A Rage to Kill

by Ann Rule

  The pimps seemed to go on forever; it took the testimony of two prostitutes to nail a pimp, and the women were afraid of a beating with a hot coathanger—or worse. It wasn’t easy to find two women brave enough to turn on the men who controlled them.

  Most of the prostitutes who worked the Pike Street stroll were no threat to their customers beyond the possibility of a sexually transmitted disease, and the seventies was an era when AIDS and even the herpes virus were unknown to the public. However, some of the prostitutes who approached men were not what they seemed to be, but it would have taken a physician to know it.

  Larry’s Take 5 drew business from straight customers, cruising women of the night, and, inevitably, from the vice squad. The restaurant’s policy was to serve everyone who was behaving himself, and things were relatively calm on Thursday night, February 12. Ike Stone was the chef. The grills and ovens were in the front of the restaurant and had an excellent view of the place through the opening where orders were picked up. He could see both the booths and the front door. Ike had seen the flotsam and jetsam of life come and go through the doors of the Take 5 for a year, and nothing surprised him much anymore. On Thursday night/Friday morning he was working the graveyard shift.

  Sometime around two-thirty A..M. on that Friday the 13th, an attractive and slender black woman walked up to the counter and, in a husky voice, ordered a grilled tuna fish and cheese sandwich and french fries to go. She wore a green pantsuit and her hair was teased in a bouffant style. Stone watched idly over the serving counter as the woman walked to the booths directly opposite him. She talked for a while with a man who appeared to be in his sixties. The man laughed and shook his head. Stone couldn’t hear the conversation but he had a pretty good idea what it was about.

  Curious, the chef kept watching as she moved to a booth where a young man sat alone. The man looked up, grinned at the woman, and Ike saw that they seemed to be getting along well, as he turned away to put the woman’s order in a bag.

  When she came to pick up her tuna melt and fries, the tall young fellow was with her. They were chatting easily, although Ike couldn’t tell if they were old friends or new acquaintances. They walked out the door together and Ike Stone dismissed them from his mind. He was looking forward to the two-hour break the Take 5 employees got when the restaurant closed for cleaning up before the breakfast rush.

  Stone worked in a kitchen that had a solid wall on the west side. The noise of the jukebox, the hum of voices from the restaurant patrons, and the clang of pots and pans overwhelmed any street noise. So Stone neither saw nor heard what was happening outside. But he could see the enraged woman who ran into the Take 5 a few moments later. It was the patron in the green pantsuit who’d ordered the tuna and cheese to go. She was holding what appeared to be a black wig at arm’s length and screaming, “Look what he did to me!” at the top of her lungs.

  Ike looked twice. Without her wig, it was apparent now that the woman wasn’t what she had seemed to be; usually Ike could spot one of the numerous transvestites who frequented the Pike Street stroll, but this one had fooled him completely.

  Before Ike could stop him, the man in drag reached into a tray of silverware kept near the first booth and grabbed what looked to Stone like a knife. In an instant, the cook was around the serving barrier and wrestling the weapon away from the maddened man, kicking it with his foot so that it slid away from him. Thwarted, the man in the green pantsuit turned and ran back outside.

  Curious, Ike Stone stepped outside to see what was going on. He could see that a crowd had gathered around someone on the sidewalk. When he pushed his way in, Stone recognized the young man who had left the restaurant with the transvestite. The youth appeared to be seized by convulsions. Stone could see no wounds, but he knew the kid was in trouble. He turned and went to the phone next to the cash register and dialed 911. He requested a Medic One aid car, on the double.

  It was only a few minutes before paramedics from the Seattle Fire Department responded, followed by Seattle Police patrol officers K. Christophersen and P. McCloud. A call of a fight or a “man down” on Pike Street was hardly unusual. The tall husky youth was semiconscious now, and he appeared to be cyanotic, his face suffused with a gray-purple tinge. He seemed to have suffered a grand mal epileptic seizure, from the descriptions of the bystanders. If that was the case, he should have begun to come around by now, but he seemed to be getting worse.

