But I Trusted You and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  But Teresa dragged her feet on her divorce too long. In January 1996, the Snohomish County Superior Court informed both Teresa and Chuck that the court was dismissing their divorce case because there had been no action on it for a year.

  The Leonards’ relationship was in limbo. Neither of them wanted to reunite, but Chuck didn’t seem to be upset that they had to refile if they wanted to be legally and finally separated forever. He would wait Teresa out if he had to.

  They were deeply in debt, although Teresa always maintained that Chuck was well off and should have paid her more in child support. As it was, he was paying her all he could afford.

  It was a paradox, but, with the insurance he carried and his other assets, Chuck Leonard was worth more dead than alive. In the financial statements he presented in their initial divorce action, they were more than $46,000 in debt. Teresa cleared only $300 a month from her shop. That baffled Chuck; she had told him she had a business degree, and he thought she should have made more than that. He offered her $334 a month for Morgan, while she said he could easily pay her $825. In essence, with all the extras he paid for his daughter, he was paying her more than $800.

  Teresa didn’t reveal that Nick Callas was sending her more than $1,000 a month. He told people that she worked as a travel agent, and she sometimes sent people to him to rent condos; at least he would later say that that was why he wrote checks on the accounts of his various condo rental properties to her. His wife knew nothing about this.

  In a will drawn up in 1991, a will still in force, Chuck had stipulated that Teresa would get everything he had, both separate property (which he owned before they married) and community property (that had accumulated during their marriage). And that added up to a considerable amount. By 1996, Chuck’s estate was substantial. He had $95,000 in insurance, $95,000 in retirement benefits from the Everett School District, the $240,000 house on Lake Goodwin, his final payroll from North Middle School of over $11,000, and various properties he had inherited near Bremerton and Camano Island worth over $120,000. On top of that, Teresa and Morgan would receive Social Security payments. Even when his final debts were paid, Teresa stood to receive well over $300,000 as his sole heir, plus Social Security payments every month until Morgan was eighteen.

  A year passed. Chuck was happy with Michelle Conley. She had her own place, but she was at Chuck’s lake house more than she was home, an arrangement that she and Chuck attempted to keep secret. His best friends knew about Michelle, but most other people didn’t.

  And Teresa was happy in her relationship with Nick Callas, although she was planning feverishly to accelerate that into much more.

  In January 1997, Chuck filed papers to keep his divorce in progress, knowing that that would probably confuse her. She wouldn’t be able to take Morgan far away until it was all settled. He was ready to finalize the divorce, but he had no intention of letting her take Morgan to Hawaii.

  Oddly, or perhaps not, Teresa was furious when she realized that she no longer had the chilling control over Chuck that she’d maintained since the night she met him. No other woman in his life had ever been able to bend him to her will.

  “The cat was going to lose her mouse,” Aunt Theresa said flatly. “She was very jealous of Chuck’s connection to Morgan.”

  It had taken Chuck a long time to move forward on his divorce. He’d asked for advice from friends before he made his final decision. Should he let Teresa back in—but only if she agreed to counseling—for Morgan’s sake?

  None of them thought it was a good idea.

  Teresa finally realized that Chuck was prepared to fight her fiercely if she attempted to take Morgan to Hawaii to live, even if she agreed to let Morgan spend the summers and vacations with him.

  They were at an impasse.

  Teresa and Morgan were close, and Morgan thought her mother was perfect. Moreover, she believed everything Teresa told her. Most five-year-olds accept their mother’s word without doubt. Teresa told Morgan that her daddy didn’t really own the house on Lake Goodwin. It really belonged to her grandmother—Teresa’s mother, who had passed away, leaving it to Teresa. She said Gloria Jones had been an antiques dealer.

  Teresa planted ideas about Chuck in Morgan’s mind, telling her if she was ever afraid when she was with her daddy, she could call her mommy or “Aunt Joyce.”

