by Ann Rule
Kiss Me, Kill Me is about homicide cases, and delves deeply into the human psyche. Earlier, I discussed serial killer Harvey Glatman, a man addicted to autoerotic asphyxia. Even though I had been a cop, a counselor in a teenage girls’ training school (“reform school” in the old days) and a crime reporter, I was in my thirties before I had more than a surface knowledge about obsessions like Glatman’s. I covered this Oregon case a year or so later. And I must admit, it shocked me just as much. In a way, I’m relieved that the truly perverted acts of violence I sometimes encounter continue to astound me. If I should ever become blasé about the cases I come across, that would be the time to move on to another genre.
The perpetrator of the crimes in this next case was a man who was much admired, highly educated, and working in a field that helped people. But he was not what he seemed.
Not at all.
The fantasy life of this man exploded one frigid December night into one of the most grotesque and violent homicides I have ever chronicled. I know the Oregon investigators who captured him well, and I can say without reservation that they, too, were shocked.
This is not a Sherlock Holmes mystery because the killer was caught quite soon, identified by a victim who, by all medical probabilities, should have been dead. I’m sure her attacker thought she was dead. Still, teams of detectives from five Oregon law enforcement agencies would spend hundreds of hours after his arrest before they finished tracing the background of this murderer—a background that did, indeed, yield clues to the danger that smoldered within him.
Silverton, Oregon, is a pleasant, friendly town with a population of 7,400 people, located fifteen miles northeast of Salem, the capital city of Oregon. To reach Silverton, one drives along a winding road past farmlands and orchards, across the Little Pudding River and through Silverton’s equally peaceful neighbor, Mount Angel—site of a jubilant Oktoberfest celebration at harvest time. On the surface, Silverton has not changed much in the last fifty years, and, indeed, it doesn’t have a great deal of criminal activity when it’s compared to metropolises like Portland and Seattle. Yet, there have been undercurrents of drug-related crimes that would have seemed impossible for the small towns of the Willamette Valley in earlier days. In 1975, the problems that Chief Cliff Bethscheider dealt with were a world away from those his father encountered in the 1940s and 1950s when the elder Bethscheider served as a lawman in Silverton.
Even so, the events of Tuesday and Wednesday, December 9 and 10, would have seemed unusual to a veteran detective of any police department; fortunately, Chief Bethscheider’s crew, though small, was highly experienced and well trained. Prepared for what they encountered? No. Nor would any big-city police department be prepared; it was just too far from what most of us like to think of as “normal.”
It was shortly after 1:30 A.M. on December 10 when the phone rang in the Silverton Police Department. Ordinarily, the office would have been empty at that time in the morning, with calls being taken by a dispatcher in her own home, but Officer George Holland, a former Green Beret, had stopped in to eat a sandwich after his swing-shift tour of duty and was talking with Officer Frank Wilson before they both headed home. Holland picked up the phone and heard someone speaking so hysterically that it was difficult for him to understand the garbled words. It sounded as if there were a “possible rape” going on at that very moment.
Holland deduced that he was getting this information second- or thirdhand—or maybe even fourthhand. Evidently, the original complainant had no phone and had run to a neighbor, who relayed the call for help through several citizens-band ham radio operators.
He understood that the address given for the attack was in an apartment in the nine hundred block of Reserve Street. Holland and Wilson sprinted from the office and drove quickly to that location. They found a cedar-shake multi-residence building painted a bright blue. It was a quarter to two in the morning when the officers arrived, but they saw the bright red smears of what looked like blood on the front door of the first apartment. There were no sounds at all inside, and they pushed open the unlocked door, allowing them a clear view through the living room into a bedroom. A pair of human legs was visible in the bedroom. Holland walked through the living room, which was dark except for the flickering light of a television set.
The sight that confronted him was more appalling than anything he’d experienced, even during his years as a Green Beret. A naked young woman lay on her back on top of a pile of blankets next to the bed. She had been stabbed so many times that she was literally eviscerated, with her intestines exposed outside her abdomen. Her head had been almost severed by a gaping cut in the right side of her head. While Holland stared down at her body, it seemed to him that someone had “fingerpainted” in the still-wet blood, leaving swirls of scarlet all over what had been a beautiful body.
