A Rage to Kill

  Amy decided that she couldn’t hide forever; if Eric meant to kill her, she knew he would find her someday. She decided to stay and face the problem head-on. She went to school, came home, and watched from behind the window blinds as the night grew dark outside. She worried most about what would happen to her children if she should die—both immediately, and over the years ahead. Who would take care of them?

  Finally, although she hated doing it, Amy told her seven-year-old daughter, “If Daddy ever shoots me, I want you to go to the telephone and dial “0” and tell the operator to call the police.”

  Amy Shaw lived that way for a year; sometimes she was more afraid than others. But she was never not afraid. It was, sadly, the fear that plagues thousands of tormented women across America.

  On the morning of September 21, 1974, Amy expected Eric to pick up their children. And he was supposed to bring clothing for them to wear; she had just bought them new school clothes, and she simply couldn’t afford to lose any more. She was determined to make sure he had kept his part of the agreement before she let the kids outside.

  The little girl was up first that morning and woke Amy, who said, “Come on, kids. Let’s go and have breakfast.” She fixed them toast and Cheerios. It was a Saturday morning like any other Saturday morning, but Amy was a little more frightened than usual. There was no one to walk the children out to the car, and she knew she had to talk to Eric about the clothes.

  Amy cautioned the youngsters to stay in the house until she had picked up the clothes he was supposed to bring. “Don’t come out until I come for you,” she said, “because Daddy might take you away in your home clothes if you come out.”

  If Eric hadn’t brought the clothes, Amy had decided she wasn’t going to let the kids go. She couldn’t take any more of his mean little games. She fully intended to turn around, go back to the house, and call the police.

  She’d told her friends what she was going to do. She told them not to worry about her, but she asked her closest friend, “Call me at nine-thirty, would you, just to be sure everything’s all right?”

  There were more than two dozen apartments in the Driftwood complex. It was a little after eight-thirty on a sunny weekend morning and almost all the residents were home. Some of them saw the white Ford drive into the carport area. A tall red-haired man sat behind the wheel, and a pretty young woman sat beside him. They looked as if they were ready for a pleasant weekend. In fact, they looked so ordinary that they scarcely merited a second glance.

  Those neighbors who lived close to the carport heard a man shout “It’s all over!” Others would recall that they had heard a string of obscenities. Only a few heard the woman’s voice cry out, “My God! Leave me alone!”

  It was a little early in the morning for a family fight, but not unheard of. But then they realized that this was far more serious than a domestic squabble. The air crackled with a sound that resembled a string of fire-crackers exploding.

  A woman who ran to her open window and looked down saw the still form in the carport. It was a slender woman with long black hair, and she lay face down with her legs close together and one arm tucked under her, as if she hadn’t had time to even break her fall. She wore white shorts and a brown blouse, and a scarlet pool was already beginning to stain the concrete beneath her.

  Two of the apartment residents were registered nurses and they raced now, still wearing robes, with curlers in their hair, to help the woman. One bent to turn the woman over and she saw the awful damage to her face. Nevertheless, she began the “kiss of life”—mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—while the second straddled the woman’s unconscious body and began to pump her chest.

  Someone brought a blanket and tucked it around the injured woman. The nurses knew that she probably wasn’t going to make it, but no one wanted to acknowledge that yet. She was so young.

  No one saw the little face watching from a nearby window or realized the child there had disappeared. A moment later, an operator heard a small voice asking for the police. “My daddy shot my mommy,” she said. Gently, the operator questioned the little girl, learned her name and her address, and nodded to another operator to go ahead and call the Des Moines police. When she turned back to the child on the line, there was only a dial tone. Someone in the Driftwood Apartments had already called for an aid car. The fire department automatically alerted the Des Moines police that there had been a shooting.

  Robert Fox happened to be patrolling only seconds away from the Driftwood Apartments, and he spotted the white Ford with what appeared to be two adults and two children inside pulling out. He turned on his blue lights, and the car slowed and stopped.

  It was a potentially explosive situation for a policeman. He knew there had been a shooting, but no more than that. There were children inside the car, and he dared not fire himself. Fox activated the outside mike and shouted, “Come out with your hands in front of you!”

  The driver’s door didn’t open, and Fox realized that the man in the car was shouting something back. Fox could not make out what he was saying. Then the woman in the passenger seat called from her window, “He can’t get out of the car—he’s a paraplegic!”

  A split second later, she reached down to the seat and tossed something out onto the pavement. It was a revolver. As it hit the street, the cylinder popped out and Fox was close enough to see that it still held three live rounds of ammunition.

  His first concern was still the youngsters, and he held his hand out to them and said, “Come on, kids.”

  They ran to him, and the little girl then made what was probably the most poignant res gestae (spontaneous) statement Fox had ever heard, “My daddy shot my mommy in the head. I tried to make him stop—but he wouldn’t. My daddy killed my mommy. My mommy told me that if daddy ever shot her, we were supposed to go live with my aunt. Will you make sure we get to live with my aunt?”

