But I Trusted You and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Patterson and Detective Jerry Monroe responded to the body site, which was nearly forty miles from their office. They realized at once that they would have to follow a trail that stretched back for months. All they found was a frozen and decomposing corpse that had been tossed into a snowbank, one that was now melting.

  As they left their office, Patterson and Monroe had had the foresight to alert Dr. Robert Bonafaci, the Chelan County medical examiner, that a body had apparently been found. They requested that the skilled pathologist join them atop the pass.

  It was approximately ten a.m. when the investigators began their probe. Patterson, who would live, eat, and sleep with the case for the next two years, had no warning that the body discovery would be the opening of a Pandora’s box of intrigue.

  They stared at the corpse that rested twenty-two feet from the edge of the road. It wasn’t visible to cars driving by. Until recently, it would have been buried under many feet of snow, but the spring thaw had begun to expose it. The dead man wasn’t a hunter; his clothes were all wrong for that. The man was fairly tall, and he was dressed in expensive clothing.

  That was about all they could be sure of at this point. Skin slippage and decomposition had made his facial features unrecognizable.

  Dr. Bonafaci commented that the man still had his own teeth, which had a noticeable overbite. There was no jewelry or other identification on the body, and fingerprinting would be useless now. The body wore a long-sleeved beige sweater over a white shirt, dark blue double-knit trousers, and laced-up black oxfords. Except where it had been chewed by animals, the clothing was in excellent condition.

  Monroe and Bonafaci took pictures of the scene prior to the body’s removal for postmortem examination. If he had any money when he died, he had scarcely any now. The detectives found only a comb, a handkerchief, a quarter, a nickel, and three dimes. These items were bagged and marked for evidence.

  Bonafaci said it might be impossible to tell how long the body had lain beside the lonely mountain pass road. The deep snow had frozen the corpse. “He could have been dumped as far back as October of 1974.”

  The dead man certainly wasn’t dressed like the thousands of migrant workers who pour into Chelan County each spring and stay until the harvest is over. They are the most frequent homicide victims for whom the sheriff’s men try to bring some justice. Inevitably, many of them are killed in fights over liquor or women or frustration at their lot in life and dumped unceremoniously in secluded spots. The harvest workers move on to the next crop, often in some far-off place, and the victims are forgotten.

  But this man didn’t appear to be one of that great traveling class. This man’s clothing spoke of taste and money, although he certainly didn’t have any cash left on him now.

  Besides snow, the body was covered with sand and gravel. “That means he’s been here through the winter,” Patterson commented. “The snowplows would have showered the gravel over the bank during the winter.”

  As the body was lifted by the deputies, its nether side came into view. Neither Patterson, Monroe, nor Dr. Bonafaci could find any obvious exterior wounds that would account for the death.

  “I may be able to tell more tomorrow,” Bonafaci said, “after I’ve completed the autopsy.”

  The labels from the victim’s clothing were cut off and retained, but they wouldn’t help a great deal; although it was high-end stuff, the labels were from clothing lines that were produced by companies with hundreds of outlets.

  News of the body discovery was published in local papers and on the evening news, and citizens began to respond by the next morning. A Wenatchee man called Chief Patterson to say that he had driven across Blewett Pass on November 1, 1974, in a snowstorm. “Me and my wife thought we heard a man calling for help around where they found the body. It was kind of scary. We stopped, turned the car around, and went back, turned the radio off, held our breaths even and listened, but we never saw anything. We finally decided it must have been the wind in the trees or something on the car radio. Never thought about it again ’til I read the paper.”

  That was possible. Winter comes early to the summit of Blewett Pass, and according to Bonafaci the body could conceivably have been there that long.

  The medical examiner performed the postmortem exam of the still-unidentified body while Patterson observed. Bonafaci located a small metal fragment between the dead man’s tongue and right mandible ( jawbone). It appeared to be part of a shattered bullet. Probing further, he found more pieces of lead in the soft tissue as he removed the jawbone. The skull itself was not fractured, nor was the brain damaged. Due to the advanced state of decomposition, the skull was retained for X-rays.

