“Just let us go,” she said. “I promise we won’t tell anyone!” she had pleaded.
“It’s too late” was their captor’s cryptic response.
While Camilla tried to reason with the man, Keith was trying to get the door open and jump out, pulling Camilla with him. He signaled his intention with his eyes, and she understood—and was ready to jump with him.
“But Keith couldn’t get the door open without the man knowing,” she said. “He had these seat belts, and they buzzed really loud if they got unhooked. The guy would have been alerted right away if we tried to jump out.”
Their kidnapper kept driving along narrower and narrower roads. It was daylight, but the trees surrounding them hid the sky and made it feel like dusk. Maybe it was, she’d thought. Maybe they’d been driving for hours; in her terror, she had lost track of time.
Camilla continued to plead for their release, but she got on the stranger’s nerves. Suddenly, she heard the gun fire and felt a stinging pain in her thigh.
“I was facing Keith when he shot me. I felt it and I could see the blood and I screamed. The man said if I didn’t shut up, he would do it again.”
When they were an estimated two or three miles past the Mud Mountain Dam, the driver turned the car down a gravel road. Evidently, he had found it dark enough and secluded enough to serve his purposes.
“He made us get out of the car, and then he reached into the backseat and came out carrying this collapsible shovel. That was scary, because we wondered why he needed a shovel?”
Camilla drew a deep breath and tried to keep her voice from trembling. Their abductor’s next request had first struck them as so ridiculous and humiliating that they didn’t believe him at first.
“He ordered us to take off our clothes. He was holding the gun in his right hand. And it was a very small gun. He’d already shot me with it, and I was still standing up.
“Keith and I looked at each other and laughed.”
But they’d soon learned it wasn’t a joke. “He said we’d better do as we were told.”
And so they removed their clothing, taking as much time as possible, taking off their jewelry, watches, tucking socks inside shoes, folding garments very slowly and carefully. They were both terribly embarrassed, and hoped the man with the gun would tell them to stop before they were totally naked.
But he said nothing, watching them with glittering eyes until they were both completely nude.
“Now you’ve got to make love to her!” the man barked at Keith Person.
“We just stood there and looked at each other,” Camilla recalled from her hospital bed. “We just couldn’t do that. Neither of us ever had. It was crazy.”
When the stranger realized that the teenagers were adamant in refusing to have sexual intercourse despite the gun he held on them, he ordered Camilla to perform an act with a beer bottle. She had never heard of such a thing in her life. She was shocked and incredulous.
Again, Camilla courageously refused, staring defiantly at the madman in front of her.
Their captor was angry, but Keith was angry, too. He moved in front of Camilla to protect her. The man he faced not only had a loaded gun but outweighed Keith by about forty pounds. He’d been trained as a fighting marine, and Keith was only a sophomore in high school.
Camilla told Detective Jerry Harris that the “crazy man” picked up his shovel then.
“He started to hit Keith on the head with it,” she said, tears running down her face. “I knew I had to get help. I didn’t see Keith fall, but I knew that both Keith and I together wouldn’t be a match for the ‘madman,’ and his gun and his shovel.”
While their kidnapper was distracted by beating Keith, Camilla ran for the bushes and then leaped and rolled down the twenty-five-foot cliff into Scatter Creek. She remembering blacking out when she hit the water. She felt as if she were drunk, or dizzy, or in a nightmare where nothing made sense.
Half walking and half floating in the icy water, she worked her way toward the bridge ahead. Several times, the dark waves of oblivion rolled over her and she sank beneath the water, but the frigid water helped to snap her back to consciousness.
“And then I looked up and I saw the man with the gun above me. He’d been following me along the bank.”
Somewhere she’d heard the term “like shooting fish in a barrel.” She felt like the fish, trapped without any protection at all.
