“Don’t worry about that,” Reverend Tweedie said, while he handed the girl his jacket to cover herself.
“No, no,” she said urgently. “You don’t understand. We have to get help for my friend. Please!”
Even in her deep shock and terror, it was not her own safety the auburn-haired girl was thinking of. They wondered if there was another girl back in the deep woods.
She was impatient with them, but they put that down to whatever emotional trauma she had suffered.
“It’s not a girlfriend,” she cried. “It’s my boyfriend, Keith—he’s still in there. He’s still in the woods with a madman. He’s beating Keith with a shovel!”
As Reverend Tweedie pulled across the bridge, prepared to try to rescue the girl’s boyfriend, he heard the cracking sound of a pistol shot.
Then there was only silence.
The sobbing girl was covered with a shirt and jacket now, but she trembled violently. Her benefactors didn’t know what to do. Should they go into the dark copse of trees to save the boy? Or was it too late? They didn’t know how badly the girl was injured. She obviously needed to get to a hospital at once, yet there still might be a chance to save her friend, as she kept begging them to do.
But they weren’t armed—ministers seldom are—and they knew the maniac in the woods ahead was. It would be foolhardy to walk into a hail of gunfire; they were all likely to be killed.
They decided to flag down the first car that came by. Fortunately, it was Ranger De Lashmutt driving the next vehicle. He stopped as he saw the two men in a red Volks-wagen frantically signaling him.
“We’re not sure what happened,” Reverend Tweedie said. “We came across an injured girl—she’s in our car over there. She says her boyfriend is out there in the woods, and that a ‘madman’ is beating him. I guess he held both of them at gunpoint. Then we heard a shot—”
“Has the girl been shot?” De Lashmutt asked.
“I’m not sure. She’s bleeding from a wound on her leg. She surely needs an ambulance.”
The ranger had a shortwave radio in his car, but the area was so isolated and blocked by mountains that he could not get a message out to ask for deputies and an ambulance. The signal was swallowed up repeatedly by the mammoth rock walls and cliffs.
While the ranger was trying different bands on his radio’s reception, they heard one more shot from the woods. And then there was a terrible silence broken only by the girl’s soft crying as she sank deeper into clinical shock. De Lashmutt grabbed his first aid kit and tried to stem the flow of blood from the wound in her thigh.
They knew they could drive the wounded girl out, but that would leave the boy at the mercy of the stranger in the woods. They breathed a sigh of relief when the next rig to approach the chaotic scene was driven by a husky truck driver.
“I’ve got a citizens’ band radio setup in my truck,” he said after they’d explained what was going on. “Let me give it a try.”
But he couldn’t raise anyone, either.
Tweedie and De Lashmutt sent the truck driver out to Highway 410, where he was more likely to make radio contact with sheriff’s deputies.
As the churchmen and the ranger waited, a lime green station wagon pulled out of the woods. The driver was headed straight for them, and they could see he was a heavy-set white male who appeared to be in his mid-
twenties.
He drove toward them, gaining speed.
“That’s him!” the girl shouted. “That’s him!”
Thinking quickly, and with considerable courage, Reverend Tweedie pulled his car across the road, almost completely blocking it. The trucker followed his lead and pulled his rig next to Tweedie’s, closing the rest of the gap.
There was no way the Pinto station wagon was going to exit Scatter Creek Road—short of plowing into the VW Beetle and the truck. It skidded to a stop.
Tweedie and De Lashmutt grabbed the man. For some reason, his clothing was soaking wet—both his blue jeans and a brightly patterned shirt. The helpful trucker saw the pistol protruding from the man’s right rear pocket. He grabbed it and placed it on the roof of the ranger’s car. Next, he checked the rest of the stranger’s pockets, but he didn’t find any more weapons.
With his arms pinioned by a minister and a forest ranger, the man who’d driven the Pinto was swearing violently. They smelled alcohol on his breath; it was almost oozing out of his pores. He was behaving weirdly, and he seemed to be out of touch with reality. But his manner was not the main concern of the group in the woods. It was the boy they cared about.
