But I Trusted You and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  With twenty-five more pounds on him, he could be handsome. In this mug shot, Don Majors looked as though he had lived his entire life dissolutely.

  Bud Jelberg still couldn’t figure out the connection between Don Majors/Thompson and Frank Monahan, but they were both missing, and Jelberg asked permission to open the safe in Monohan’s office.

  In spite of his years of experience in the Seattle Police Department, Jelberg was startled by what he discovered in that safe. As he looked through letters, pictures, and printed material, he found that the highly successful and respected businessman had been leading a double life, a life unknown to his closest friends or his family. Frank Monohan had apparently been deeply involved in “swinging,” exchanging sexual intimacies with perfect strangers, the singles and couples who advertised in his collection of erotic publications: Swingers’ Magazine, Sandra’s Erotic Journal, and others of that ilk.

  Jelberg sat back on his heels as he thumbed through the safe’s contents. He wasn’t expecting to find this. He’d thought Monohan might have had tax problems, or been afraid that he’d be caught embezzling, or, most likely, that he had left with a woman much different from his wife.

  The magazines and mail in the safe didn’t fit with any of that. Would-be sexual contacts had sent their pictures in various stages of undress, including completely naked poses. They were holding whips, handcuffs, black leather masks, and phallic-shaped vibrators, along with all manner of kinky sexual toys. The advertisers’ sexual preferences were printed in black and white, although you had to speak another language to understand them. “French, Greek, B. and D. [bondage and discipline.]” The far-out fantasies listed in the magazines required very creative minds to imagine them.

  Jelberg lifted out a photo album with dozens of obviously private snapshots that many women had mailed to Frank Monohan. Some of the women who posed naked for an unknown person’s Polaroid camera were beautiful; others would have had trouble being picked up in a dark bar at “last call” by a man who’d had five martinis.

  The poses were obscene, and there was no question about the kind of appetites they were trying to whet. There were photographs of men, too: a handsome, powerful-looking man sitting naked on a bar stool in his recreation room, holding a torture device, a cruel smile on his lips. His pretty wife, with a whip in her hands, sat nude beside him.

  Don Majors’s picture was in the album, too. And as Jelberg studied his photo, he knew he had found the connection to Frank Monohan. Majors was engaged in a perverted sexual act with a female whose face was obscured.

  Jelberg would try to identify the other women posing with Majors. Maybe he could build stronger links between the dead man and the missing man.

  Frank Monohan had kept not only the correspondence from other swingers but also carbons of his own responses. He had always been an efficient businessman.

  Sometime in the past few years, Monohan’s life had changed radically: he’d become obsessed with the pursuit of kinky sex. And yet he had apparently managed to carry on his business, too, and to keep his sex-driven world a secret from those who knew him as he once had been. Maybe he’d always been drawn to the forbidden and erotic, and, at forty-eight, had simply decided to leave his marriage and give in to his heretofore hidden impulses.

  Jelberg had little doubt now that Frank Monohan was probably dead. He’d been walking on the wild side, a tempting target for people who used the sex trade for profit. But his body had never been found. Legally, it would take seven years for Monohan to be officially declared deceased if his remains were never found or proof of his death wasn’t firmly established.

  Jelberg believed in his bones that the mysterious Don Majors was involved in whatever had happened to Frank Monohan. But how could he prove it? In those early months of 1975, Monohan’s body had not been found. Sometimes, Bud Jelberg doubted his own intuition, and he could almost picture Monohan drinking a piña colada on a balmy beach far away, laughing because he’d pulled of the perfect escape from a boring life in the clammy, rainy atmosphere of the Northwest.

  Not likely.

  The missing persons detective knew less about Don Majors; he was gone, too.

  “Maybe Majors is the dead one,” Jelberg commented to Detective Joyce Johnson, who had the desk next to his. “Maybe I’ve figured it out all wrong.”

