Lying in Wait and Other True Cases

  The Department of Justice authorities were tight-lipped when questioned by reporters, but court filings revealed that the suspect detective could face criminal charges for withholding documents that should have been turned over to the defense, losing evidence, and listening to confidential recordings between the defendants and their attorneys.

  It was a blow to the entire prosecution team. It threatened to damage the reputations of those who had gone by the book and could even result in a dismissal of the federal indictment.

  The prosecutors had only recently learned of the omission of evidence by the accused detective. They had never tried to hide anything and were as stunned as everyone else to discover the problems.

  An audit had indeed turned up evidence that should have been given to the defense: twenty-seven banker boxes of evidence.

  A hearing was held in April 2014, with Judge Haggerty considering the request by Pedersen’s attorneys to find that the prosecution had violated the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel and had acted in bad faith.

  The hearing lasted for four days, with both defense and prosecution tense and sometimes snapping at each other. Judge Haggerty intervened to ask counsel on both sides to avoid “tit-for-tat” arguments, so that the tedious process could be sped up.

  In addition to missing crime-scene photos, interviews with Pedersen’s family members could not be found. The “death-penalty interviews” may have made an impact on both defense and prosecution arguments in considering a capital-punishment verdict.

  Whether the mishandling of evidence by the accused detective was sloppiness or deliberate deceit was questionable. He had been put on administrative leave, and the rest of the team was left to pick up the pieces.

  At least one member of the prosecuting team had acted in bad faith, Judge Haggerty ruled. Though he was not named in court, it was assumed that the judge was referring to the detective. The prosecution team testified that they had never listened to the taped conversations between the defendant and his attorneys, but the fact that the confidential tapes had been given to them displeased Haggerty.

  The Justice Department’s prosecution team was wary. Now Pedersen had something to bargain with. After the four-day hearing, in an unusual and complicated plea bargain, Pedersen agreed to stop the motions against the prosecution in exchange for leniency for Max and Cacee Lewis.

  The federal prosecutors agreed to give Max eighty-nine months (just less than seven and a half years) instead of fifteen years. Cacee was already expected to get probation. The deal would work only if Pedersen and the Lewises all pled guilty, and the overseeing judges agreed to the terms. Holly had no part in this arrangement.

  Pedersen, it was noted, would not be benefiting from the deal. The death penalty was already off the table, and he had received a sentence of life in prison without parole for the Washington case.

  In April 2014, David “Joey” Pedersen pled guilty to two counts of carjacking resulting in death, one for Cody Myers and the other for Reginald Clark.

  In August 2014, Pedersen was sentenced to two life terms for his federal crimes.

  Holly made a plea deal with the federal prosecutors, and on March, 11, 2014, she stood before U.S. District Court Judge Ancer Haggerty as he questioned her about her role in the death of DeeDee Pedersen.

  “Yes, I aided in the commission,” Holly acknowledged.

  “Did you in fact stab her to death?” he asked.

  “No.”

  Holly had changed her story, and her response brought gasps from DeeDee’s relatives.

  “Are you saying your co-defendant did that?” the judge prodded.

  Holly said quietly, “I have nothing to say about Joey.”

  Holly Grigsby pled guilty to racketeering, one of fourteen counts against her. As part of her plea deal, she will not face further charges in Washington, Oregon, or California, and she will be sentenced to life without parole.

  Holly threw away everything to follow a man full of hate. How sad. Her little boy will grow up without a mother.

  If he lives out a thirty-year-old man’s average life span, Joey may go down in criminal history as the prisoner incarcerated the longest. It is a world he knows, and, indeed, possibly a world where he feels safer than when he is outside the walls.

  * * *

  Cody Myers’s family will mourn for him for the rest of their lives. Reginald Clark will be forever missed by the many friends and family who loved him.

  There won’t be any more Grandkids’ Picnics for DeeDee Pedersen’s grandchildren or family gatherings in DeeDee’s mobile home in Everett. When she met Red Pedersen, she marveled at how lucky she was.

