by Robert Scott
Lane told Clarridge about his take on all the similarities between the Carol Leighton case and Elaine McCollum case: the main one being two murdered women only a mile apart on the same isolated logging road. The article went on to recount the story of Frankie Cochran and the relationship that had grown up over the years between her and Lane Youmans. And Frankie was emphatic about what had kept her going: “I couldn’t let that SOB serial killer win!”
Lane spoke of tracking down every lead he could on Gerard and even at one point putting a homemade sign on his desk at work, GERARD TASK FORCE. In a way it was a joke—Lane was the task force of one. A fellow detective at GHSO told Clarridge, “Lane endured good-natured animosity from colleagues who had to pick up the slack left by his hunt, but he persisted.”
Undersheriff Rick Scott said that Lane never wanted to be promoted upward out of the Detective Division, because he was so intent on the Gerard cases. And Lane talked to Clarridge about this aspect. Lane said that so often a detective would work a cold murder case over the years, but when he left the Detective Division, a new detective had to get up to speed on that case. It was always a matter of trying to play catch-up. By staying in the Detective Division for so many years, Lane was able to remember key dates, key places and key names on unsolved cases. It was one great reason he’d had his “epiphany” in the milking shed where Frankie was found half-beaten to death. The name David Gerard rang a bell with Lane about the house fire years before at Patricia McDonnell’s house, and the four people who had perished there. It was Gerard’s unusual behavior that had stayed with Lane all those intervening years.
Lane may have been sure that David Gerard was “good” for the murder of Elaine McCollum, and other GHSO detectives were as well, but it was still a hard sell to get the county prosecutor to take action on that case. County Prosecutor Steward Menefee told Clarridge that he didn’t believe there was enough evidence to convince a jury that Gerard had killed Elaine McCollum. Menefee said that was why the county prosecutor’s office hadn’t filed charges in that case or the house fire case. Menefee related to Clarridge, “I’ve had cops look at a guy on a street corner and say to me, ‘I know he’s got coke (cocaine) on him.’ And I’ll say, ‘I believe you, but that doesn’t mean I can get a search warrant.’”
Menefee added that in McCollum’s case, Gerard was not the only donor of sperm in connection to Elaine, since she’d had a boyfriend at the time of her death and apparently had sex with him not long before she was murdered. Menefee told Clarridge that a good defense attorney could argue that a sperm donor other than Gerard was her killer.
Lane, on the other hand, didn’t buy this logic. He reiterated that Gerard had already been convicted for a murder less than a mile away from where McCollum’s body had been found. And in both cases the murders had been vicious and bloody. Although Elaine’s boyfriend at the time, David Simmons, didn’t have an airtight alibi, all indications were that he was indeed at home trying to kick heroin. And besides that, Simmons had never been arrested for a violent crime, while Gerard was already convicted for the murder of Carol Leighton and attempted murder of Frankie Cochran.
In his pursuit of justice for Elaine McCollum, Lane Youmans sought out independent opinions from two well-respected King County prosecuting attorneys. These attorneys agreed that with all the evidence gathered against Gerard on the Elaine McCollum case, they would have gone forward to trial in their county. King County prosecutor Steve Fogg told Clarridge, “We would have charged that case in a minute. In fact, we even offered to try it for them (the Grays Harbor County Prosecutor’s Office), but they didn’t want any part of it.”
In the article, as well, was a section about how Frankie Cochran felt about Lane Youmans and the support he had given her over the years. It quoted Frankie saying, “There’s nobody better than him. There’s nobody who ever could have cared that much about me.” In fact, Frankie related that she planned to get married to her caretaker, Steve Jones, and when she did, she wanted Lane to walk her down the aisle. Frankie’s father had died by then, and in Frankie’s mind, Lane was almost like a father to her now. As for Lane, who had two children, Frankie had become like a daughter to him. Lane said later, “It’s incredible the amount of pain she fought through just to keep going. It was her iron will that got her to where she is today.”
