Practice to Deceive

  “He showed me how he had blacked out the van’s windows so the police couldn’t look in on him. He had a TV, computer, feather bed, clothes, and a large black ‘Tupper-ware-style’ tote in there,” Sandra recalled. “He was proud of the way he had it all set up so the van could run his computer and TV. He said he found the feather bed in a bag beside the road someplace.”

  Plumberg wondered if Russel Douglas might have had a feather bed in his Tracker—since he traveled so much for his job.

  Eddie Navarre wove many good stories, including his tale of owning a huge marijuana farm in Gainesville, Florida, his promise of a twenty-thousand-dollar investment from an elderly man in Canada who wanted to help him republish a book/pamphlet he’d written in the eighties called Layman’s Guide to Fasting, and the fact that he had to work only two or three hours a day selling the juice franchises that were making him wealthy.

  And yet Mark Plumberg felt he was a shadow man. Sandra didn’t know where he lived, only that it was supposed to be a garage apartment with “new tile.”

  He asked Sandra if Navarre had ever mentioned a watch to her. She suddenly looked surprised.

  “Yeah—a watch. How did you know—?”

  And then she shook her head as if she’d been about to say something and then stopped.

  “I’ve forgotten the conversation,” she said, but sometime during the first week of spring this year—March 21—Eddie called me to tell me he’d found a ring and asked if I wanted it. I wasn’t interested, and I never saw the ring.

  “During that conversation, he mentioned a watch that he had that he was very proud of.”

  “What kind of watch did he wear?” Plumberg asked.

  She pointed to his Timex “Ironman” black sport watch, and said, “Like yours—a simple black watch like yours.”

  Sandra Malle regretted ever having let Navarre back into her life, and she was frightened that he still might hurt her. He was angry when she and her boyfriend kicked him out.

  “He wasn’t very happy.”

  “Did you ever threaten to call the police?”

  “No, we didn’t. He made it very clear that he didn’t like police and he wanted to avoid them—you—at all costs.”

  Now, Navarre was stalking Sandra Malle, and she was frightened. He was acting weirder and weirder.

  “After Dirk and I asked him to leave, he kept calling my phone. I wouldn’t answer and he’d let it ring off the hook. I’ve seen his van drive by my house several times a day. Once, he came over to my house and sat in the driveway and honked the horn. He sat there for over an hour. I’m afraid to answer the door when I’m home alone.”

  Sandra said she had begun to wonder if Eddie Navarre might have had something to do with Russ Douglas’s murder.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The stuff he told us. He said he’d been arrested for first-degree arson for burning down his medical supply business in the early nineties. I think he’s still wanted for that in Florida. He’s such a creepy man that I think the police here should be aware of him.”

  “Do you know where he’s living?”

  “The last time I talked to him, he said he was moving to Whidbey Island, and he was moving things from his storage unit in Renton.”

  Mike Birchfield had asked all the personnel assigned to the South Precinct to see if any of them had contacted an Eddie Navarre between December 26 and 31. A deputy working that weekend night shift, said that he had been dispatched to answer a complaint about someone in a van who was trespassing on a homeowner’s land.

  “This guy—Navarre—was sleeping in his van. I gave him a verbal warning about trespassing and asked him to leave the property. He was cooperative.”

  With more information on the Chrysler van, Birchfield had sent out a request through WASIC (Washington State Information Center) and NCIC (National Crime Information Center) to be on the lookout for Eddie Navarre.

  There were no recent hits. Birchfield had found that Navarre had a lengthy rap sheet that began in the 1970s and continued to 2000.

  Neither he nor Plumberg could help but wonder if Eddie Navarre with his job selling franchises for juice bars might be the “headhunter” that Russel Douglas had mentioned during a holiday dinner with his extended family. Navarre was a persuasive con man. And Russ Douglas longed to have success and a larger paycheck. Even though he had just been upgraded to a new division at Tetra Tech, he might have been interested enough in Navarre’s get-rich-quick franchises to meet with him.