“He told me to get out of the creek and come back up the bank,” Camilla said. “And I did what he said, but I didn’t stop when I crawled up. I figured that somehow I’d survived the first bullet, and maybe the next one wouldn’t kill me either. I knew he was going to shoot me.”
As Camilla reached solid ground, she said she’d begun to run, ignoring the shouts of the man behind her. She heard him fire the gun again, and waited for the sting in her back, but this time the bullet didn’t hit her.
And then, mercifully, she broke out through the brush and ran to the safety of the minister’s car.
“I knew he would have killed me if he caught me …”
Camilla said she had never seen the man before but knew she would recognize him again. Despite his bizarre demands that she and Keith perform sexually for him, he had not touched her himself.
Why on earth had the suspect taken the helpless teenagers for that forced ride?
Detective Grunden tried to sort out some of the answers as he took a statement from Jerry Lee Ross. Again, Ross had been fully advised of his rights and, after talking to his pastor, he said that he wanted to tell the truth about what had happened.
He recalled that he’d seen the two young people walking toward Enumclaw. He wasn’t sure of the time, but he decided he’d ask them if they wanted a lift. He denied he had forced them into the car.
“As we were driving the girl asked me where we were going. About that time I pulled out a gun alongside the driver’s seat. I had put the gun next to the seat before I left home in the morning. The gun is a .25-caliber automatic, a Colt. I’d loaded it with seven shots.
“I told them to keep their mouths shut—that we were just going for a ride.”
But, as he continued his statement, Ross admitted that he was thinking about the girl as they drove. At first, he’d considered “laying her” himself.
“Then I thought about watching them do it,” he said. “I also thought I could tie the boy up and ‘play’ with the girl. I already had a leather shoestring in my car that I planned to use.
“As we were driving, the girl asked for a cigarette. The gun went off accidentally when I reached for one.”
Jerry Ross’s version of the attack grew more tangled as he spoke, the wheels spinning in his mind almost visible to Grunden as he wrote down the words.
“I think the bullet hit the horn because it was honking. The bullet struck the girl’s left leg. I unscrewed the horn and stopped it from honking. The girl was screaming. I said something like shut up or I would do it again—or something like that.”
Ross recalled how he turned off onto a dirt road and drove to the end. He described getting the shovel from the back of his car because he planned to knock the boy out so that he could molest the girl.
“We walked to an old bridge site. We walked about a hundred feet. I told them to take off their clothes. They were reluctant at first. The girl asked me to let them go—I told them no.”
Ross told how he watched while the teenagers shed their clothing.
“I ordered them to have sex with each other,” he continued, “but they wouldn’t do it. When they refused, I offered the beer bottle to the girl.”
Ross’s statement of the attack was so depraved that it was difficult for even veteran detectives to listen to it.
When Keith’s back was turned, Ross said he’d hit him twice on the back of the head with the shovel. “He kind of dodged the blows, but I knocked him to the ground. Then he got up, sort of ran or turned around.
“The girl started running down the hill. I s
hot at the boy.”
Ross said he had chased the girl until he couldn’t see where she was. Then he said he had disarmed his gun. He’d returned to the scene and found Keith Person lying facedown. “I didn’t see any blood. He wasn’t moving.”
No, Keith Person wasn’t moving. Even had he lived, he would not have moved again. He’d been shot—not once, but three times, with one of the slugs lodging in his spinal column.
That may very well have been the first shot that hit the brave teenager, and it would have paralyzed him from the vertebrae it hit, taking away any feeling below that level. A .25-caliber slug is not all that large, but it would have severed forever the vital nerve pathways needed to walk, run, ski. A second shot had perforated his right pelvis and small bowel. The third shot entered Keith Person’s head near the midline in the back. It was a near-contact wound, characteristically star-shaped, marked with smudging and searing of the tissues.
It now looked very much as though someone had deliberately placed the gun close to the boy’s head and fired while he lay helpless from the spinal wound. This was probably the shot, coming from deep in the woods, that Reverend Tweedie, Bob McCleod, and Camilla had heard.
