Lying in Wait and Other True Cases

  Andersen was the only principal who was not on the scene at the Morrison, and no one knew where he was. He appeared a short time later in the police patrol division offices and told Officer Nick Carnovale that he wanted to talk to someone about a murder. Detectives Bill Baughman and George Marberg, who had been called in to help with the murder investigation, contacted Andersen and brought him to the homicide unit for questioning.

  The hulking man was obviously under the influence as he began to recite his version of the events of the afternoon. He told Baughman and Marberg that he was in a room over at the Morrison Hotel around noon, and he wasn’t sure of the number but thought it was 114. “Anyhow, I know it’s on the first floor.”

  Andersen said he’d been drinking Thunderbird wine with a white female about twenty-three years old when a man came into the room. “He was black, about thirty-two, and had a mustache and beard, and I think he’s called Butch. Anyway, this guy comes bustin’ in, and he accuses the woman of stealing some Ritalin from him. He starts slappin’ and beatin’ and chokin’ her, and I get up and try to stop him, and he pulls a switchblade knife on me. So I just took off and left them in there.”

  The detectives studied the man before them. He was six feet, five inches tall and weighed close to 250 pounds. It would seem he could have put up a stronger fight to aid the woman being attacked—if his story was true.

  Andersen went on to say that he’d wandered around the hotel for about twenty minutes, trying to visit other friends who wouldn’t let him in. When he arrived back at 114, he said he’d found the woman lying half off the bed and “all bloody in the face.”

  “I didn’t want to get the guy in trouble—the one who’s lettin’ me stay there—[Rogers], so I tried to pick her up, and I was gonna put her in the garbage can, but she was too heavy for me. So I left.”

  At the very least, Andersen lacked a lot in chivalry; at the worst, he looked like a pretty good candidate as the killer himself.

  Andersen said that he’d been very annoyed when Butch showed up, because he had been planning to “make it” with the girl and thought he might have been able to if they hadn’t been interrupted.

  “What did you do after you left the hotel?” Detective Marberg asked.

  “I went down to the railroad tracks, thinking I’d hop a freight train out of town . . . but I waited, and nothing came along, so I walked up to Mary’s Cafe in Pioneer Square. I got to thinking I should tell somebody about what I saw—so I came over to the police station.”

  Andersen said he didn’t know the woman’s name. All he knew about her was that she lived at the Morrison with her “old man.” He said that Joe Rogers, his benefactor, had moved out of 114 and into Misty’s room on the fourth floor and let him live there free until the rent ran out.

  “What’d you do with your bottle of Thunderbird?” Detective Baughman asked.

  “I took it with me when I left.”

  Andersen said he didn’t have any permanent address and just stayed wherever he hung his hat. He’d been in the Seattle area since he got out of the service in 1965, he said, and he had a pretty good job as a pipe fitter in a shipyard.

  Both detectives noticed that Andersen had blood on his hands, on his pants, and on a matchbook he pulled from his pocket. When they mentioned this to him, he became very agitated and blurted, “I should have just kept going and never reported this!”

  “If you’d kept going, we would have come looking for you,” Marberg said quietly.

  At this, Andersen jumped out of his chair and screamed, “What for?”

  “For murder,” the detective said in the same quiet tone.

  Now Andersen became very antagonistic and surly, and he refused to answer any more questions. He took on the attitude of the outraged innocent who had only come in to do them a favor and was being rewarded for his good citizenship by an accusatory attitude on their part.

  Kurtis Andersen was arrested and booked for suspicion of murder.

  Before the day was over, however, three men were jailed on suspicion of murder in the case of Britt Rousseau’s death: Don Fabry, her traveling companion and sometime lover; Joe Rogers, in whose room she was found and who had discovered her body; and Kurtis Andersen. None of them had a very good alibi, and all of them had had ample opportunity to kill her.

  Andersen was the only suspect who’d borne signs of blood on his person and clothing. Marberg took eight swabs of Andersen’s fingers for blood residue, and his clothing was retained for evidence.