  As the paramedics checked him carefully, they found a very small lateral wound in his right upper chest. It was almost bloodless, and didn’t appear to be serious. They began immediate efforts to combat shock and the nameless young man was transported to the emergency room at Harborview Hospital, only a few blocks away.

  Harborview Hospital (the King County Medical Center) is used to dealing with patients with major trauma and its physicians and staff are probably the best in the county in dealing with the results of violence and accidents. If a patient could be saved, they would do it. They had a chance with this patient, it seemed; his admission came well within the parameters of the “Golden Hour” before shock can begin to shut down the body’s functions forever.

  “John Doe” was admitted with a systolic blood pressure of fifty, and a diastolic so low that it was off the scale of the sphygmomanometer. His pulse rate was fifty-six beats a minute and dropping rapidly. He could still speak, and he asked weakly where he was, and what had happened to him. ER physicians couldn’t answer his second question. They had hoped he could tell them. When they asked for his name, he was able to gasp, “Brad Bass.”

  The only wound he had was the tiny transverse cut in his upper chest, and it wasn’t bleeding—at least externally. The first danger in a knife wound is exsanguination—death by loss of blood. And often that bleeding is internal. Life slips away silently as the lungs or abdominal cavity fill with blood. Some victims can suffer massive stab wounds and bleed enough externally that it appears as if every drop of blood in their bodies has seeped out, and still survive. Others, like Brad Bass, can die from one innocuous-looking shallow thrust.

  Something was terribly wrong with Brad Bass, and he was rushed into surgery. Once the trauma surgeon had opened his chest, he could see that Bass had sustained a one-inch wide stab wound that had penetrated two and a half to three inches through his chest wall. But, in doing so, it had nicked the right auricular appendage of the heart and the aorta—the large artery that carries blood to all parts of the body. A silent, often-fatal medical situation called “cardiac tamponade” had resulted. The pericardial sac that encases the heart had begun to fill up with blood. The sac that usually protects the heart was rapidly crushing it. Each time Brad Bass’s heart contracted, more blood filled the sac surrounding it, compressing the heart so tightly that less and less blood could be pumped to the extremities of his body. Despite the surgeon’s efforts, his blood pressure continued to drop.

  The surgeon mended the damage done by the tip of a thin blade to the heart and aorta, but it was too late. Brad had begun to die.

  It is essential to look at all the ramifications of Brad Bass’s demise to understand what legal death is. The human body does not die all at once. Rather, it dies in stages. When there is a lack of oxygen and nutrients, death occurs first in the most fragile cells. The brain cells are the most sensitive of all to lack of oxygen and may die in a matter of minutes while skin and bone cells can continue to “live” for weeks after brain, heart, and lung death.

  It was still Friday, February 13. As dawn broke only hours after he had walked out of Larry’s Take 5, Brad Bass, until this day a perfect physical specimen, lay motionless. The cells of his brain had flickered out like light bulbs cut off from electricity, and they would never live again. He was legally alive, but not in the sense of his having any meaningful life. But he was not yet officially a homicide statistic.

  The detectives assigned to the Seattle Police Homicide Unit arrived at work at 7:45 A..M. Detective Sergeant Jerry Yates talked to the head nurse in the emergency
room at Harborview. She told him that the victim of the street stabbing of the night before was “very bad”—worse than critical, if possible. He had been admitted with ten dollars and change in his pockets. They had found no wallet and no I.D. “He was able to give us his name,” she said. “But that’s all. We have no way of knowing if he has any relatives or friends in Seattle.”

  When Yates heard that the victim’s prognosis was almost nil, he realized that he and his men would have to treat this as a probable murder case.

  Information gathered by patrol officers at the site of the stabbing had been sketchy; habitués of the nether world along Pike Street were not traditionally known to confide in the police. The only information that had survived the chaos of the scene was that the victim had been involved in a scuffle with a tall, sexy, black woman. Some said the glamorous figure was most certainly a female; others questioned that.

