Blood Frenzy

by Robert Scott

  “I photographed the residence and then the vehicles. In the rear of Robin’s Ford Explorer, there was a new water heater in a cardboard container. The heater was along the driver’s side and clean. David’s Oldsmobile wasn’t nearly as clean. On the dashboard of his car, I found a receipt for the ferry ride he said he took to Tacoma. After several days we arranged for our search-and-rescue group to search the woods surrounding the residence. While we were involved with the search, a father and son stopped our vehicle near a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Kalaloch. They had seen a sleeping bag on the slope below the road. The search team investigated and found a woman’s body inside.

  “The Clallam County Sheriff’s Office was called, and an autopsy confirmed that it was the body of Robin Rose. She had been shot twice in the head with a twenty-two-caliber weapon. We served a search warrant on Robin’s residence and both vehicles. Luminol was sprayed in the bedroom, and blood showed up that had been wiped. We found the same thing in Robin’s Ford Explorer. There was an outline of blood where the water heater had been sitting.

  “A service sticker on the driver’s door of the Ford Explorer indicated that it had an oil change at a Jiffy Lube in Seattle. The employees recalled that David Coleman had the vehicle serviced and he had vacuumed it out, but he didn’t want them to help. I found that Robin had purchased the twenty-two rifle at a sporting goods store in Arcata. The owner of that store knew Robin, and knew she had gone to a friend’s residence at one time to test-fire the rifle. I went to that location and spent hours searching behind the residence where the owner indicated that Robin had fired her weapon. I found seven .22 casings that were later matched to the one Coleman’s mother found. The rifle was never found, nor were Robin’s purse or fanny pack. David Coleman was arrested for her murder.

  “We think that Robin was getting tired of Coleman. She had received eighty-six thousand dollars in a settlement after being injured at a mill where she worked near Arcata. She probably got tired of him living off of her money. She may have tried to end the relationship, got into a fight in the yard, and her sweatpants got muddy there. It appeared that she had been sitting on the edge of her bed, changing her sweatpants, when Coleman grabbed the rifle and shot her twice. He then put her body in her sleeping bag, loaded it in the Explorer, and drove up to Kalaloch. He attempted to throw the sleeping bag with Robin’s body into the Pacific Ocean, but it got hung up halfway down the cliff. Either he didn’t see that, or he was afraid to go down there and possibly be seen by someone as he pushed it into the ocean. He then probably drove to Tacoma, caught the ferry and visited some friends, to try and set up an alibi. He also went to the Jiffy Lube in Seattle and tried to clean up the Ford Explorer. He called the answering machine twice, but never left a message, knowing that Robin would never hear it.

  “David Coleman was tried and convicted for the murder of Robin Rose. As he was being led from the courtroom after sentencing, he turned and threatened to get me when he got out. He never got the chance, however. He was diagnosed with cancer and died in prison.”

  All of the detective work on the Robin Rose case and the trial interrupted whatever efforts could still be made on Elaine McCollum’s case. As Lane Youmans noted later, “After a year or so, the steam began to run out of the Elaine McCollum investigation. Other murders occurred, other crimes took precedence, and the Elaine McCollum murder was pushed to the back burner. Detective Stocks was promoted to patrol sergeant and Detective Smythe returned to the drug task force. In 1993, I was assigned to the drug task force for a year and a half. By the time I returned to my regular investigation duties, the three-ring binder containing the McCollum homicide investigation was sitting on a bookshelf in the undersheriff’s office. I took Elaine McCollum’s driver’s license and taped it to the wall by my desk. The case was inactive, but not forgotten.”

  Not helping matters in any further progress in Elaine McCollum’s murder was a new grisly murder case only months after Elaine’s. Once again there was a blood frenzy involved, and all the detectives, including Lane, who had spent so many hours on Elaine’s case, were soon collecting evidence at a blood-soaked crime scene. Even though this new murder was eventually deemed not to be connected to the murder of Elaine McCollum, it helped Lane and the other detectives hone their forensic skills and ability to gather evidence.

