by Ann Rule
The teenage suspect stared at him, shrugged, and made no comment, but little beads of perspiration dotted his forehead.
“Do you want to talk about it now?”
Lee DuBois said nothing.
“The victim from this morning has already identified your pants—she’s here in our office, and she says she can identify the man who grabbed her,” Lieutenant Bob Holter said quietly. “Did you do it?”
Now, the youth silently nodded his head.
“Did you kill the woman in the park yesterday?”
Again, he nodded his head.
“What did you do with the knife?”
“I dropped it.”
DuBois agreed to give Billy Baughman and John Boatman an account of his crimes. Before taking a statement, the detectives tried to contact Lee’s family, calling their home every ten minutes for more than an hour.
No one answered.
Although they are always blamed for what their offspring do, no real guidelines exist to predict which parents are going to have problem children. There are so many causes for teenagers going astray, and, sometimes, there is no cause at all. Lee DuBois was a teenager whose actions—whatever they might be—would surely prove agonizing to his parents.
Ironically, Lee’s mother was a woman whose many years of education had been spent learning to deal with children’s problems. She held a doctorate in educational psychology. Her second husband and Lee’s stepfather was a Boeing engineer. The family lived in a very nice house in a wealthy neighborhood only a few blocks from Seward Park.
On the surface, Lee’s home appeared to be stable, happy, and secure.
But that was only on the surface, and like most families, there were secrets no one knew about.
On August 9, 1978, Lee DuBois gave a taped statement to detectives Baughman and Boatman, while Juvenile detective Ron Massie stood by.
“On August eighth,” the youth began, “I walked to the tennis courts in Seward Park about six thirty. It was too hot to sleep, and I wanted to find a place to put in my toy hydroplane. I walked halfway around the road that leads around the park. I then sat down in the shade for a while between the road and the beach near the restroom. A Samoan man came up to me. I told him my sinuses were bothering me and he told me he had sinus trouble also, and he gave me a yellow pill.”
There were many Samoan families in Seattle, and the University of Washington football squad was blessed with a number of them—who quickly became athletic heroes. Still, DuBois’s story had a dreamlike quality to it, and the detectives wondered if it was true.
DuBois said he didn’t want to take the pill because it had no “writing” on it to show what it really was. When the “Samoan” told him it was because it was the “improved kind,” that reassured him and he’d swallowed the pill.
After the stranger left, DuBois recalled that he saw a girl jogging down the road. “I would say she was about twenty-six, a white girl in shorts which were blue or red. She jogged by me and said, ‘He got you, huh?’
“I knew she meant the Samoan as she smiled at him as he went up the trail off the road.”
Lee said the woman paused a few moments and then began jogging again. He said he was beginning to feel peculiar from the pill he’d ingested, and he got up and ran after the woman.
“She stopped—as if she had a cramp—and I asked her what she meant by what she’d said, but she didn’t tell me. She laughed and started running. I ran after her. I put my left arm around her neck and kept asking her what she’d meant, but she still wouldn’t tell me. Then I took my knife out of my pocket and took it out of the case. I pointed the blade at her, saying, ‘You’d better tell.’ She said, ‘Okay, but put the knife away.’ ”
DuBois had complied, and he described the knife as a “fish” knife, about six inches long, and said it had a wooden case—designed so that it would float.
“I told the woman we were going back to the bathrooms to see if the Samoan dude was still around. The woman was walking ahead of me up a trail.
“She said I’d ordered her up the trail, but I denied that. I turned around and headed back down the trail when the knife fell out of my pocket.
“I turned around and saw that she had picked it up. I told her to give it back. She told me to come get it, and began waving it at me. I grabbed one of her wrists and cut myself slightly on two fingers. She fell down during the struggle. She had her back to me as she began to get up. She was about to run away when my mind kept saying, ‘Kill her—kill her.’ I walked up to her and stabbed her five times in the back. She fell facedown and was trying to get up when I ran away. When I walked out of the trail I saw the Samoan dude and he was shaking his head at me, saying ‘Tch … tch … tch.’ I hit him with my fist and then started running. He chased me for a short way and then stopped.”
