by Robert Scott
It surprised Lane to learn that Gerard had been a suspect in a 1997 rape case in Grays Harbor County. Lane had been working on other cases at the time, and the name David Gerard didn’t mean anything to him then, other than a connection to Patty Rodriguez and a house fire that had been ruled as accidental. A woman reported that she had been raped on a logging road outside the small town of McCleary in the eastern part of the county. Detective Ed McGowan was the on-call detective then, and he responded to the hospital to contact the victim. McGowan learned that the victim, Julie, had been drinking at a tavern in Elma, and at the time she carried a fanny pack with a .38 revolver inside for protection.
Having a revolver didn’t help Julie much when she started drinking on the evening in question. A man sat down next to her at the bar and struck up a conversation with her. At some point she must have either talked about or shown the man the revolver in her fanny pack, although she didn’t recall this later. Apparently the man conveyed this information to the bartender about the revolver in Julie’s fanny pack, and the bartender told her she had to leave the tavern. Julie began staggering toward the door, angry and upset that her night of drinking had been cut short. The man sitting next to her got up and helped her to the door. What was odd was that Julie had not drunk that much alcohol to make her so woozy and unstable.
Julie didn’t get far, but, rather, fell down near the doorway just as an Elma police officer arrived. The officer removed the revolver from Julie’s fanny pack and called for an ambulance. When the ambulance arrived, Julie was transported to Mark Reed Hospital in McCleary, about ten miles away. The man who had helped Julie to the doorway followed the ambulance to the hospital.
At the emergency room Julie was combative and uncooperative with the hospital staff, and they released her to the custody of the man who had followed her to the hospital. It was at that point that things went from bad to worse for Julie. She was still fairly intoxicated, but she recalled being driven by the man for several miles into some dark woods. The vehicle stopped, and Julie tried opening the door, but it wouldn’t open. She then rolled down a window and pulled the outside door handle. Once the door opened, she staggered out into the inky darkness. Julie felt her way to the back of the car, where the man was standing.
Without saying a word to her, the man suddenly pushed her down onto the vehicle’s trunk. He savagely pulled her pants down while holding her body against the trunk lid. He then entered her from behind. She wasn’t sure how long the rape lasted, but when the man was done, he pushed her off the trunk lid and onto the gravel road. He told her if she ever told anyone about this, he would find her and kill her. Then he climbed back into his car and drove away, leaving her lying in the gravel road, alone in the cold, dark woods.
Julie was found the next morning, lying naked and still intoxicated, in a fetal position, where she had been pushed to the ground. Taken by ambulance once again to Mark Reed Hospital, deputies returned to the scene where she had been discovered and found her jacket, jean shorts, some keys and change lying on the ground. It was hard to tell if these latter items were connected to the crime or not. Some locals used the spot to dump their unwanted garbage and other items.
It was after this second trip to the hospital that Detective McGowan contacted Julie and interviewed her. McGowan also obtained copies of the medical forms from Julie’s first trip to the hospital. At the bottom of a release form was the signature of the man who had accompanied Julie to the hospital from the tavern. The signature was that of a man named David Gerard.
After reading that, Detective McGowan discovered that David Gerard had been booked into the county jail on a previous occasion, and McGowan obtained a mug shot of Gerard. McGowan then put together a photo array of six mug shots of different individuals, one of them being Gerard, and showed the array to Julie. Within seconds Julie pointed to the fourth photo and said that he was the man who sat next to her at the tavern. The fourth photo was David Gerard.
Detective McGowan had a female police officer take photographs of the bruises, cuts and abrasions on Julie’s arms, thighs, shoulders, buttocks and back. While none were serious, it was obvious from them that she had been manhandled pretty roughly. When the photos were taken, a scale was placed next to the bruise or cut to show how large they were.