  As it turned out, they were going to need every bit of those skills concerning McCollum. It wouldn’t be long before another murder on the very same Weyco Haul Road occurred. And that murder was going to have a direct link to McCollum’s murder. The detectives were going to need every bit of experience they could get in solving that murder, since the County Prosecutor wanted much more than just circumstantial evidence in bringing it to trial. Before all was said and done, the detectives, including Lane, would gather hundreds of bits of evidence and amass thousands of pages of documents. It would be a long, tiring, very tough road. And that road ran right through a new murder case that popped up near the Grays Harbor resort community of Ocean Shores.

  6

  VIRGINIA

  Whatever time and energy GHSO detectives could spend on Elaine McCollum’s case came to a screeching halt on August 26, 1991. On that day the detectives had another brutal murder on their hands in the county. It all began when Detective Gary Parfitt, who had collected evidence at the McCollum murder scene, went out to Ocean Shores, a new and expanding resort community on the Pacific Ocean. Parfitt sat down with a teenager named Becky, who had an incredible story to tell. A friend of hers named Derek, who had recently dropped by the gift shop that Becky’s parents owned, showed her some Polaroid photos he’d just taken with some friends of his. In the photos were depictions of Derek, Cyndi and Donna. The photos had been taken at Virginia “Ginny” Barsic’s apartment in nearby Hogan’s Corner.

  Then, almost as an afterthought, Derek told Becky, “You know the lady that lives at the apartment in Hogan’s Corner?”

  Becky said she knew the lady was named Ginny.

  Derek added, “We killed her.” And then he indicated that the others in the Polaroid shots had helped in killing the woman, or at least had viewed the woman’s body after she was dead.

  Becky told Detective Parfitt, “I kind of grinned, and said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ But he replied, ‘You don’t believe me? We were there, and Ginny started freaking out, and the next thing I know, she was dead.’”

  Not knowing if this was true or not, Parfitt called for backup before heading to Virginia Barsic’s apartment in Hogan’s Corner. Soon his backup was coming from Montesano, and it included Detectives Bill Stocks, Doug Smythe, S. C. Larson and Lane Youmans.

  Stocks was the first detective on the scene, and since he saw no police activity around Ginny Barsic’s apartment, he decided to drive five more minutes into Ocean Shores. While Detective Parfitt was still there, Stocks spoke with Becky and also believed that she might be telling the truth. The young woman was composed, straightforward and didn’t seem to be making this up.

  By the time Detective Stocks reached Ginny’s apartment, Detective Larson was just driving up as well. The two detectives started walking toward the building, which contained an upstairs and downstairs apartment, and as they did so, they noticed reddish brown drag marks on the cement sidewalk and on the grass. The detectives peered through the windows of the downstairs apartment and saw more reddish brown marks on the floor of the kitchen. From his vantage point Stocks could see a piece of paper on the kitchen table. On the paper was written Fuck you!

  Fairly certain they were looking at a crime scene, and possibly a murder scene, Stocks went to a nearby phone booth (cell phones were a new item around that time), and Larson followed some more reddish brown drag marks over the grass and toward a lot behind the local VFW hall. As Stocks spoke into the phone to chief criminal investigator Mike Whelan, Larson continued following the reddish brown marks to an area covered with a small amount of dirt. It was apparent right away that this was the ending spot for the reddish brown marks
.

  Sticking out of a mound of freshly dug dirt was a female’s arm, part of a leg and her face. The woman had curly brown hair and she’d been savagely beaten around the face. One of her eyes had been pierced by a sharp instrument. From the description he already had, Detective Larson was pretty sure this was Virginia Barsic.

  It started to rain hard, and Larson placed a tarp over the body of the woman. Detective Stocks advised Detective Smythe, who was on his way to the scene, “Get on your grubbies, Doug. It’s raining and it’s a muddy mess around here.”

