Leslie is a popular female name today, but in the 1940s, it was more commonly a boy’s name, and Leslie Mae didn’t like it. Her name would change often along with the vicissitudes of her life.
Clara Belle and Melford eventually divorced each other and married other people. Though Leslie was thrilled when her stepmother, Karol Sudds, gave birth to a baby girl, Helen, she was not allowed to help care for her. Leslie thought her new sister was the prettiest baby she had ever seen, and she longed to hold her. She was thirteen and dependable, but her overprotective stepmother did not trust her with the baby.
It hurt Leslie’s feelings, and she sometimes felt like an outsider in her own home.
It was worse at Clara Belle’s house. Leslie’s new stepfather, Vernon, would sneak into the room where she slept with Butch and touch her inappropriately. She soon learned that if she changed places with her little brother in the bed, it would discourage her stepfather from molesting her.
This kind of abuse was far more common seventy years ago than anyone knew—or acknowledged. Many families had dark secrets, but few talked about them.
DeeDee Sudds broke the cycle of abuse; she vowed that she would never allow cruelty toward any children she might have one day.
* * *
DeeDee graduated from Everett High School in 1960; she was seventeen. She was petite at five feet, two inches, but full-breasted. DeeDee was pretty, with soft brown bangs curling around her face. Nearsighted, she always wore glasses.
She attended Catholic church with her longtime best friend, Jean, but she was confirmed in the Lutheran church. She and Jean remained close friends.
DeeDee was engaged in high school, but that fizzled, as most teenage romances do.
When Jean married a young man named Edward Nemitz, she introduced DeeDee to his brother, Richard.
After her first date with Richard, DeeDee announced to her mother that she had just met the man she was going to marry.
And she did—six weeks later, on April 7, 1961.
The future lay ahead, promising all good things. DeeDee and Richard had their first daughter, Lori Jane, on April 8, 1963, and their second, Susan Beth, on February 5, 1966.
While Lori Jane thrived, Susan was frail and spent a lot of time at what was then called Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. Despite the worry over Susan’s health, the Nemitz family was happy, and they prospered.
In the summer, they loved to go camping at Crescent Bar in eastern Washington. Lori and Susan learned to swim there, and their father mastered waterskiing. The girls climbed apricot trees and ate the sweet fruit, its juice dripping down their chins.
They had a dog, a schipperke named Tippy Toes, and wonderful neighbors who treated the Nemitz girls like grandchildren.
But the happy times didn’t last. After nine years, DeeDee and Richard told their daughters that they were getting a divorce. Confused and shocked, Lori Jane used the news during her class’s show-and-tell in the third grade. Her teacher that year and her adviser, who was the vice principal, helped her deal with what, to Lori Jane, seemed unthinkable.
Neither Lori nor Susan approved of their mother’s choices when she began to date again, often coining scatological nicknames for the new men in her life.
“Mom told me later that she always viewed her first boyfriend as her punishment for divorcing Dad,” Lori said. “We called him Rick the Prick.”
DeeDee dated one man who drove a car painted lime green with glittery flakes in it that the girls found “the coolest.”
Another boyfriend was a mountain climber who had once scaled Mount McKinley in Alaska and Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest mountain in Africa.
But despite the passage of time, DeeDee found no likely prospects for marriage.
And then she met Leroy Marvin Danner, a Vietnam vet. He was solid, a good man who had served his country, and DeeDee was very attracted to him.
Her girls liked him, and they called him Dad, although their biological father was still a big part of their lives, and they often visited Richard Nemitz.
DeeDee and Leroy were married on August 18, 1976.
Leroy had his faults, but he and DeeDee really loved each other, so their marriage flourished. They rolled over the rough patches, and their union grew happier.
They had been together for a few years when Leroy went to Idaho to visit his mother. When he came back, he told a shocked DeeDee that he had a daughter.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
She knew Leroy had two sons—Leroy Jr.* and Ron*—but he had never mentioned a daughter.
