Even so, her suicide was a terrible shock.
“How could someone as vivacious and full of life as Brenda hang herself in her daughter’s garage, knowing Heather would find her?” Rhonda asked.
“She just stepped off the back fender of her Mustang and hung herself. She had put all of her files out, and told us what she wanted done. It rocked my world. Our family was fractured—and it had been for such a long time. Losing Brenda may have brought us together a little bit. But only time would tell.”
Brenda was to have been a witness for the state in Peggy’s trial—an event set to start in only four days. Brenda’s death notice was only a short column in the Whidbey Island papers: PEGGY THOMAS’S RELATIVE DECEASED. There was no mention of her having been on the witness list for the upcoming trial.
Peggy Sue’s trial was quickly postponed for four weeks, although no reason was given. Peggy’s day in court was to begin on October 24. That would be a wondrous season in Coupeville as yellow and scarlet leaves fluttered on the trees that lined streets where beautifully restored old houses abounded.
Tourists would flock to bed-and-breakfasts and stroll through shops before the end of the season. Once the fierce winds blustered off the Sound, Whidbey Island wouldn’t be nearly as welcoming.
It didn’t matter for reporters, writers, and television docudrama teams. All of us booked reservations, guessing how long Peggy Sue’s trial might last. Most thought it would be two—possibly three—weeks.
ABC’s Dateline was rumored to be following the strange murder of Russel Douglas, and so was 48 Hours. Whatever verdict was handed down by her jury, Peggy Thomas’s fate would undoubtedly be determined by Thanksgiving.
But no one could have foreseen just how long it was going to take for either Jim Huden’s or Peggy Sue Thomas’s trials to actually take place.
I made and canceled many hotel reservations, packed and unpacked, and often wondered if I would ever actually write this book.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
* * *
ON OCTOBER 3, 2011, defense attorney Craig Platt presented the court with an amazing request. He explained that his client, Peggy Sue, needed time and the freedom to travel because she had so many loose ends to tie up. Forcing her into a premature trial without letting her take care of her affairs would be unfair.
Michael Moynihan—a visiting judge from Bellingham, Washington—was sitting in for Judge Alan Hancock. Moynihan had retired from the bench, although he occasionally took over the reins from superior court judges when they took time off.
Moynihan pondered Platt’s reasons for asking that Peggy Sue be allowed to travel to at least five states over the following two weeks to visit her several properties and for personal reasons!
Island County prosecutor Greg Banks listened, astounded, as Platt ticked off the errands the defendant had to see to before the end of October.
Peggy’s attorney said she needed money to pay for her defense. She and her mother, Doris, had already put up two of their properties for her bail bond. In order to liquidate more of her assets, she found herself forced to sell outright one of her other houses—the one she had purchased in Roswell, New Mexico, after her divorce from Mark Allen.
Platt said that Peggy Sue also had to clean out another New Mexico residence and bring her possessions back to Nevada. She needed to get her winter clothing, she had to winterize her houseboat, and see that her lawn and garden in Henderson, Nevada, met the standards of the homeowner’s association in her gated community. If she didn’t do that, Craig Platt said, she would be fined by the association.
There were so many things the accused murderer needed to tend to. Peggy Sue had her own dentist in Nevada and her teeth needed attention. Almost as important, she wanted to get her car and bring it up to Whidbey Island so she could run errands, seek employment, and attend court.
Platt added that Peggy Sue also needed to retrieve items, including photographs, to use in her defense on the first-degree murder charges.
And then there was the tragedy of her half sister Brenda’s suicide. The Stackhouse family would gather in Idaho for her services. She wanted to go to Brenda’s funeral in Bonners Ferry.
Greg Banks was against it. Why did Peggy want to go to Brenda’s funeral when she knew Brenda was going to testify against her in her upcoming trial?