  Blood typing wouldn’t help. DNA hadn’t been discovered yet. Putrefaction had destroyed all typing factors. Had there been any alcohol present in the blood, it had long since dissipated.

  The dead man had been five feet eleven inches tall and had probably weighed about 180 pounds. Although Dr. Bonafaci suspected the cause of death had been a penetrating bullet wound, it would take more tests to verify that.

  X-rays did show scattered metal fragments. Bonafaci interpreted the films as showing that the victim had been shot high in the back of the neck, and that the bullet had traveled forward and ended up, spent, in the oral cavity.

  French fried potatoes were still discernible in the stomach, indicating that the victim had eaten them shortly before he died.

  “These hemorrhagic lungs—without free blood in the stomach—point to instant death,” Bonafaci explained. “The wound track undoubtedly severed or at least severely damaged the cervical spinal cord.”

  Any call for help from the unknown victim could not have been heard by anyone—unless he realized that he was in danger just before the fatal shot.

  After the first flurry of calls, the response from Wenatchee-area citizens was sparse, and Patterson sent out bulletins to law enforcement agencies around the state asking if they had any currently missing men who met the description of his “John Doe” body. The Chelan County investigators believed the mystery man had been between thirty-five and forty-five, but they couldn’t be sure.

  Bill Patterson also checked with local garages to see if there were any unclaimed abandoned cars that might have belonged to the dead man. Again, he found nothing that fit.

  The victim couldn’t have walked up the mountain pass and down the other side, and he didn’t look like a hitchhiker. It was more likely that he’d had a car and that it had been stolen, or possibly he was riding with someone he knew and trusted and there’d been an argument.

  “We just don’t know,” Patterson admitted. “We have no idea what happened.”

  He and Deputy Whaley drove back up to the summit of Blewett Pass and spent hours with a metal detector searching for a gun that might have been the fatal weapon. All they found among the sword ferns, wild huckleberries, and meadow daisies were beer cans and junk metal, plus some liquor and beer bottles. The victim could have been killed anywhere; the route via Snoqualmie Pass and then Blewett to Wenatchee and further east is the most popular choice of travelers in the summer and fall.

  This was a likely spot to get rid of excess baggage.

  The Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office—whose jurisdiction adjoined Chelan County to the south—notified Patterson that they, too, had found a body of a middle-aged man who was initially unidentified.

  “He was alongside a county road with a .22 bullet in his head,” the Kittitas detective said. “We got a report on the body on the fifth of March. We found out who he was, though.”

  “Who was he?” Patterson asked wearily.

  “Kind of a character. He was running for president on a kooky campaign, asking people to write his name in. He was his own main supporter.”.

  The flamboyant victim in the Kittitas County case had planned to run in 1976 on a platform of minimal taxes and maximum benefits for “the little man.”

  His platform included a man-made bridge from Alaska to Russ
ia, a new monetary system, taxation for all churches, return of all service people abroad, and complete amnesty for Vietnam defectors.

  The would-be president’s murder remained unsolved. His peculiar philosophies might have been enough to annoy his killer, but there seemed to be little to link him to the body in Chelan County except for body location, age, and manner of death.

  The metal fragments removed from the Blewett Pass victim were weighed in an attempt to determine the caliber of the bullet that had killed him. The largest fragment weighed 28.6 grams, the smaller piece l.7, for a combined total of 30.3 grams. Ballistics experts said that a .22-caliber long rifle slug, when whole, weighed 40 grams, leading investigators to believe the gun they were looking for was probably a .22-caliber rifle. Allowing for some of the fragments that had scattered, the weight was close.

  At this point, however, the rifle didn’t seem as important as finding the identity of the dead man, who remained nameless for almost a week.

  That mystery, at least, would be solved in the weeks ahead.