They wouldn’t need to search for the death weapon; a razor-sharp knife with a tan bone handle, covered with blood, rested only an inch away from the body.
Acting reflexively, Holland bent to check for a wrist pulse and then touched his fingers to the left side of the woman’s throat. He had not expected to find a pulse, and he found none, but the flesh was as warm as if the beautiful dark-haired victim still lived.
Suddenly, he realized there was a faint sound of breathing in the room, and for a moment Holland froze, wondering if the killer was still there in the shadows. Then his eyes fell on a tiny form on the bed. A 2-year-old girl lay there, her pajamas sprinkled with blood. Tentatively, Holland reached for the child, and was relieved to see that she was not injured; she was only asleep. Somehow, she had slept through the savage attack that had occurred only two feet away from her. He wrapped the little one in a blanket and took her, still sleeping, into the next room, where he called Chief Bethscheider and Lieutenant T. J. Woodall. Woodall was the small department’s sole plainclothes investigator, and his fellow officers teased him, calling him “Kojak.”
As Holland and Wilson made an initial attempt to piece together what had happened, a breathless young man ran up. He gasped, “I’ve got a wounded girl at my house. She’s hurt bad!”
Wilson followed him to Ames Street, a block and a half away. The man led him into the kitchen and pointed to another young woman, who lay on the floor, covered with a blanket. She was pale as death itself, but she was alive. Wilson wondered how she could be; she, too, had been cut deeply just beneath her breasts—from one armpit to the other. And then someone using almost surgical precision had sliced her belly open vertically. She had also been eviscerated. But this woman had fought her attacker. She had defense wounds—deep cuts on her forearm, and one of her fingers appeared to be almost severed.
Wilson ran to his squad car and called for an ambulance: “Code Three,” which meant lights and siren. Then he returned to the terribly injured girl and did what he could to staunch the blood, hoping that somehow he could stave off irreversible shock.
The grievously injured girl would not rest, however, until she whispered to Wilson, “Kent Whiteside* did this to me.”
• • •
Chief Bethscheider and Lieutenant Woodall arrived at the apartment where the first victim lay dead. There they talked to a young man who lived in a downstairs unit. He identified the dead girl as Byrle “Fran” Steffen and said the injured girl was his girlfriend, Lee Connors,* who had been staying with Fran because he had had an argument with her. It was just some silly disagreement, he said brokenly. “We would have made up by tomorrow.” He gave his name as Will Grant.*
Asked if he knew anyone named Kent Whiteside, Grant nodded. “He’s an older guy—somewhere in his middle thirties—and he lives over in Mount Angel. He likes to hang out with our crowd, even though he’s a lot older than we are.”
Grant said he thought Whiteside lived in a house with two male roommates.
By two A.M., the Silverton police had informed the Marion County Sheriff’s Office in Salem of the murder-assault. There was no question that they needed assistance in the inv
estigation from the much larger department. Silverton just didn’t have homicides. Detective Woodall also notified the Mount Angel Police Department and asked them to place an immediate stakeout on Whiteside’s home, but he warned them not to attempt an arrest. “We think he’s very dangerous,” he said.
While Lee Connors was rushed to Salem Memorial Hospital, Holland, Wilson, and Deputy David McMullen of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office joined the Mount Angel officers. Quietly, they surrounded the gray two-story shake house where Kent Whiteside lived. Marion County Sheriff Jim Heenan, Chief of Detectives Jim Byrnes, Detective Dave Kominek, and District Attorney Gary Gortmaker were already headed for the crime scene in Silverton, while Marion County detective Mike Wilbur was sent to meet the ambulance bearing 22-year-old Lee Connors.
