While Fenkner and Johnson attempted to track down the elusive ex-con, the rapist was still busy. It was two days later, at 11 P.M. on June 4, when twenty-six-year-old Carol Brand drove up in front of her home in the North End. She parked and got out, idly noting that a man was walking eastbound along the sidewalk.
Carol had just reached her front steps when the man called out, asking her the time. As she turned to answer, he grabbed her, covering her eyes with her coat. She screamed several times while he dragged her to the yard of the house next door. Her first thought was that he was trying to force her into a car, and she told him she would do anything he wanted.
The man was evidently confident that she had no choice in the matter anyway, and he continued to drag her behind a fence, where they would be hidden from the street. Once there, he tore off her slacks and panties. He forced his fingers roughly into her vagina, bit her breasts, and raped her.
Not satisfied, the man committed acts of both oral and anal sodomy. During the entire attack, he tried to keep her eyes covered. The coat over her mouth and nose was smothering her, and when she told him she couldn’t breathe, he let up the pressure on her face a little.
She heard the sound of other voices—children’s voices—asking her attacker what was going on and the man answering, “We’re making love.”
“Are you all right, lady?” a young voice called.
She was terrified. The man had hit her in the chest before, and she feared he would beat her to death if she called for help now. The kids would be incapable of stopping him and might be hurt themselves. She managed to tell them she was all right, hoping that they would realize that she wasn’t and go for help.
She heard their feet running away. The rapist seemed nervous. No, he sounded ashamed. He asked if she was “okay” and allowed her to put her clothes back on.
Then he fled.
The youngsters had run to their mother and cried, “Mommy, there was a man, and he grabbed a girl, and she screamed, and he dragged her into the bushes and put his hand over her mouth!”
The woman called police, and Wallingford precinct patrolmen arrived almost at once. But just as before, the rapist had disappeared into the night, leaving only blood from his feet, which had been cut by nails on the fence. That wouldn’t help; the technology for DNA matching would not be developed for more than a decade. Carol Brand was taken to a hospital, where doctors confirmed she had been sexually assaulted. And she had received deep scratches on her neck, sternum, and back.
Carol gave detectives a now-familiar description: tall, thin, ragged shag haircut, mustache, twenties. Her attacker’s MO matched that of the earlier attacks almost exactly. The man stalked lone women late at night, kept their eyes covered, and not only subjected them to sexual indignities but also seemed to enjoy beating them.
What was most alarming was the increasing frequency of the assaults. It was quite possible that the rapist assumed his victims had not seen him, that he felt perfectly free to continue his pattern. He had gotten away clean every time. If he felt safe, he might slip, feel overconfident, and thereby betray himself.
Or he might just kill his next victim. The number of rape victims who have ended up dead through strangulation or beatings is overwhelming. Sometimes the rapist goes further, uses more force than he intended; sometimes the “thrill” of “simple” rape is no longer satisfying enough to the rapist, and he progresses to murder.
It is a very thin line.
On June 10, eighteen-year-old Moira Drew* attended a party at a friend’s house in the North End. There were several people she knew there and a few she didn’t. One was a tall, good-looking man with a mustache. As she left the party between 1:30 and 2:00 A.M., the man approached her and asked if he could have a ride to Aurora Avenue.
“Sure.” She nodded and pointed to her car.
She felt no apprehension. After all, she had met the man at a friend’s house.
Once on their way, the man, who had told her his name was Paul Smith, changed his mind about his destination and asked if she would mind taking him to North 91st and Linden Avenue North. It was only a few more blocks out of her way, and she agreed.
“Hey, move closer to me,” he said, as she pulled up to his corner.
It seemed like a simple pass. She shook her head and refused.
As quickly as a cobra strikes, the man’s hand reached out and seized her by the throat, powerful fingers cutting off her air entirely. A black curtain dropped over her eyes, and she saw pinwheels of light as she fought to breathe. With her last strength, she leaned on the horn.