  More than 150 miles away from Blewett Pass—in Seattle—Detective Bud Jelberg, who handled missing persons and psychiatric cases for the Seattle Police Department, read the bulletin sent out by Bill Patterson. Jelberg had had a missing person file open on his desk for almost six months on a man named Franklin Lee Monohan. Monohan, forty-nine, had been missing since mid-December 1974 under circumstances that were most peculiar.

  Frank Monohan had been reported missing by his estranged wife on January 8, 1975. The couple had been separated since early November 1974, and Monohan had moved into an apartment fashioned from a loft in his office. He ran a successful engineering business in the area near SeaTac airport. Despite the recent marital split, his wife said it was extremely unusual for him to let Christmas pass without making any effort to get in touch with his family.

  Monohan was not a graduate engineer but a self-taught genius. His mastery in designing machine parts to specification had built the foundation of his highly lucrative business. He owned his own plane—one that still sat at a British Columbia airport, where it had seemingly been abandoned sometime in early December.

  Monohan’s checking account had a balance of well over $5,000, and it hadn’t been touched since December.

  Bud Jelberg understood the family’s concern for the missing man. If Monohan had decided to disappear into greener pastures, he certainly would have cleared out his bank accounts and taken his money with him. He probably would have chosen to fly his own plane.

  Jelberg had studied the pictures of the friendly-looking man, and set out to find him in early 1975. He’d found many people who left fewer signs behind, but the Seattle police’s missing-persons expert discovered Monohan’s vanishing was one of the most difficult cases in his career.

  First, he’d contacted a former business partner, Tom Greco,* who was used to seeing Monohan almost daily. Greco said he’d been concerned about his friend. He hadn’t seen Frank, nor had any of the other friends Greco had questioned.

  “I traced back, and realized the last time I saw him was on December 12,” Greco told Jelberg. “If he leaves town on business, he always calls me after a couple of days, and he never leaves his plane at the airport for so long.”

  Jelberg checked traffic tickets, vehicle registrations, hospitals around the state, and found nothing indicating Monohan had been in an accident. There had been no activity in his personal checking account since the first of December. The last activity in his commercial account was on December 12. The most recent hits on the Standard Oil computer for credit card use were also noted as having been on December 12.

  Accompanied by the missing man’s estranged wife, Detective Jelberg went to Monohan’s office. As she turned her key, they saw that everything was covered with dust—motes floating eerily in the air where light beams cut through the dimness. Still, there was no indication that a struggle had taken place there. Whatever had been there before seemed to remain, all neatly in place.

  In the loft apartment, the pair found the missing man’s clothes, food-stocked cupboards, and the other things a newly single man would choose to furnish a temporary home.

  It looked as if Frank Monohan had stepped out to go to lunch and never returned. His wife said he’d always carried an American Express card. Reaching into the incoming mail drop in his office, Jelberg pulled out a number of envelopes that had been delivered since December 1974. One of them was an unopened bill from American Express. Finally, he had found evidence that someone had made purchases on Monohan’s corporate card. There were many receipt slips for charges made after December 12.

  Jelberg handed them to Mrs. Monohan, and she studied the signatures.

  “These weren’t signed by Frank,” she gasped. “These on the fourteenth and fifteenth of December. His normal signature is ‘F. L. Monohan,’ and these are signed ‘Frank’ and ‘Franklyn,’ and they definitely aren’t in his handwriting.”

  They found more charges from American Express for Monohan’s card, most of them from the sprawling Southcenter Mall where Frank had his office. They were from toy stores, women’s intimate apparel stores, a men’s clothing store, and several others. Someone had gone on a spending spree with the missing man’s charge card.

  After they locked up, Jelberg and Monohan’s estranged wife looked for his pickup with its canopy, half expecting to find it parked nearby. But it wasn’t. If Frank Monohan had become one of the army of souls who simply decided to “drop out,” he apparently had done so with only the clothes on his back. He could have lived a sumptuous life for a long time, but he left it all behind.

  Strange.

  Jelberg went to the stores listed on the American Express, but most of the purchases had been made during the Christmas rush, and the clerks had trouble recalling just who had made these charges. Many were no longer employed there, as they’d been temporary holiday salespeople. For those who did have a vague recollection of the sales, they could remember only that there were “two men.”