  She had no idea what evil stalked them both.

  MURDEROUS EPITAPH FOR THE BEAUTIFUL RUNAWAY

  She was born and raised in a world where private schools, debutante parties, and high society reigned. She was brilliant and lovely in a patrician way, the kind of young woman who would become more beautiful as she grew older. She was slender but full-breasted, with high cheekbones and dark hair that hung a full twenty inches down her back. Her family had been wealthy for generations, and her father held a responsible position with the State Department. She could have had the whole world, but, like so many other young women in the 1970s, Britt Rousseau* chose to follow the beat of a different drummer.

  Britt was only eighteen when she left her family and the luxurious trappings of wealth she was used to in late 1976 to begin her wandering odyssey across America. She was legally an adult, and nothing her family could do or say could dissuade her from leaving, setting out on foot with her backpack and only a bicycle for transportation. She had to “find” herself.

  Britt’s family sent telegraphed money orders whenever they knew where she would be for longer than a day or so. They waited and prayed and worried. It was agonizing for them to wonder just where she was, if she was safe. And the months passed as the wanderer moved farther and farther away from home. Maybe, just maybe, she would miss the world of Washington, D.C., and the rolling countryside of Maryland that she’d left behind. Horse country. Maybe she would return and finish her schooling closer to home as the thrill of the open road and undiscovered territory began to pale. Maybe.

  On Christmas Day, 1977, Britt Rousseau was alone, walking down the empty, rain-washed streets of Portland, Oregon. Portland is a friendlier town than most, but no city is very welcoming on Christmas; everyone who has a family is at home, and even the street people are lined up to find shelter and a free holiday dinner.

  Britt looked at the closed stores and the deserted streets, and she sighed, wondering where she would go next. She had a little money left, although not much, and everything she owned was in the backpack she shouldered.

  Suddenly, a man yelled at her from across the street. She turned, and he waved. She didn’t know him, but he looked all right. She waited as he crossed over to join her.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Flip a coin—you’ve got it. I could go south for the sunshine. Anything would be better than this. Or north. I’ve never been to Washington State. I hear they have some good colleges up there.”

  The man studied her. She was as tall as he, at five-foot-six, and probably weighed about the same. She was younger by more than a dozen years, and yet she seemed to have a certain insouciance about her, as if she could handle anything that came her way.

  “I’m going up north,” he offered. “You want to join up with me? It’s rough being alone on Christmas, and it’s easier anytime to travel in partners. What do you say?”

  “No strings?” she countered.

  “No strings.”

  “Okay. Just remember, I go my own way. I don’t answer to anyone, and I get nervous if somebody tries to tie me down.”

  He laughed. “I’m with you. I’m not asking you to marry me. I just want a traveling buddy.”

  He was a nice guy, she decided, as they cemented their pact over a beer in one of the few taverns open on Ch
ristmas. Then they hitchhiked over the bridge crossing the Columbia River and into the state of Washington. Britt called her family, and they agreed to wire fifty dollars to her, which she could pick up in Centralia, Washington, eighty miles farther north. It wasn’t the kind of Christmas present they would have liked to give her, but at least they knew she was safe for the moment. She promised to keep in touch.

  Britt’s traveling companion told her his name was Don Fabry,* that he was thirty-three, and that his folks lived in Oregon near the state capital of Salem. They decided that they would look for work, but neither of them was apparently very adept at it. They hitched across the Cascade Mountains to Wenatchee, the apple city. Wenatchee was overflowing with jobs for migrant laborers from spring through harvest, but there weren’t any in the bleak days after Christmas. It was freezing cold, and the snow was deep, so the pair soon decided to thumb their way back to Seattle, where the chances of a job would be considerably better. Britt thought she might be able to get a grant to go to school if her luck ran well.

