by Ann Rule
The lack of a definitive decision on the part of either pathologist was a crushing disappointment for Donna’s sister. She had fought so hard to get the exhumation order and the second postmortem examination. It had been agonizing to go through, too—and now it seemed all for nothing.
For D.A. Jeff Sullivan there was still not enough probable cause to issue an arrest warrant charging anyone with murder. For the second time he declined to prosecute.
The world moved on. Donna Howard was dead, and that’s the way it was—to everyone but Donna’s family. Her parents grew older, their will to live weakened by the loss of their beloved daughter. Donna’s father would not live to see the end of the case.
Bobbi Bennett, however, never gave up. She read. She phoned. She wrote letters to anyone who might help her avenge Donna’s death. “Some people might say it took over my life,” she would recall later. “I made up my mind that I was not going to let her go until they did something.”
Over the years Donna’s family would spend thousands of dollars on the case, a case everyone else seemed to consider closed.
The marriage between Sunny and Russ Howard was a bumpy one. Perhaps it was inevitable that it would be. Sunny had fallen in love with Russ because he was fun, and she loved fun. But there was little hilarity once they were married; Sunny was scared and guilty about what she knew, Russ was gone a lot, and he continued to drink a great deal. For all intents and purposes the marriage ended in 1978.
Sunny left Russ and ran off with another man. But Sunny was adept at picking the wrong men. She found herself in an abusive relationship. Periodically things got so bad that Russ looked good, and she would phone him and beg him to come and rescue her. He would pick her up, bring her back, and help her get set up in an apartment or in his house. Until 1979 Sunny and Russ had some manner of a relationship, however tenuous.
Donna Howard had been dead for almost five years, but Sunny’s conscience still bothered her. If her niggling doubts hadn’t gone away by then, she figured they weren’t going to. In early July, 1980, Sunny went to a Yakima County deputy sheriff, an old friend from high school, and asked him a hypothetical question: “If I knew information about somebody that was going to be murdered, and then they were, and somebody told me more things—and I never said anything—would I be in trouble, too?”
Her deputy friend stared at her quizzically for a few moments, and then he assured her that she would not be the focal point of a sheriff’s probe.
Sunny replied that in that case, she had some things to say. However, she told him that if she did get charged with a crime, she was going to deny everything. Her friend took her down to the county detectives, who took a taped statement from her.
Bob Langdale had retired, but Ray Ochs was still in the detective unit, and Jerry Hofsos had moved up from patrol. What Sunny Riley had to tell them was riveting, to say the least.
Sunny began by reviewing late December, 1974. She said Russ Howard had told her that he planned to kill his wife. He had told her he was going to lure Donna out to the barn of their old house on the pretext of making some repairs that had to be done before the new tenants moved in. It would be only natural, he had said, for him to have a hammer with him. Then he planned to strike Donna with the side of his hammer because he thought that would make a wound resembling a horse’s shoe. His alibi would be that he had been in town at the time Donna died. He would go to town right after the crime, and he would make sure people in town remembered him.
On the day Donna died Russ had told Sunny he’d done it—but he said it had been more difficult to kill his wife than he expected. He confided that he’d had to hit Donna in the head three times before she died. The rest of his plan had been carried out just as he had outlined it to Sunny earlier.
The information that Sunny gave might well have been enough to indict Russ Howard for the murder of his wife. There were some problems, though; the things he had told her before marriage would be admissible in a court of law, but the confidences after marriage probably would not be. And then there was the fact that Sunny had gone right ahead and married a man she believed to be a murderer. A jury might wonder about that and find her a less than credible witness.
A polygraph exam administered by an expert from the Washington State Patrol indicated that Sunny Riley was telling the truth.
The Yakima County Prosecutor’s Office continued to mull over whether to charge Russ Howard. So much of the original physical evidence was gone. Donna’s bloodstained clothing, the quilt, the Bekins blanket had all been destroyed. The loafing shed had been repainted, obliterating the blood smears there. No investigator had ever found a hammer or, for that matter, even looked for one.