And the investigators understood now why Jerry Ross’s clothing was soaking wet when he came barreling out in his car; he’d gone into Scatter Creek to try to grab Camilla, but her youthful agility had given her the strength to get away and dash up the bank.
Processing of Jerry Lee Ross’s car substantiated statements taken from Camilla and from Ross himself. Among the items found were: an expended shell casing (from the shot that penetrated Camilla’s leg); a brown holster next to the driver’s seat; the horn’s rim that had been struck when the bullet was fired at Camilla; the green collapsible shovel; the leather thong that Ross had planned to use to tie up Keith while he molested Camilla. The tire measurements matched the photos and moulages made at the scene.
Jerry Lee Ross had had the .25-caliber automatic since March 8, 1974—only two weeks before. At the time he obtained a permit to carry it, he had listed “self-protection and sports” as his reason for wanting a gun.
There wasn’t much doubt that he had premeditated a sexual attack on someone. He just hadn’t known who at the time he bought the gun. Filled with rage, Ross had been a prowling, stalking, killing machine.
Charged with first-degree murder and first-degree assault, Ross was denied bail by Justice Court Judge Evans Manolides.
On April 26, 1974, Jerry Lee Ross pleaded guilty to both counts. Later, he received a long prison sentence—but not a life sentence. When he was released, he spent the last of his free years living about fifteen miles from Enumclaw.
What insidious tracery of cruelty moving through Ross’s brain caused the death of a young man of great
potential and the emotional scars on a heretofore trusting young girl is something that a psychiatrist might be able to explain. He wasn’t intoxicated when he shot Camilla and Keith. He might have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Vietnam, but that diagnosis was seldom accepted in courtrooms in 1974. He might have been a run-of-the-mill sociopath, capable of neither empathy nor guilt.
For the parents and siblings of the two kidnapped youngsters, it really doesn’t matter anymore. Their losses are irreplaceable. And, for the community of Enumclaw, there is a diminishment, too: gone forever are innocence and trust and the feeling that violence happens only in the big cities.
If there was any good to come out of the tragedy of March 22, 1974, it is the knowledge that passersby did help, and that they cared enough to stop and risk their own lives in an effort to save Camilla Hutcheson. Without them, she might very well be dead, too.
Today Keith Person would have been fifty years old. He never got to graduate from high school, go to college, marry, become a father, or have a career he enjoyed.
Camilla Hutcheson is fifty-one, but she has disappeared from the public eye, cherishing her privacy. Certainly, she has carried the weight of a tragic and ultimately frightening memory over the thirty-five years that have passed since Keith died. To maintain her privacy, I have changed her name.
All the detectives who worked to unravel this unbelievable case have long since retired, and a few are deceased.
Jerry Lee Ross died on January 14, 2006, at the age of fifty-nine. The one thing in his life he was proud of was his service as a corporal in the Marine Corps. He lies buried among other soldiers, sailors, and marines in Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent, Washington.
The reason why he shot at two helpless kids died with him. And maybe even he didn’t know why.
DARK FOREST: DEEP DANGER
The state of Oregon voices a philosophy about tourists—only half in jest: “Visit us but don’t move here.” Native Oregonians and “near-natives” cling to the fond hope that they can keep Oregon’s natural glories free of the megalopolis congestion that chokes other parts of America, and keep the air as crystalline and pure as it was in pioneer days, when weary travelers first glimpsed what was indeed a promised land. Oregon may very well be the ideal spot in America to raise a young family, and the Medford-Jacksonville area in the southwestern part of the state is one of its choicest regions.
Those Harry and David fruit baskets sent for Christmas and other celebrations—every juicy piece wrapped in tissue paper—come from the orchards growing around Medford.