Not surprisingly, Island County prosecuting attorney Greg Banks opposed Platt’s other requests. He pointed out to Judge Moynihan that Peggy had not been released on her own personal recognizance, and she shouldn’t be treated as if she was. She was being monitored constantly through the tracking device on her ankle. Banks said he considered Peggy Thomas an escape risk, nonetheless.
Several of the areas she wanted to visit would be ideal jump-off spots, the prosecutor said, where she could slip across the U.S. border if she wanted to.
“It sounds to me like just about everything she’s asking to do could be done by others, by family members or hired contractors,” he continued in his arguments to prevent the defendant from leaving Whidbey Island.
“She wants to travel to New Mexico and Nevada to visit her two daughters, mow the lawn at her Nevada residence, take care of some of her other real estate, and pack up some stuff and move it.”
The prosecutor didn’t see why Peggy herself needed to go to Nevada to cut her grass or winterize her houses. Couldn’t she hire someone to do it?
“We do have dentists in Washington,” Banks told Judge Moynihan. “And they do sell clothing in Washington as well.”
The GPS anklet that semihobbled Peggy Thomas was far from foolproof. It would not work in areas outside certain cell phone ranges. If the person wearing the device wandered outside the coverage of AT&T towers, transmission would stop and no one could track where she was. Nor would the GPS activate on airplanes. And Peggy Sue was asking to go to Bonners Ferry, a Canadian border town in Idaho, and to Nevada, New Mexico, Washington State outside of Whidbey Island, and Utah.
Much of Peggy Sue’s travel would be in regions where there were dead spots for cell phone transmission. And she would also be flying much of the time.
Platt countered that his client had every reason to return for her trial. There was the property bond that she didn’t want to forfeit, and there was her sincere intention “to appear in court and defend herself zealously.”
To the prosecutor’s dismay, Judge Moynihan granted Peggy Sue’s request to travel America, albeit with a GPS device that would sound an alarm on Whidbey Island if she attempted to pry it off.
She was required, of course, to give Greg Banks’s office a detailed itinerary of her travels, right down to times, dates, flight times. She also said she would be glad to check in with local law-enforcement agencies wherever she went.
Craig Platt had extolled Peggy Sue’s many virtues and reliability to Judge Moynihan, but it didn’t do much to ease Banks’s mind.
Media outlets all over America and in Great Britain found Peggy’s travel arrangements after being charged with murder in the first degree so unusual that her case made headlines again in many newspapers and television programs.
* * *
WHILE PEGGY SUE WAS gone on her bizarre trip to get her world and wardrobe in order before her trial, it would be fair to say that Island County prosecuting attorney Greg Banks had some anxiety, wondering if she would come back or end up in another country. He knew how charismatic and engaging she could be, how chameleon-like. Although she was an almost Amazonian-size woman, Peggy could appear very feminine, even demure. She was many things to many people.
Banks worried that if she took off her tracking anklet in a dead zone in the New Mexican desert, Peggy Sue could be long gone before they realized it.
But she did show up at the places she had intended to visit. She was there at Brenda Gard’s memorial service in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. Along with her many half siblings and family members, she watched the slide show of Brenda’s life, a life ended too soon, and seemed as saddened as the rest of the mou
rners.
As Brenda’s lovely face flashed on the screen in still pictures and home movies, it seemed impossible that she should be gone at only the age of fifty-two.
No one was sure why Brenda had taken her own life. It could have been the long-delayed result of her mother’s murder, it could be that she had lost her two marriages and felt very alone, and it could also be because of guilt she felt over the prospect of testifying against her own half sister. Despite the differences among Doris’s and Jimmie’s kids, they had always tried to be loyal to each other, protecting their joint family against the outside world.
There were even those who suspected that Brenda had not died by her own hand—but that someone else had wanted to take her out of the picture. Autopsy findings did not validate that. In the case of hanging, forensic experts can determine which way a rope or cord has frayed and then see the difference between someone dropping from a height, and someone who has been unconscious and hoisted up over a beam of some sort by a killer standing behind him or her. The petechiae (small burst blood vessels) in the deceased’s eyes and face usually occur in both cases.