  If he was, that could have been the reason Russel had driven to a lonely location with which he was unfamiliar.

  How he might have met Navarre was problematic. His family had heard of a headhunter, but they had never heard Navarre’s name. Neither his Washington State friends nor the people he kept in touch with at the University of Phoenix were familiar with the name.

  Plumberg drove to the mainland to retrace his and Birchfield’s steps and seek out possible information they had not come across before. He took with him an enlarged photo of Douglas, along with two photos of Eddie Navarre that he had received from the Scottsdale, Arizona, Police Department. Navarre was still a strong “person of interest,” and the detective hoped to find someone who could help him link the two men.

  He went to the Fred Meyer store in Renton where store director Rick Nestegaard set up interviews with employees who might have waited on Russel. Would any of them recall seeing Eddie Navarre with him?

  A clerk in the toy department quickly recognized Russ’s photo. “He used to come in a lot to look at Hot Wheels cars.”

  “When was this?” Plumberg asked.

  “Not recently.”

  “Could it have been six to eight months ago?”

  “Yes. I remember he was very athletic looking, but I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

  Shown Navarre’s picture, she shook her head. “I’ve never seen this one.”

  A woman working in the health food section of Fred Meyer recalled someone who looked like the murder victim. He often bought nutrition supplements and lotions for his face and skin.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Maybe about a month ago.”

  “He died last December,” Plumberg said.

  “It could have been that long ago. I’m not sure.”

  The clerk didn’t recognize Eddie Navarre at all. Mark Plumberg went from store to store: Safeway, Starbucks, another Fred Meyer store, back to Gold’s Gym, showing photographs of the victim and the suspect to employees. Many recalled Russel Douglas—but no one was familiar with Eddie Navarre.

  It seemed that the Island County detective had better news when he showed the photos to the manager at the Mission Ridge Apartments and she nodded vigorously. She thought Russ had often been with an older man, who was “creepy.” When Plumberg asked about Navarre, she immediately recognized the name.

  “He applied to get an apartment—but he had a criminal history and we didn’t rent to him.”

  It seemed like a breakthrough after almost seven months! The apartment manager said she would check her records to find out more about Navarre.

  And she did. There had been someone by that name who wanted to move in, and he did have a criminal record. But this applicant was African American, and Eddie Navarre was definitely Caucasian.

  It was a huge disappointment for Plumberg.

  He came back to the mainland day after day, showing the photographs at myriad stores, gas stations, banks, and restaurants from Renton to Tacoma. Surely someone must have seen Russel Douglas with Eddie Navarre.

  But no one had.

  Mark never found Eddie Navarre. The man he had tracked to Florida had the same name, but it turned out that he was the one with the long rap sheet. The “Eddie Navarre” who had stalked Sandra Malle on Whidbey only had one charge, and that was for selling a tear gas weapon in California in 1978. “He might not even have known that was against the law,” Plumberg said.

  As he spun his outrageous lie
s and behaved so eccentrically, Eddie Navarre came close to being charged with murder. Perhaps he realized that himself, and traveled far, far from Whidbey Island.

  There were other leads that seemed—at least initially—to have merit. One man came forward, a part-time Whidbey Island resident who was an avowed homosexual. He recalled that he’d once met Russel Douglas in a bar and that they had had a “one-nighter.”

  “He said he’d never done that before, but that he was curious about it. I never saw him again.”

  When shown a lay-down of several photos which included Douglas’s, the man could not absolutely identify him, having met so many strangers in bars in Washington and in Hawaii.

  PART FIVE

  * * *

  Mark Plumberg

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  TWO DAYS AFTER JULY 4, 2004, Mark Plumberg returned from vacation. Commander Mike Beech called him into his office and informed him that he was now the lead detective on the Russel Douglas case. Mike Birchfield was leaving the Island County Sheriff’s Office and joining another island city’s department, and Mark would step in. (Tragically, Birchfield died in his early forties of pneumonia a few years after he left the department.)

