by Robert Scott
Lane began to wonder, did David Gerard have a foot fetish? Was it important to him to remove a woman’s shoes before raping her? Was there something about a woman’s foot that turned him on?
Then things really got interesting. In February 2003, Frankie Cochran phoned Lane and asked him what had happened to one of her milking boots. She had talked to Eugene Clark at the dairy and he told her that when he found her, she was only wearing one rubber boot. Lane told Frankie that when he arrived at the scene, both milking boots were standing upright near the bottom of the ramp that led into the milking parlor. Lane added that at the time he assumed that the paramedic crew had removed Frankie’s boots and placed them there. Now he began to wonder. One crime scene where a woman had a missing shoe was a coincidence; two crime scenes was a matter of interest; three crime scenes was a pattern.
Lane contacted Eugene Clark, who repeated the information that when he first saw Frankie lying on the floor, she was only wearing one milking boot. Clark couldn’t remember on which foot. Lane then pulled the milking boots from the evidence box and began to examine them. They were still grungy and covered with dried cow manure. There was some cow manure inside the left boot, as though it had been tossed aside on the floor and some manure had splashed inside it. The boots were calf height and tight-fitting. The boot wouldn’t have just come off by itself while Frankie was being attacked. Lane concluded that David Gerard must have pulled the boot off. But why? Did it make him recall the other women he had murdered? Was it part of his sexual/murdering mode? Lane began looking for more clues.
Lane pulled the crime scene photos from the McCollum and Leighton cases and studied them very carefully. Suddenly something hit him. Both of the women were lying on their backs, along the south shoulder of the road, with their heads pointing toward the west. Both women had their heads tilted toward the side, one arm bent at the elbow with a hand toward the head, the other arm straight, with that hand pointing toward their feet. Like the missing shoes, the head and arm positions were exact opposites between the two women.
And then another thing struck Lane. He looked at a photograph of Elaine McCollum and a photograph of Carol Leighton lying in the road, and he noticed they were mirror images of each other. It suddenly occurred to Lane that when Gerard looked in his rearview mirror at Elaine’s body, he saw an exact opposite of how she really was. So when he murdered Carol Leighton, he posed her body in the manner in which he had seen Elaine’s body in his rearview mirror. It was posed 180 degrees differently than Elaine’s body had been.
The coincidences didn’t stop there. Both women were Caucasian, between thirty-four and forty-one years of age, and both frequented taverns in the area. They were about the same build; both had light-colored straight hair; both had worn coats that were open; both wore red shirts; both were smokers; both wore no jewelry or makeup. Both women were last seen at taverns in downtown Aberdeen, right across the street from each other. And both were slightly intoxicated when their bodies were discovered. Lane said, “The final coincidence was that both had sex with David Gerard shortly before they were murdered—Carol possibly willingly, and Elaine most likely unwillingly.”
Reexamining eight-by-ten photos of Elaine and Carol’s bodies, Lane once again noted the partial bloody handprint on the leg of Carol’s jeans. Suddenly the reason why struck him, too. He surmised that as Gerard posed Carol’s body, he made it try to look like what he recalled about Elaine’s body. Lane began to believe that Gerard had taken hold of Carol’s pants with one of his hands and moved her the way he wanted. There were footprint scuffs around Carol’s body, but not around Elaine’s. Lane conjectured that Gerard had not gotten out of his car in 1991, but merely looked in his rearview mirror for signs of life in Elaine. When he didn’t see any, Gerard concluded she was dead, but that image in his rearview mirror really stuck with him. Lane posited that when Gerard murdered Carol five years later, he posed her body in the manner in which he had last seen Elaine’s body, lying on the right side of the road. Right down to removing one of Carol’s shoes. Not only that, he had repeated the process when he hit Frankie Cochran in the head with the hammer and left her for dead. Gerard must have removed one of her boots and left it on the ground, not knowing that, unlike Elaine and Carol, Frankie would live.
15
OTHER BODIES
Lane Youmans mainly disagreed with the FBI profilers’ assessment that the killer of Elaine McCollum and Carol Leighton was not one and the same. But one thing he did agree with them on was that there seemed to be too much of a time gap between the killings if the same individual had done the murders. Usually those types of killers would murder with less of a time gap between murders, mainly because they were in some kind of rage, or they just plain liked to kill. In that regard, Lane began to wonder if David Gerard had murdered some other woman in the area in the time period between Elaine and Carol, and no one knew about the connections. After all, Gerard’s odometer readings showed that he was traveling around the region at a prodigious rate, and Frankie confirmed that. And Frankie spoke of Gerard, not just traveling around the Olympic Peninsula, but elsewhere in Washington State as well.
Lane contacted Bob Gebo, who was with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office HITS Unit, and asked him for a list of unsolved murders in the counties that surrounded Grays Harbor County. Lane wanted the list to go as far back as 1980, when David Gerard was eighteen years old, involving women whose bodies had been found outdoors. Gebo came back with a list of nine names, including two in Grays Harbor County.