  More credit-card slips came in, and Jelberg added them to Frank Monohan’s file. His American Express card had been used at the Holiday Inn in the Duwamish Slough area, just south of the Seattle city limits, on December 13, 1974. Monohan’s true signature had been used to sign for a steak dinner for three, and then to pay for two deluxe rooms.

  But that was the last time Frank Monohan himself used the card. A day later, a new signature had signed for purchases at a boutique in Southcenter Mall (for black mesh stockings and a black satin waist cincher), at Toys Galore (for electric train equipment and tracks), and for expensive men’s clothing at an exclusive men’s store. Armed with Majors’s mug shot, Jelberg showed his picture and other mug shots to a new group of clerks. This time he hit at least a spoonful of pay dirt. They looked at a “laydown,” a collection of photographs including both Monohan and Majors, and they all chose the missing trucker as the man who’d used Frank Monohan’s credit card.

  Monohan’s truck, an orange 1969 Ford pickup, was located in a towing yard. A man who wanted to buy such a vehicle had spotted it there and called one of Monohan’s relatives asking about the price. The truck had been dumped surreptitiously on the huge towing yard lot, and because they took only sporadic inventory, the owners were completely unaware it was there.

  Detective Joyce Johnson had the truck impounded and towed to headquarters, where it was processed. Nothing of evidentiary value was found in the truck.

  This was the status of the search for Frank Monohan in early June 1975 when Deputy Bill Patterson of Chelan County sent out his request for help in identifying the body found on Blewett Pass.

  Bud Jelberg immediately forwarded dental X-rays of the missing Monohan for comparison with those of the corpse. If the body was Monohan’s, at least they would solve the first part of the mystery of what had become of him. Jelberg even had a prime suspect—Donald Kennedy Majors—who was still at large.

  Moreover, the Seattle detectives already had a handle on the motive for murder. Monohan had been fair game for the swingers he’d been in touch with, and Majors swung with the best of them.

  Dr. Bonafaci and Bill Patterson took Monohan’s dental chart to Dr. M. L. Westerberg’s dental office. Westerberg studied the two charts intently. Finally, he looked up.

  “I’m positive it’s the same man. There’s one chance in a half million that this chart could belong to anyone other than Frank Monohan.”

  Since the victim’s body had been found in Chelan County, Patterson would be the principal investigator in the murder case. He knew who his victim was now, and he knew who the main suspect was, but he still had to find Don Majors. And he had to find some testimony or physical evidence that would bind Majors inextricably to the killing.

  Despite Majors’s identification as someone who probably used Monohan’s credit cards, it wasn’t an absolute fact. And that was what Bill Patterson needed to take his case to the Chelan County prosecuting attorney.

  That would not be easy.

  By the time Bill Patterson finished with Don Majors, he would know more about the wily trucker than Majors’s own mother. Some of the people the chief deputy contacted were horrified to find themselves linked to Don Majors. The thought that their hidden sex lives might be revealed left them pale and shaken, and their words tumbled over each other as they hastened to make up excuses. In truth, they were aghast to learn that their “advertisements” in swingers’ magazines had now come to the attention of a sheriff’s detective. A few admitted knowing Don Majors, while others stoutly insisted the whole thing was a mistake, and they had never willingly participated in such advertisements.

  Many were professional people w
ho were “pillars of their communities.” One man finally admitted that he’d met Majors through an ad in The Seekers, a swingers’ magazine. “I met him and his ex-wife in ’68,” the man recalled. “Majors called me after I answered his ad. I met him at his place in Quincy and he introduced me to a gal. Later on, I worked on the trucks with him.”

  The embarrassed man said that Majors liked to brag, and claimed to have been a “hit man” in Chicago. “He said he kept a twelve-gauge sawed-off shotgun down his pants leg, but I think he made it all up.”

  Most people Patterson interviewed still believed that Don Majors was primarily a truck driver. His CB handle was, ironically, “Dudley Do-Right.”