  Plumberg was both elated and challenged by his new assignment. This was a case that only grew more convoluted as months passed.

  Mark Plumberg seems born to be a detective, although law enforcement was a career he had never aspired to in his early years. Tall, muscular, and highly intelligent, he started life in Kansas City, Missouri. Now close to fifty, he is a man of many interests and avocations, representative of a new generation of police officers who are anything but the doughnut-eating, hard-drinking, tough-talking cop caricature of decades ago. And that image in itself was a reputation given to them by macho writers and reporters. (In thirty-five years of writing true crime, I’ve never met a cop who ate doughnuts!)

  Plumberg could well be a college professor teaching zoology and ichthyology. As an avid scuba diver and underwater photographer, he was the first to film the procreation of sand lance—a type of fish that burrows beneath the sand to spawn in tidal flats—a huge step forward for ichthyologists.

  The Island County detective hikes in the Cascade Mountains, bikes for miles, enjoys the symphony, makes plum wine and beer, and also cooks holiday dinners for his two grown daughters.

  Plumberg is a devoted father, and as his daughters grew up, he spent every vacation with Natasha and Heather—and only them. They wanted to go back to the places they’d visited when they were younger and their dad took them to Idaho, to Craters of the Moon and Glacier Park. He recently became a grandfather to a beautiful baby girl— Kennedy.

  Long divorced, Mark lives in a home with easy access to Puget Sound, and sweeping views of mountains on all sides. He grows quinoa, barley, and kale in the backyard and raises chickens.

  The youngest of eleven children and raised in the Midwest, Plumberg went to college on a football scholarship as a linebacker, but he didn’t finish the four-year program. Instead, he joined the marines and stayed in the corps for eight years. He has lived in Hawaii, southern Spain, Asia, Corpus Christi, Texas, and too many areas of the world to note. He is fluent in Spanish. When he moved to Whidbey Island, he knew he was “home.”

  He pursued various careers for a time and became friends with local cops who suggested he consider being a reserve officer with the Island County Sheriff’s Office.

  Somewhat reluctantly, he gave it a try. Plumberg graduated from the Reserve Academy in 1996. His police friends urged him to take the civil service exam to become a regular deputy. He did, and graduated from the Basic Law Enforcement Academy in 1997 in the number-one spot. He joined the Island County Sheriff’s Department and found that law enforcement was a perfect fit for him.

  The Island County Sheriff’s Department doesn’t have that many detectives—only four—so each wears many hats. Mark Plumberg handles homicides, sex crimes, fraud, robbery, white-collar crimes, and arson. “Everything, really,” he comments. “I love it—but it’s draining because I love it so much.”

  As part of his arson training, he attended the Emmetsburg, Maryland, National Fire Academy.

  “As I worked full-time,” he recalls, “I quickly began to understand everything I learned in the academies.”

  One aspect of law enforcement troubles Plumberg, however. “I can’t protect people. I try to tell people that. It’s a rare occasion when I can actually prevent a crime. I have to deal with the aftermath.”

  It is the age-old dilemma for good cops. Solving crimes can be challenging and even exciting, but sadness and regret come inextricably bound together in a homicide case. They grieve for the victims’ lives, even as they try to give them some kind of justice.

  * * *

  WITH EDDIE NAVARRE, PLUMBERG had a suspect who could be quite easily wedged into the empty spots of the jigsaw puzzle that Russel Douglas’s murder had created. Not exactly fitting, but doable. But Plumberg wasn’t satisfied with that. There were many other scenarios to explore, quite possibly suspects who had yet to be revealed. It was maddening that the motive for Russ Douglas’s murder was still obscure.