“If you don’t shut up,” the man hissed, “I’m going to kill you.”
But Moira kept her hand on the horn, its bleating staccato shrieks blasting through the early-morning air. A car pulled up and paused, and the driver looked curiously over at Moira’s car.
It was enough to spook “Paul Smith,” and he leapt from her car and took off running.
Moira Drew was not a fragile little girl; although perfectly proportioned, she was five feet, eight inches tall and weighed 145 pounds. She had fought her would-be strangler with such ferocity that she had forced the brake pedal of her car to the floor, making the brakes inoperable. She didn’t realize that until she pulled into a nearby all-night market and found she had to pull on the hand brake to keep from crashing. There was a police car parked there, with Officer G. J. Fielder inside.
The distraught teenager approached the police unit, and Fiedler could see the angry red marks on her neck—perfect imprints of a strong man’s fingers.
This time—finally—the rapist had run out of luck. He had attacked a woman who knew people he knew, and with Detective Fenkner’s instructions, Moira called her host at the party and asked who the “tall, good-looking man with the mustache” was.
“Oh, him—that’s Mike Smith,” the man responded.
Michael Smith. Already a suspect but unaware that sex-crimes detectives were closing in on him, he had continued in his proclivity for brutal attacks on women.
Burglary detective Bill Berg had been investigating Mike Smith, too, and had information that tied in with his fellow detectives’ case. Even better, he had a line on where Smith could be found: near an address on Northwest 56th Street. Berg arrested Smith on suspicion of rape in the case of Lynn Rutledge. The suspect would now have to face his accusers in a lineup arranged by sex-crimes sergeant Romero Yumul.
On June 11, the ex-con moved across the lineup stage with several other men who looked a great deal like him. He had always been very careful to cover the eyes of his victims, nearly smothering some of them, but they had seen him, and they had remembered him.
Kitty Gianelli, the young nurse, recognized the man who had beaten her nearly unconscious. Carol Brand, raped, beaten, and tormented, recognized him. Moira Drew recognized him. Lynn Rutledge, kidnapped from Northgate and raped twice, recognized him. The youthful witnesses to Carol Brand’s attack recognized him.
Joanne Bixler, whose attacker had thrown dirt on her after the rape and tried to bury her, was not sure, nor were the other young women who had been kept in pitch blackness while the attacks were carried out.
But there was enough. Deputy prosecutors Paul Bern-stein and Lee Yates filed charges of rape, robbery, and kidnapping (in the case of Lynn Rutledge) and three further charges of rape and sexual assault (in the cases of rape and sexual assault of the other young women who had picked him out of the lineup).
With the arrest and confinement of Michael Smith—held on a one hundred thousand dollar bail—the attacks on women in the North End stopped. The physical evidence on Carol Brand’s rapist was piling up. He had cut his feet on the picket fence as he ran from the sound of approaching police sirens. Partially healed wounds on the soles of Smith’s feet looked like nail punctures. And Berg was aware that bloody male clothing, discarded by Smith, had been found. Semen samples from the rape victims matched Smith’s blood type.
Smith had no alibis at all for the times the
attacks had occurred. The burglary charge for which Berg had arrested Mike Smith in February had many aspects that made it look much more like a rape attempt than a burglary. Pry marks had been visible around the windows of the home where Smith was caught, and inside lived a particularly beautiful young woman—alone. Smith had claimed that he had only been siphoning gas, and his trial on that charge had ended in a hung jury.
Detective Berg wanted Smith, felt he was potentially dangerous. Now he would work countless off-duty hours to help prosecutors Bernstein and Yates build their case. The investigative trio revisited each attack site and took pictures. They interviewed and reinterviewed the victims—all women who not only were intelligent but also had fantastic memories for detail. The case file grew as the prosecuting attorneys and the burglary detectives gave their own free time to compile a loophole-free dossier against the brutal rape suspect.