Wilbur’s assignment was not a pleasant one. In view of Lee Connors’s massive injuries, no one had much hope that she would survive. In order to obtain a “deathbed” statement—similar to an “excited utterance” or a “res gestae” statement in legal lingo—that would hold up in court in any trial of her attacker, Lee had to be told that she was “in imminent danger of dying.” Legally, she had to be aware of her condition. No cop ever wanted to do that. The natural impulse was to say, “You’re going to be okay. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Lee Connors’s reaction was unexpected, but it demonstrated her tremendous will to live. She was angry with Mike Wilbur for even suggesting she wasn’t going to make it. She assured him she wasn’t going to die. He was glad to hear it, and so were the ER doctors who witnessed her reaction. That determination just might save her. She repeated her earlier accusation about Kent Whiteside, saying he had cut her and hurt Fran.
“Did you see the knife?” Wilbur asked.
“I never saw a knife at all,” she gasped. “I didn’t even feel it—it was too quick.”
The Emergency Room nurses and physicians were as jolted by Lee Connors’s condition as her neighbors and the investigators had been. She shouldn’t be alive—but she was. Her pulse was racing at 110 beats a minute and her blood pressure had dropped to ninety over sixty, and it was falling rapidly—not a good sign. Her heart started and stopped erratically, and raced out of control with tachycardia, followed by no discernible beats at all. The doctors immediately did “cut-downs” to get intravenous needles into her veins, which had collapsed as the blood drained from them, and pushed as much blood and plasma as possible into her even before she went into surgery. To their surprise, she was not having difficulty breathing, but she was in deep shock. Fortunately, she was still in her “golden hour,” when she could be brought back from the damage that shock does to the human body.
Mechanically, the admitting physician noted her injuries: a two-inch cut in her throat, a transverse cut through the lower breasts and the anterior chest muscle, a vertical cut from her sternum (breastbone) to her pubic area—so deep that it extended through the subcutaneous tissue and into the rectus muscle. There was also a diagonal slash next to her appendectomy scar. This was probably the most disturbing wound to view because it allowed at least two feet of her bowel to protrude. The defense wounds inflicted to her left forearm were into the muscle, and a tendon was exposed in her left hand. Lee was in “extremely critical” condition. Hours of surgery lay ahead, and even if she survived, there was still the danger of massive infection.
There had been no time as yet to wonder “Why?” or “How?” two pretty young women had been attacked so violently. At least Lee Connors was in skilled hands. Sadly, there was no need to hurry back to the scene of the attack, as Fran Steffen was beyond help. It was far more important to proceed carefully and meticulously in gathering evidence. The scene where Fran’s body lay had been secured with crime scene tape and officers were stationed to guard it from anyone who might contaminate it.
It was oddly silent when police officers from Silverton and Mount Angel and the Marion County Sheriff’s Office surrounded the house where Kent Whiteside lived. Most of Mount Angel’s Christmas lights had been turned off, and a few evergreen wreaths swayed quietly in the wind. It was cold in the predawn December gloom as the officers and detectives were deployed front and back of Whiteside’s house. They had every reason to believe that Whiteside was inside: his car was there, and no one could miss it. It was, as witnesses had described it, a yellow Volkswagen bug, decorated garishly by hand in “John Deere tractor green” with red fenders. It was parked right in front of the house.
A Marion County investigator, his voice magnified twenty times by the loudspeaker attachment on his squad car, ordered everyone inside the house to come out. The waiting officers saw the door open within a moment or two. Two men emerged, their hands over their heads, their faces wearing completely bewildered expressions. They quickly identified themselves as Kent Whiteside’s roommates.
“He’s not here, though,” one of them said.
“Isn’t that his car?” Frank Wilson asked.
“Yeah,” the roommate said, pointing. “But his motorcycle’s gone.”
The investigators searched the house and agreed that the suspect’s roommates were telling the truth. Wherever Whiteside was, he was not inside. One of his roommates said that he had come home about six that evening and taken a brown leather satchel out to his car. Whiteside had been in an exceptionally good mood earlier that evening. “He was almost euphoric. He read a book for a while and then we went to Tiny’s; it’s a bar here in town.
“I asked him for a ride home,” the housemate recalled, “and he answered somewhat oddly—something like ‘Not again!’ like he was mad or something, but he did drive me home. I thought he was going home, too, but he said he was going back to Tiny’s.”
“What time was this?” Wilson asked.
“About 9:30.”