The earliest case concerned Connie Rolls, a Hoquiam resident who disappeared in 1984. Connie was twenty years old that year, and her younger sister, Teri, remembered that Connie was her “cool big sister.” Teri said later, “I didn’t spend much time with her until I was fifteen and she was twenty. She loved to draw and she was very talented. Amazingly so. She loved music—things by Rush and early Heart. We used to have a horse and she spent a lot of time riding.
“At that time Connie was about twelve weeks from completing beauty school, but she quit. She had some sort of fight with a classmate and dropped out. Honestly, she didn’t seem that passionate about it. She was just trying to get some kind of good job for her future. About that fight—she wouldn’t instigate them, but she also wouldn’t let people get the better of her. She was tough and loyal, to a fault. Mess with a friend or loved one meant messing with her. She’d have done anything for me.”
Teri related, “Very near that last time I saw Connie, she got into a very serious argument with my mother’s new boyfriend, who later became my mom’s husband. It was an argument with him and his brother. I was the only person there besides Connie. It nearly came to blows. Right after that fight Connie packed her things and left.”
Connie packed a suitcase and left a note with her mom that she was going to visit a friend, Melinda, in the town of Yelm. Yelm was about eighty miles away from Hoquiam, east of Olympia. Connie was probably going to take the bus, although Lane learned that she might have hitchhiked if that was the only alternative. Connie was last seen standing at a bus stop in front of the Montgomery Ward store in Aberdeen. Even though she was last seen there, the bus driver was later interviewed by an Aberdeen police officer, and he said that he had not picked up a young woman matching Connie’s description. This left open the possibility that someone had given her a ride in his vehicle.
There was also a strange sideline to all of this. Connie’s sister, Teri, related, “A friend of Connie’s said that she saw Connie walking through the downtown streets of Aberdeen with a shotgun. It seemed implausible, but then later my mother’s boyfriend reported one of his shotguns missing.”
If Connie really was carrying a shotgun, then it is improbable she got on a bus. And if someone picked her up, and she was really carrying a shotgun, then it may well have been someone who knew her. It is very unlikely that a stranger would pick up a hitchhiker carrying a shotgun. Whatever happened, Connie went missing on January 25, 1984.
A year and a half went by without any trace of Connie Rolls, and then in September 1985, two mushroom hunters, John and Chresensia Buttles, were out in the woods near the town of Shelton in Mason County, about forty miles northeast of Aberdeen. As they searched through the woods, they suddenly came upon a human skull and a few other bone fragments and bits of clothing. Stunned and shaken by what they had found, the Buttleses contacted the Mason County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO).
MCSO deputy Rick Thompson went out to the area off South Grapeview Loop Road and determined that the remains were indeed human. Chief Detective Bob Shepperd was called, and he arrived on scene to cordon off the area and take photos. Soon other detectives and techs arrived, and a preliminary estimation put the time of death for the victim at between January and March 1984. Since there were no Mason County residents listed as missing from that time period, other surrounding law enforcement agencies were contacted.
Deputies cordoned off the whole area and a large scale search was conducted for the next two days. Even five members of the Mason County Trackers combed the woods and logged areas, spreading out from the initial site. An Explorer Scout search-and-rescue troop also joined the investigation.
Since this was not far from the Puget Sound area, where numerous young women’s bodies had been found over the years, the Green River Task Force (GRTF) was called in to participate in the investigation. The Green River Task Force had been put together as the bodies of women started being found in alarming numbers south of Seattle, in the Green River area. As time went on, the pattern of bodies seemed to spread outward in an increasingly large area. The task force was put together because the bodies were found across jurisdictional lines, but the perpetrator seemed to be one person.
GRTF detective Dave Reinhardt told a reporter that his agency was involved in the Mason County Jane Doe case because of the similarity of terrain where the remains were found to other locations tied to the so-called Green River Killer. Just how common the same type of area was for the GRTF could be determined by a short article in the Daily World of Aberdeen. The newspaper noted: The pattern is sickeningly familiar—the remains of a young woman are found in a wooded area, and the Green River Task Force is called in to investigate. In this case it was not only for the remains found by the mushroom hunters near Shelton, but also that same weekend the GRTF investigated the body of a young woman discovered just south of Seattle in Lakeview Park. That young woman appeared to have been in her teens and was fully clothed when found. She was about five feet six inches tall, had brown hair, and was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She had been killed by a gunshot.
As time went on, however, the GRTF backed off from thinking that this Mason County victim was one of theirs. She didn’t fall into the profile of so many of the others they had researched. Indications pointed to this having been done by someone other than the Green River Killer. Perhaps a local, or at least someone who lived on the west side of Puget Sound. Someone who knew how to maneuver around the back roads.