  “There was one place he always used to show up,” the informant said. “Even though I heard he was driving for that outfit in Seal Beach, he never used to miss the fourth Saturday of every month at the Scarlet Circle Dance Club in Portland. That’s when the interested swingers get together.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Patterson asked.

  “Sometime after the first of the year.”

  “What was he driving?”

  “As I recall, it was a bronze 1966 Chevy Impala with Nebraska plates. I didn’t look at the plate numbers.”

  “Was he alone?”

  The informant shook his head. “He had a woman with him—he told me he’d met her sometime in January 1975 in a motel in Nebraska.”

  Even for a cross-country trucker, Don Majors was peripatetic. He was reported here, there, and everywhere—and always as a faithful fourth-Saturday attendee at the Scarlet Circle Dance Club in Portland, Oregon.

  Despite his degenerate appearance and skinny frame, Don Majors seemed to affect women the way catnip did cats. He’d been living with a divorcee, Gerda Goss,* in Quincy, sharing her home with her and her teenage son, Curt,* until sometime in December. Majors also kept up cordial relations with his ex-wife, and had, indeed, used her picture when he advertised in the swingers’ magazines (albeit without her knowledge).

  He had brought his newest girlfriend, Shireen Gillespie,* to visit his ex-loves in Washington sometime in January, and they had apparently spent their nights in several homes where he’d once been welcomed as a lover.

  If any of the former women in his life knew where Majors was, they weren’t telling Bill Patterson. Neither his wife nor his former girlfriends professed to know anything about Frank Monohan. They shook their heads and said they had never heard his name. All they knew was that Majors and Shireen had left Quincy in her bronze Impala sometime during the late winter months.

  With cooperation from other law enforcement agencies, Patterson arranged for stakeouts to be placed in the locations where Majors was known to visit.

  But the Chevy Impala didn’t surface.

  Patterson tried another tactic. He checked out phone calls that were charged to Monohan’s credit card long after he vanished. Many of the people the Chelan County detective called denied that they even knew Don Majors. And nobody admitted being acquainted with Frank Monohan.

  Patterson suspected that he wasn’t always hearing the truth, but he understood the swingers’ fear of discovery. Finding witnesses was next to impossible.

  Patterson began to backtrack on Don Majors’s behavior in mid-December 1974. That was shortly after Monohan disappeared. He spoke again with store personnel where Monohan’s credit card had been used, and learned that Majors had been accompanied by a younger man.

  “I would judge him to be possibly in his thirties,” one store owner said. “He didn’t say much.”

  The witness tapped a mug shot photo Patterson held. “This guy—you say his name is Majors—he did all the talking. We thought the young guy might have been his son.”

  All of the clerks picked Don Majors’s picture from a ten-subject laydown as the middle-aged man who had made purchases in their stores.

  Don Majors had spent thousands of dollars on December 14—purchasing everything from sexy underwear to cameras worth three or four hundred dollars. Monohan’s American Express card had also been used at a jewelry store in Yakima, Washington, a day or so later. For some reason, Majors was hopping all over the state.

  “Maybe he just had the Christmas spirit,” Patterson said sardonically. “He seems to have been buying presents for a lot of people.”

  While he was finding out more about “Dudley Do-Right” Majors, Bill Patterson was also interviewing Frank Monohan’s family and friends in depth. They all knew him as a solid businessman, not given to extravagance. When he moved away from his family home, he could well have afforded an expensive apartment. Instead, he had simply put a bed, refrigerator, and a phone into the storeroom off his office. There were no windows there, and it was stuffy and drab.

  “Frank always carried his Standard Oil card, the American Express card, and a phone credit card,” one close friend said. “He usually carried only seven or eight dollars in cash,” another friend added. “But he kept a hundred-dollar bill hidden in his wallet all the time—for emergencies. I don’t recall that he ever had to use it.”

  Monohan’s two best friends said they’d had dinner with him at the Duwamish Holiday Inn on December 12 and he had paid for the meal with his American Express card.