Whiteside had told his roommates earlier in the evening that he’d like to find some “stray ladies.”
Whether he had or not, they didn’t know, but his other housemate said that he’d already gone to bed when Whiteside came running up the stairs shortly after one A.M. “He has to go through my room to get to his, and he was panting hard,” the man recalled. “Five minutes later, he passed through again, wearing different clothes. He seemed like he wanted to talk, but I was half-asleep so he left.”
As the officers impounded the tricolored Volkswagen, they heard the roar of a motorcycle approaching and looked up to see a man who answered Kent Whiteside’s description riding toward them.
Frank Wilson approached him and asked, “Are you Kent Whiteside?”
“Yes, sir, I am,” he replied mildly.
He was searched and handcuffed and put into a squad car. When Wilson and McMullen attempted to question him about the horrifying attack on Fran and Lee, Whiteside looked at the floor, saying only “It was a nightmare.”
None of them could argue with that. They decided that Detective Larry Lord of the sheriff’s office would drive Whiteside to the Marion County Jail in Salem to be booked, while a full crew of investigators returned to Fran Steffen’s apartment.
Looking at Fran’s apartment as it must have been before the carnage began, they could see it was somewhat disordered but that the messiness appeared to be from a casual lifestyle and not from a struggle. It was the blood that was splattered everywhere that made the rooms look like an abattoir. Fran Steffen had lost an incredible amount of blood in the bedroom, and so, of course, had Lee Connors. The living room couch, bookcase, and records were all stained with droplets, now drying to a reddish-brown.
Chief Bethscheider and Detective Woodall from the Silverton Police Department, and the crew from Salem—Sheriff Heenan, Jim Byrnes, Dave Kominek, and D.A. Gary Gortmaker—found that the knife next to Fran Steffen’s body was a hand-ground filleting knife with the brand mark J Marttiini, Finland on it. They also found a man’s green plaid jacket in Fran’s house with items bearing Whiteside’s name in the pockets. A pair of men’s wire-rimmed glasses lay on the floor nearby. The dead woman still clenched strands of long
brown hair in her right hand.
In the predawn hours, Oregon State Police Crime Lab criminalist Corporal Chuck Vaughn and Sergeant William Zeller of the State ID Bureau joined the crew in Silverton, and began processing the murder scene. There was a likelihood that the suspect had been cut, too, so all the blood found would be tested for typing. Jim Byrnes, Vaughn, and Zeller searched Whiteside’s oddly painted Volkswagen for more evidence. Inside, they found a scabbard that fit the Finnish filleting knife exactly and bore the same name, “Marttiini.”
A voluminous photographic record grew from pictures taken by Byrnes, Vaughn, and Lieutenant Woodall. There was a corncob marijuana pipe in the apartment, as well as some butts—“roaches”—of marijuana cigarettes and a number of empty beer bottles. Just outside the front stoop of the unit, they found a copper bracelet, dented, with a carved dragon’s-head design. The amount of marijuana was negligible. They weren’t doing a drug bust, anyway: they were trying to solve a homicide.
As the investigators followed the path of Lee Connors’s incredible flight from the Steffen apartment to the house of the first caller a block and a half away, they found a pair of women’s jeans, soaked with blood, and turned inside out. Lee had worn only a blouse, bra, and underpants when she’d burst into her friend’s home. Evidently, she had shed the jeans as she ran, possibly because they were tripping her. Her complete story would have to wait—if they would ever be able to talk to her.
Dr. W. E. Grodrian, the Oregon State deputy medical examiner who was called out to do a preliminary check of Fran Steffen’s body, suspected that her aorta had been penetrated, in addition to her many other stab wounds. Oddly, there seemed to be no evidence of a sexual attack, save for the fact that she was naked when she was found.
It was now almost four in the morning, and there seemed to be little doubt that Kent Whiteside had killed Fran Steffen and attempted to kill Lee Connors. He’d been photographed, printed, and booked into jail in Salem after receiving treatment for a badly skinned lower leg—probably the result of his falling as he ran from the scene. Lee Connors had defense wounds, however, and she might have been able to fight him long enough for him to incur that injury.