  The “woman” had left the scene in a dirty, dark, old car—possibly a Chevrolet—which had held several occupants of undetermined sex.

  Jerry Yates asked the hospital to place a hold on the victim’s clothing and to call if, by some miracle, the youth regained consciousness. Solving a homicide that was not even a homicide yet, a case with so many conflicting witness statements at that, didn’t seem likely.

  Dalton Bass was worried. Brad had been gone all of Thursday night and still wasn’t home by Friday night and that wasn’t like him. He would never have stayed away all night without calling. The brothers had talked on the phone Thursday and Brad said then that he was going to try to cash his paycheck Thursday night. He had been temporarily laid off from his shipfitting job but his last paycheck was for over $200.

  Dalton called the Seattle police after he’d checked all of his and Brad’s friends. They told Dalton that a Brad Bass had been injured in a street fight and was in the hospital. Shaking his head in disbelief, Dalton Bass was horrified when he reached Harborview to find Brad in a deep coma. He asked where Brad had been hurt and was given the address of the Take 5. As far as he knew, Brad had never patronized the restaurant; he certainly had never mentioned it.

  When Dalton Bass asked the detectives where Brad’s truck was, they said they hadn’t known he even had one. Everyone had assumed he was on foot the night he was stabbed. Dalton drove to the Take 5 and looked for his brother’s prized truck. He found it quickly; it was still parked a few paces away from the restaurant.

  Dalton knew that Brad seldom carried a wallet, but he thought that he would have had his payroll money with him. Searching the truck, he found approximately $280 hidden in the tape deck.

  Dalton called their father, who flew immediately to Seattle. The elder Bass found his son comatose, kept alive only by life support machines. The tracings of the EEG were almost flat, indicating that his brain was barely active. He was told that Brad had almost no chance to survive, and that, if he did, he would live in a state of vegetation. If there was to be any turning point, it would surely come within the next few days.

  Brad Bass had chosen to will his kidneys and eyes after death so that they might save another’s life and sight. He was only twenty-three; he could not have known how soon his legacy would be used. On Friday, February 20, one week after he was stabbed, Bass’s brain waves were completely flat. His father asked physicians to remove him from the respirator that made it look as if his chest rose and fell through some conscious effort on his part. It was an agonizing decision for any parent. If Brad could breathe on his own, even if he never regained consciousness, his father would have taken care of him forever. But it was a travesty of life to keep the bloated body of a once vital young man alive by mechanical means.

  The breathing machine was turned off. Sometimes miracles happen and clinically dead patients do breathe on their own. Brad Bass did not. For two and a half minutes, the doctors, nurses, and his father hoped for some sign of life, but there was none. At that point, with the physicians’ support, Brad Bass’s father decided to fulfill Brad’s wish to donate his kidneys and eyes to someone else.

  The life support systems were reconnected, but this time it was only to keep these vital organs alive until donors could be prepared for surgery.

  On Saturday, February 21, Brad Bass’s kidneys were removed. Two people would live because of him, but Brad himself was pronounced dead at 2 P.M. Dr. Donald Nakonechny, Deputy King County Medical Examiner, began the postmortem almost at once. To Nakonechny, there was no question that Brad’s brain was “grossly dead,” and had been for some time. It had softened and swollen as the brain will after death, until it extruded through skull openings and the spinal cord. His cause of death was listed as “anoxic encephalopathy—softening of the brain due to lack of oxygen, secondary to piercing of the right auricular appendage.”

  Now it was up to Seattle Homicide detectives to bring in a killer. Most of the information they were receiving had filtered down from the street people through the beat cops. Detective Benny DePalmo got a tip from one of the street officers that the “woman” with the knife was Jacqueline Emerson. DePalmo ran the name through Seattle Police records and found that there was a Jonathan “Jackie” Lewis Emerson, twenty-four, whose occupation was listed as a female impersonator. But there was no current address for Emerson, who had a rather lengthy rap sheet for various charges, many of them soliciting for prostitution.