Was he alive or dead?
Bob McCleod and the trucker grabbed the first aid kit and headed into the desolate area as far as they could in the truck driver’s rig. They had to park and set out on foot when they came to a turnaround on the forest road. First they went down the Scatter Creek bypass road.
They found nothing, and they heard nothing but poplar leaves quivering in a faint wind and the cry of birds.
Next, they headed in a northward path from the turnaround area. When they got to Scatter Creek itself, they saw the teenager. He lay facedown just above the creek itself. And he too was nude. He was bleeding from several areas on his body, and most of his skin was either scratched or bruised.
The two men climbed over to him, praying that somehow he would not be dead at all but only unconscious.
It was a forlorn hope. They touched his carotid artery under his ear, his wrists, and even his feet for a reassuring pulse.
But there was none. Keith Person was dead.
Gulping down the impulse to cry, they looked around the creek-side area. They spotted two piles of clothing—
one obviously belonging to a teenage girl, and the other to the dead boy, who had probably given his life to save hers.
None of it made any sense to these laymen, nor would it compute for the sheriff’s detective either. The captured man, who smelled like a brewery and struggled with the men holding him, swearing obscenely, had to be at least a decade older than the victims. A love triangle didn’t seem likely.
They would have to wait until the injured teenager felt well enough to talk about what had happened next to Scatter Creek. She was the only living witness.
While the burly suspect was being held for the arrival of the King County deputies, Reverend Tweedie and his friend Bob McCleod headed into Enumclaw with the injured girl. Enumclaw Sergeant L. E. Robinson met them and led them to the hospital.
Camilla Hutcheson had suffered extensive scratches all over her body as she made her desperate bid for freedom in the woods. At the hospital’s ER, physicians verified that she was suffering from severe shock.
“She’s been shot, too,” the doctor on duty said.
“She was?” Tweedie asked anxiously. “We didn’t know.”
“She has a wound in her left thigh that was caused by a small-caliber bullet,” the attending doctor said to the minister and the deputies. “It’s a through-and-through wound. She was extremely lucky. If the bullet had hit a bone instead of flesh, she might have been crippled and unable to escape. I believe this will prove to be a .22- or .25-caliber bullet. They tend to tumble over and over—bounce around inside—if they strike a bone, and they can destroy vital organs. It’s much better for the patient to have a small bullet pass through only soft tissue.”
Camilla would be held overnight in the hospital. But there was nothing that could be done to help fifteen-year-old Keith Person, who lay in the woods. The EMTs hadn’t yet arrived with an ambulance; in fact, they had been told to turn back until they got further word. Although Keith was thought to be dead, his age and his reputation around town made every man connected to the case surreptitiously check for himself. The quick pressure of warm fingertips against cold flesh. The impossible hope.
There had to be a heartbeat. Good kids like this shouldn’t die.
In a town the size of Enumclaw, news spreads like a lava flow. Already, the news (albeit a bit garbled) of what had happened at
Scatter Creek was circulating in town.
“We have to get to the boy’s parents,” Enumclaw police sergeant Robinson said quietly. “They must not find out on the street.”
Fortunately, they located Keith’s parents rapidly, and they listened with horror and disbelief as police told them that he was dead.
Death notification, especially of the young who have perished as the result of criminal violence, is the hardest assignment any detective or police officer ever has.
But someone had to tell Keith’s parents that their fine, healthy, popular son had been killed with two gunshots.
“But why?” his father asked. “Why?”
No one really knew why yet. None of it made sense. But the teenager was gone forever, and there was no way to bring him back. While his parents grieved, the search for answers had already begun.
Back at the crime scene, King County deputies Mark Fern and Herb Duncan had reached the scene in the woods near Scatter Creek, followed shortly by patrol sergeant Harlan Bollinger. They saw the red-eyed, disheveled-looking man who was still held tight in the grip of a forest ranger and a citizen who looked as though he should have been in church. Ironically, he should have, but Reverend Tweedie was determined that the stranger must not escape. Fern and Duncan handcuffed the suspect and placed him in the backseat of their patrol car.