DuBois said he had gone home then.
“What were you wearing at that time?”
“My blue coat and my maroon and beige pants. Prior to running away, I stepped on her neck and her back. I was wearing my Nike basketball shoes.”
The suspect said he had returned to the park the next day to see if he had killed the woman.
“I stayed in the road and looked up, but I didn’t go up where she was. I don’t know why I killed the girl. Something just kept telling me to do it.”
Lee DuBois also admitted to assaulting Tricia Long, but again, he hadn’t been in control of his feelings. The voice inside him had told him to “kill … kill.”
At this point, detectives were finally able to reach the suspect’s parents. His mother insisted that all questioning stop, and she said she was going to contact a lawyer. The investigators agreed to her request, and Lee DuBois was taken to the Youth Service Center, where he was placed in the high-security detention section.
Were his violent actions on August 8 and 9 surprising? Not really. When the Seattle investigators checked Juvenile records, they found that Lee had been in trouble before. He’d been a runaway when he was only seven, involved in vandalism when he was ten, and accused of “indecent liberties” when he was just twelve.
He did have a history of sinus problems but had never been known to take drugs of any kind or to drink alcohol. He was active in football, basketball, and track.
It was a dreadful thing to contemplate, but it looked like a boy little more than fifteen years old was behind the ugly murder and attempted rape in Seward Park.
Although DuBois had admitted the murder and the attack to Billy Baughman and John Boatman, he had resolutely denied that there was any sexual motivation in his crimes. He could not—and would not—explain how Penny DeLeo’s clothes had come off, and he grew very disturbed when any mention of sex was brought into the interview. Nor would he discuss what had happened to Penny DeLeo’s car.
The postmortem examination of Penny DeLeo’s body showed that she was five feet, four and a half inches tall, and weighed only ninety-two pounds—no match at all for a youth over six feet tall who outweighed her by almost seventy-five pounds.
Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. John Eisele found thirty-one stab wounds scattered over the hapless woman’s body. As Dr. Don Reay and the first detectives on the scene had suspected, many of her knife injuries would have been almost instantly fatal. Her jugular vein had been severed and her heart, lungs, and abdominal organs pierced. Her right wrist had been cut so deeply that the tendons were severed, as well as the ulnar and radial arteries.
If ever there was an example of overkill, this was it. Penny had also been hit hard in the right eye by some kind of blunt object—possibly a fist. The only saving grace for those who loved her was that she had probably not had time to be afraid, and died with the first few knife thrusts. If rape had been attempted, it had not been consummated.
That was very small comfort.
As the news media reports of the murder and attack in Seward Park escalated, homicide detectives received phone calls from several joggers who had seen a man in the park who seemed to be acting p
eculiarly.
One man said he’d been jogging in the park on August 8 at 7:15 a.m. and he’d observed a tall, slim black male watching two female joggers. The man was obviously trying to keep his face covered. He’d worn a white hat, light jacket, and solid-color pants. Several women had also seen the tall young man wearing the floppy white hat.
At 8:00 p.m. on August 9, the Port of Seattle Police recovered Penny DeLeo’s Toyota Celica near the First Avenue South bridge, miles west of Seward Park. The car was taken to the Seattle Police Department’s processing room for latent-print examination.
Criminalists found Lee DuBois’s fingerprints inside Penny DeLeo’s car. They also determined that the ridges on the bottom of the suspect’s shoes matched the prints etched in blood on her body.
The net was cinching tighter.
On August 10, detectives interviewed still another young woman who had been attacked in Seward Park—a day before Penny DeLeo’s murder. This woman, Janet Carroll,* a nurse employed in a Seattle hospital, told them that she had been jogging in the park on August 7 at 7:00 p.m.