  But Emerson was only one of the names rumored to be the person who’d stabbed Brad Bass. Vice Detectives Bill Karban and John Boren had heard other rumors. One was that the night bartender of a well-known gay restaurant and lounge had been in the crowd around Bass. The bartender had named another transvestite hooker.

  Primary responsibility for finding Brad Bass’s killer was assigned to Detectives Ted Fonis and Dick Sanford. They began a tour of several gay gathering places, carrying a laydown montage of suspects’ mugs. Jonathan Emerson was number four. Many of those they questioned seemed to recognize Emerson but they were evasive and wouldn’t admit knowing him. If they did recognize him, they said they had no idea where he was at present.

  The detectives went to the club where the bartender, who was supposedly an eyewitness to Brad’s stabbing, worked and learned that he had suddenly taken a trip East. But other witnesses were in town and the detectives were soon flooded with informants. On February 24, one called to give them the name of Sonny Jimson*, who was claiming he had seen the stabbing. Fonis and Sanford found Sonny, a tall, lean, transvestite with bright orange hair. He told them he’d seen the killer. “It was ‘Large Tillie’ Schwenk*,” he said firmly.

  Large Tilly, he said, worked as a transvestite hooker and hung around a waterfront tavern. However, Sonny was not as forthcoming when Fonis and Sanford arranged for him to take a polygraph examination. He looked very nervous and admitted he’d made up the whole thing. “I told my sugar daddy that I was there because I was really someplace I shouldn’t have been and I was afraid he’d find out I cheated on him.”

  Just on the off chance that Sonny had been telling the truth the first time around, Sanford and Fonis went to the Seashell Tavern and asked for “Large Tillie.” The bartender said he’d never heard of a “Large Tillie” or of Sonny Jimson. He did identify the mug of Emerson as a transvestite he knew as Jackie, and he promised to call them if he saw Emerson again.

  DePalmo interviewed the dishwasher of the Take 5 who had been on duty when the attack took place. He had observed “Jackie” and Brad Bass, and recalled that they had been friendly until they got out on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Then a scuffle had started. “It was the ‘woman’ who was kicking and punching,” the dishwasher said. “The tall guy in the brown shirt was just trying to avoid her blows—but he wasn’t fighting back.

  “Finally, he grabbed at ‘her’ to stop her, I guess, and her wig got torn off.”

  The “woman” had run into the Take 5, screaming she was going to get a knife. When she came out empty-handed, a car had driven around the corner, evidently full of people she knew. She had yelled that
she needed a knife and apparently someone in the car had handed one to her. “I didn’t see her stab him,” the witness said, “I looked away for just a second. When I looked back, the guy was looking down at himself and then he held out his hands toward the “woman” as if he was begging her to stop . . .”

  While the witness watched, the person in the green pantsuit had hopped into the car and sped off. Everything had happened so fast. The young man had collapsed to the sidewalk and gone into convulsions, but the witness didn’t know that Brad Bass had been stabbed. Something was wrong with him, so he had called to Ike Stone to get an aid car.

  He was certain of one thing, however. The person the victim was fighting with wasn’t a woman; he was a male in drag. The dishwasher was positive he would recognize him if he saw him again. The man who’d stabbed Bass had had a distinctive broken tooth. When he saw that, he would know.

  It wasn’t difficult to figure out what had happened. Brad Bass had thought that Jackie Emerson was a woman when she came up to his booth. In the dim lights of the restaurant, Jackie had looked very feminine. But in the bright street lights at the corner of Pike and 6th, he would have realized that Jackie was a male and backed away. Jackie Emerson had become enraged and started kicking and beating Brad. And Brad could not bring himself to strike a “lady,” even when he knew she wasn’t a female. He’d backed away and just stood there until Jackie got too rough. Finally, he pushed at “her” and dislodged her wig.