  Early the next morning, Detectives Mike Tando and Duane Homan were assigned the case for follow-up. On the surface, it looked not too difficult. In actuality, the problem was going to be winnowing out the real killer from the three suspects.

  The victim’s parents had been located in Bethesda, Maryland, and informed of their daughter’s death. They said that they hadn’t seen her in about a year but had wired money to her a few weeks before. Her real name was given as Brittania Louisa Rousseau. Her family had no information about whom she traveled with or what her plans might have been. They had prayed that she would come home, and she had talked of going back to college, but her decision hadn’t been firm about that.

  Homan and Tando began their investigation by checking for prior records on the three suspects. Neither Rogers nor Fabry had any convictions. Andersen had been charged with rape in 1973 but had been acquitted.

  They pulled the file on that case and studied it. According to the complainant, a seventeen-year-old girl, she had been approached by Andersen, whose wife was a friend of hers, at a bus stop. The girl had been on her way to work, and Andersen, she said, had urged her to come with him to visit a friend in a nearby building. He’d explained that the friend was disabled and didn’t have many visitors. The girl had refused several times but finally agreed to go along with Andersen after he’d promised to see that she got to work on time.

  There had been another man in the apartment they went to visit, but he had gone out shortly after they got there, and the girl had reported that Andersen had forced her to have intercourse twice and had threatened to break her neck if she didn’t comply. She had been shocked and frightened at this violent side of Andersen’s personality and had considered herself lucky to get out of the apartment alive.

  The victim had not been a good witness in court, however, and was so upset to be in the same room with the man who had raped her that she could barely speak.

  Kurtis Andersen was acquitted of those rape charges.

  Now, Andersen’s estranged wife was interviewed, and she said that the suspect had beaten her often and that she was afraid of him because he did things during his “blackouts” that he didn’t remember or believe he had done. Lucretia Andersen* said he liked to drink. His preference was vodka or bourbon when he had money and Thunderbird or “Mr. Death” (MD-20) when he was broke.

  Andersen’s wife became distraught when she realized that the victim looked amazingly like herself; she said she believed he had killed Britt thinking that he was killing her.

  “I was so afraid of him. I tried to get a restraining order, and I put the kids in a foster home because they were terrified of him. I finally had to go to a home for battered women.”

  Andersen had fingered still a fourth suspect: Butch. They located a subject through the narcotics files named Jacque Francis Renault—or Butch.

  Butch was twenty-four and five foot seven and weighed 135 pounds. It was rumored that he did occasionally frequent the Morrison Hotel, but his home address was not known. A “question and detain” notice was put out on Renault.

  Investigators Homan and Tando talked to Don Fabry. Fabry evinced considerable anxiety about being in jail, a new experience for him. He recalled how he’d met Britt and their brief partnership. “She trusted people—everybody.”

  “You say you saw her Sunday morning?” Homan asked.

  “That’s right. About ten . . . she was going out to buy some joints. Like I told the other officer, she didn’t like to be q
uestioned, so I didn’t ask her just where she was going.”

  “What was she wearing when you saw her last?” Tando inquired.

  “A sweater, I think, and jeans. They were way too big for her, and she must have been in only stocking feet. She left her black combat boots in our room.”

  Fabry said that he had stayed in their room. Rogers and Misty had come to visit him and had borrowed a radio from him. “Then they came back, and they were real shaken. Joe said, ‘I think your old lady’s inside one-fourteen. And I think she’s dead.’ ”

  Fabry said that he was afraid to look at first and ran downstairs to call for police. He’d ridden up on the elevator with the policeman and had forced himself to look into the room, and he’d recognized Britt. “Then I walked down the hall and sat on the window ledge with Misty, Joe’s girl, and we were both kind of sick and really upset.”

  Fabry said he wanted to take a polygraph test, because he’d had nothing whatsoever to do with Britt’s death.

  “When was the last time you were intimate with Britt?” Homan asked.