Lane related, “Steve was a friendly guy. A very caring person. I felt that Frankie’s luck with men had finally turned around. They seemed very happy together. Steve may have been small in stature, but he was very strong. He used to ride a bicycle almost thirty miles every day.”
And yet, with all things related to these cases, there was always the bitter with the sweet. In an amazing reversal of roles, it was Frankie who became Steve Jones’s caretaker. Steve got cancer, and though Frankie was still in a lot of pain, she began taking care of Steve during his treatments. Steve lost a lot of weight and had a hard time just keeping his food down. What he had done for Frankie, she now did for him.
Lane noted, “Frankie was going with him when he went for cancer treatment, preparing his meals, and giving him his meds. She tried to make him as comfortable as possible.”
In the end there was no walking down the aisle for Frankie and Steve. After about a year from the time he was diagnosed, Steve Jones died from his bout with cancer. Lane said of Steve, “He was a good guy. He cared a lot about Frankie and helped her overcome so much. It was a real tragedy that he died from cancer, just when they were about to start a new life together.”
When Steve died, Frankie cried and cried for days. It was as if life, which had been so rough on her, had taken one more hard shot. And yet, with a will that had seen her through so much, Frankie eventually recovered her composure and carried on with life. She went to live in an assisted-living center in Aberdeen, which Lane had helped her move into. Frankie still had to walk with a cane a lot of the time, and had a hard time using her left arm. However, she became a fixture at the center, telling everyone her incredible story. In essence, Frankie became a local celebrity there. One woman, who had suffered abuse from a boyfriend, said, “Frankie is my hero. If she could make it through that situation, then I could make it through mine. I had to have my eyes opened up by her. I admire Frankie so much for all she had to endure.”
22
PUZZLE PIECES
Lane Youmans finally did end his career as a detective at GHSO in 2006. However, he was not through with his stint in law enforcement forensics. He became a part-time coroner for Grays Harbor County. He also started working with a group to restore the 7th Street Theatre in his hometown of Hoquiam. The theater was an art deco treasure dating from 1928, but by 2006, it was in great need of repairs. Lane and other volunteers put in new seating, created a new sound system and replaced the old rigging and curtains. One of the most beautiful aspects of the new theater was its lighting system. When the lights went down, it created an atmosphere of sunset in a Spanish garden. Lane said, “It was designed to look like an open courtyard at dusk with the stars coming out.”
Despite all his time spent on the theater project, it was still with forensics and cold cases where Lane’s passion lay. It was a line of work he never grew out of. The list of John and Jane Does was a long one for Lane concerning people buried in the county’s cemeteries who had no identities. Some were murder victims and one was a suicide. One such case concerned a mystery man buried in Block 43, Space 32, in the Fern Hill Cemetery. In an article for the Daily World, Lane told reporter Lisa Patterson, “He needs a name. He needs more than John Doe.”
A few graves away from this John Doe was one more unknown individual. This person’s body had washed ashore onto Grayland Beach in 1997. The man’s clothing and identification had been stripped from his body by the powerful surf before his body was discovered. He may have been in the water for three months before coming ashore. All of the ridges on his fingerprints had been battered away.
Because of some suspicious circumstances Lane got a court order and had th
e body exhumed. The ground over the coffin was dug up and Lane put on a white jumpsuit, white gloves and climbed down into the grave. He opened the coffin lid and the body bag. What he found surprised him. There were millions of tiny insects living in the coffin and on the body. Lane described them as looking like tiny dark mustard seeds. Lane said, “I didn’t know what kind of bugs they were, so I scooped some up, packaged them and sent them off to the lab for identification.” It was a scene right out of the popular television show CSI.
The suicide John Doe was just as curious and baffling in his own way. A young man had checked into an Amanda Park motel near Olympic National Park on September 15, 2001. He wrote his address as being from Meridian, Idaho, but that probably was not his real address. He also wrote his name down on the motel paperwork as Lyle Stevik. This was clearly a reference that he had borrowed from a Joyce Carol Oates fictional novel, You Must Remember This. In that book the main character was a young person named Lyle Stevick. It was a book about a young man who eventually committed suicide.