For whatever reason, Brenda was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
* * *
THE FALL OF 2011 was not the happiest time of Greg Banks’s career. One of his prime suspects was flying—somewhere—around America, the second was locked in the Island County Jail, unable to make bail, and the victim’s widow—a woman who rumor said was part of a murder plot—had yet to be charged with anything.
Greg Banks grew up in upstate New York and Connecticut, and graduated from the University of Connecticut with a degree in engineering in 1985. At the time, there were few engineering jobs in that area. Banks had a brother living in Portland, Oregon, who encouraged him to come west and consider moving there.
In many ways the Northwest and New England are vastly different, but Banks liked the lifestyle he found in Oregon and Washington—ocean beaches, mountains, and skiing. The Pacific Ocean was an easy drive from the cities on the west side of the Cascades, and Banks and his wife appreciated the casual friendliness of the people they met.
He ended up being hired by the Boeing Company as an engineer, and later took a job with a software company. By 1990, Greg Banks realized that his career as an engineer wasn’t where he was meant to be, and he entered law school, graduating with a law degree in 1993.
Banks worked as a deputy prosecutor at the King County Prosecutor’s Office in Seattle, and then in Island County. And he knew that the law was where he fit in.
Banks is a brilliant attorney, much respected in Island County and among other prosecutors in Washington State. He is a kind man who thinks always of the victims and the survivors of crime. He understands the pain that families who have lost loved ones to murder feel, and he often consults with them before he makes major decisions on how to prosecute defendants. If and when he feels that accepting a plea bargain rather than going to trial is the wiser choice, he will consult not only with the detectives on the case, but with the victims’ survivors to assess how they feel before he makes the final decision.
Either way, Banks goes with what he thinks is right and that justice will be done. In the death of Russ Douglas, Greg Banks had worked with the investigators throughout the probe. He knew every twist and turn of the frustrating case.
Banks’s family grew to include three children ranging in age from late teens to midtwenties. While they were growing up, he coached a lot of soccer. Like Detective Mark Plumberg, with whom he has worked so many years on the Russel Douglas case, Greg Banks is an avid vegetable gardener, a pastime that many islanders share. And he is also an athlete who runs, swims, and bikes.
Banks has had so many challenging and tense cases during his tenure in office that he needs the healthy pursuits he practices.
There is the case of a young man who killed both his grandfathers. He left the first crime scene and drove to the second house where he repeated his killing spree.
In 1997, Jack Pearson, sixty-seven, lived with a woman friend, Linda Miley, fifty-eight, after he had invited her to move into his home. It seemed to work out well for about six years. But when he suddenly kicked her out, leaving her a note, “Don’t drag your feet . . . just get out of here!” she was enraged.
Miley did not leave quietly. Instead, she bludgeoned Pearson in the head and then shot him five times in the chest. She ran to their neighbors and told them that a burglar had broken in and killed Jack. Later, she claimed that Pearson had raped her and she had no choice but to fight back in her own defense.
In her 2008 trial, Linda Miley’s attorney argued that she suffered from a dissociative mental disorder that prevented her from having the capacity to plan and carry out a premeditated murder.
She made a lengthy statement claiming that she had been tricked by an investigator to admit things that weren’t true while she was under the influence of her medication. She insisted that evidence had been lost that would have made the jury come back with an innocent verdict.
Found guilty of second-degree murder, Linda Miley faced a sentence of from fifteen years and three months to twenty-three years and four months. Greg Banks asked for the higher limits.
And Judge Alan Hancock agreed. He sentenced Linda Miley to twenty-one years in prison.
A sadder case was filed against a Whidbey Island teenager whose fifteen-year-old girlfriend disappeared suddenly. He finally admitted that he had killed her and buried her in his grandfather’s mulch pile. Her body had deteriorated so much that it was no longer possible to tell if she had been pregnant when she died.