Detective McGowan went to Merino’s Seafood restaurant in the town of Westport, where David Gerard was working at the time, and contacted him there. Gerard admitted that he’d been at the bar in Mary’s Kitchen on a previous night and met a woman there who had been drunk. In fact, he said he’d met her once before at Sidney’s Lounge in Aberdeen. Gerard admitted he helped the woman to the door at a tavern and followed her to Mark Reed Hospital. Gerard spoke of Julie trying to assault the staff, and he had told the staff he would drive Julie home. He said they drove a few blocks to a downtown park, where he got out of the car to use a public restroom. According to Gerard, Julie also got out and started walking toward the women’s restroom there.
Gerard said, as he was going into the men’s room, he noticed a brown van parked nearby that had several Hispanic men inside it. When he was done urinating, Gerard added that the van was gone, the Hispanic men were gone, and so was Julie. He assumed at that point she had left with them. He went home to Aberdeen, got a few hours’ sleep, then went to work at Merino’s Seafood restaurant.
At that point Gerard added one more bit of unexpected information. He said he wouldn’t have raped Julie because he had a rash on his penis and it made sex painful. He even said he’d be willing to take a polygraph test to prove his innocence.
Lane said later, “Detective McGowan was a good interviewer, since he handled most of the sex abuse cases that came in. But he didn’t examine Gerard’s vehicle. McGowan didn’t realize that by dusting the trunk lid of Gerard’s car, he could have confirmed Julie’s story by finding her handprints on it, as she was pressed down on it. An exam of the car would have also confirmed that the inside door handle on the passenger side didn’t work.”
Detective McGowan later found out that the doors to the restrooms at the park, where Gerard claimed he and Julie had gone, were locked by the McCleary Police Department every night at ten. The doors had been locked several hours before Gerard said that he and Julie used them. After getting this information, Detective McGowan tried to contact David Gerard once again, only to discover that Gerard had quit his job at Merino’s Seafood shortly after being questioned and hadn’t even gone back there to pick up his final paycheck. Julie’s rape kit was sent to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, but no semen was found. After that, the investigation stalled.
On October 15, 1999, Lane Youmans contacted Julie, and she still remembered some details about the night she was raped. Lane asked her if she had met David Gerard before that night at Sidney’s in Aberdeen. Julie responded that she was a member of a pool-playing team, and she shot pool at various taverns around the area, but never at Sidney’s. She had once been to an office party there, but she did not believe she had met Gerard at the time.
One thing had bothered Lane for a long time—he noticed by looking at old files that Julie’s panties had never been collected for the rape kit. He said later, “They weren’t in the rape kit and weren’t found on the road. Rape kits have a bag marked ‘Undergarments,’ and the bag in Julie’s case was empty. I felt uncomfortable asking a woman such personal questions like that, but I asked, anyway, knowing it might be important. She told me she didn’t wear panties, and that’s why none had been collected.”
Lane was also troubled by one other thing. When he had looked at the photos taken of Julie after she reported the incident, he noticed that even though they had scale markings as to size, there were none to indicate how far up the body the cuts and bruises began. This could have been helpful to place them in relation to Gerard’s vehicle trunk and bumper.
Lane now took some more photos of Julie as she stood next to a large measuring stick. Even though the bruises were long gone, and she was now fully clot
hed, Lane could estimate where some of the bruises had occurred in relation to the height of the vehicle’s bumper and trunk lid. It was a long shot he would ever find that vehicle again, since he already knew that Gerard had sold it long ago. The current owner of the Chevrolet sedan had moved and the license had expired, but there was no indication from the licensing bureau in Olympia that the vehicle had ever been destroyed. Finding it would be like finding a needle in a haystack, but Lane was determined to try.
Lane didn’t tell Julie all he knew about Gerard up to that point, except to say that he was now in prison for trying to kill his girlfriend. Lane added that they might proceed with charges about David Gerard raping Julie in 1997. As Lane noted later, “I didn’t want to freak her out. I wanted to protect her for as long as possible from knowing she must have been one of Gerard’s few living victims. I knew that the only thing that had saved her that night was her highly intoxicated state. She was too drunk to put up much of a fight. I guessed that normally she was the kind of woman who would have put up a fight. Fighting off Gerard’s advances would have just pissed him off, and most women who did that didn’t live very long. Julie would have to know eventually, but for now I decided to keep it a secret.”