  “I know he was alive during the day of the thirteenth,” one former business associate said, “because I got a question from a ferry company about some work Frank did for them that day.”

  Frank Monohan’s relatives told Patterson that his $300 watch was missing, along with a cowhide attaché case. His wallet—made out of alligator—was gone, too. And his electric shaver.

  When Monohan’s pickup was recovered, there were only 289.4 miles on the odometer since the last time it had been serviced.

  “We know he put about two hundred of those miles on in short trips we were aware of,” a young male relative said, “but somebody put ninety miles more on the odometer. That wasn’t enough to get up to Blewett Pass and back. So someone must have driven him up to the summit in their car.”

  The letters from potential sexual partners had continued to pour into Monohan’s letter drop long after he was dead. They were shocking and disturbing to his family, none of whom had any idea about his involvement with that element of society.

  These swingers’ letters were turned over to Bill Patterson. Some were from way across America, but several were in the Seattle or Wenatchee area. Detective Jelberg also had a packet of red-hot correspondence sent to Monohan from people he’d already met, and these too were turned over to Patterson.

  Was the answer to what had really motivated Frank Monohan’s murder buried somewhere in the torrid scrawls on perfume-scented stationery or in the flat-out pornography typed on plain white sheets?

  Possibly. There were several letters either to or from Don Majors. Majors mostly wrote about how he was going to set Frank up with his ex-wife. Majors’s tactical approach seemed to be a refinement of the old “badger game”: he promised much but delivered little. He had kept Frank Monohan dangling, with explicit details of his ex-wife’s charms and descriptions of her body. He kept assuring Monohan that their meeting was imminent.

  And all the while, the poor woman had had no idea of what her ex-husband was doing.

  Patterson felt sure he had found Frank Monohan’s killer. All he had to do was find Don Majors.

  Word came from a California detective, Wayne Hunter, in Sacramento. A stolen credit card owned by an Elroy Smollett* was being used to buy gas for a car registered to the woman Majors was traveling with—Shireen Gillespie.

  The bronze Impala was gone, and they were now driving a maroon 1966 Chevrolet.

  “We have copies of gas-charge receipts made from Idaho, south through northern California,” Hunter said. “The last address we have for Elroy Smollett was in Sacramento.”

  “Could you contact him?” Patterson asked. “And ask him what the circumstances were when he lost his gas card?”

  Detective Wayne Hunter called back later the same day. �
�Smollett says he was visiting a man named Ted Aust* in May and that there was a man there named ‘Don.’ Smollett says he’d left his wallet out in his car while they were doing some remodeling. He didn’t notice the card was gone until sometime in June and reported it stolen then.”

  “Did he describe this ‘Don’?” Patterson asked.

  “Yeah. The guy is way over six feet tall, skinny, and he has a handlebar mustache. Smollett thinks he’s in his late forties or early fifties.”

  It was Majors. It had to be. Patterson winced as he realized that his quarry now had himself a different car and credit card. At least the investigators looking for him were able to trace him, and Patterson hoped that Don Majors didn’t know that.

  The hits on Elroy Smollett’s gas card came in with steady regularity. Majors was buying gas so often that he seemed to be driving twenty-four hours a day. He was in one town, then another, and soon a thousand miles away.

  On June 27, 1975, Majors and his latest woman were still on the run, but Patterson got some startling new information.

  The Seattle man claimed to be Don Majors’s nephew, and he said he’d had a visit from his Uncle Don on the second of June.

  “My uncle said he had a .22 that was misfiring. He brought it in and we looked at it—it was a rifle with a ten-inch silencer. We shot it into a block of wood and it worked all right. He also had a derringer.”

  The witness said Majors had told him that he’d killed a man, but he hadn’t really believed Majors at the time.

  “He sometimes tells big stories,” the man said.

  “Was anyone with him when he dropped by?” Patterson asked.

  “Yeah—a woman named Shireen. He said she was his girlfriend. And they had another girl with them, too.”