  Teresa told Joyce Lilly she was worried that Chuck was sexually abusing their daughter, and Joyce was convinced it was true. The two women gave Morgan teddy bears with secret pockets where they had hidden their phone numbers. Most of the time when Chuck called Teresa at her shop to facilitate Morgan’s transfer, Teresa would burst into tears at the end of the conversation, making her salesgirls think that Chuck Leonard must be a bullying monster.

  Joyce was almost as gullible as Morgan, worrying about Teresa and her small daughter. The two young women who worked at The Consignment Shop were sympathetic, too. They noted that Morgan, who had once been jumping with excitement while she waited for her father, seemed to hold back. She cried and begged to stay with her mother, saying she didn’t want to play with all the toys her daddy had for her.

  No one knew exactly what Teresa was telling her.

  Probably no one ever will.

  Chuck wondered what Teresa was up to. Looking at her, she didn’t appear to be dangerous. Still, Chuck—who had come to recognize her lies—sometimes wondered what she was capable of.

  In November 1996, Chuck had wakened when Michelle nudged him. She whispered that she had heard a squeak on the stairs leading down to his bedroom. “I think someone’s in the house.”

  He jumped out of bed and they heard the sound of someone running upstairs. Chuck leapt up the stairway to the living room. Soon, he came back, saying he hadn’t caught up with whoever it was.

  Michelle dressed hurriedly and drove after a car she spotted driving toward the main road that led to the freeway. Its headlights were out. It appeared to have come from a darkened area full of trees that abutted the state park at the end of Chuck’s street. As the car passed under a streetlight, she saw the license plate. But the vehicle was soon in the shadows again, and she couldn’t see the driver clearly. She was positive about the license plate, however. Then the car pulled away and picked up speed before she could catch up with it. She gave up and called Chuck, giving him the license plate number.

  It was the license number of Teresa’s Nissan.

  Chuck thought it might have happened again in January 1997. This time, his eyes snapped open with the sense that they were not alone. Half-asleep, he looked past Michelle who lay beside him in bed and thought he saw a dark figure in his ground-floor bedroom. He blinked and the figure was gone.

  There was no particular sound of an intruder; it was more a feeling. But Michelle slept quietly, and the fear he’d felt slowly went away. He figured he must have had a bad dream—the fugue state of the nightmare that was already giving way to reality. They had both been jumpy, but not enough for Chuck to lock his doors before heading for bed. He never locked the cat doors because his five cats needed to get in the house if it rained, or if predators like raccoons, coyotes, or an occasional cougar stalked them. He wanted Bear, Chaucer, Zena-the-Warrior-Princess, Tab, and Jezabel to be safe and to come and go as they pleased during the night. A very small person could wriggle through the swinging cat entrances.

  “Chuck loved his cats,” his sister recalled.

  Usually, Chuck liked the clear window in the floor over his waterbed, and the comments it elicited from visitors. It had once been a circular stairway, but he changed that when he remodeled the house, making it more like a ship’s ladder than stairs, with a removable see-through hatch cover.

  On this chilly night, he shivered at the thought that someone could have been up there in the dark, watching Michelle and him sleep. Maybe someone had been—maybe it was only a nightmare that had evolved from the incident in November. If someone had really been there, the trespasser had left the house on Lake Goodwin without causin
g any harm or stealing any of Chuck Leonard’s possessions. Michelle believed it was Teresa.

  Chuck told one of his good teacher friends about his “nightmare,” and they tried to rationalize it in the light of day. Finally, they assumed it had been an imaginary thing—a night terror. Chuck had been under a lot of stress recently, and that could account for his feeling that someone was hiding in his house, watching him.

  If only it had been.

  Chapter Three

  Deputy Wynn Holdal of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office was at the Lake Goodwin Fire Station at a quarter to one in the afternoon of February 20, 1997, when he heard the emergency medical technicians get a call of “Man down” at an address on Forty-second Drive. He prepared to follow the fire fighters to the address when more bells sounded and the station radio blared.

  “Man down is DOA— dead on arrival.”

  This time, Holdal was dispatched to the scene by the sheriff’s radio. He arrived by 1:00 p.m. and met with Fire Chief Darryl Neuhoff and Assistant Chief Robert Spencer. They had already strung yellow tape around the carport area of the three-story house; the rest of the yard was fenced off.