The railroad tie that Dr. Muzzall believed to be the instrument that made the oval fracture in the victim’s skull was now anchored in cement, part of a fence. No one had ever searched the barn or the house thoroughly for signs of violence; it hadn’t seemed important back in 1975 when the autopsy decreed accidental death.
Now it was too late.
Sunny ran scared. She moved around from place to place, fearful of reprisal from Russ. She moved to California with a new man and waited for word from Yakima authorities. Impatient now, she couldn’t wait for Russ to be arrested. But months passed, and nothing happened—at least nothing she could see.
The case was already more than five years old, and authorities were doing their best to make it as solid as possible before they moved on it. They figured Russ Howard wasn’t going anyplace.
It was 1981. Sunny was worried, and she was drinking. A few more drinks and Sunny was not only worried, she was angry, too. Russ had her furniture. She called him one night and suggested that they get married again. She pointed out that he was going to be charged with murder sooner or later, and if they were married, she couldn’t testify against him. Sunny figured this might make him give back her furniture. After the trial was over they could split up again, she reasoned.
The next day Sunny was sober, and she changed her mind about the plan that had seemed so good the night before. Russ had rejected her proposal anyway. But she had tipped him off that something might be happening that he didn’t know about. Still, he didn’t move from the Yakima area. He didn’t seem the least bit worried.
Russ Howard continued to have bad luck with women in his life. In the early 1980s he was living sporadically with a new woman and working part-time at a local tavern. One afternoon the couple came home together and talked for a few moments with Russ’s daughters and a friend of theirs who was visiting.
Russ left a little while later to go to work at the tavern, and his girlfriend went upstairs, apparently to take a nap.
A few minutes later the three teenagers heard a loud noise upstairs. They went up to investigate and found the woman dead on the bed, shot in the stomach. She clutched a gun in her hand.
The nearly hysterical girls called Russ at work, and he rushed home, managing to arrive even before the police did. When the police got there they found Russ standing next to the dead woman, the gun in his hand.
The bartender at the tavern told investigators that Russ had been there when the phone call came in from his daughters. His most recent girlfriend’s death was ruled a suicide.
This was the situation when two of the Washington State justice system’s most prominent figures entered the case. A special investigative unit of the State Attorney General’s Office was mandated by a new law in 1981 to conduct independent inquiries into criminal cases around the state, to offer assistance to counties, and indeed to prosecute in some instances. (At the request or with the concurrence of the governor or the county prosecutor.) It was to be basically a two-man operation, but those two men were quite probably the equal of a half-dozen less-skilled investigators and prosecutors. Greg Canova would head the unit as senior assistant state attorney general, and his sole investigator would be Bob Keppel, late of the King County Police’s Major Crimes Unit.
Greg Canova worked as a deputy prosecuto
r in the King County Prosecutor’s Office from 1974 to 1981, ending up as the senior deputy criminal prosecutor in that office. Canova was brilliant, honest, and persistent. He rarely lost a case, and he garnered respect from both conservative and liberal factions. Greg Canova had helped draft Washington State’s new capital punishment law. Tall and handsome, with a luxuriant mustache, a quick legal mind, and a deep, confident voice that served him well in the courtroom, Canova had been so successful a prosecutor that he was already something of a legend at thirty-five. Canova candidly attributed some of his wins to luck. “Luck plays a part. In the past I’ve won some cases I probably should have lost and lost some I figured to win. You can never be sure with juries.
“I always go in thinking I can win. If you don’t think you can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, then you shouldn’t ever file a case.”
The other half of the new team—Bob Keppel, Canova’s investigator—is one of the smartest detectives this reporter ever knew, respected all over America for his intellectual approach to investigation. A former track star, Bob Keppel was a young homicide detective in the King County Police Department with only one case under his belt when he found himself plunged into one of the biggest cases of his—or any other homicide detective’s—career: the “Ted Murders” that began in the Northwest in 1974 and ended in Florida in 1978.