And Lane began to wonder if Julie had been drunk at all when she staggered toward the door of the tavern. Lane noted that Rohypnol, the date rape drug, was odorless and colorless. Gerard could have easily slipped it into Julie’s drink when she wasn’t looking. In the past she had never become so “intoxicated” on so few drinks. That night she displayed all the symptoms of someone who had been given Rohypnol.
One reason for keeping all of this a secret was that Lane Youmans was sure by now that David Gerard had been the one who had killed Carol Leighton, and maybe Elaine McCollum as well. He wanted to keep those ideas in his back pocket for now, not tipping off Gerard or his defense lawyer until things were further along in the investigation. Lane believed that if Gerard knew he was a suspect in Carol or Elaine’s murder, he would begin concocting an alibi. An alibi more airtight than the one he had tried to concoct about Frankie Cochran and his supposed drive around the Loop when she was attacked. The detectives needed the element of surprise when they confronted Gerard with these new allegations. And they needed more evidence. One thing Lane had learned about Gerard so far was that once he concocted a story, he stuck with it, no matter what. He couldn’t be bulldozed or frightened into confessing to things he had done.
Since the cases David Gerard might have been involved in now included the rape of Julie and the murders of Carol Leighton and Elaine McCollum, Lane hauled all the evidence boxes that had been in storage to an empty room on the old jail’s second floor. This area had once been used as a records area until a new building was built. With the help of evidence custodian Bill Pelesky, Lane moved all of the evidence of these three cases to the former archives room. Lane made separate piles of material along one wall, one for each case, and then signed the evidence transfer sheets for all of the items after he and Pelesky inventoried everything to make sure all the items were there. Lane placed a padlock on the front door, so that he would be the only one to enter the room. And then he placed a sign-in sheet near the door, which he wrote upon every time he entered the room, stating date and time.
To some of the detectives at GHSO it became sort of an in joke: “Lane Youmans, the one-man David Gerard Task Force.” They gave him good-natured kidding about it and even took up some of the slack when Lane was working on aspects of the different cases. Lane mostly worked on all of this on his own time.
Over the course of the next year, when he had time, Lane examined every piece of evidence that had been collected concerning the cases. He photographed many of the items once again, collected trace evidence from them, and submitted numerous items to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. He also contacted the FBI Laboratory to see if they would conduct mitochondrial DNA exams on the hairs found on the condom and on the tissue paper lying next to it, which had been found two-tenths of a mile from where Carol Leighton’s body lay. Those hairs had already been sent to the WSP Crime Lab, and the results from them had been that the hairs were “similar to Carol Leighton’s hairs.” The WSP lab with their testing couldn’t be any more specific than that. This evidence would be crucial if the hairs in and on the condom came back as a hit to Carol Leighton. It was already proven that David Gerard was the donor of the sperm inside the condom. If Carol Leighton’s DNA matched the hairs found on the condom, then it could be proven that Gerard and Leighton had sex on the Weyco Haul Road around the time she was murdered.
On July 10, 2000, Lane was finally able to send the hairs to Alice Eisenberg, at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia. On January 19, 2001, Lane received a reply from the FBI Laboratory. The DNA from the hairs didn’t match Carol Leighton’s. Lane said later, “This was a real blow. It would have been the evidence to put David and Carol together.”
Lane was still sure that David Gerard had murdered Carol Leighton, however, and he sent the McDonald’s napkins, once again, to the state lab to check them for DNA. He also sent the lab the actual condom and asked them to swab it for Carol Leighton’s DNA. The lab reported back that there was no DNA found on the outside of the condom. At least none they could trace.