  She was such a little kid, Fox thought—not more than six or seven. She should never have had to witness what she had obviously just seen. He sheltered the kids in his arms and led them to the back seat of a patrol car. The little boy didn’t seem to understand what was happening, but Fox feared the girl would never forget it.

  Although it had been only a few minutes since the shooting, the scene on the Kent–Des Moines Road was alive with squad cars, both from the city of Des Moines and from the King County Police. Detective Sergeant Marty Pratt (soon to be the Chief of Police) joined them a few minutes before nine. He helped the woman companion of the gunman into his car. She, too, was a paraplegic. The .38 was locked in the trunk of a county car while the investigators made sure that the shooter didn’t have more weapons.

  In the seventies, Des Moines was a city of just over 4,000 people and had not had a homicide in many years. Like many small departments in the county, the local police operated on a reciprocal program with King County Police. They now requested help from that department’s homicide unit. Detective Sergeant Len Randall and Detective Rolf Grunden joined the Des Moines police and King County patrolmen in trying to sort out just what had happened.

  The victim had been rushed to the emergency room of Highline Hospital in nearby Burien, and Randall and Des Moines Sergeant Ken Schnorr saw that the crime scene was secured and left deputies guarding all that was left of it—a huge pool of coagulating blood, a stained blanket, and numerous bullet casings. Then the two sergeants drove to Burien Hospital to see about the condition of the victim.

  They knew her name because neighbors had identified her as twenty-eight-year-old Amy Shaw. But that was all they knew about her world, her life or why the red-haired man had shot her.

  And they would not learn the truth from Amy; although the paramedics had used heroic procedures on the break-neck run to the hospital and the ER doctors had worked frantically over her, Amy was pronounced dead at 9:40 A.M. There was no way she could have lived no matter how much medical treatment she received. Eight .38 caliber bullets had crashed into her body. All of her wounds were to the left side
of her body, as if she had turned, prepared to run, after she saw the gun in the shooter’s hand.

  Bullets had pierced Amy’s left lower jaw, breast, lung, ear, and thigh. Ironically, the bullet that penetrated her shoulder had gone on to sever her spinal cord at the same level where Eric’s had been cut six years before in Vietnam. She might have survived those bullets, but not the one that entered her skull and coursed through her brain. Doctors and cops alike shook their heads. Amy Shaw’s killer had had to reload his gun to cause so much carnage.

  Eric Shaw and his second wife, Mariel, were transported to the Des Moines police station to be interviewed separately. Detectives used the wheelchair in their car to move Mariel, and improvised with an office chair with wheels and padded arms, maneuvering it carefully as they brought Shaw himself in.

  Mariel Shaw was understandably distressed, but she fought to control her emotions as she tried to reconstruct what had happened.

  “We’d gone over to pick up Eric’s children,” she said softly. “And then Eric and Amy were having an argument—I think about their clothes.”

  Eric had turned to her and asked her to hand him a sack of clothes they had brought with them. She reached down and picked up the bag from the floor. Only then, as he took it from her hand, had she seen the glint of the gun beneath the bag.

  The pale woman in front of them looked anguished as she remembered the shooting. She said Amy Shaw had still been walking toward the car when the shots began. Her husband had fired all the bullets and then reloaded. “I tried to stop him but he’s too strong,” she said.

  She had had no idea how deep her new husband’s hatred for his ex-wife ran, no idea that he had brought a loaded gun with him. She was willing to give a verbal statement to the Des Moines detectives, but she was reluctant to sign a written statement until she had talked to an attorney.

  In sharp contrast to his bride, Eric Shaw did not appear shaken by the tragedy. When Detective Rolf Grunden approached him with a swab that would show if he had gunpowder residue on his hands, Shaw quickly held up his left hand. “You might as well only take this one,” he drawled. “That’s the only one that did it.”

  Detective Jerry Burger faced the man who had just shot his ex-wife eight times. He asked Shaw if he was comfortable.

  “As comfortable as I can get,” Shaw answered, pointing to his crippled legs with a massively muscled arm.

  “You’ve served time in the military?” Burger asked, trying to find some possible explanation for the carnage he’d just witnessed.

  “Yeah . . . I was all over Nam. That’s where I got greased,” he answered, touching his shoulder and lazily tracing the path of the bullet which had paralyzed him. “Can I have a glass of water?”

  When Burger returned with it, he was shocked to hear Shaw whistling cheerfully. Eric Shaw declined to make any statements at all without the presence of his attorney. When he was informed of his rights under Miranda for the third time, he waved his hand, “I know about all that good stuff—I took business law at Bellevue Community College.”

  As unbelievable as it seemed, Eric Shaw appeared very pleased with himself that the woman he’d once been married to, the mother of his children, was dead. His children were now, for all intents and purposes, orphans, but that wasn’t bothering him. Nor was he concerned about Mariel, who sat weeping in another interview room.

  The investigators didn’t know yet just how much of the shooting—if any—the children had witnessed, and they were reluctant to question them so soon after their mother’s death. A policewoman came into the station to comfort them until they could be removed to a receiving home to wait for their aunt to arrive.