  Lane Youmans arrived shortly after the others and was soon put in charge of the scene. He recalled later, “When I arrived and did my initial assessment, it was getting dark and the clouds were rolling in. I decided that we would leave Virginia where she was until morning, and we covered up the dirt pile and all of the footprints and drag marks with plastic. The footsteps were perfect, and I planned on casting many of them the next morning. I stayed in my vehicle parked in the driveway to protect the scene. My county vehicle was a dark blue Ford Aerostar, nicknamed the war wagon, because I kept everything in there to process any type of crime scene. I also kept a sleeping bag and enough food and water to last me five days.”

  Meanwhile, Stocks and Parfitt went to Ocean Shores and began picking up more stories about how Ginny Barsic had invited some local teenagers over to her apartment because she was lonely. Her husband was a fisherman out in the Pacific, and he was gone for months at a time. The stories revolved around how six teenagers had gone to Ginny’s place and started drinking alcohol. After a while things got out of hand, and Ginny asked them to leave. Instead, Ray Baca, one of the teenagers, decided to kill her, mainly to see what it was actually like to kill a person. Just exactly what he had done would come to light soon enough once the detectives began collecting all the evidence. And the most important portions of that would come from Ray Baca himself.

  Ginny Barsic and the footprints might have been covered up with plastic tarps, but not even Lane, who had been to plenty of crime scenes over the years, expected what happened next. He remembered, “As night came on, the skies opened up. It rained so hard that I was hardly able to sleep with the rain pounding on the roof of the war wagon, directly over my head. When dawn broke, I went to the field to check the footprints. It had rained so hard that all of the impressions were flattened out and now useless. I’d seen rain before on crime scenes, but nothing like this. To say I wasn’t happy doesn’t begin to describe how I felt. But I was about to get lucky. The idiots who had done this murder had hardly cleaned up at all in the house where it occurred.”

  In the morning hours of August 27, the detectives entered the apartment and took photographs of blood in the kitchen and hallway. They also took swabs of blood for evidence. In the hallway there were several holes punched into the Sheetrock of the walls, and spatters of blood surrounded the holes. There were what appeared to be knife stabs in the bathroom walls, with blood surrounding the stab marks. There were even several bloody shoe prints on the floors of the hallway and kitchen area. All of this pointed to a very violent murder within Virginia Barsic’s residence.

  Lane Youmans recalled of the crime scene in the apartment: “I had total control over this crime scene. In the past there would be defense attorneys who asked during a trial, ‘Who was in charge of the crime scene?’ He would get answers such as ‘the sheriff, Detective so-and-so, Sergeant so-and-so.’ It might be three or four different people who had been in charge at one time or another, during one crime scene investigation. That wasn’t going to happen this time.

  “When I first went in, I just stood at the entryway and stared at the scene. I didn’t do any crime scene tech work at all. I spent about ten to fifteen minutes taking in all I could, putting a game plan together. Then I walked to every pertinent location and took photographs of everything before anything was touched. I dusted the hallway and got shoe prints all up and down the hallway. This was fortunate, since the footprints outside had been ruined by the downpour.

  “There was blood everywhere. There had been some attempts at cleaning up the scene, but it was poorly done. A person had even taken a shower afterward in the apartment to try and wash blood off their body. An individual had stuffed his bloody underwear in the toilet tank. It was a very shoddy attempt at a cover-up.”

  In late morning Detectives Stocks and Smythe walked over one more time to where Virginia Barsic’s body lay. As they did so, the coroner, a medical examiner (ME) tech and a vehicle from Coleman’s Mortuary arrived. The coroner and detectives all observed multiple stab wounds to Ginny’s neck region, breasts and torso. These wounds obviously corresponded to all the blood found in her apartment. Finally Ginny’s body was placed into a body bag and was taken away to a mortuary.

  Because of all the stories coming out of Ocean Shores, especially the one from Becky, a statewide alert went out for the six teenagers suspected of murdering Virginia Barsic. These six teenagers were to some degree responsible, and none of them were criminal masterminds. The oldest, Marilyn, had just turned twenty, and the youngest two, Cyndi and Donna, were only fourteen. Instead of heading out of state as soon as possible, most of them hung around the immediate area after the murder. Ray even cooked up a crazy scheme to go back to Hogan’s Corner, unearth Ginny’s body, drag it into her apartment, then burn the whole place down. This scheme never got off the ground. In fact, Ray, Cyndi and Donna were wandering around the streets of Aberdeen after the murder. They were walking down Wishkah Street when an Aberdeen police officer happened to drive by. This officer had a description of the teenagers connected to the Hogan’s Corner murder, and this trio looked like some of them.