The Amanda Park motel John Doe moved from one room to another after he complained of noise in the first room. On September 17, a maid entered this young man’s room and found that he had hanged himself on a coatrack. He had closed the blinds so that no one would see him. He had put pillows around his body so that no one would hear him thrashing around in his death throes. He had even left money on a nightstand with a note that it was for his last night’s motel payment.
Lane said of this John Doe, “He was polite and thoughtful until the end. He paid for his room as one of the last acts of his life. He had traveled about as far west as you can in America to end his life. Maybe no one still cares about him, but until I find out differently, I’ll keep trying to learn who he was.”
Lane’s constant looking at old cold cases had one unforseen benefit, especially for the sister of Connie Rolls. Ever since Connie had a big argument with her mother’s boyfriend just before she disappeared, her sister, Teri, had been afraid that the mother’s boyfriend might have had something to do with Connie’s disappearance. Teri related that she had worried all her life that her mom’s boyfriend might have killed Connie. The boyfriend had hurled terrible insults at Connie back then, and, according to Teri, even her mom had said that Connie had obtained the boyfriend’s shotgun. Teri’s mom related that the boyfriend had been questioned by authorities about this, although he would later deny that he had, but he did report the gun as missing. In one e-mail to Lane Teri wrote, Help me put my fears to rest!
Finally, in 2009, her fears were put to rest. Not because the killer of Connie Rolls was arrested, but because the facts were laid out by Lane pointing to David Gerard as a credible suspect in the murder of her sister. Teri related that she barely knew where to begin in expressing her gratitude. She said a weight had been lifted from her life. She added that David Gerard did sound like a viable suspect for Connie’s murder. And if Connie had actually been carrying a gun on the streets of Aberdeen, it must have been someone like Gerard, who knew her and would give her a ride. Teri even posited that Connie could have met Gerard at a party or a tavern.
Teri wrote about the main fact that Lane offered to explain why her mom’s boyfriend had not killed Connie. It was the phone call that had come in by an anonymous phone caller about Connie’s suitcases. Teri said that her mom’s boyfriend would have never made that call. She said if he had killed Connie, it would have been in anger, and he wouldn’t have toyed with the police by making a phone call to them about the suitcases. Then Teri said, “The blue suit case was described exactly. Gerard makes sense!”
As to why the Connie Rolls case hadn’t gone any further than it did, in light of the other dead women’s remains found up in Mason County, near to those where Connie had been found, Lane had one salient idea. He said, “The case was a prime example of agencies not working together. Connie was a Hoquiam girl, last seen alive in Aberdeen, and her skull was found a year later in Mason County. The agencies may have done their individual part, but they should have been working together. GHSO wasn’t brought in to assist. The Green River Task Force was brought in for a short while but determined it wasn’t one of their cases. So that was the end of that.”
Lane also had some very interesting things to say about David Gerard in connection to many other cases. “I believe Gerard is unusual in the fact that he didn’t have a set area or crime signature that we know of. It’s not as if he went out and sought victims. He went through life—fat, dumb and happy—until a woman pissed him off, and he would react with a primal response. Connie, Roberta, Elaine and perhaps others were all in need of something. In their cases it was a ride, and Gerard was in the right place at the right time. For them, he was in the wrong place, at the wrong time. I can see him picking them up, driving them to a remote area, and taking what he wanted. The rape victim who survived, Julie, was highly intoxicated and was unable to put up a fight.”
Of this last victim mentioned, Julie, Lane Youmans was about to get a big surprise in the year 2009. Hearing of that story, another woman contacted Lane and told of her own run-in with David Gerard. It made Lane look at Julie’s rape in a whole new light.
