by Ann Rule
The constant stress that Lorraine Millroy had endured can only be imagined; she was in the middle of a divorce, striving to earn a living, and at her wits’ end trying to find help for her son. The explosions between the two were to be expected. She never knew what he might do, and she was afraid—and yet she had attempted to keep some semblance of normalcy in the house. Dusty was still her son, and she couldn’t bear to think of him living, cold and hungry, in his battered old car with its broken window, with rags stuffed in to keep out the freezing temperatures.
And Lorraine had taken him back home again and again, a home that was immaculate except for his rat’s nest of a room. Only another mother would understand why she couldn’t just give up on her son.
Still, she was full of fear. Her neighbors were afraid for her. But there had seemed no way to stop the inexorable path of tragedy that lay ahead.
With the discovery of Lorraine’s body, prosecutor Lee Yates entered another charge; Dusty Millroy was now charged with first-degree murder. Before a trial, however, he would undergo ninety days of observation by psychiatrists at Western State Hospital to see if he was competent to participate in his own defense.
There is, of course, a vast difference under the law between clinical insanity and legal insanity. Prosecutor Lee Yates and Rebecca Roe, the deputy prosecutor who would assist in the State’s case, felt that, under the M’Naughton Rule, Millroy was not legally insane. He must have known that what he did was wrong: he had denied his crime, made efforts to cover it up, hidden the body—all acts of a man who realized the difference between right and wrong as he committed murder.
Sergeant Sam Hicks had felt that Millroy was “playing games” with him when Hicks interrogated him after his arrest. And Officer Hursh, who had talked to Millroy in his home about the blood spatters on the wall, felt the same way. When Hursh had asked him about the blood, Millroy had bristled, “What are you trying to do—nail me with a homicide beef?”
Millroy had then tried to explain away the blood by saying he’d had a severe nosebleed and that his forehead had then broken into a rash and had begun “dripping blood.”
When he was first institutionalized, Dusty Millroy seemed quite withdrawn and disoriented. However, on February 15, he called Yates and said he wanted to talk about obtaining a reduced charge of second-degree murder. After advising him of his rights under Miranda once more, Lee Yates and Sam Hicks had an extended phone conversation with the suspect. Hicks asked Dusty to explain the difference between first- and second-degree murder in his own words, and Dusty responded, “Well, first degree is premeditated and second degree is spur of the moment.”
His grasp of the fine points of the law didn’t seem to be the words of a man who was legally insane.
Finally, Dusty Millroy was ready to tell them for the first time what had happened on the morning of November 27:
“Okay. After I woke up, I killed her, okay?” Millroy began.
“How did this happen?” Sergeant Hicks asked.
“It was just spur of the moment. It was no argument or anything. I just killed her.”
Millroy said he’d awakened about eight or nine and found his mother in the kitchen, wearing the blue bathrobe and the shower cap. He said he’d glimpsed the knife on the counter.
“Did she make you mad or something?” Hicks asked.
“No, she didn’t.”
“She was just standing there and you got mad and stabbed her?”
“Yeah.”
Millroy said his mother had been facing him, had said nothing, and that he really had no idea why he had killed her.
“What did you do with the knife?” Hicks asked.
“I stabbed her in the neck.”
“Did you stab her more than once?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Where?”
“Around the neck and—and once or twice in the chest.”
“But you don’t know why you did it?”
“No.”
“Did you have bad feelings about her before?”
“Yes—uh, being tossed out of the house and stuff like that.”
In response to Hicks’s questions, Millroy said he had wrapped his mother’s body in the plastic tarp, dragged it downstairs, and then placed it on the plywood sheet in the van. “Then I drove to Cle Elum, but I changed my mind and turned around with her body still in the van.”
Hicks asked Dusty if the Puget Power crew or the forest rangers had seen her body when they were digging him out of the snow.
“I already got rid of it by then.”
“You positive you didn’t argue with your mother that morning?”
Sighing, Dusty Millroy admitted that there had been a discussion that morning. His mother told him that he would have to start thinking about moving out of the house, but she hadn’t given him a specific time when he had to go.
Even so, her comments had angered him, and he had attacked his mother so unexpectedly that she had no time to resist the plunging knife.
“I knew I was in trouble then,” he said. “That’s why I had to hide her body. I tried to clean up the house and wash the clothes I wore.”
This statement indicated that Millroy had indeed realized the difference between right and wrong at the time he killed his mother.
***
Despite his earlier admissions, when Dusty Millroy went to trial in early May 1979, however, it was a different man who took the stand.
Superior Court Judge Warren Chan was hearing the case without a jury. He entered a plea of innocence by reason of insanity for the defendant, in addition to the defendant’s own plea of innocent.
But Dusty Millroy refused to entertain any arguments at all that he was insane, nor would he admit to his mother’s murder—even though he’d already told Yates and Hicks that he had done it.