“It was as much a surprise to me as it is to you,” Leroy answered. “I didn’t know. Not until my mother told me. It seems as though Mom knew, and my daughter, Gracie,* knew—everyone knew but me.”
From then on, DeeDee, Lori Jane, and Susan welcomed Gracie into the family. DeeDee had a kind heart, and she considered Gracie her daughter, too.
Leroy Jr. and Ron spent a lot of time with their new sisters—until the boys became caught up in the drug world and gradually drifted away.
* * *
Her years with Leroy were quite likely the happiest period of DeeDee’s life, but she didn’t truly trust it to last; she had had too many dreams dashed to bits.
Lori Jane was fourteen and Susan eleven when they decided they wanted to live with their biological father. That decision was devastating to DeeDee.
“It hurt Mom immensely, which I take full responsibility for,” Lori recalled. “Leroy was furious with us. I didn’t talk to Mom for six months and only spoke to her again because my dad’s attorney called and told me to.”
Gradually, Lori Jane and Susan mended the rift in their tattered relationship with their mother. They had acted like bratty teenagers because their mother didn’t always let them get their way.
“I knew after talking to Mom that I had made a mistake moving to my dad’s,” Lori Jane admits. It hurt the girls to hear the pain of rejection in their mother’s voice. “After seeing what that did to her, I swore I’d never do that to anyone else.”
Susan eventually moved back to live with DeeDee and Leroy, but the wound to their mother’s heart took a long time to heal.
DeeDee and Leroy had a happy marriage. When the girls grew older, they traveled a lot. With her second husband, DeeDee found a kind of love she hadn’t known before, and she was grateful for it.
But just as she had always feared, the joy would not last. Leroy was having surgery for a hernia when the surgeon discovered an invasive cancer. Ten months later, on March 5, 1995, Leroy died at home with DeeDee by his side. She was overwhelmed with grief. They had been together for more than eighteen years, and she had hoped their marriage would last forever. With the love of her life gone, she never expected to marry again.
She had no choice but to go on. There were bills to pay, and she had never shirked hard work. After twenty years as a legal secretary, DeeDee worked for five years for Snohomish County’s Public Utilities Department, and then, before she retired, she worked as a legal transcriptionist and a validator of medical credentials.
DeeDee continued to live in Mount Vernon in the nice mobile home that she and Leroy had bought together, and she devoted herself to her family. She was fun and creative, and her grandchildren adored her.
One of DeeDee’s most popular ideas was the Grandkids’ Picnic.
“My mom and all the grandmas in our family dressed up in funny old clothes, and the kids just laughed and laughed,” Susan recalls. “Then we had a picnic that was really good.”
DeeDee was still attractive as she aged, and once, just for fun, she and her sister, Aunt Bubbles, and their mother went to a photo studio and had glamour shots taken.
Though she always took care with her appearance, it was not because DeeDee was trying to attract a man. She was content with her life just as it was. She talked with her daughters daily and had a close relationship with them. Their disagreements from the past were long forgotten.
DeeDee was comf
ortable in her cozy mobile home. She enjoyed spending time with her grandchildren, and she adored her little dog. The miniature Australian shepherd was loyal and well behaved. Though she missed Leroy terribly, DeeDee counted her blessings. Her life was pretty good.
* * *
And then DeeDee met David Jones “Red” Pedersen. It was Valentine’s Day, 1997, when a friend of DeeDee’s set her up on a blind date with the ex-marine whom everyone called Red for his once-fiery-red hair. His hair was white by the time DeeDee met him, but the nickname had stuck. He was quite handsome and thirteen years younger than DeeDee.
Red was closer in age to her daughters, only eight years older than Lori Jane. DeeDee was both surprised and flattered when Red Pedersen flirted with her.
He was determined to be with DeeDee, and despite her hesitancy about their age difference, they were soon spending time together. Though he was younger, Red was the one with health issues. The pain from arthritis in his shoulders and knees often made it impossible for him to work the long shifts as a truck driver. When his joints ached like fury, Red needed someone to help him.