(“Ted” turned out to be Ted Bundy, who died in the electric chair in Starke, Florida, on January 24, 1989. Just a day before he died, Bundy, who was suspected of murdering anywhere from twenty-five to three hundred young women all over America, confessed some of those murders to Bob Keppel. He viewed Keppel as his intellectual equal, and the two had jousted many times. Indeed, many experts suspect that Bundy’s offer to “advise” Bob Keppel and several F.B.I. special agents on how to second-guess serial killers was the basis for Silence of the Lambs. Keppel let Bundy think he was a respected advisor—just to keep dialogue open between them.
In 1975, using what now seems to be an archaic computer system, Keppel narrowed a field of 3,500 suspects in the “Ted Murders” to only five, and Ted Bundy was one of those five. Keppel’s methods were right on target when Bundy was arrested for similar crimes against pretty dark-haired women in the Salt Lake City area. The rest is, of course, criminal history.)
With the expertise he gained in being one of the lead detectives in the “Ted Task Force,” Bob Keppel has been called upon by probers in dozens of serial murder investigations in this country. When Canova recruited Keppel away from the King County police, he knew what he was doing. Even so, he had to lend Bob Keppel back to the Green River Task Force for two years.
Greg Canova and Bob Keppel were just what Donna Howard’s family had needed for a long, long time; they had become disheartened by years of butting their heads into bureaucratic brick walls. Bobbi Bennett would not give up until someone was convicted for what she believed to be Donna’s murder.
Bobbi carried her campaign to reopen the investigation into Donna’s death to the governor’s office, and her arguments were cogent and persuasive. Then-Governor John Spellman asked the Attorney General’s Office (specifically Canova’s unit) to look into the Howard investigation in late 1981.
At that time it was a moot point. Canova had no investigators. In March, 1982, Bob Keppel came aboard, and the probe began in earnest. Keppel would practically wear a groove in the I-90 Freeway across the mountains to Yakima, interviewing and re-interviewing. He talked to the original detectives, and to Ray Ochs and Jerry Hofsos, who were more than eager to continue the probe. He questioned the paramedic who had been at the scene of Donna’s death. He found neighbors and hardware store employees, and perhaps most important, Keppel questioned Sunny Riley.
Meticulously Bob Keppel reconstructed a case that was already seven years old and seemed to be as dead as the victim. In truth, it was about to have a whole new life.
The problem, Greg Canova felt, had begun with the first autopsy. The report was only one page long, and that page stated that the wrong hand bore the defense bruising. Moreover, it had not been a complete autopsy because her death was deemed accidental. The investigating stopped, any physical evidence was tainted or obliterated, the body was buried, and the case collapsed like a straw fence in a windstorm.
What Greg Canova and Bob Keppel did have was a witness who had passed the lie detector test with no signs whatsoever of deception. Sunny Riley had come forward even though she was scared to death of being implicated. She was a woman whose lifestyle had changed from hedonistic to responsible. Sunny knew she would probably face some uncomfortable questions from Russ Howard’s attorneys—if this case ever got as far as a courtroom—but she was prepared to answer them.
Bob Keppel’s efforts to talk with Russ Howard himself were met with scorn. “I was amused,” Howard said later. “I never dreamed it would get this far, that anybody would take Sunny seriously.”
Howard confided to reporters that he felt he had antagonized Greg Canova and Bob Keppel by “laughing at them.”
Not so. He only intrigued them more.
The physical evidence came down to a few precious items that remained. There were the pictures taken by investigating officers that icy morning of January 10,1975. Blow-ups of the photographs and the recall of the Yakima deputies who were there indicated that there had been absolutely no hair, blood, or human tissue on the sharp end of the railroad tie. Some experts felt that since the ovoid fracture was a depressed fracture, the instrument causing it would have pierced the brain itself, however briefly, and probably come away with blood and tissue residue, and probably some hairs from the victim’s head.