Two psychiatrists and a psychologist testified that Dusty was criminally insane—testimony that enraged the rail-thin defendant, who had insisted on making his own plea of innocent.
The defendant’s father, referring to the recent mass suicide (by cyanide-laced Kool-Aid) of the Reverend Jim Jones’s devout followers, described his son as a “Jonestown type—the sort of person who would have followed the Reverend Jim Jones.”
“Jonestown follower?” Dusty blurted out, his eyes glinting with anger.
“What do you mean by that?” defense attorney Rich Brothers asked.
“That he would have been susceptible—”
“That’s ridiculous!” Dusty exclaimed loudly, shaking his head.
When he took the stand—against his attorneys’ advice—Dusty Millroy continued to disagree with any testimony that he was insane. “I never wanted the insanity plea in the first place. I am a pacifist. I don’t believe in killing—even insects.”
“Did you kill your mother?” defense attorney Brothers asked.
“No. I did not.”
Dusty’s mind circled once more around his main delusion. He testified that he felt the CIA was possibly responsible for his mother’s murder.
“While I was at Evergreen State College, it became apparent that somebody had laced the well that supplied water to the college with some kind of chemical or drug,” he said with his own crazy conviction. “The chemical caused men to become drowsy and women to become sexually productive [sic].”
The defendant explained to Judge Chan that strange people had begun showing up on campus and that he felt they were sent by some government organization.
“It looked like we were under observation of some kind. The government was using the students as guinea pigs, and about seventy percent of the students dropped out without finishing the year.”
Millroy told the court that he was sure the CIA was to blame and that spies from that agency had followed him to California, and then to Turkey. “They tapped my phone,” he said, “and they fired a shot at me.”
Asked to describe his recall of November 27, he said he’d awakened, walked into the kitchen, and found “a mess o
n the floor. I thought it might be the remains of a chicken. I tried to clean it up, but I just tried that briefly. Then I suddenly noticed something was wrong. There was too much blood for any chicken.”
He testified that he began to worry that his mother had been hurt. “I felt my mother had been injured because she was nowhere to be seen. I think the CIA killed her, because they were the only ones who had animosity to me. They are, of course, capable of such activities.”
Dusty Millroy’s mind was either churning with delusions and ugly fantasies, or he was trying very hard to appear insane.
He testified that he’d driven his mother’s van to Cle Elum to look for her.
“Why did you do that?” his attorney asked.
“I did that because I’d heard a voice during the night—when I was half asleep—and it mentioned ‘the highway east.’ ”
Millroy’s courtroom statements certainly smacked of a man in the grip of psychosis. But prosecutor Yates had introduced the quite rational admission to his mother’s murder that Dusty had given freely in February, just a few months earlier.
Dusty Millroy’s affect was flat throughout his trial, with the worst emotional outbursts evident during the twelve minutes when Lee Yates cross-examined him. He was extremely annoyed when Yates suggested curtly that the defendant was playing games with the judge.
Yates wondered why the defendant had driven east up the mountain, searching for his mother.
“You’re saying you thought you would just come upon [your mother] in the wilderness?”
“I thought maybe I could spot blood in the snow …”
“Oh, come on,” Yates said, derision in his voice. “You don’t expect us to believe that!”
“I don’t care whether you believe it or not,” Millroy spat out. “It’s the truth.”
Dusty quickly recovered the stoic attitude he’d exhibited through most of his trial.
There seemed to be no doubt in Judge Chan’s mind that Dusty Millroy had been the immediate instrument of his mother’s death. No one else had a motive to kill Lorraine Millroy, and all physical and circumstantial evidence pointed to her firstborn, her own son. She had coddled him, spoiled him, and forgiven his outrageous and bizarre behavior time and again. And she had finally had all she could bear and ordered him out of her home.
Had he used drugs the morning she was killed? Probably—but diminished responsibility brought about through the use of mind-altering substances or liquor is not a defense. Dusty had decided of his own free will to ingest LSD, and perhaps other drugs.
Judge Chan returned a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder, which carried with it a mandatory life sentence (which meant, actually, thirteen years and four months), with a consecutive five-year sentence for the use of a deadly weapon—his mother’s favorite cooking knife—while committing her murder.
Lorraine Millroy had lived on the edge of disaster. The Washington State law—passed to protect the rights of the individual—that forbade committing an individual to an institution unless he was patently and demonstrably dangerous to himself or others was soon modified. For Lorraine Millroy, the new law came too late.
Prosecutor Lee Yates never denied that the entire case wasn’t marked by pathos and tragedy, yet he stressed that under the M’Naughton Rule, Dusty Millroy had indeed known the difference between right and wrong at the moment he plunged a kitchen knife again and again into the neck and breast of the one person in the world who had tried desperately to save him.
Lee Yates went on to prosecute a number of homicide cases successfully, and then he went to work at the Public Defender’s Office, helping accused people who had no funds to hire defense attorneys. He also became a stock car racing driver.