  If Russel had met Eddie in a bar—in Redmond where he worked, in Renton where he lived, in Lynnwood or Mukilteo or somewhere on Whidbey Island—he might have fallen for Navarre’s crafty line of patter about a fortune to be made in juice franchises. He might even have been curious about a promise of gay sex. But it would have taken a series of coincidences for their paths to have crossed.

  Even though Mark Plumberg continued to look for Navarre, he didn’t allow himself to have tunnel vision. He had more people to interview or reinterview.

  * * *

  BRENNA DOUGLAS HAD STOPPED talking to the sheriff’s investigators months before. Now, Brenna’s attorney, Jessie Valentine, contacted Island County prosecuting attorney Greg Banks and asked for a meeting.

  Shortly before three 3 P.M. on July 15, Plumberg, Banks, and Brenna met in Valentine’s office. Susan Wilmoth, Valentine’s legal assistant, was also present. Brenna and her lawyer provided her phone records for December 2003, and for January and February 2004. They also turned over her bank statement for December; they validated where she had made purchases on December 27. Jessie Valentine said she had no problem giving the investigators her client’s appointment book at Just B’s, showing a client list from December 22 to 27. They couldn’t offer any more, citing Brenna’s need to protect the privacy of her clients.

  “Nobody needs to know who gets their hair dyed or what color.”

  This was to be a difficult interview for Greg Banks and Mark Plumberg; Jessie Valentine often made comments that precluded Brenna Douglas from answering questions spontaneously. At times she seemed to be guiding Brenna back to a particular question when she became distracted, and seemed to be almost coaching her.

  Plumberg had to remind Brenna of what she had said when she was first notified of Russ’s death and in the days that followed.

  “I was told that you stopped cooperating with our investigation some time ago.”

  “Oh no,” she insisted. “I wanted to help. The only time I didn’t want to talk to Detective Birchfield was when the insurance investigator came to my salon. He treated me horribly and told me they weren’t going to pay my claim. That was when I called Jessie.”

  Both client and attorney said they had tried to make appointments with Birchfield without success.

  Brenna had brought her appointment book with her to help her recall specific dates. Russ had come to visit on December 19 when his mother was there. “He stayed that night and on the twentieth,” she said.

  “He told me then about some guy who called and wanted to talk to him—the headhunter—but he wasn’t sure he should talk to him because he had just gotten a promotion at Tetra Tech.”

  Once more, the recent widow stressed that Russ had very few friends—and that any he had came from “my circle.”

  “Who do you think
might have killed Russ?” Plumberg asked.

  “I have no idea!”

  “What would have been his connection to Wahl Road?”

  “I have no idea,” Brenna said again.

  Mark Plumberg told her frankly that he was still a little surprised about how quickly she had walked outside in her robe late at night when there were two strange men—himself and Mike Birchfield—in her driveway.

  “I thought it was Russ coming home,” she said. “My son woke me up and said there were lights in the driveway. I was angry—pissed—because I was thinking ‘Great! He finally shows up after I’ve gone to sleep.’ When I saw you, I didn’t think you were any threat to me.”

  Brenna didn’t think it odd that her girlfriends had called her so late at night.

  “That’s just what girlfriends do.”

  Jessie Valentine agreed with Brenna, adding that it was what women often did.

  Still nonplussed at the way Brenna had responded to the news that her husband was dead on the night of December 27, Plumberg bore down harder.

  “You only asked us in a kind of off-handed way why we were there. And we talked to you a long time and asked you some very pointed questions and you still didn’t ask us what had happened. Even after Mike Birchfield told you that Russ was murdered, you didn’t ask us why or where. Why was that?”

  “I guess I was in shock. I assumed something bad had happened to him or you wouldn’t have been there asking questions. I’m not a retard!”

  Brenna seemed a bit indignant.

  “I guess I just emotionally shut down. Russ couldn’t swim very well,” she said. “Actually, he swam like a rock. I guess I thought something had happened to him because he was going surfing the last time I saw him. I just didn’t know what had happened that night.”