“I was running on the east loop road,” she said, “when I saw a tall, dark young man. I jogged by him and then I heard footsteps behind me. He grabbed me and held something sharp against my stomach. Then he threw me over the bank onto the rocks on the lakeshore. I started to crawl back up and saw a male jogger approaching. When I screamed for help, the boy who’d grabbed me ran.”
Ms. Carroll said the teenager who’d attacked her wore blue jeans and a light blue top with writing on it.
The MO of the suspect seemed set, although, of course, there was no way of knowing for sure if he had used the same techniques with Penny DeLeo. She could no longer tell police how the man had captured her. From what Lee said of his deadly encounter with her, it sounded very similar to the other victims.
The tall youth’s pattern was to stand in the running path, facing away from the joggers, let the women pass him, and then run after them, grabbing them from behind and threatening them with a knife. Now, there was an attack on August 7, a murder on August 8, and a third assault on August 9. There were probably other rape attempts or even completed rapes, but the victims had been too embarrassed to report them.
On August 16, the King County Juvenile Court declined jurisdiction over Lee DuBois; he would be tried as an adult for murder in the first degree and two counts of assault.
Detective Dick Reed joined the probe, and he obtained a search warrant for inspection of the suspect’s room. Reed made a list of items that might be in that room, but they could also be somewhere in Seward Park: a long-sleeved sweatshirt believed to have been worn by DuBois during the murder, the car keys to Penny’s Toyota, the white-handled fishing knife, a floppy white hat, blue jeans, jean jacket, and a baby blue T-shirt with writing on it.
Lee’s room in the handsome residence near the park was furnished impeccably: the floor was carpeted, it had its own private bathroom, TV and stereo, and floor-to-ceiling sliding doors opening onto a lushly landscaped yard. Lee could clearly come and go through the sliders without his parents knowing.
The room was very neat, and Lee DuBois’s clothes hung on hangers in the closet—all pointing the same way. He had a wardrobe any teenager would envy.
Accompanied by the suspect’s mother and his lawyer, Dick Reed and Ted Fonis searched for the missing clothes. They found several pairs of blue jeans, jean jackets, and a light blue shirt with “Adidas” printed on it. All the clothing had been washed, and at this point it would be hard to isolate blood spots if they had been there. Still, some of the jeans bore dark stains, worth analyzing to check for any vestige of blood.
Dick Reed checked off just a few items listed in the search warrant, but there weren’t many left. Next, they did a grid search of Seward Park, beginning at the spot where Penny DeLeo’s body was found. They failed to turn up any of the items sought. The knife, car keys, and floppy hat were gone, perhaps hidden in the waters of Lake Washington or somewhere in the thick vegetation.
Reed received a call from still another female jogger who had seen a tall black male in the park early on the morning of August 8—just about the time Penny DeLeo would have been jogging.
“He was sitting under a big maple tree,” she said, “and watching joggers on the trail. I was alone, but there were several people running near me. I guess I was lucky.”
“Yes, you probably were,” Reed said, wondering if she really could fathom just how lucky she was.
Clearly, Penny DeLeo had been chosen for attack, possibly because she had the misfortune to be jogging alone and rounded the trail loop at a time when no one else was around.
And possibly for her shiny new car.
Lee DuBois’s only alibi for where he was at the time was Reilly Jones, his cousin from Los Angeles. Jones had already returned to L.A., but the Seattle homicide detectives asked that a Los Angeles Police Department detective interview him.
Reilly Jones’s statement to the California detective filled in many of the blank spots during the three-day period when DuBois allegedly brought down a reign of terror on females in the park.
Reilly said he’d been in Seattle since the middle of July, and had spent a lot of time with his cousin Lee. They’d gone to Seward Park on the afternoon of August 7.
“Lee told me that he would have a car the next day from one of ‘his girls,’ ” Reilly recalled. “I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but he took off about seven p.m. and headed toward the jogging trail. I didn’t feel like going with him, so I went home. He came home at eight and told me again he was going to have a car tomorrow.”