They learned much about Smith’s relationships with women, and an interesting psychological profile emerged. There had been no dearth of women in the ex-con’s life, but he had fought with most of them, had beaten one severely, and had not taken any hint of rejection without seeking revenge—not on the women who’d refused him but on his victims. After each fight or breakup with a girlfriend, he had gone prowling, looking for a pretty woman on whom to vent his wrath.
Interesting, too, was the fact that most of the attacks had taken place in the same neighborhood where Mike Smith had grown up—one directly across the street from his former home. Since his release from prison, he had been on the move, living with one friend or another in the North End of Seattle.
Michael Smith was slated to go on trial for attacking the four young women in whose cases charges were filed in August 1975. When Smith was faced with the voluminous evidence that detectives Johnson, Fenkner, and Berg and prosecutors Bernstein and Yates had gathered against him, however, he changed his mind about going to trial. He was allowed to plead guilty to a charge of first-degree kidnapping and robbery in Lynn Rutledge’s case.
The other charges were dropped. The kidnapping charge would mean a mandatory life sentence (which in the state of Washington means a thirteen-year, four-month minimum), and had he been convicted on the four other charges, it would have been highly unlikely that he would have received any more prison time.
Michael Smith is in his sixties now and should be safely behind bars for a long, long time. But the scars on his victims will not soon fade. One woman is afraid to walk the streets by herself even in the daytime and no longer feels safe living alone. Another has suffered from painful recurring migraine headaches.
And yet they were lucky: they escaped with their lives.
“TAKE A LIFER HOME TO DINNER . . . WITH MURDER FOR DESSERT!”
The hobbies, pastimes, and avocations of man are many and as varied as the idiosyncrasies known to the human race. For one undersized resident of Washington State, the question regarding his preference of activity evokes a simple answer: escape. For over thirty years, he has pursued escape with a diligence that cannot be rivaled. He has become a wizard of the art of making himself scarce.
What continues to baffle law-abiding citizens in the state, and especially the officers who worked so hard to put this modern-day Houdini behind bars, is why “do-gooders” in prison reform chose to give such a pro a virtual key to freedom. The widow of the man he killed after his last escape wonders why, too, and her lawsuit against the state of Washington puts more than a little bite into her question.
The afternoon of Wednesday, May 3, 1972, was—by Northwest standards—a fine spring day: sixty-seven degrees and not a hint of rain. Lori Taylor, fifty, who, with her husband, Bob, fifty-four, ran Tacoma’s Avenue Loans & Swap Store at 3017 Portland Avenue, glanced at the store’s clock and noted gratefully that the 5:30 closing hour was near. The pawnshop was empty of customers; maybe she and Bob would be able to get away on time and enjoy a quiet dinner and a peaceful evening in their comfortable home on East 31st Street.
The Taylors were popular members of the Portland Avenue commercial community. They’d been there for years doling out loans on the guitars, stereos, silver sets, diamond rings from relationships that had soured—all the possessions that their customers could “hock” when they needed quick money.
Bob and Lori were fair, law-abiding, and happy in their small family business, even if it was not the safest way to make a living. They’d been ripped off with a regularity that would tend to make many store owners pack it all in.
But the Taylors weren’t about to let small-time punks drive them out. Both of them wore holsters with loaded .38s. The Taylors figured that would show the next punk that they weren’t going to stand still for another heist.
As Lori Taylor prepared to close up shop for the day, locking and checking the front entrance, a short middle-aged man suddenly burst through the unlocked rear door of the cement block building. The spunky woman shouted at him to get out.
“Shhh!” the intruder hissed. At that point, Mrs. Taylor saw that the man held a pistol. She called her husband, whose back was turned. As Bob Taylor turned, the gunman fired twice, wounding him.
Still, Taylor fought back. He drew his .38 and fired at the holdup man. The gunman was hit and stumbled backward into a small bathroom. Lori Taylor drew her revolver and fired. The man slumped down onto the toilet seat, but he didn’t stop shooting. Lori Taylor turned and ran for cover. She didn’t make it; bullets thudded into her back and she fell.