  Eric Shaw had claimed that the police could never touch him because they had no facilities to care for him, but he was wrong. He was booked into the King County jail, and the investigation continued. Des Moines had only eight policemen at the time, and they would all be busy for days trying to sort out what had happened and interviewing the dozens of witnesses who had seen Amy Shaw fall in a blaze of gunfire. There was no paucity of evidence and witnesses’ statements in the Amy Shaw case.

  Many of Amy’s neighbors in the Driftwood Apartments gave statements. They had seen Amy Shaw, clad in a brown blouse and white shorts, as she walked out to the white Ford. They had seen the gun in the driver’s hand, heard him shout obscenities at her as he continued to fire even after she had fallen. And sadly, they had seen the small girl witness the whole thing, heard her screaming for the shooter to stop.

  Rolf Grunden processed the white Ford, and found a nearly-full box of .38 special ammunition in the front seat. Des Moines detectives searched Amy’s apartment and found the chilling photographs that had once been cheerful family scenes—only Amy Shaw’s head had been snipped from each picture, as if she were already dead in Shaw’s mind.

  Detective Burger faced the task of interviewing the young daughter of the victim. In any testimony given by a child, it is necessary to establish that the youngster understands the difference between reality and fantasy. Carefully, the Des Moines detective gave the little girl some examples of truth and lies and she nodded wisely, showing him that she did, indeed, know the difference.

  “Can you tell me what you remember about the morning when your mother got hurt?”

  She knew that there had been trouble between her parents because her dad was keeping all their clothes. “My mom told us to stay in the apartment until she got us clothes to put on from dad. My mom walked out and said, ‘Where are their clothes?’

  “And he said, ‘What do you mean? What clothes?’ and then BANG! BANG! BANG! And Mariel was crying and telling him to quit. When I came out, he was still shooting her a couple more times and I tried to get him to stop but he wouldn’t.”

  The little girl said that her father had never moved from his seat in the car while he shot her mother. When the loud BANGS! finally stopped, she had done exactly what her mother had asked her to do. She had turned around and gone into the house and dialed “0” and asked for the police.

  “She told me if she ever got killed, she would go up to heaven—and she told me to call the police.”

  Then she had taken her little brother by the hand and led him outside. Her father had told them to get into the car. “I didn’t tell my dad that I called the police because he really would have gone [far away] and then you guys would have never found me. That’s what I thought, anyway, so I didn’t let him know.”

  If Bob Fox hadn’t been almost in front of the Driftwood Apartments, Burger realized, the tragedy might have been compounded. The little girl said they had been so glad to see the policeman, and as soon as he had said, “Come on, kids,” they had scrambled out of the car to the safety of his car.

  Eric Shaw was charged with murder in the first degree. His attorneys argued that his health would be threatened if he were forced to remain in jail, because there weren’t proper facilities to care for him. They almost pulled off that argument and one Superior Court judge wrote an order that would allow Shaw to go to his specially equipped home. However, that was quickly rescinded when prosecutors argued that he was too dangerous to be allowed his freedom pending trial. Besides, it would have cost the county $150 a day to guard him.

  In January 1975, Shaw changed his plea to guilty of second-degree murder. On February 21, 1975, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in the state penitentiary. He was paroled to supervision in Arizona in 1987, and was released from supervision in July of 1993. He was fifty years old. To put the woman he called “Ruby” in the ground, Eric Shaw gave up a promising new marriage, a lifetime of financial security, and an education that could have led to a meaningful career.

  Worst of all, he robbed Amy of her life, and he robbed his children of their mother.

  That Was No Lady

  I once went to the most peculiar murder trial I’d ever experienced. The defendant in the second degree murder trial in Judge Donald Horowitz’s courtroom didn’t create the usual courtroom disruptions; the
re wasn’t any swearing or shouting or wrestling with courtroom deputies. The pretty woman at the defense table was actually a perfectly mannered lady. Jackie was quite demure, turning only occasionally to greet friends in the spectator section. She smiled sweetly at a couple who had brought a change of clothes for the next day’s session. It was important to her to look her best each day of her trial, and she never wanted to be seen in the same outfit two days in a row.

  I remember how Jackie nodded happily when she saw the lime green pantsuit on the padded hanger. She was obviously something of a clothes horse, although her taste ran to the slightly bizarre. On this day, she wore a pair of tight pink slacks, a figure-revealing green sweater, and high-heeled pumps. Her hair was teased into a huge bouffant with youthful pigtails, and her makeup had been expertly applied—base, eyeshadowand liner, false eyelashes, and her full lips were deep red.

  It might have been any trial where an attractive female sat in the defendant’s chair, only there was a vast difference. Jackie wasn’t a woman at all. She was a twenty-four-year-old transvestite prostitute. It would have been hard for a casual observer to tell; the defendant mimicked women so well that he would have fooled anyone.

  Jackie’s attorney had made a motion asking that his client be allowed to wear women’s clothing and a wig during the testimony and that he be referred to as “Ms.” After pondering this request, Judge Horowitz granted the motion.

  While some of the circumstances of this trial had a humorous side, there was sadness too. The victim had died, the prosecution said, because the defendant had fooled him with “her” disguise, and because he had confronted her. There was nothing funny about the end of their story.