by Ann Rule
But where was he? The patrolmen searched every inch of the mobile home. Red was not there. Both he and his car—a 2010 Jeep—were gone.
Lori explained the recent household setup to Detective Sergeant Gary Woodburn. DeeDee and Red usually lived alone, but Red’s only son and his girlfriend had come up for a visit. “I think they’re still here— or they’ve just left.”
Joey didn’t have a car; the couple had come from Oregon by bus. While they were in Everett, Joey had driven Red and DeeDee’s car.
The last time Lori Jane had talked to her mother, DeeDee had said that Red was planning to drive Joey and Holly to the bus station in Everett the next day or the day after.
Lori told Detective Sergeant Woodburn that Joey had recently been released from the Oregon state prison on parole. Woodburn perked up at that.
The police had three good suspects in Leslie Mae Sudds Nemitz Danner Pedersen’s murder.
And all of them were missing.
* * *
The Snohomish County medical examiner’s office was informed by Everett Police Detective Sergeant Woodburn at approximately 6 P.M. on September 28 that there appeared to have been a murder in the mobile-home park.
Woodburn had arrived to find an elderly Caucasian woman lying on her left side in the back bedroom. She wore a blue denim blouse and capri pants. Her feet were bare, and there was duct tape hanging from her ankles. She had several purpling bruises in her neck region—but strangulation was not the cause of her death.
There were at least two large, gaping incised wounds on her neck. The forensic examiner later would determine that the mechanism of death was the right jugular vein’s being severed. The victim then bled to death. The knife wounds were what had killed her. There were no sheets on the bed, only a bare mattress. That was soaked with a dark magenta liquid: drying blood.
Woodburn put out a wants-and-warrants for Red’s vehicle, a 2010 black Jeep Patriot with Washington plates, license number ABZ7996. The front license plate was a U.S. Marine Corps plate. If spotted by law officers, the driver and any passengers were to be held until the Washington State detectives arrived.
On September 29, 2011, police in Corvallis, Oregon, recovered a backpack from a garbage can in a park. Inside the backpack, the officers found four credit cards—three belonged to Red, one to DeeDee. There was also bloody man’s clothing and a Ka-Bar fighting knife.
The Kershaw Ka-Bar knife matched the kind of weapon that had been used to slice DeeDee’s throat. Investigators knew that Red had a knife like that, but it would be a stretch to say it was the same one that Red owned.
Whatever had transpired in the Pedersen trailer in Washington was still not clear. DeeDee Pedersen was the only known victim, while Red was a missing person. Was Red a hapless victim, or was he involved in the murder of his wife?
Both Holly and Joey had long records, but Red appeared to be a law-abiding citizen. By all accounts, he loved DeeDee and treated her well. But detectives could not rule anything out—not until they found Red, dead or alive.
Investigators had few facts, and they were certain of only one thing: the suspects had to be stopped before they hurt someone else.
* * *
On Saturday morning, October 1, 2011, Susan Stewart hugged her nineteen-year-old son, Cody, and they said to each other what they always said: “I love you.”
Cody Faye Myers was excited about going to the annual jazz festival held in Newport, a coastal town in Lincoln County, Oregon, and a popular tourist destination dubbed the “Dungeness Crab Capital of the World.”
The “Jazz at Newport” festival was celebrating its eighth year, and its organizers, the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts, proudly showcased world-class jazz. The festival attracted the most talented musicians from all over the state and beyond, and Cody was looking forward to the performances.
Cody drove away from his Lafayette, Oregon, home in his white 1999 Plymouth Breeze, headed southwest toward the Pacific Ocean. Lafayette, near the larger and better-known city of McMinnville, was about an eighty-mile drive from Newport, and Cody could expect to arrive at the festival within two hours.
Cody loved music. The teenager was making plans for his future—a future he was sure would include music. He hoped to be a concert jazz guitarist, and he practiced every chance he got.