Sam Hicks and Leo Hursh worked closely together in solving Lorraine Millroy’s murder, and they would investigate many other cases in the next three and a half years. Hicks was a tall, broad-shouldered man, whose desk sat in the middle of many desks in the Major Crimes Unit of the King County Sheriff’s Office. He was usually smil-ing. I remember taking photographs of him with a Rollei camera, one that was guaranteed never to shoot double exposures.
And yet, when I had them developed, in three of the frames, there were two images of Sam, a transparent image superimposed on a more solid picture. No camera expert could explain that to me. They had never seen it before with a Rollei.
Perhaps it was an omen.
A few weeks later—in June 1982—Sam Hicks and Leo Hursh went to a farmhouse in Black Diamond, the ghost of a one-time booming coal mining town. The rickety building sat back from the road, isolated from other dwellings. The two detectives wanted only to question a thirty-one-year-old man about the homicide death of a Seattle rock musician.
They didn’t expect trouble.
But, as they left their police unit, shots rang out. They had no other choice than to crouch down in the open, perfect targets for someone who was firing a rifle at them from the barn.
Sam Hicks was killed instantly, and Leo Hursh injured. I went to Sam’s funeral and then joined the miles-long cortege to the cemetery.
It was one of the saddest good-byes I’ve ever seen, with thousands of citizens standing along the route in honor of a good cop.
Where is Dusty Millroy now? I’m not sure. He is not in prison, he’s not listed in death records, but someone with his name is listed in the phone book of a small town in Washington State. Not to protect him, but to protect the privacy of his sister and his father, I have chosen to use pseudonyms for this family, a family who sadly mirrored an upheaval in America that changed our world as we knew it.
MONOHAN’S LAST DATE
The seventies were, indeed, a strange decade. All manner of people were attempting to break free of the constraints put upon them by society and religion. “Swinging” was in, with many married couples switching partners and previously staid, new experimenters being drawn into “orgies.” In 2007, an hour-long television series traced the fictional lives of thirtyish suburban residents in the seventies who changed partners as if they were at a square dance. It didn’t last for a second season; there was something distasteful and even base about it. Despite some shocking aspects of the new millennium, swinging has never returned in the epidemic sweep that it once had. It seems crass, contrived, and sordid.
The puzzling death of a Northwest man who was leading two lives—until he came to the end of both of them—occupied investigators from three police agencies for three years, and in the unfolding of this amoral case, even experienced detectives were shocked at the sadism and perversion of the man who would emerge as a killer.
If there is evil in man—and there must be—Franklin Monohan’s murderer had to be the living embodiment of all the greed, viciousness, and ugliness imaginable.
The first report came in to the Chelan County sheriff’s dispatcher as an “unattended death.” Chelan County, Washington, is on the eastern side of the vast Cascade Mountain range that bisects Washington and Oregon. In spring, summer, and part of fall, it is apple-growing country, where the best Delicious apples in the country ripen. In winter, it is very cold, and the edges along the shore of Lake Chelan, one of the largest lakes in America, sparkle with ice.
You can get to Chelan County by choosing one of three passes, although sometimes two of them are closed because of avalanches and icy roads. It was spring when a young couple traveled from Seattle along I-90, turning just beyond Roslyn and Cle Elum to take the scenic Blewett Pass approach toward the city of Wenatchee. Blewett’s summit is at 4,102 feet, eleven hundred feet higher than Snoqualmie Pass. There are precious few stops as the road up to the summit climbs higher and higher, so the driver pulled over to the side of the road to relieve himself in one of the thick stands of evergreens.
It was sixteen minutes after eight in the morning on the fine spring day of May 28, 1975.
The man walked off the roadway, almost unerringly to the one spot where he viewed a silent tableau that would stay with him, hauntingly, for years
. Had he moved even a few feet to the right or left, the corpse would have been hidden by the firs and budding cottonwood trees. He didn’t see it at first because he was intent on the urgency of his mission. But then he turned.
It was not a pretty sight, and the man ran to the car where his wife waited, scarcely saying a word to her. They drove farther on, looking for a public phone but there weren’t any, so he stood beside the roadway, waving frantically at passing cars. Fortunately, a Washington State Patrol trooper was also headed for Wenatchee that morning, and he skidded to a stop on the roadside gravel when he saw the man flagging him down.
“There’s something back there …” he gasped. “It’s exactly two and a half miles north of the summit.”
His shocked state of mind said more than his words, and the trooper picked up his radio. The Washington State Patrol deals principally with traffic problems. Today, they run a very sophisticated crime laboratory—but in 1975, they were not geared for homicide investigations. As the trooper learned more details, he gave information that was relayed to chief criminal deputy Bill Patterson at the Chelan County Sheriff’s headquarters in Wenatchee.
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.
