Station at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, a short distance northwest of San Jose, and only a mile from San Francisco Bay.
Moffett Field has a long and rich history going back to 1931, with huge wooden hangars that once housed dir
igibles (blimps like the ill-fated Hindenburg, which crashed and burned in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937). Later Moffett provided space for fighter jets. The naval facility was decommissioned in 1994, and both NASA and private corporations now occupy the fifteen hundred acres there.
For Stackhouse, his wife, Mary Ellen, and their three boys and three girls, Moffett was a good duty station. The temperature was moderate, there were flowers everywhere, and even the fog that hovers so often over San Francisco is held back by the coastal range of mountains before it hits San Jose. At the time, Moffett was rumored to have the best commissary in America, and navy families abounded so that Mary Ellen and their children had no difficulty finding friends.
Jimmie bought a split-level house for his brood on Ruskin Drive in the Berryessa neighborhood in San Jose. There were plenty of bedrooms and a green sweep of grass where the Stackhouse children could play.
They were a handsome family. Jimmie was a big, rugged man with wavy, red-blond hair that he combed into an imposing pompadour. Thirty-year-old Mary Ellen was a tall, slender brunette who was attractive enough to be a model. Tommy, eight, was the oldest and resembled his mother, while Mike, seven, Lana, five, Brenda, four, Rhonda, three, and Robby, eighteen months, all looked like Jimmie.
Jimmie had thirteen years in the navy and he loved it. A flight mechanic, he planned to stay in the service until he retired. Mary Ellen had her hands full with six children under eight, but she occasionally worked as a cocktail waitress at the navy base and also helped out with wedding receptions there. To add a little more to the family’s income, she sold Avon products.
She was fiercely protective of her children, particularly when Jimmie was gone for training or active duty.
In early June 1963, Jimmie was far away from home. He was attending navy classes at Stewart Air Force Base near Nashville, Tennessee. Mary Ellen missed him, of course, but she wasn’t lonely—not with six active children running through their new house.