Susan encouraged her firstborn son. In fact, she bought him his first guitar when he turned fourteen. He hadn’t asked for it and seemed a little perplexed by the gift, but he smiled at his mother and thanked her. The guitar was set aside until a musically inclined uncle visited, bringing his own guitar along. He showed Cody a few chords, and the teen was hooked.
Everyone was impressed by how fast Cody took to the guitar. After a few months, he was playing as if he had been strumming for years.
Susan wasn’t surprised to see how quickly Cody mastered the instrument. The kid had always been exceptional, and his mother sensed that from the start. “I fell in love with him from the moment I was pregnant with him,” she said.
Born on April 24, 1992, Cody Myers was a happy baby. His mother noticed his intelligence early on. At age two, he took a pile of Legos and created a structure that rivaled those built by children far older.
He had the potential to become an engineer or an architect or just about anything else he wanted to be. In addition to hoping for a career in music, Cody was drawn to another vocation. He seriously considered becoming a minister.
He was a devout Christian who was active in his church, and he loved people. He was also considering the possibility of becoming a missionary so that he could both help people and travel the world.
But Cody was only nineteen, his future not cast in concrete. He had every reason to believe that there would be plenty of time to decide.
Though Cody was close to his mother, he was no mama’s boy. He was a tall, strong young man and quite independent. His mother worried, as most mothers do, and she was horrified to learn that he had once slept on a bench in Portland when a night out grew too late for him to find a decent place to stay.
He was also known to spend the night in a sleeping bag on the Clackamas Community College campus. It was an hour’s drive from his home to the school, and Cody slept on the grounds on nights he had lingered too long practicing his music and did not want to risk being late to class the next day.
At six foot three and 220 pounds, Cody felt he could take care of himself. Few predators would choose to tangle with anyone Cody’s size. He thought his mother worried too much, but he humored her, and he checked in with her regularly when he was away.
Cody was expected to return from the festival on Saturday night, and his mother brushed aside her worries as it grew late and he had not returned. He was a considerate kid, and it was not like him to forget to check in with her if he was going to be delayed. He didn’t answer his cell phone, but Susan knew that could mean he was out of range, or perhaps the phone battery was dead.
Susan went to sleep, confident that she would wake the next morning to find her son home. When she heard his alarm blaring at 10:30 A.M., she figured he was ignoring it, sleeping in after a late night out.
She went to wake him and found his bed empty. She pushed down her panic, forcing herself to consider all the logical reasons Cody had not returned. His car could have broken down, or maybe he had run into friends and lost track of time. Still, as the agonizing hours slid by and there was no word from him, Susan was sick with worry.
Her biggest concern was that Cody had been in a bad car accident. Frantic, she phoned all of the hospitals between the Lafayette and Newport areas. Cody hadn’t been admitted to any of them.
Susan even called the jails, though she knew it was highly unlikely that he could have been arrested. Still, it would have been a relief to find he had been. Anything was better than what she feared.
When Susan heard a knock at her front door, she opened it and immediately slammed it in the face of a startled deputy. The sight of the man in blue had turned
her blood cold. “I thought he was there to tell me that Cody had been in an accident,” she said.
Susan did not want to hear the bad news she was sure the deputy was there to tell her, but she worked up the courage to open the door again. The officer, however, was not there for the reason Susan thought. He was looking for Cody. He told her Cody was suspected of serious criminal activity. Not only had his car been spotted moving erratically down the freeway, but its license number had also been caught by the surveillance camera of a Salem convenience store—the apparent getaway vehicle for someone who had tried to use a stolen credit card. The police suspected Cody.
“I stood on the porch and argued with him for half an hour,” Susan says.
She tried to tell the officer that Cody was missing and that if there was any illegal activity, then he was the victim, not the perpetrator.
The deputy offered her reasons for why her son might have turned to a petty crime. He suggested that Cody might have met a girl at the jazz festival who influenced him to walk on the wild side with her.
But Susan shook her head, adamant that Cody could not be involved. No, she told the officer. That was simply not possible. She knew her son. He would never have gone willingly with the sort of people who would commit crimes.