  It was very cold out, the morning’s frost barely burned off by a vapid sun.

  Holdal could see the dead man, lying half-naked partially on his back and slightly on his right side on the top step inside the front gate. Oddly, his right arm lay so close to a chain saw that it seemed to cradle it.

  A man about forty stood nearby. He was fighting with his emotions, but did his best to tell Holdal what he knew. He gave his name as Douglas Butler and identified the corpse as his friend, Chuck Leonard.

  “We both work at North Middle School,” he said. “Chuck is—was—a counselor there and I teach shop and wrestling.”

  Butler said that Chuck hadn’t come to work at the school earlier in the day or called in to arrange for a substitute. That wasn’t at all like him, and both he and the principal were concerned. Chuck’s estranged wife, Teresa Gaethe-Leonard, had called the school looking for him. That was a fairly rare event, too.

  “Our principal asked me to check on him,” his fellow teacher said.

  Doug Butler said he’d gone to Chuck’s lakeside house, walked down the sidewalk to the gate, and found it closed. “But I could see through it, and I saw Chuck on the steps. I opened the gate, and I knew he was dead, but I checked for a pulse anyway. There wasn’t any.”

  Butler said that he and Chuck had been good friends for eighteen years, and he’d spent a lot of time at Chuck’s house over the years.

  No wonder his face was pale and his voice strained. It would have been a horrible shock to find his friend lying on the cold cement in icy weather. Dead.

  Deputy Wynn Holdal asked Doug Butler the last time he had seen Chuck Leonard.

  “Yesterday—about four p.m.”

  “He live with anyone?”

  “No, not usually. He lives alone—except when his little girl is here—she’s just turned five. He has a girlfriend named Michelle who works for the Everett School District. She sometimes stays over. And he’s got an ex—or estranged—wife named Teresa. She never stays over.”

  Butler explained that this would have been Chuck’s week to have Morgan, but the child had to have some dental work done. Neither Teresa nor Chuck had been able to say no to her about eating candy or going to bed with sugary juice in her bottle when she was much younger, and she’d had dental problems as a result. On this day in February, Teresa had argued that she would do better staying with her mother after seeing the dentist, and Chuck had given in.

  “I hope she’s not in there,” Butler said nervously. He was afraid plans might have changed, and he worried that Morgan could possibly be inside the house, terrified, hiding someplace. Neither he nor Wynn Holdal wanted to think that she had suffered the same fate as her father.

  Sergeant Matt Bottin had been dispatched to the scene and arrived at a quarter after one. He walked up to Deputy Holdal, who was standing in front of the carport talking with the aid crew and another man—who he learned was Doug Butler.

  Bottin saw the body of Chuck Leonard lying on the top steps. He wore only a gray, bloodstained T-shirt.

  He asked Butler about that, and Leonard’s long-time friend said that Chuck was in the habit of sleeping either completely naked or wearing just a T-shirt.

  “He just doesn’t like underwear, and he sometimes answers the door nude when I’ve gone over to visit him in the morning. That’s just him.”

  Sergeant Bottin crossed the yellow tape and walked close to Chuck Leonard’s body. The gate was ajar about two inches. He could see trauma in Leonard’s chest area, just above his heart.

  “Was the gate like this when you got here?” Bottin asked Doug Butler, who shook his head.

  “I pushed it just that far open so I could see if I could help Chuck,” he said. “But it was obvious that he was dead, so I backed off without disturbing anything, went to my car and phoned 911 on my cell phone.”

  Bottin commented that it was odd that the dead counselor had his arm around the chain saw. Butler said that was his saw—that he had loaned it to Chuck a few days before. “It probably was sitting there when he collapsed.

  “I’m still concerned about Morgan,” he said. “I know she’s not in there, but what if she is …”

  To calm his fears, Bottin and Holdal slipped on rubber gloves and walked past the dead man. They entered the home through the front door, which stood open about six inches. The front door was on the east side of the lake house.