  “Maybe Friday, Saturday night, last night. I’m not really sure.”

  “Have you had a vasectomy?”

  “No, sir . . .” Fabry looked at the detectives curiously. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “We just need to know for analysis of lab reports.”

  The autopsy on Britt’s body had shown that she had died from manual strangulation. The hyoid bone in the back of her throat was fractured, indicating the extreme hand strength required. She had a head cut and a bump on her head. There were scratches on her face and in her anal canal. Because she’d bitten her nails too short, it was impossible to obtain scrapings that might lead back to her killer. DNA testing was fifteen years in the future, but forensic scientists could test for blood type and even racial markers.

  Britt’s lovely dark hair was full of minute green glass fragments. It seemed likely that she’d been struck with the wine bottle and subdued or knocked unconscious before being strangled.

  There was another substance found in her hair: mucoid matter identified as semen. Washington State crime-lab criminalist Chesterine Cwiklik found that there was no sperm in the seminal fluid, indicating that the ejaculate was from a male who had had a vasectomy.

  Don Fabry had assured the detectives that he and Britt had engaged only in vaginal intercourse on their last intimacy and that they’d never had anal intercourse. The scratches found in the victim’s anal canal indicated that her attacker had attempted to commit an act of sodomy on her.

  Investigators Tando and Homan talked next with the third suspect, the owner of the room, Joe Rogers. The room monitor at the Morrison Hotel had told them what Rogers had said immediately after finding the body: “That goddamned Andersen did it, and I’m going to tell the police.”

  “What made you so sure that Andersen was the killer?” Tando asked. “Don’t you know anyone they call Butch?”

  Rogers acknowledged that there was a guy known as Butch, but he doubted that Butch had anything to do with Britt Rousseau’s death.

  “Butch isn’t all that swift,” Rogers said, “and he never seemed mean or violent. He mostly just hangs around with this young, hippie-looking guy who has a room over at the Reynolds Hotel. I think his name is Lenny or Benny something. I can’t see why Butch would kill Britt.”

  Joe Rogers said that he remembered that Kurtis Andersen had been drinking that Sunday morning, and he said that Kurtis had taken it upon himself to mediate a fight that Rogers and Misty were having. He had seemed very interested in playing the love counselor until Britt had approached his room, and then Rogers had seen Andersen direct her into the room. Suddenly, Andersen had been in a big hurry to get rid of them. Andersen had hurried through his speech: “You both love each other, so why argue and disagree? Go home now. Rap it out and settle it.”

  “He just wanted us out of there, man. He had something planned with that young chick.”

  Rogers said he had left his bottle of Thunderbird wine in the room when he and Misty left to go upstairs and make up. He said that later on, they’d been invited to have a pickup lunch with some friends on the fourth floor, but they were supposed to bring their own plates and silverware, so they’d gone back down to 114 to pick up some plates Rogers stored there.

  “I knocked on the door, but there wasn’t any answer. It was just about noon then,” Rogers told the detectives.

  Joe Rogers and Misty had gone into Britt and Don’s room then, but Britt wasn’t there. Don had offered them some beer and peanut butter and crackers, and they’d remained to talk with him for a while. Then they’d gone back upstairs to Misty’s room. When they came back down in an hour or so, the room where Rogers had seen Britt last was still locked.

  “I got the monitor to open the door. And it was like when the police found her. Misty got real sick, and then we went down and told her old man.”

  Kurtis Andersen was rapidly emerging as the prime suspect among the three arrested. When it was determined that only Andersen had had a vasectomy and the other two passed polygraph examinations, they were released from jail.

  On January 20, Officer Masterson brought in Caswell Rombough,* the second “Butch” in the investigation. Rombough was the Butch who hung out at the Morrison from time to time and who had a gentleman friend named Lenny. As Homan and Tando questioned this Butch, they were aware that his intelligence was either limited to begin with or severely blunted by his fondness for the grape. He answered their questions haltingly and said he did drink a bit.