What came next was the kind of nightmare that no mother should have to live through. The media had jumped on the story of runaway homicide suspects Joey Pedersen and Holly Grigsby, and their faces flashed across TV screens as Susan Stewart watched in shock.
Was the fate of her son in the hands of dangerous fugitives who had murdered an elderly woman?
While security cameras had captured the pair with Cody’s car, the teenager himself was nowhere to be seen. It did not look good for him. The mother, sister, and three brothers who loved Cody so dearly were not alone in their affection for him. He had many friends and relatives who prayed for his safe return. He was a good guy, and people liked him. Maybe he had managed to charm the coldhearted pair. Maybe he was simply a hostage.
But the story of the beloved musician who was kind to everyone ended tragically. On October 5, 2011, he was found in a wooded area near Corvallis, fatally shot in the chest and head, most likely killed the day he went missing.
Susan Stewart has yet to hear the truth about her son’s encounter with Holly Grigsby and Joey Pedersen. The story shifted, and the “facts” changed, depending on the whims of the convicts—the only two people left alive who truly know what happened.
Some of it makes sense to Susan. Holly approached Cody and asked him for a ride. The boy did not hesitate to help her and her tattooed boyfriend.
Everyone said that was just like Cody. He’d help anyone who needed it. Of course he agreed to give them a ride. Susan does not dispute that part of the story.
But she still questions the killers’ claims that Cody fought them for his car after he had been taken by gunpoint to a secluded area. Cody would have been just fine, his killers insisted, if he had just let them drive away in peace. According to them, their unarmed captive dove through the driver’s-side window to try to prevent them from leaving.
They almost made it sound like self-defense. But Cody was levelheaded; there was no way he would have done such a foolhardy thing.
On another occasion, Susan noted, the killers had confessed that they had planned to murder all their victims, leaving no witnesses along their wicked trail.
And yet another reason given for the bloodshed was so heartless that every decent human being who heard it was stunned. White supremacists Joey Pedersen and Holly Grigsby proudly declared that they were on a mission of hate, with a goal of obliterating those whose genetic makeup or religious faith did not meet their perceived standards of superiority.
Cody was murdered because “Myers sounds like a Jewish name,” the killers explained.
The name Myers, in fact, is not a Jewish name but originates from the ancient Anglo-Saxons of England. But that is beside the point. The murder was senseless no matter the roots or race of the victim.
In still another contradiction, Holly Grigsby told a reporter for the Marysville, California, Appeal-Democrat that the media had gotten it wrong. They hadn’t known his name until after they had killed him and looked in his wallet. They could only hope, she said, there was a reason he deserved to be killed.
When Cody was murdered, his loss caused immeasurable emotional pain. Sadly, the fugitives were not finished, and they soon encountered another kind soul with a heart as big as Cody’s.
Reginald Alan Clark, fifty-three, had lived in Eureka, California, since he moved from Chicago in the 1980s. Born into a big family with twelve brothers and sisters, he learned early on how to get along with people, and he made new friends everywhere he went. Forever smiling and cracking jokes, he instantly put people at ease.
According to his friends, he was a gentleman, who was always willing to help someone in need. “Kids loved him,” Tim Guyette told Patrick Fealey, a reporter for The North Coast Journal weekly. “He was gentle and respectful around women. He never cussed in front of a woman.”
It was not just his friends who loved him; Reginald was also adored by his fiancée and her children. He had helped to raise her kids, and they considered him a father figure.
His many nieces and nephews looked up to him, and one niece remembers that when she was six years old, Uncle Reggie had spent days looking for the very Barbie doll she wanted, after he saw her crying because her mother would not buy it for her.
Reginald had had some rough spots in his life. He wore a pacemaker because of a heart defect, and he had been homeless for a while. One winter, he slept in a friend’s truck, but he still managed to keep himself clean, and he always looked well groomed.