  She seemed to have an extremely easygoing approach to life, and Fabry warned her that she trusted too many people. “I’m okay . . . but you didn’t know that. You have to be careful who you go with.”

  She laughed and told him that she hadn’t had any trouble so far and didn’t expect that she would.

  Nonetheless, Fabry talked her into opening a checking account in Seattle. “When you’re on the streets, even fifty dollars can be enough for somebody to knock you on the head. Put your money in the bank, and then draw it out when you need it,” he urged.

  She thought he was being overcautious, but she agreed. They didn’t have enough money to get a room in the Queen City, and the pair went to the Salvation Army, where someone arranged for them to have a room in the Morrison Hotel, an aging structure kitty-corner from the main headquarters of the Seattle Police Department.

  It wasn’t much of a room, but it was shelter from the rainy days of the New Year. There was a view of the gray buildings of Seattle’s lower Third Avenue. Furniture had been culled from rejects here and there: an iron bed, a 1920s vintage dresser, a worn gray armchair, and some old tables. Cooking was not allowed in the rooms, but everyone did. There was a sink, but the bathroom was down the hall, and heat came only grudgingly from the radiator near the window.

  Britt parked her ten-speed bike next to the bed. If she’d left it in the lobby, it would have been stolen.

  She talked to Don about possibly moving on to Bellingham, up near the Canadian border, so that she could go to college at Western Washington University, but mostly they just kind of coasted. Although they had established a physical relationship, she still warned Fabry that she didn’t belong to him or anyone else and that she didn’t want to be questioned if she wanted to spend some time without him.

  Perhaps if she had decided to go to Bellingham, a much smaller town than Seattle, she would have been safer. The campus of Western Washington University was definitely more benign than a seedy hotel on skid row in Seattle.

  It was approximately 2:15 on the afternoon of Sunday, January 15, when the emergency operator at the Seattle police dispatch center received the report of a “dead body” at the Morrison Hotel. Patrol officers were dispatched. Calls regarding dead bodies were not especially unusual when they emanated from the crumbling old hotels of skid row. Most of the rooms were occupied by transients or elderly people getting by on pension checks. Many of them died, either from old age or loneliness or because they drank too much cheap Tokay wine. Only two days before, one of them had been found dead on the roof of the Morrison.

  But when the officers looked into Room 114, the body they saw before them was not that of an elderly transient; it was a beautiful young woman, nude from the waist down.

  They spoke to a husky man about thirty who said that he had been the renter of Room 128 but that he hadn’t been living there; he’d moved into a larger room on the fourth floor with his girlfriend. He had discovered the body and called police.

  The first responders secured the room and called over to the homicide unit to request a crew of detectives. Detective Sergeant Craig VandePutte and Detective Wayne Dorman didn’t have to bother picking up a car; instead, they grabbed their cameras and equipment and walked across Third Avenue. The temperature was a relatively balmy fifty-two degrees on that Sunday afternoon, and although it wasn’t raining, there was a layer of threatening clouds overhead.

  VandePutte and Dorman made up two-thirds of the skeleton homicide crew on the weekend and had expected they might have a chance to catch up on the ever-present paperwork of their department, but this was to be no quiet Sunday.

  Officer Meyers met them at the door of Room 114.

  “No one’s been in since I got here,” he told the detectives. “She’s over there—on the bed.”

  VandePutte and Dorman stepped into the room, which measured fourteen feet, seven inches by twelve feet, six inches. It was hot and fetid. Someone had covered the room’s two windows with blankets so that the place was half lit, and the radiator hissed steadily, keeping the temperature up around eighty degrees. Oddly, both faucets of the sink were turned on and running at full tilt. Dorman attempted to shut them off, but they were stuck open.

  The room was furnished with a single twin bed and other assorted furniture.

  The girl lay on the bed or, rather, half on and half off. The upper part of her body rested on the end of the bed, while her hips and legs dangled over onto the floor.