  Next, Standard Oil bills began to trickle in to Monohan’s office address. All the receipts showed charges made after December 12. Gas and other items had been purchased in Lynnwood, fifteen miles north of Seattle, and south a thousand miles to Los Angeles, and back again to Sacramento. The license number listed on the slips was not for Monohan’s truck but rather for a sedan registered to a California couple, a couple whose home address was listed in the Seal Beach area—on Long Beach Harbor.

  Jelberg felt he was getting closer. Maybe his missing man was having a midlife crisis and had taken off with a younger woman who had a child. That would account for the toys someone had bought. Maybe the woman had signed Frank’s name with his permission.

  Jelberg called Sergeant Buzzard of the Seal Beach Police Department and asked that the couple be contacted. Buzzard soon reported back that the man who owned the car in question—a 1968 Pontiac—was the owner and manager of a building supply firm in Seal Beach.

  “This guy says he uses only Union Oil cards to buy gas,” Buzzard explained. “But he has several truck drivers who work for him and they often have access to his vehicle. When they borrow his car, they put gas in it.”

  “You have their names?” Jelberg asked.

  “Right. There’s four men who live here in California. There are two headquartered in Portland, Oregon. That’s Al Bryson* and Don Majors.”

  Buzzard said he felt the owner of the 1968 Pontiac was telling the truth.

  “He seems totally straight and cooperative with me. I’ll see if I can get you rap sheets on the California employees who had access to the Pontiac.”

  Back in Washington, Detective Jelberg checked for possible criminal records on either Al Bryson or Don Majors. Bryson was clean, but Majors had a current warrant out for him from Grant County, Washington.

  The missing persons investigator had pulled the loose end of a string that would keep unraveling. Grant County authorities confirmed that Don Majors also had an outstanding wa
rrant in Wyoming for grand larceny by check. Since Majors often lived in Grant County, the Washington agency was looking for him as an assist to Wyoming. They promised Jelberg they would do a discreet investigation into Majors’s background.

  In the meantime, Jelberg issued a request to all agencies to search for the still missing canopied pickup belonging to Frank Monohan. No one in Seal Beach had seen it.

  The first information on Don Majors came in: Majors had two birthdates of record. Grant County detectives believed that the documents that listed his birthday as September 13, 1922, were probably accurate. “He’s very tall—somewhere between six foot three to six foot five,” the Grant County investigator said. “And skinny. But his description tends to vary like his birthdays.”

  “Where’s he live?” Jelberg asked.

  “Not sure. His ex-wife and twenty-year-old daughter still live in Quincy, Washington, but Majors himself is in and out of town, and usually on the road.

  “We’re sending you his rap sheet,” the Grant County contact said.

  How Don Majors might have come to know the missing Frank Monohan was a puzzle to Jelberg. Quincy was thirty-five miles east of Wenatchee. The men lived across the state from each other—separated by a towering mountain range—and Monohan was a respected and wealthy businessman, while Majors’s activities seemed to be questionable at the very least.

  When Majors’s rap sheet arrived, Jelberg was even more surprised. It was thick enough to indicate decades of criminal activity. Majors was presently a fugitive from not only the Wyoming warrant but from a bench warrant in Grant County for not complying with the conditions of his parole release from prison.

  “His last known address is in George, Washington,” Grant County detectives said in a follow-up phone call. “But the most recent place we have reports about him was in Portland, Oregon, where he goes under the name of Donald Thompson.”

  Jelberg studied the mug shot of Donald Majors aka Donald Thompson aka who else? He was thin to the point of gauntness, and high cheekbones and sunken cheeks made his face almost cadaverous. He resembled more than anything an old-time western villain who smoked too much, drank too much rotgut whiskey, and probably had tuberculosis. His eyes were like a fox’s, piercing and light-colored. He wore metal-framed glasses and an old-fashioned handlebar mustache.