In Jackson County, the thick stands of towering fir alternate on the horizon with dry chaparral, and gold and green rolling hills give way to emerald-shaded mountains that rise higher and higher and then disappear into clouds or, perhaps, infinity. Until the recent recession, jobs were almost always plentiful for an able-bodied man willing to work in the orchards, the woods, computer companies, and the many industries necessary to maintain the comfortable standard of living local residents enjoy. In the last thirty years or so, myriad businesses have expanded to cater to the burgeoning tourist trade. Fishermen, hunters, campers, and those who seek to recapture a sense of how it was more than a century ago, vacation in Jackson County.
The Rogue River and the Applegate River wind their way through the county, although today a section of the Applegate has long been dammed up to become Applegate Lake, flooding small hamlets such as Copper, which no longer exists above water. Sturgis Fork and Carberry Creek also flourish near Jacksonville.
None of the main characters in this very sad true story were tourists, however; most were native born, descended from Oregon families who have been around for generations.
Some had chosen Oregon to be their home state.
In the case—or rather, cases—below, we will follow three families. One was to be admired and emulated, at least until they met up with pure evil in a deceptively peaceful setting. The next was downright odd—and violent. The third family was small, only a mother-to-be and the infant she carried in her womb. There was a common denominator among them, of course.
Their lives became inexorably linked, their fates entwined, all their names noted in media reports and newspaper articles. The five victims might have avoided their fates if the dates or times they met with a stalker were changed just a little. If they had shopped for groceries a half hour earlier, if it had rained, if a car hadn’t broken down … so many minute aspects of anyone’s day can change fate.
Or, possibly, they are fate?
The first victims had no reason to be afraid. They were virtually home when they met unimaginable cruelty and danger. They trusted the land, the woods, their neighbors, and even strangers.
Their stalker wasn’t afraid, either. Nonetheless, he trusted no one and had no sense of guilt or conscience in the dark places behind his charismatic smile.
The last victim should have died, and would have died—had she not been incredibly brave. She clung to her life and her baby’s life, as she realized to her horror that she was the only one who could save them.
In the summer of 1974, twenty-eight-year-old Richard Cowden and his family lived in White City, O
regon, a town with about 6,500 residents. Like his brothers, he was a handsome man. Cowden was a logging truck driver, handling those behemoths of the blacktop with their loads of felled timber giants as easily as another man might pilot a Volkswagen Bug. It was hard work, but the pay was excellent and he enjoyed the woods, with the pungent smell of evergreens mixed with sawdust and the sound of keening chain saws.
Cowden had a family to support and protect, and he cherished them. There was his wife—Belinda June, twenty-two, a pretty, dark-haired woman; five-year-old David James; and the new arrival, five-month-old Melissa Dawn. They lived in a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home, complete with mortgage, of course, but they were chipping away at that. They had two cars, one a 1956 Ford pickup that they used for camping, they were making payments on the 1970 sedan, a vacuum cleaner, and some new household furnishings. They still managed to maintain two savings accounts.
Richard and Belinda were close to their extended families. This solidarity helped them all get through a spate of serious family illness. Three sons had been born to the elder Cowdens; the oldest brother died of cancer when he was only twenty-five. Richard was born next, followed thirteen months later by his brother Wes. They had a sister named Susan. Because he’d started school at four, Richard was held back a year, so he and Wes ended up in the same grade, and they went through school together, further cementing the already close bond between them.
Richard Cowden was content and at ease in his world, but in late summer 1974 he faced someone unlike anyone else he had ever known.
By Labor Day weekend that year, the Cowdens’ freezer was filled for winter, and Belinda’s vegetable garden still thrived. They had just finished redecorating young David’s bedroom, and he was looking forward to starting kindergarten. Their first Christmas with baby Melissa lay ahead. It seemed as if they had the perfect life.
The Cowdens loved to camp out, but they hadn’t planned to go camping on the Labor Day holiday. Richard had arranged to borrow his boss’s truck to haul a load of gravel for his driveway, and he expected to spend the weekend spreading the gravel.