Lane later said of the GRTF people who looked at Connie’s recovery site, “Somehow the GRTF determined that Connie Rolls wasn’t a Green River Killer victim. I could never understand how they could make that determination so quickly, since the Green River Killer eventually admitted that he changed his MO to throw police off. I believe the GRTF was selective so that they didn’t end up with hundreds of potential victims. None of the local victims were ever tied to the Green River Killer, but he did move around, and he took some of the skulls of women he killed in King County, down to Oregon. Whether he killed anyone on the Olympic Peninsula, I don’t know.”
Mark Papworth, deputy coroner for Thurston County, and a forensic specialist at Evergreen State College, worked on trying to determine the sex and age of the deceased Mason County woman that the mushroom hunters had found. He finally assessed that the person had been female, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. And this early estimate made detectives wonder if the skull and other remains were those of Connie Rolls, missing since 1984. It also brought up another chilling murder case. These remains had been found not far from a site where the remains of nineteen-year-old Carin Conner, of Tacoma, had been found in 1983. She, too, had been missing for a while, and then her remains were found in the forest off the Grapeview Loop Road. If there was such scant information on Connie, there was even less on Carin—at least information that found its way into public view beyond the police files.
To make all of this even more mysterious, the Mason County Sheriff’s Office received a phone call from a woman in California who stated she’d just had a terrible dream. The dreamer was Tina Bittner, of Rancho Cordova, California, who had been raised in Hoquiam, Washington. The dream had been so vivid and terrifying that she phoned the Grays Harbor Sheriff’s Office just before the skull and remains had been found in Mason County. Bittner described to a deputy at GHSO that in her dream “either a child or small adult was in trouble, and they were near a log and sobbing.” After that, Bittner was sure they had been murdered. Bittner had no knowledge of Connie Rolls being missing, or of anything about her. Bittner said of her dream, or vision as she called it, “It was astonishing! It was scary!”
Detective Mike Bagley took this news seriously and told a reporter, “There is good documented evidence about psychics being right sometimes. Suppose we didn’t look and there was a person dying out there.”
By September 25, the Shelton-Mason County Journal was reporting, Remains found in woods may be Hoquiam woman’s. What made identifying her so difficult was addressed by Connie’s mom, Becky, who said that her daughter’s medical records had apparently been lost by the army. By now, Connie’s dad was retired from the army and living in Texas.
MCSO undersheriff Bud Hays added, “We are investigating all young ladies of that age missing in that time period, from several different communities. We can’t give any family member out there hope that maybe we found their daughter.”
Quite a bit of time passed, but finally dental records proved that the remains, in fact, were those of Connie Rolls. But it could not be determined how Connie had been murdered. And another very strange occurrence had happened in connection to her. Lane related that on July 17, 1984, someone made an anonymous phone call to the Grays Harbor Sheriff’s Office. The person said, “While out in the woods I came across a blue suitcase with woman’s clothing, off of a side road. Clothes are in good condition and don’t look as if someone threw them away. Location, north of Promised Land Park, to the first gravel road on the right. Take the spur off to the left. Suitcase is not far back on that road.” This person never identified himself.
Lane recalled, “The area was checked, and no suitcase or clothing was found. I began to wonder if David Gerard had made that phone call. This is the kind of thing he would do. He would give out false information that was one hundred eighty degrees opposite of where a crime scene was. When Frankie was assaulted, he said he was driving the Loop and up at Forks. When Patty Rodriguez and the others perished in the house fire, he said he was drinking in Olympia. He always tried setting up some kind of smoke screen to what really happened.”
Looking in a different direction, Lane researched a case from Lewis County that had some similar characteristics to the Connie Rolls case. On May 5, 1985, a woman’s corpse was found in a rural area between Interstate 5 and the town of Winlock. Once again it was a mushroom picker who found the remains. The first article in the Lewis County Daily Chronicle noted that because
of decomposition, not even the age or sex of the victim could be determined.
By the next day’s article more details were forthcoming about the body. It was determined by the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office that it was the body of a woman, she had been completely nude, and she had been somewhere between thirty-five and fifty years old. She had been about five feet seven inches tall and weighed around 150 pounds. She’d had brown hair, and the cause of death was determined to be a homicide. An autopsy indicated that the unknown woman had been dead from six to eight weeks. Even though sheriff’s deputies, detectives and Washington State Patrol officers scoured the marshy area, none of the woman’s clothing or other items were found.
Chehalis dentist John Hendrickson found evidence of extensive dental work, which, he said, would make identifying her much easier than if she’d had no dental work done at all. Hendrickson created a dental chart, and it was compared to missing women from surrounding counties. Fingerprints were taken by LCSO techs and compared with missing women from all over the Northwest.
A week went by and the Daily Chronicle reported: Police still have no ID of corpse. And it went on to report, The exact cause of death still has not been released.