DeeDee was a nurturer, and looking after a man came naturally to her. The more time they spent together, the less she worried about their age difference. Maybe age didn’t matter, she decided, reasoning that past the age of fifty, no one noticed.
Still, she took care to appear as youthful as possible. Large-breasted women tend to droop as they age, and DeeDee was no exception; she had undergone breast-reduction surgery while still married to Leroy. She took time each morning to make sure her hair and makeup were perfect.
Red and DeeDee got along well, and it wasn’t long before she fell in love with him. They married on Valentine’s Day, 2004, exactly seven years after they had met.
DeeDee had been content to live by herself, but she was really a man’s woman, and she loved making Red happy, cooking his favorite meals, and in most of their photos, her hand was in his, or she was touching him fondly. Now that he was in pain most of the time, she did her best to make him comfortable.
Red also liked to pamper DeeDee. When she was still working, he often made dinner and drew baths for her.
Lori Jane and Susan were not as taken with Red as their mother was. They were suspicious of his motivations. Before he married DeeDee, Red had no house and no job. “He used a cardboard box for a coffee table,” Susan recalls. Now Red shared the nice home that DeeDee had made, and she supported them.
From the beginning, the girls didn’t like the way Red treated their mother.
“He called her an ‘old bag,’ ” Susan says. “And other mean things.”
Lori nods and confesses, “We thought he was terrible and that he wore our mom down, but she said that was just his way—he was joking. And she laughed along with him.”
“Leroy was a wonderful father,” Susan says wistfully. “Red wasn’t our dad.”
“We were pleasant to him because our mom loved him, and she seemed happy with him,” Susan emphasizes, “but we never felt he was part of our family.”
While Gracie and Susan were especially wary of Red, Lori Jane was a bit more accepting of him.
DeeDee’s daughters never came to completely trust Red Pedersen. They knew very little about his family, and what they did learn didn’t exactly reassure them. His first wife, Linda Eilene Pedersen, had suffered from multiple personalities and had been hospitalized several times. Red had married and divorced her twice.
Linda had called him Pa, and he had called her Ma. They had two children, Joseph and Gloria.*
Suspicious of Red, Susan looked into his background. She snooped around but did not learn much—only that he was one of four brothers. One brother had died in an accident as a young man, and another was named Steve. She found no information at all about the third brother.
Red had been open about the fact that he had a son, David Joseph Pedersen, “Joey,” who was serving time in an Oregon prison. For what crime, Lori didn’t know. And neither did her mother.
DeeDee was vague when her daughters questioned her about the convict stepson she had yet to meet.
“I don’t think Mom knew that much about what he was in for,” says Lori Jane.
* * *
In 2007, Joey Pedersen wrote a letter to his father, inviting him to visit him in prison. “He was incarcerated in Colorado at the time,” Lori says.
Red and DeeDee didn’t have much disposable income, but they scraped together what they could to pay for a trip to see Joey. But when they got there, he refused to see them.
“They were really disappointed,” Lori says. She thinks she knows the reason for his change of heart. She suspects that a relative of Joey’s got wind of the fact that he was planning a reunion with his father and stirred up disturbing memories from his childhood, reminding him that Red had not always been kind to him.
Red had made it no secret that he had been abusive to his children, but he never went into specifics.
“Abuse can mean different things to different people,” Lori says, explaining that her mom assumed that Red felt guilty for being short with his kids, yelling at them and spanking them. When Red insinuated that he had not been the best father in the world, DeeDee could never have imagined just how bad it had been for his children.
Short-tempered and commanding, Red was a marine sergeant and sometimes treated his children like little soldiers. But that was not the worst part. At least one of his children was sexually abused by him.
David Joseph Pedersen, Joey, was born in Stayton, Oregon, on June 18, 1980, fifteen months after his sister. With an emotionally fragile mother and a demanding and abusive father, the Pedersen siblings had a far-from-ideal childhood.