  “Deputy Holdal and I would do only a cursory search, and then turn the crime scene over to the homicide detectives, who had been notified.

  “There was a trail of blood from the deceased to the threshold of the door, and blood drops and smudges on the door itself. The blood trail continued into the house,” Bottin recalled. “Down the hallway, across the living room to the stairs, which led down to Chuck’s bedroom.”

  Doug Butler had told them that Morgan Leonard’s room was upstairs, the first door on the left. “It was closed,” Bottin said “and I opened it from the back side of the door knob.”

  Morgan’s room was a lovely little-girl’s room, full of dolls and toys, and it was completely undisturbed. Thank God, she wasn’t anywhere in the house.

  Wynn Holdal searched the remainder of the upstairs, while Bottin walked through the kitchen. He noted some open wine bottles and two or three empty wine glasses, which were sitting on the kitchen counter.

  The kitchen didn’t have a bloody trail. The two Snohomish County officers resumed following the dried blood that led down the stairs to a bedroom, passing by a throw rug that was rumpled as if someone had slipped on it.

  Bottin spotted three bullet casings at the bottom of the stairs; they appeared to be for a .45 automatic. There were dried blood smudges on the wall beside the steps.

  But they realized they’d found the site of the shooting in the bedroom itself. A large water bed sat in the middle of the room, and the comforter on it was blood-soaked. A bullet hole was evident in the fabric. The pillows at the head of the bed were also stained red. Clearly, the victim had been attacked in his bed, possibly while he was sleeping. The water bed had been pierced; the floor beside it was covered with puddles of water.

  At the end of the bed, there was a sofa table with books and magazines on it, and there were blood splatters on top of these, too. A child’s Pocahontas wigwam, a large white teddy bear, and children’s books were also in the master bedroom.

  They glanced behind a bifold door and found a closet inside. Another door led to a small office room. Neither closet area showed any signs of being disturbed.

  They touched nothing directly as they looked through the house, and they were vastly relieved that they hadn’t found a five-year-old girl inside.

  “We turned around and left,” Holdal said. “We still hadn’t touched anything.”

  For all intents and purposes, Chuck Leonard had probably been near dea
th from the moment he was shot, but he had managed to leap from his bed, run up the steep captain’s ladder stairs after his killer, and keep going until he had bled out in the cold loneliness of his front yard. Even if paramedics had been in his house when he was shot, he probably would not have survived.

  There were nine houses along the single-lane dirt road, but only seven were occupied in winter. The beach area was buzzing and alive in the summertime. And Wenberg State Park was just beyond a wooded area at the end of the street. Picnickers and campers filled the park then.

  The house just to the north of Chuck’s three-story home was occupied year-round by a doctor, who was a good friend of the victim’s. In fact, Dr. Les Staunton* let Chuck park his Porsche in his carport. Their homes were about twelve feet apart wall-to-wall, but their decks were only four feet apart.

  Bottin opened the door to the west wall of the carport and saw the walkway leading down to the doctor’s home. He started down, but Butler stopped him.

  “I’ve already banged on the door, but no one answered.”

  There was a good reason for that. Staunton had returned from a trip to Venezuela a day or so earlier, and he’d taken a sleeping pill the night before to try to get rid of his jet lag. He’d wakened early and left for his practice.

  When he was located at his clinic, he told the investigators that he’d gone to bed a little after midnight and fallen sound asleep, only to be wakened by something—something he couldn’t identify. It might have been the motion-detector light on his porch or a strange noise.

  “It sounded like somebody with asthma,” he said slowly, “a noise that sounded very foreign to me, but it wasn’t an actual voice, [and] it wasn’t a scream. It was just a wheezing noise, but it was loud enough for me to hear it from my bedroom—which is the opposite side from where Chuck’s house is.”

  Staunton said he’d gotten up and sat on the edge of his bed for “thirty seconds,” noticing that the motion-detector light on his porch was on. He listened, but he heard nothing more—no more screams or wheezes or whatever it had been. No sound of a car engine starting. It could have been anything—from an owl in the night to a cougar or even a raccoon fight.