  The officer pulled over at 11:05 A.M. on August 2 and questioned the trio. Ray and Cyndi tried giving fake names, but Donna gave her real name. The officer asked them to come down to the Aberdeen police headquarters and all three complied without making a fuss. Soon they were being questioned and pointing fingers at each other as to what had happened in Ginny’s apartment.

  Even though Derek and Marilyn made it a little farther away to Olympia, it wasn’t long before they were picked up as well.

  Ray was unexpectedly cooperative with the police, even though he was the most involved in the murder. He willingly went with detectives back to Ginny’s apartment and began telling them and showing them how things had gone down. Right in front of Detectives Lane Youmans and Doug Smythe, Ray said that there had been an argument with Ginny, and she’d locked herself in her bathroom. Ray said he was able to talk her out into the hallway and reached out toward her as if he were going to give her a hug. She went to hug him, and he grabbed her and threw her on her back on the hallway floor. Ray was handed a pillow by Derek and started trying to suffocate Ginny. But this wasn’t working, so Ray jabbed two of his fingers into Ginny’s right eye socket clear down to the second knuckle. Then he gave her a choke hold he had learned in karate lessons.

  Thinking she was dead, Ray began to walk away. Derek spoke up and said, “Hey, she’s still moving.” Ray went back and did two or three karate twists on her neck, in essence to break her neck. But that didn’t work, either. So Ray grabbed a screwdriver and jabbed it into Virginia’s eye clear down to the handle of the screwdriver.

  By all reasoning, Ginny should have been dead at that point. But she wasn’t. In a frenzy Ray went to the kitchen, grabbed a butcher knife and began stabbing Ginny in the face, the chest and in her back. He stabbed her so many times that he, the floor and the wall were spattered in blood. Finally, after an absolute butchery, Virginia Barsic was dead.

  Ray and Derek grabbed ahold of her body and dragged it out of the apartment, across the sidewalk and lawn, to a dirt mound behind the VFW building. They covered the body with some dirt, but it was a sloppy job at best, because it was so dark outside at the time. All during his recitation Ray seemed almost proud of what he had done. He showed no signs of remorse.

  After all six teenagers were in custody, it was never a matter of proving they
had been at Virginia Barsic’s apartment when she was murdered; rather, it was of determining the amount of responsibility for each individual. Ray, Derek, John and Marilyn were held in the GHSO Jail, while the two fourteen-year-old girls were held in the Juvenile Detention Center. Both Ray and Derek were eventually charged with first-degree murder, while the others got lesser charges of accessory to murder.

  An obituary in the Aberdeen Daily World stated that Virginia had been born in Bremerton, Washington, in April 1941, raised in Ketchi-kan, Alaska, and met and married Gregory Barsic in San Diego in 1987. Virginia had won several poetry awards, including the Golden Poet Award.

  For the next several weeks the Daily World ran stories about Virginia Barsic, Ray Baca and the others involved. The region was shocked by the brutality and senselessness of the crime.

  When the trial for the chief instigator, Ray Baca, occurred at the Grays Harbor County Courthouse in Montesano, David Foscue was the judge, Baca’s defense attorney was Jim Heard, and Steward Menefee was the main prosecutor. In years to come, Menefee would play a very important role in David Gerard’s life.

  When put on the stand, all the teenagers gave the same general story line that Ray Baca had told investigators about how the murder had occurred. The most chilling testimony of all came from Ray Baca, who seemed almost detached from what he was telling. He spoke of trying to smother Virginia with a pillow, trying to break her neck, gouging her eyes with his fingers, stabbing her with a screwdriver and finally finishing her off with a knife. Part of the testimony left the court observers gasping. Ray Baca spoke of drinking some of Virginia Barsic’s blood and painting a design on his chest with her blood.