(Janet Carroll, the nurse, was seized on the jogging trail at 7:00 p.m. on August 7, and got away from her attacker.)
Jones said that he had seen his cousin tuck a short-bladed fishing knife in the elastic anklet band of his right sock on either August 6 or 7. “He told me he carried it for protection.”
Reilly Jones said he thought Lee was just blowing smoke about getting a car—he wasn’t even old enough to have a driver’s license. But on August 8, Jones said that Lee wakened him by tapping on his window at 11:00 a.m.
“He was tapping with car keys. There was only one key on the ring.”
DuBois had bragged, “I told you I was going to get a car!”
Lee changed his clothes, and Reilly saw him throw a pair of green corduroy pants into the closet. Then Lee insisted on taking Reilly for a ride in the new shiny-brown Toyota Celica.
“It was hidden down the street so Lee’s mom—‘Dr. Sue’—wouldn’t know about it,” Reilly said. “And he told his little brother who’s eight to keep quiet about it.”
Reilly had his doubts about where the car had come from. As far as he knew, Lee didn’t have any girlfriends, much less one who would let him drive her brand-new car. But he went along. They drove to a drugstore to buy candy, and then cruised aimlessly around the southwest section of Seattle for about an hour.
“We were headed back toward Lee’s house when the car ran out of gas. He told me we were going to have to walk home. I saw him throw the car key into some brush. When I asked him why and told him ‘That dude’s gonna get you for throwing his key away,’ he wasn’t worried at all.
“He just said, ‘No. Sh—he won’t.’ ”
They were miles from Lee’s house, and it took them several hours to walk home. They spent the rest of the day watching TV, and Lee DuBois never mentioned just how he’d gotten the car.
“What was his mood?” the LAPD detective asked. “Did he act different than he usually does?”
“Naw. He was just his usual self.”
“Did he have any scratches on him?”
“I didn’t see any.”
The next day—August 9—Reilly Jones hadn’t seen his cousin at all.
“He was gone at eleven that morning when I woke up. I haven’t seen Lee since we went to bed on the eighth. We were tired from walking miles after the car ran out of gas.”
Was it possib
le that DuBois had seen Penny DeLeo in the park before, knew she ran every morning before 8:00, and had coveted her new car? Even if that was the only motive, it didn’t explain why he had attacked women the day before and the day after her murder.
Although the category wasn’t yet known in 1978, in retrospect it’s clear that Lee DuBois had all the traits of a “spree killer.” “Serial killers” weren’t categorized at the time, either. Until the early eighties, every killer with multiple victims was considered a “mass murderer.”
Spree killers erupt suddenly, striking day after day after day—until they are caught. Often they take suicidal chances. Lee DuBois was captured three days after he began raping and killing, and it was extremely fortunate that he was. He might have run up a toll even more devastating than he already had.
Lee DuBois went to trial twice. His first trial, in February 1979, answered some of the questions about why and how a fifteen-year-old boy could have grown up to be a spree killer.
As his jury listened, transfixed by the perversity and cruelty of Lee’s crimes, the testimony detailed his horrendous early years. He hadn’t had the safe and secure childhood that most people assumed he had. His mother’s first marriage—to his natural father—had been marred and then destroyed by the “outrageous outbursts” of Lee’s father.
The crux of DuBois’s defense plan was that he was mentally ill and unable to differentiate between right and wrong at the time of his crimes. Under Washington State law, this means “unable to perceive the nature and quality of the act.”
The prosecution did not deny that the defendant was clinically mentally ill, but the State contended that he was legally aware of what he was doing as he stabbed Penny DeLeo thirty-one times and assaulted the other two joggers.
Now, his mother dabbed at tears as she painfully recalled her first marriage. She testified that her former husband’s outbursts usually began as he sat in silence at the foot of his bed. Predictably he would get up and begin to beat his head against the wall.