The weeks went by again, with other cases beginning to take up Lane’s time. Then Lane got more news that he’d been waiting for. He received a report from the WSP Crime Lab indicating that the DNA found on the vaginal swab taken from Carol Leighton, the DNA found on her panties and the DNA from the napkins all came from David Gerard. The lab stated that the chances of the DNA belonging to someone other than David Gerard was one in several trillion. There weren’t that many people living on Earth. To make things even better, there was a mixture of Gerard’s and Carol’s DNA on the napkins. Now, once and for all, it could be proven that David and Carol had been together, having sex, on the Weyco Haul Road, not long before she was murdered. And this sex had occurred only two-tenths of a mile from where her body was discovered. This magnified what he already had learned on the DNA trail to David Gerard.
Lane quickly notified Sergeant Pimentel, Detective Matt Organ and Undersheriff Rick Scott. At 9:00 A.M. that same day, Undersheriff Scott and Lane Youmans met with county prosecutor Steward Menefee and deputy prosecutor Gerald Fuller. Lane briefed these prosecutors on the evidence he now had concerning Carol Leighton’s murder, and also told them that he believed that David Gerard had murdered Elaine McCollum in 1991. He backed this up by saying that he’d already sent Elaine McCollum’s panties to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, but they had not returned a report to him, because they were so backed up with work concerning the infamous Green River cases and “Green River Killer” Gary Ridgway.
Once Lane presented his evidence, County Prosecutor Menefee told him they should wait before arresting David Gerard on either the Carol Leighton murder or Elaine McCollum murder. He wanted Lane to gather more evidence and wait for the McCollum lab report to come back in about Elaine’s panties. Menefee knew they would only have one chance in court concerning Carol and Elaine’s murders. If a jury did not convict David Gerard, then he could never be prosecuted again on those cases.
Disappointed, and waiting for the lab reports to come back about Elaine McCollum, Lane became determined to dig even deeper into David Gerard’s background. Lane decided to talk to every person he could find who knew Gerard, and he concocted a cover story that he was conducting a study of domestic violence offenders. As Lane recalled, “I would explain that Gerard exhibited some of the same characteristics as the other offenders I had dealt with, although most of them wouldn’t go so far as to try and kill their loved ones. I would say I wanted to find out if there was something in their past that would lead them to become abusers. Hearing that explanation, people might be helpful in filling me in about Gerard’s background. I knew of all these people, Frankie Cochran would be the biggest help of all.”
13
FRANKIE’S TALE
Frankie Cochran’s recovery after the assault was a slow and painful one. She had spent six months at a rehabilitation center in Bakersfield, California. Frankie later said of this experience, “I was in constant pain. I took every kind of medication they had, from low to high. Nothing seemed to work. Then I took something that was the last on the list. It finally helped with the pain some.”
A lot of rehabilitation work there centered on the use of her legs. After months and months of therapy, Frankie was able to get out of her wheelchair. Even then, when she began to walk, there were other problems. One day she was walking down the hall with some of the staff. Even though they were near her and talking, she could hear them but not see them. It freaked her out, and it was discovered that her peripheral vision was nearly gone. This added to Frankie’s anxiety, because Gerard had sneaked up on her and she only saw him at the last second. This lack of peripheral vision made her hyper-alert because of the fear of not being able to see anyone coming toward her from outside of her line of sight.
There were so many things to work on at the Centre for Neuro Skills (CNS): Frankie’s vision, motor skills, memory skills, use of her arms, use of her legs. The list went on and on. Slowly she got better and more independent in her ability to take care of herself. For someone who was not even supposed to live, she was making a remarkable recovery.
Lane Youmans kept in touch with Frankie often by mail when she was in California and he also kept in touch with her mother, MaryLou. When the Department of Labor Industries refused to cover Frankie’s medical bills, Lane made sure the department knew that Frankie had been working at the time she was assaulted. With that, and a few well-placed phone calls by Lane, the department began covering Frankie’s medical expenses.