  Rombough had some dark reddish stains on his clothing, and he admitted that he’d dropped by the Morrison Hotel on Sunday the 15. It seemed bizarre that this man could turn out to be a killer—just as Kurtis Andersen had said—and Homan asked Rombough what he remembered of that Sunday five days earlier. He replied that he’d been taken to the detox center at his own request that day and that he’d fallen there, and that’s when he’d bled.

  “You been wearing these same clothes all week?” Homan asked.

  “Yessir, I guess I have.”

  Rombough said that he survived on checks forwarded to him by a wealthy aunt in California.

  Homan asked Butch about Britt Rousseau’s murder. “I’ve never hurt anyone. I don’t even know who some lady named Brick Rizzo is.”

  Butch seemed quite confused about the whole thing. Homan placed a call to the detox center, which cleared the newest suspect. Caswell Rombough had been admitted to the center at 9:49 on the morning of January 15—at least two and a half hours before Britt Rousseau died. He had indeed fallen at the detox center and bled enough to stain his clothing.

  Detective Dorman had taken fingernail scrapings from Kurtis Andersen shortly after the huge suspect was booked. Criminalist Cwiklik compared these scrapings with traces of food particles (starch grains, starch clumps, cellular matter) found adhering to the pubic hairs of the victim and removed by combing during the postmortem. The two sources produced some particles that were microscopically alike in class and characteristics.

  A body hair removed from the undershorts Andersen was wearing when he was arrested was found to be microscopically similar to body hairs of the victim. In addition, head hairs removed from the undershirt and T-shirt that Britt was wearing when she was killed were found to be microscopically similar in class and characteristic to Andersen’s hair.

  None of these comparisons could be considered as damning as a fingerprint match. Before DNA, hair matches consisting of the root of a hair could only be considered as a “probable,” while a fingerprint match was and continues to be an “absolute.” Still, the hair evidence—combined with the circumstantial evidence—enhanced the Seattle detectives’ belief that they had the right man.

  They had little doubt that Kurtis Andersen had invited Britt Rousseau into his room—probably offered to sell her a few marijuana joints—in the belief that he would have no trouble seducing her. He’d been drinking, and the investigators had
been told that drinking tended to produce irrational and violent reactions in the suspect.

  Although Britt had been friendly and trusting, she had had no interest in Andersen. And she’d suddenly been faced with a situation she couldn’t handle. Undoubtedly, reasoning with him hadn’t worked, and the slender girl wouldn’t have had a chance against the six-foot-five-inch man who was intent on having sex with her.

  A few raps with his fist and a crack over the head with the wine bottle, which had shattered on impact, and Britt would have been virtually helpless. Apparently, she’d continued to fight until the breath was choked out of her, her throat crushed. As a final indignity, Andersen himself had admitted he’d picked up her body, intending to throw it away like so much rubbish in the garbage can.

  Kurtis Andersen was charged with second-degree murder. Although Homan and Tando believed that he had planned to kill Britt Rousseau if she didn’t submit to him willingly, they had no proof of that. And then they bumped into a helping hand from a most unexpected quarter.

  As Andersen was being led off an elevator, the detectives spotted a grizzled and bedraggled character who appeared to be studying the prisoner. Later this man came over to the investigators and said, “I just wanted to be sure they got the right man.”

  “How would you know that?” they asked him.

  “I was there. Right there in the Morrison that morning. This great big guy comes up to me, and he asks me, did I see a naked woman go running by? I’ve been asked some funny questions before, but—”

  “Go on,” Detective Tando urged.

  “So, like I say, I’m getting ready to say I never saw no naked lady, when here comes this lady—naked from the waist down. She sees him, and she runs faster, and this guy takes off after her. He’s yelling ‘Brittany’ or ‘Bitsy’ or something like that after her, but she won’t slow down.”

  “And when was this?”

  “On the fifteenth . . . right over there in the hotel. About noon. I saw him running after her, and then I hear they found the girl dead—so I just thought I’d check and be sure you got the right man.”