The deputies then attempted to further secure the area where Keith Person’s body lay facedown. It had to be held sacrosanct until homicide detectives could begin their inch-by-inch crime-scene analysis.
However, an odd individual refused to move on, and kept creeping closer to where Keith’s corpse lay. He was about to cause them a good deal of trouble.
The man explained that it was he who had calmed the suspect by putting him into “an hypnotic trance.” Fern and Sergeant Bollinger exchanged glances; the prisoner hadn’t seemed at all “calm” to them.
Now, the self-styled psychic insisted on remaining at the spot next to Scatter Creek. Finally, with the aid of state trooper Earl Gasaway, the weird man was secured in the trooper’s vehicle until he could give a statement.
As the investigators had suspected, the man’s meandering explanations proved that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the case; he had merely been passing by and wanted to become involved in “the excitement.”
Deputy Fern, too, had checked Keith Person’s vital signs, hoping as they all had that he might still be alive. Fern then took possession of the gun retrieved from the man in the green Pinto. It was a Colt .25-caliber semi-automatic. The deputy marked his initials on the butt of the gun with a green felt pen and later turned it over to detective Rolf Grunden to be placed into evidence. Fern also found a .25-caliber bullet in the suspect’s pants pocket.
With instructions from Sergeant Len Randall, Fern transported the suspect to the Enumclaw Police Department headquarters, where he was advised of his rights under the Miranda Rule. He agreed to take a Breathalyzer test to determine the percentage of alcohol in his system. The results showed a concentration of only .02, nowhere near the legal level of intoxication.
The suspect, whose wide, bland face and rosy cheeks made him look like anyone but a murderer, said his name was Jerry Lee Ross, and that he was twenty-six. He was currently working as a ripsaw operator at Harris Pine Mills, a local firm. He was five feet, eight inches tall, and weighed a hefty 180 pounds.
Ross told detectives that he lived with his wife and two toddler daughters on Pioneer Street in Enumclaw.
He seemed proud of his service as a U.S. Marine and said he’d received an honorable discharge. After that, he’d attended Green River Community College in Auburn, in the hope of finding another career; lumber mill jobs were fine for young men, but he had seen the hard physical work wear down men who’d stayed too long at the mill.
Why had Jerry Ross shot two high school kids? That was the question in everyone’s mind. Detective Rolf Grunden checked to see what might be on Ross’s rap sheet—if, indeed, he had one. Jerry Ross did, but it was for penny ante stuff and showed only numerous traffic arrests, including a few DWIs. Nothing that could be considered a violent crime.
There was not the slightest explanation for the horror that had erupted in the woods.
Jerry Ross was asked to remove his clothing while he stood on a clean white sheet. Often minuscule pieces of evidence can be found as they drop to a sheet. There were a few evergreen needles, some dirt, but those would only tend to validate Scatter Creek as the site of the murder—and the investigators were already pretty sure of that.
Ross then dressed in clean coveralls and awaited transportation to the King County Jail.
It seemed that this one day was at least a week long. It was getting dark, but that was natural in March. Back near Scatter Creek, detectives Ted Forrester and Bruce Morrison surveyed the crime scene. The dead youth still lay facedown, his slight frame stretched along the ground. Someone—maybe a deputy—had thrown a blue shirt across the youngster’s back as if to protect him from the cold he no longer felt.
The two piles of clothing told the graphic story that inanimate objects often do: a green plaid jacket, a pair of boy’s shoes with socks tucked inside, a pair of jeans with a watch in the back pocket, a pair of boy’s jockey shorts; the girl’s brown leather jacket, her blue jeans with bloodstains on the thigh, a blue sweater, a white bra, a pair of blue and white panties, a pair of small blue tennis shoes, a red cloth purse. And a copy of The Story Bible.