  She appeared to be fully clothed above the waist in a T-shirt and waffle-knit long underwear. The T-shirt bore the inscription of a well-known fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and the victim’s bra had been pushed up over her full breasts. The victim still wore socks—mismatched—on her feet. A pair of panties lay near her right leg, and the detectives found a pair of jeans between the bed and a small wooden trunk.

  Dorman lifted the sheet that covered the girl’s face and saw that she had been very pretty. Her long dark hair cascaded over the bedding. There was just a trace of blood marring her forehead.

  The dead girl had pierced ears with earrings in place, and she wore a silver wire necklace around her neck. Her neck was scratched and bruised, as if someone had strangled her manually.

  She had not been dead long. The body still felt warm on its nether side, although her exposed lower body was cold.

  Green slivers of broken glass littered the bed and were caught in the victim’s long hair. The label was still intact on the wine bottle; it was Thunderbird, a relatively cheap wine popular with skid row habitués.

  Sergeant VandePutte took pictures of the victim, the bed, and the surrounding area, which was cluttered with blankets and a light green man’s shirt and gray sandals.

  It looked as if the victim had put up a tremendous fight for her life, but though she appeared young and healthy, she was thin and would have been no match for a man intent on rape. One drop of blood flecked her pale skin just above her pubic hair, and there was a bit more on her right leg. If rape had not been accomplished, it had surely been attempted.

  At 3:20 P.M., the King County medical examiner, Dr. Donald Reay, arrived.

  “She’s been moved,” Reay commented. “The lividity pattern shows that she lay on her right side for some time after she died. Then someone moved her to the position in which you found her. That’s why you see the darker red on her side and the lighter pink staining on her back. When the heart no longer pumps, blood drops to the lowest portion of a body.”

  Discovery of blood marking the pillow that rested at the top of the bed appeared to confirm this.

  Taken rectally, the victim’s body temperature was ninety-two degrees, which would pinpoint time of death within the previous two or three hours, with some allowance made for the fact that the room was very warm. Dr. Reay took swabs of the victim’s vaginal canal and mouth.

  When VandePutte and Dorman had finished bagging and labeling all the clothing and other evidence found in the room, the body
was released to the medical examiner for postmortem exam, and the room was officially sealed.

  There were many tangled stories to unravel. The victim had been tentatively identified as Britt Rousseau, who, had she lived nine more days, would have been twenty years old on January 24. She was rumored to be from Baltimore, Maryland.

  While VandePutte and Dorman worked inside the death room, Detective Jerry Trettevik had interviewed the man who said he was Britt’s traveling companion. Don Fabry recounted to Trettevik his meeting with Britt on Christmas Day. He said they’d come to Seattle about nine days before, had stayed two nights in the Union Gospel Mission, and then had been placed in the Morrison Hotel by the Salvation Army, in Room 128.

  “Then she didn’t die in your room?” Trettevik asked.

  Fabry shook his head. “No—the last time I saw Britt was about ten this morning. She did a little grass and a little acid when she could afford it, and she borrowed some money from me this morning and said she was going to buy some joints.”

  “Did you ask her from who?”

  “No . . . she was independent. She didn’t like to be questioned.”

  Fabry explained that he and Britt shared Room 128, and they had become acquainted with several other residents at the Morrison. The room in which she had been found belonged to Joe Rogers.*

  “But Joe wasn’t living there. He’d moved in with his lady, Misty,* up on the fourth floor. So Joe was letting Kurtis Andersen* live in it.”

  Andersen was described as being a very tall, very strong man of about thirty who was living at the hotel because he was estranged from his wife.

  “When did you hear about Britt’s being killed?” Detective Trettevik asked Fabry.

  “Just before we called the police. Rogers came down to my room and said, ‘Come to one-fourteen. Your old lady’s dead.’ ”

  Fabry had run down the hall and seen Britt’s legs dangling off the bed. Rogers had insisted right away that Kurtis Andersen was responsible and had run to call the police.