When life became too much for Linda Pedersen, she sometimes retreated to the bedroom and locked herself in for days. Red took his frustrations out on the children, raging at them as they cowered in fear.
Years later, Joey’s sister would tell a reporter that Red did not drop his drill sergeant façade at home. He had no self-control at all, and he exploded at the sight of a messy house.
Red set impossible standards, forbidding his young son to cry. Sergeant Pedersen grew frustrated by the fact that the limitations of his seventh-grade education prevented him from helping his kids with their homework. When he could not understand the assignments, he vented his wrath on his children.
While Gloria tried to behave, Joey had a rebellious streak and would sometimes deliberately defy Red.
Joey was about five years old when his family moved to Camp Pendleton, California, in San Diego County. Red was stationed at the camp, the major West Coast base for the U.S. Marine Corps.
The family lived there for about four years, and despite their dysfunctional home life, there were also some good times for the kids. They got along well with each other, and they swam in the ocean, caught crawdads, and rode their bikes.
Sometimes Joey and Gloria were bounced around, dumped on relatives and neighbors. In 1993, when Red and Linda divorced, neither parent sought custody of the kids, and they became wards of the state. They stayed for a while with an aunt in Stayton, Oregon.
The aunt’s house was warm and inviting. She decorated the home for the holidays, and she baked Christmas cookies—something that was apparently so alien to Joey that he would one day describe the scenario to Portland Monthly reporter Alison Barnwell, saying, “Those were the best years of my life.”
At age thirteen, Joey moved in with his mom in Salem, Oregon, but she kicked him out when he quit school at sixteen.
In June 1996, Joey was arrested for third-degree robbery. He was put on probation until October of that year. Soon robbery became a habit for the troubled teen. He robbed at gunpoint two coffee stands, a McDonald’s, and a Plaid Pantry.
In March 1997, Joey was incarcerated at MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn, Oregon. Despite the fact that he was only sixteen, motions were made to move him to an adult prison. On his seventeenth birthday, he was moved to the Oregon
State Correctional Institution in Salem.
The incarceration of an underage teen in an adult prison was unusual and could have been the tipping point for an impressionable youth who had an already skewed outlook on the world. He had been behind bars with hardened adult prisoners for about a year when he assaulted someone. He would collect nearly six dozen violations of prison rules during his incarcerations.
While imprisoned, he began to embrace white-supremacist ideology. One of his relatives would later tell a reporter that Joey had not always been a racist and, in fact, had had a black girlfriend when he was fifteen. Many of Joey’s opinions were formed while he was in prison, and it was there that he got his tattoos. He grew more violent and angry as the years passed and was written up for harassment of those of other religions and races and also for sexual harassment.
In February 2000, Joey sent a death threat to a U.S. district judge in Idaho. The judge had presided over the trial of Randy Weaver, the former U.S. Army combat engineer and white supremacist at the center of the deadly confrontation with the FBI at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Weaver’s wife and son were killed in the mountaintop showdown, and Weaver was apparently a hero to Joey.
More than one hundred prison gangs have been identified by the Oregon Department of Justice, and Joey allegedly belonged to one known as Aryan Soldiers, a radical gang infused with intense hate for those who are different from them. Joey bonded with a member of the gang when he discovered they could speak to each other through a vent in the wall that separated their cells.
He had lengthy conversations with the inmate, who had been incarcerated for shooting his foster mother at age fourteen. The kid had been in and out of foster homes since he was eighteen months old and had lived with his victim and her family for about ten months. After he had moved out, he went back to the house to burglarize it, and he ended up killing the forty-eight-year-old woman.
Joey Pedersen was surrounded by violent people, and his life behind bars was bleak. His prison rap sheet was lengthy. In one of his more shocking crimes, Joey assaulted a prison guard, striking him in the face repeatedly with a hot clothes iron. Joey was in a rage, and he admitted he would have killed the guard if another convict had not stopped him. Bigger and heavier than Joey, the other inmate slammed him from behind and pinned him to the wall.