Despite his own troubles, he was generous to others. Once, when he heard that a friend was broke, he handed him forty bucks and told him to keep it.
A hard worker, Reginald had held a variety of jobs, including a stint washing pots and pans at St. Vincent De Paul. He was trying to better himself, and in the fall of 2011, he was making plans to go to truck-driving school.
Reginald was optimistic about his future, but his dreams were dashed when he crossed paths with Joey Pedersen and Holly Grigsby.
At about 10:30 P.M. on October 4, Holly approached Reginald outside a Winco Foods, a grocery store in Eureka, and asked if he would give her and Joey a ride. True to his character, Reginald did not hesitate. It was his last kind act.
Joey and Holly climbed into Reginald’s truck—a 1989 Ford. Reginald had had the truck just two weeks, after saving up for a year and a half for the one-thousand-dollar down payment.
Joey shot Reginald in the back of his head, and then he left his body in the truck he had been so proud of.
* * *
On Wednesday afternoon on October 5, California Highway Patrol Officer Terry Uhrich, forty-two, was on a routine patrol in the Yuba County foothills when he heard the dispatchers announce a 187—police slang for murder.
“I didn’t pay that much attention,” says Uhrich, explaining that the message was for I-5 patrol units about a hundred miles away. They shared the same radio frequency, so officers often overheard announcements for faraway units.
The “be on the lookout” (BOLO) specified a white car with Oregon plates and two occupants—a male and a female.
A short while later, as Uhrich drove along a quiet road, he noticed a white Plymouth Breeze pulled over, with a young female standing beside it. Three of the doors were open, and the officer noticed that the car was cluttered with junk.
Uhrich pulled up next to the car and asked, “Is everything okay?”
“I’m just stretching,” the woman replied.
It was not unusual to find people living in their cars in this area, and he figured she was just another person down on her luck.
Uhrich drove away, but it suddenly dawned on him that the Plymouth had orange plates. He knew that Oregon license plates were orange, and he remembered the BOLO he had overhea
rd. He had not seen a male—only the lone female standing outside the car. As he turned his car around, Uhrich called dispatch and asked for a repeat of the license number.
The white Plymouth was on the move, and he followed a safe distance behind, as the license number was confirmed. He felt a rush of adrenaline as he realized that this was the murder suspects’ car.
For nearly three miles, Uhrich tailed the vehicle. They were headed in the direction of the backup patrol car, so he waited before he finally activated his rotating lights and pulled over the suspect car.
Waiting for backup, he stayed seated for the longest three and a half minutes of his life. “It felt like three and a half hours,” he confides.
The patrol car was parked a few feet away from the suspects’ car. The male, who had apparently ducked down when Uhrich had first approached the Plymouth, now called out, “What’s this about?”
“Stay in your car,” Uhrich answered. The officer’s hand was on his gun, prepared to shoot if necessary. “I was ready,” he remembers. “If it was going to go down, I was ready.”
Uhrich did not know the suspects were white supremacists Joey Pedersen and Holly Grigsby. And he did not know that Holly had a .22 between her legs and that she turned to Joey and said, “Let’s shoot him.”
Joey took one look at the hairless Uhrich and said, “No, he is one of us.”
“I’m bald and I blame my grandfather for that,” Uhrich now jokes.
To Pedersen, the officer looked like a skinhead—a racist who had shaved his head to make a statement.
Uhrich’s grandfather had passed on what had seemed like some undesirable genes, but in this instance it was a blessing. It prevented a shoot-out that could have left Uhrich wounded, dead, or with blood on his hands. The last thing he wanted to do was to shoot someone.
“I did not take my eyes off of them,” Uhrich explains. He was aware of their every movement, and when the two began kissing, he wondered if they were preparing to go down in a blaze of gunfire.
When Uhrich’s backup arrived, Joey and Holly were arrested without incident. The suspects were separated, and Holly rode in the back of Uhrich’s patrol car. He had been instructed not to “Mirandarize” or speak to the suspects.