This new contact, Sandra, told Lane that she had been at a cocktail lounge in 1994 and had three drinks. Lane related, “For some reason she got very drunk, very quickly. Sitting near her at the bar was David Gerard. Sandra told him she didn’t feel well and needed to go to Elma. Gerard offered her a ride. She got into his car, and before long, she blacked out. She remembered, later, David’s car being stopped at the Montesano off-ramp, and a police officer asking if she was all right. She blacked out again and woke up the next morning. Her shoes were missing and everything that was in her wallet was missing. A few days later, she said, David gave her parents her shoes and a bottle of Tylenol that had been in her purse. He told her parents that he found the items in his car.
“She didn’t know why her shoes were off, and she wondered if she had been raped. I have no doubt she was raped, and survived, just like Julie, because she offered Gerard no resistance. It made me rethink Julie’s case. It’s very possible that Gerard slipped the date rape drug, Rohypnol, into their drinks. I can see Gerard hanging out at taverns, providing him access to women, and slipping the date rape drugs into their drinks. It makes me wonder how often this occurred. Frankie Cochran spoke of David’s wallet and ‘secret box’ being filled with cocktail coasters with women’s names penned on them.”
Sandra’s response to all of this was, “Julie’s story sends chills up my spine. It really does sound similar to my story. I guess I really am lucky that nothing happened to me that night. Or if it did, I don’t remember it. I’m better off not knowing. I hope Julie is okay and didn’t have lasting problems from her experience.”
Of all the John and Jane Doe cases in Grays Harbor County, the one that bugged Lane Youmans the most concerned the woman whose remains were discovered by mushroom hunters near Elma in 1988. He and the other detectives had been able to determine that the woman was about five feet tall and weighed about one hundred pounds. She had dark brown hair and was possibly Native American or Asian. Several items of clothing found at the scene revealed that she had been wearing a blue Loren Scott shirt, a floral print shirt and black pants. She also had worn navy blue slip-on shoes, which were new. She’d had a pearl and silver Avon ring and gold earrings with five blue sapphires.
The forensic clay reconstruction of this Jane Doe’s head had never produced any viable clues as to who she was or how she died. She had definitely been murdered. Lane began working with a forensic sketch artist to make a better rendering of what the “Elma Jane Doe” might have looked like in life. Lane wondered if a boyfriend or a husband had killed this Jane Doe. And he also wondered if David Gerard had. The body had been found on isolated Weyco property. It was in an area where Gerard had often gone hunting. The bullet that had killed her came from a gun that matched the type of weaponry that Gerard had once used.
Lane later said,
“The woman victim was wearing clothing similar to what Grays Harbor prostitutes like Carol Leighton would wear. Nothing fancy. It didn’t mean she was a prostitute, but her clothing was not outside the realm of her having been one. Back in the early 1980s, there was a nuclear plant going up at Satsop, so there was an influx of construction workers living and drinking in Elma. I’d be naive to think there weren’t hookers working in Elma. Whether David Gerard ever picked up any there, I don’t know. He certainly went as far as Tacoma to do that. This was proven by him being busted in a john sting there in 1996. And Tacoma is farther away from Aberdeen than Elma is by many miles. I also knew that Gerard liked hunting in that area around Elma and knew its back roads very well.”
The section of timberland where the Elma Jane Doe’s remains were found was supposed to have been logged in 1989. Lane related, “Over the next ten years I searched that site sixty-plus times. The guards there were ex-cops, and they helped me as far as Weyerhauser was concerned in keeping new logging operations out of there. The last remains I recovered were in 1994. After 1999, I just couldn’t justify not letting Weyerhauser log on that land. It was released as a crime scene and they began logging the area.”
Just as in the cases of Connie Rolls and Roberta Strasbaugh, Lane said, “I don’t give up hope on her that someone may know something more about the case, one little bit of information that will be the key. I even put a story and a picture in a large Cambodian magazine about the Elma Jane Doe. No responses ever came back.”
In going outside the usual channels on this case, Lane Youmans even went on the Internet. He contacted Websleuths. Many detectives roll their eyes when Websleuths is mentioned, because they are a group of amateur unlicensed Internet “detectives.” Lane, on the other hand, was willing to see them as a tool that just might come up with a key bit of information.