Beyond that, Dr. Muzzall’s re-creation had Donna Howard kneeling to clean off her horse’s hoof. If that was true, why didn’t the pictures show dirt or snow on the knees of her jeans? In the photographs the knee portion of her jeans was clean.
Greg Canova and Bob Keppel had a picture in their minds now of how and why the murder had occurred. Russ Howard had wanted out of his marriage and had wanted to keep his children and his financial assets. So, as he had told Sunny, he had, indeed, managed to get Donna out to the loafing shed on some ruse. There he had struck his wife once with the flat of the hammer, expecting her to go down. But Donna had fought him, fending off the hammer with her right hand, protecting her head. The force of the hammer’s blows against the webbing between her thumb and forefinger had been so strong that it was not only bruised, but the actual weave of her glove was imprinted on her flesh. Twice more Russ had crashed the hammer against Donna’s head.
Then he would have dragged her body along the frozen ground on the Bekins blanket, arranging the corpse in the loafing shed where the two horses were. If Donna Howard had been kicked and simply fallen back, her shirt and jeans would not have been pulled up as they were in the pictures. That rumpling was exactly what would happen if someone had pulled her by her feet.
Donna’s body was warm when the sheriff’s men and the paramedic arrived, covered tenderly with a quilt. Russ had probably done that deliberately—to keep her warm while he was in town creating his alibi. Either that, or he had gone to town first and returned to carry out the rest of his plan.
The problem for Greg Canova and Bob Keppel in 1982 was how they were going to prove their theory of what happened in 1975 to a jury’s satisfaction.
The main piece of physical evidence was Donna Howard’s skull. Cleaned and dry and reconstructed, it would be examined now by some of the most expert forensic pathologists in the country.
Dr. Donald Reay, chief of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, examined the skull in July, 1982, and agreed that the damage did not seem to be from a horse’s hoof. The back of the skull, maybe—it had been shattered in nineteen pieces, and all manner of force could have done that. However, the much smaller ovoid fracture on the top right side of the skull was very unusual. An oval piece of bone had been broken clean through and forced through the skull against where the brain had been.
The skull
was sent next to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was examined by a chief forensic anthropologist. He thought that the top single fracture looked as if it had been caused by a hammer. However, he said, “There’s someone who knows a lot more about this kind of injury than even I do—and that’s Clyde Snow.”
Clyde Collins Snow, Ph.D., forensic anthropology consultant and something of a legend. Big, gray-haired, and deceptively casual, Snow lives in Norman, Oklahoma, but he is rarely there. He may be in South America working over skeletons or in the Philippines reconstructing skulls of massacre victims. He is a witty and jovial man whose manner belies the grimmer aspects of his profession. Snow can tell all manner of things from a skull.
Dr. Snow is not averse to checking out his findings with other experts, and in this case Snow showed Donna Howard’s skull to Dr. Bob Kirschner of the Cook County (Chicago) Medical Examiner’s Office, to Kirschner’s associates, and to Dr. Fred Jordan of the Oklahoma State Medical Examiner’s Office. They all agreed with Snow’s conclusion that the small oval fracture had been caused by a hammer. Kirschner particularly pointed out that he felt the wood from the railroad tie would have left splinters in the wound, and the wound would have left tissue on the railroad tie.
When Clyde Snow reported his initial findings to Bob Keppel he commented, “This case shines like a herring left too long in the hot sun.” That was Clyde Snow’s way of saying things were not as they had been reported to be.
After a meticulous examination of Donna Howard’s skull Dr. Snow sent a letter to Bob Keppel and Greg Canova. Donna Howard had not had a thin skull, easily shattered. Rather his exam had shown it to be slightly thicker than normal.
Snow noted, too, that the wood of the railroad tie would have been far too soft to have done the damage found in the ovoid fracture. “The fracture was caused by an object of high density with a flat face and a circular upper margin.”