Like the “grotesques” in Sherwood Anderson’s classic novel, Winesburg, Ohio, Whidbey Island has its share of bizarre crimes, just as other small counties and towns across America, crimes that involve residents who heretofore seemed normal and harmless.
Huey Ford, sixty-five, had one best friend: Mahlon “Lonnie” Gane Jr., fifty-five. They seemed an unlikely pair; Lonnie was black and mobile, and Huey was Caucasian and used a wheelchair, but they became truly close friends. Lonnie couldn’t do enough for Huey. He once drove Huey all the way to Louisiana and back so his disabled friend could visit his relatives and see once more where he had grown up.
Such a friendship is hard to find, especially for lonely older men. But one summer, the two began to argue, and the arguments turned into a feud.
Huey Ford was very proud of his lawn but it wasn’t looking good, bare and yellowing in many areas, and nothing like the green velvet perfection he had come to expect since Lonnie began helping him.
Huey suspected that Lonnie was deliberately poisoning his grass, although he wouldn’t say why. He found that just downright mean. They fought for weeks as Huey accused and Lonnie denied. And the grass continued to look peckish.
Because he was disabled and needed his wheelchair to get around, Huey Ford took extra precautions to protect himself; there was always a .38 hidden beneath one of his legs.
One day in July 2005, Lonnie Gane went over to visit Huey in his house on Camano Island. He brought with him a .45 caliber handgun that he had borrowed earlier from Huey.
They began to argue about the grass again, and Gane threw a pillow at Huey Ford who responded with a racial slur. It was so unlike both of them, but it escalated the fight.
Huey pulled his .38 from its hiding place under his leg and fired two shots at his best friend’s legs. Lonnie made a grab for the .45 off a table where it rested, but Huey hit it out of his hand. Then Lonnie punched Huey in the face and knocked him out of his wheelchair onto the ground.
The two longtime buddies rolled over and over on the ground. If they had taken a moment to think how ridiculous it was to get so angry over a patch of grass, they surely would have stopped, laughed, and shook hands.
But they were both mad. Huey Ford managed to reach the .45 and gain control of it. He fired blindly but still managed to hit Lonnie in the back of his head.
Even so, Lonnie continued to fight him, and H
uey didn’t think he was hit. Huey fired again and his gun jammed. He could hear Lonnie gasping, “I’m dying—I’m dying. Let me go . . .”
It should have been over at that point, but Huey reached for his .38 and shot Lonnie two more times.
Lonnie Gane wasn’t moving any longer. Huey Ford reloaded his gun. He told Island County Detective Sue Quandt later that he did that because he intended to shoot himself afterward.
But he changed his mind and called 911. He told them he had shot his friend. When EMTs arrived, they found that Lonnie was beyond saving.
Huey Ford pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He died there in October 2011.
“We never expected him to get out of prison,” Greg Banks said when he heard that Ford was dead. “But it happened sooner than we thought.”
As the prosecuting attorney of Island County, Greg Banks had been to trial or overseen complicated plea bargains multiple times—but he had never seen a case as demanding as the investigation into Russ Douglas’s death in the silent woods.
There was a plethora of circumstantial evidence, very little physical evidence, and virtually no clear motivation that sparked this Christmas homicide. Banks hoped that Peggy Sue Thomas’s trial would unearth some of the long-buried secrets behind Douglas’s death.
* * *
ONE MORE THORN IN Greg Banks’s side in 2011 was a local editor/reporter, Brian Kelly of the South Whidbey Record, who had obtained many of the sheriff’s follow-up reports. Under the Freedom of Information Act, it was legal for Kelly to get the records. Most reporters, however, understand that the release of too much information in the media before trial can seriously impact both the prosecution and the defense. Journalists, including myself, adhere to a kind of gentleman’s agreement to withhold certain details until a case has been adjudicated. We don’t want to hamper either side.