“Someone forced those kids to undress—and you can see they took as long as they could, delaying what was coming,” Ted Forrester said. “See how carefully everything is folded?”
Forrester took pictures of the evidence and the surrounding scene. There were tire tracks—distinctive impressions left by relatively narrow new tires. After Forrester finished, Morrison made plaster moulages that showed the treads, tire size, and even small marks that indicated where rocks or stones had marked the tires. In many ways, tires are like teeth when used as identifying factors. Wear and tear, scars, distance measurements, placement of teeth and treads.
Morrison and Forrester found bullet casings, too, from a small-caliber weapon. Ballistics experts would be able to tell them exactly which weapon, more precisely.
As Keith Person’s body was removed to be transported to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office in Seattle, an angry crowd gathered outside Enumclaw Police Department headquarters. Jerry Ross sat inside the police headquarters in a tightly secured room. He had requested to talk with a minister, and investigators had arranged for one to visit him.
Still, the situation had all the elements of an ugly confrontation, one not dissimilar from old-time lynchings. The crowd outside was growing bigger every minute, and they wanted to get their hands on Jerry Ross. To forestall a possible rush on the building by citizens caught up in the mob mentality, Lieutenant Richard Kraske and Sergeant Len Randall decided that the suspect must be removed at once through a rear entrance.
They managed to distract the furious throng out in front of the police station, while they rushed a disguised Jerry Ross out to Rolf Grunden’s car. Grunden drove out of town on back streets, with a deputy following close behind in another vehicle.
The Seattle jail was high atop a building, and much more secure. During the ride into Seattle, Ross spoke about his life as a marine.
“I was a rifleman in Vietnam,” he said, almost wistfully. He spoke of his years in the Marine Corps, the camaraderie, and somehow managed to make even war sound like a good place to make friends.
After fifteen minutes, Ross’s voice trailed off.
“I think I would like to think a little bit,” he said.
“Go head,” Grunden said. “You probably do have some thinking to do.”
There was, of course, one person other than the suspect who knew exactly what had happened in those bleak woods that edged up to Scatter Creek. And that was sixteen-year-old Camilla Hutcheson. Somehow, she gained the strength to give a statement to detective
Jerry Harris. The investigators hated to ask her to remember the horror she’d been through, but they also knew that her memory might well become flawed as time passed. Jerry Ross was a dangerous man, and they wanted to be sure he wasn’t out on the street within a matter of months.
They felt he would soon be stalking other vulnerable victims.
“Start by telling me about your afternoon,” Harris said. “Just tell me what you remember?”
“It was about one p.m.,” Camilla began. “I was walking down the highway with Keith Person. And I saw a guy drive by once in a green Pinto and then he drove by again. [When we were] near the Safeway he stopped and rolled down his window, and asked if we wanted a ride. Keith looked at me and I said ‘No.’ I asked Keith if he knew the guy. He said he thought he did.”
She closed her eyes as she recalled what had been a deadly decision for them. She and Keith had walked over to the car smiling, but as they drew closer, Keith touched her arm—firmly enough to let her know he wanted her to stop.
“I don’t know him at all,” he whispered out of the side of his mouth. “Let’s take off.”
Camilla said they’d half turned away from the green Pinto, ready to run toward the shopping section.
“It was too late,” she said faintly. “When we looked back to see if the man was driving away, we saw that he was still there, and he had a little gun in his hand. He was aiming it right at us.”
“You’re going for a ride with me,” the stranger ordered in a menacing but authoritative voice.
“We felt as if we didn’t have a choice,” Camilla recalled. “We thought he was going to shoot us.”
They got into the front seat of the Pinto, and the man started driving toward Crystal Mountain. He turned off the main road near the Mud Mountain Dam, but there was another car on the road ahead. Their captor had muttered that it was “too light out,” and he turned around.
Camilla hadn’t known what he had in mind, but she knew it wasn’t anything good and she begged him to let them go. If he would just let them out on the highway, they’d find their way back to Enumclaw.