Witnesses drawn toward the pawnshop by the repeated sound of gunshots saw a bloody figure emerge. He was a small man, but mighty determined to get away. He fell to his knees but scrambled upright again and made it to the driver’s seat of a car parked nearby. He tried to start it, but the effect of his wounds was getting to him and his hand fell ineffectually away from the ignition switch.
Inside the shop, neighbors found Bob Taylor sprawled out on the floor. He was unresponsive to his friends’ frantic efforts to help him. Lori Taylor sat nearby in a chair. She appeared to be in deep shock, and the chair beneath her was stained with blood.
While a few neighbors tried to staunch the blood from the Taylors’ wounds, others put in a call for emergency help from Tacoma Police. Officers reached the store in a matter of minutes.
There would be no manhunt for the would-be robber. Police found him still sitting in his car, which was fast becoming as bloody as he was. Whatever threat he had posed minutes before was gone; the gunman and Lori Taylor were dispatched to Tacoma General Hospital—ironically, in the same ambulance.
But the little man obviously had a lot more to hide than his recent shooting spree. Even as the ambulance sped toward the hospital, he surreptitiously tried to straighten a reddish-brown wig, which had slipped over his forehead, and to tear up a temporary driver’s license he carried. He flatly refused to identify himself or to talk with police.
Both Lori Taylor and the nameless gunman were admitted to the hospital in critical condition—the latter with ten bullet wounds in his body!
“Any guy with ten holes in him who’s still trying to hide his identity has got to have more secrets than a pawnshop rip-off,” a detective commented. “You recognize him?”
His partner shook his head. “If he won’t talk, we can print him. I’ll bet you two days off he’s got a rap sheet that would choke a horse.”
There was to be no speeding ambulance for Bob Taylor; he lay dead in his own store, his .38 still clutched in his hand. Lori Taylor fought for her life as surgeons probed for the .45 slugs that had slammed into her back.
Detectives began to process the suspect’s car. They found a .45-caliber revolver, with six empty cartridges in its cylinder, beneath the gore-soaked front seat. There was another wig in the glove compartment. Efforts to trace ownership of the sedan were thwarted when the vehicle proved to have been sold recently without the property filing of transfer papers.
Attendants at Tacoma General who cut away the gunman’s clothes found a pair of steel handcuffs in one of h
is pockets.
Mrs. Taylor’s .38 was found on the floor of the store’s bathroom. Although she could not remember doing so, she probably had thrown it at the gunman as it clicked harmlessly against an empty chamber.
As the wounded widow remained in critical condition, her assailant was wheeled into surgery early Thursday morning. After long hours of surgery, physicians had removed all but one of the bullets fired at him by the Taylors. They speculated cautiously that the mystery gunman might live if infection did not set in. Late Thursday afternoon, detectives were allowed to question him briefly, which drew no response at all; the patient appeared to be a confirmed cop-hater. Nevertheless, his uncooperative fingertips were rolled across an ink pad and placed firmly on a card.
It didn’t take long to find out who he was. The answer brought some incredulous looks and not a few unprintable expletives from lawmen in the Northwest.
Arthur St. Peter. “St. Peter the Escaper.” The same St. Peter who had once been quoted as saying that his main purpose in life, once he was “inside,” was to start figuring out how he could get out, and he didn’t mean through regular channels.
As far as the men who’d sent him up were concerned, the five-foot-four escape artist should have been firmly locked inside the walls at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. He’d been convicted in 1962 of first-degree assault, escape, armed robbery, auto theft, and of being a habitual criminal. The latter charge was what convicts called “The Big Bitch.” He was sentenced to life.
Arthur St. Peter was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1924. Two years later his family moved to Seattle, Washington. In 1941, two destructive events took place; the beginning of the Second World War and the beginning of Arthur St. Peter’s criminal career. The war was over in four years; St. Peter never quit.