by Ann Rule
It figured. No one at the Exotica knew where George had come from, where he was going, his last name, or anything at all about him. Their business was not a place for close and continuing relationships.
The detectives went over George’s “bedroom” and found nothing with his surname on it. Pomarleau promised to try to find out more about the man he’d hired as a bouncer. He was so oily and ingratiating that the investigators wondered what he was trying to hide.
One of the girls in the studio said she remembered that George’s last name sounded “foreign. He was like a very dark Italian. Me, I’m mulatto and he wasn’t as dark as me—but dark. His name might have been Rodriquez, but I’m not sure. Maybe it was Danny Rodriquez?”
Lamphere and Nordlund went through their computer bank and all the FIRs (Field Investigation Reports filed by patrol officers) for the prior six months to see if there were any hits on “Danny Rodriquez.” They found no one matching the rapist’s description. They hadn’t really expected that they would; those who frequented the Exotica lived in a netherworld, moving in shadows and usually using several aliases. They wondered if they would ever find the man who had savagely attacked Arden Lee.
Pat Lamphere was surprised to receive a call from Roger Pomarleau. He said he had gone through some receipts and found the name “George Ayala” on them. “I might have a picture of him someplace,” he added. “I’ll look.”
Since Roger Pomarleau had done his share of knocking young women around in the past, it seemed odd that he would try to help the police find his ex-bouncer. Perhaps he just wanted to make points against any future trouble he might have, but, whatever his motive, Pomarleau was the best informant they’d had thus far on the sadistic—and now vanished—George.
Joyce Johnson, another Sexual Assault detective, who was working the night shift, ran the name “Ayala” on the computer. She found some hits on Mexican Ayalas, but they were all older or they were in the computer banks under “victim.”
There was a growing sense of urgency in this so-far-fruitless investigation. Ayala was still free, and he might assault other women. His rage against them was far beyond anything most detectives had ever encountered. Expanding her computer search into Oregon and California, Joyce Johnson contacted Salem and Sacramento to see if their state’s computers had any listing for individuals named Ayala.
Sacramento detectives reported on June 5 that they had two “George Ayalas” in their computer banks. One was a burglar out of Los Angeles, and the other had gotten into trouble in San Francisco for sex and narcotics offenses. One was twenty-one and the other twenty-eight. “We’re forwarding photos of both of them.”
Arden Lee had finally recovered enough to speak with detectives in some detail about what had happened to her. John Nordlund tape-recorded his interview with her while Lamphere stood by. Arden remembered standing in front of the Korea Tavern around midnight on the night of May 31-June 1. “I ran into this man named George,” she began. “I don’t know his last name, but Kim introduced us, and I said, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and we started talking, just gossip, and then he asked me if I wanted to come and have a drink with him. He said he’d just bought a new house and we could go there. He said it was still boarded up, but he had the lower floor fixed up.”
“Did you have any fear of him at that time?” Nordlund asked.
“Not when we were first walking up the street. A police car went by and he asked me if there were any warrants out for me, and I said, ‘No,’ and he said there were for him, but that’s about as much as he said then.”
There was no point in telling Arden now that she had used very poor judgment in agreeing to walk off into the night with a man she barely knew. She had learned a terrible lesson, and even though it appeared that she was going to survive, what had happened to her would surely remain a devastating memory for all of her life.
Arden recalled that she became suspicious of George. “I was frightened when George started walking up a path through thick shrubs,” she said. “They even shut out the streetlights, and it was very dark. It didn’t look like a house at all—at least not one someone could be living in. It had a ‘For Rent’ sign on it, and he’d told me that it belonged to him.
“And then he started walking real fast ahead of me, and I said, ‘I’m not going. I don’t like it up here. I’m not going no further.’”
George had turned around then, and she’d seen the rope in his hands. She’d been afraid before when she saw the dark bushes and the “For Rent” sign on the house that was supposed to belong to George, but now, seeing the looped rope, she was terrified.
“I started screaming and running, but he tackled me and got the rope around my neck. He started choking me with it and I had to stop screaming.”
“What happened then?”
“There was a little stairway with a metal railing. He made me take down his pants and do oral sex.”
“How did you get down the path to that stairway?”
“He dragged me by the rope around my neck.”
Arden said that when the act of fellatio was finished, George had dragged her down into the concrete room in the basement. There, he’d made her take all her clothes off, and he asked her for money. “I gave him the two one-dollar bills I had. I always carry a bottle of Tylenol with me because I get bad toothaches. And he took that, too.”
“Now you’re inside the room,” Nordlund said. “Does he still have the rope around your neck?”
“Yes. He had the rope on my throat the whole time. After I got my clothes off—he ripped some of them off— he made me lie on my stomach.
“He unzipped his pants and tried to have intercourse in my behind—but he couldn’t do it. He told me to put my hands behind my back, and he would tie me up and for me not to tell anyone what had happened. So I put my hands behind my back and he kind of sat on them, and then he pulled my head up with the rope.”
At that point, Arden thought she had passed out—liter-ally hung by the rope. Although tests had shown she’d been raped vaginally, too, she had no memory of it, nor could she remember the terrible beating she’d endured.
“The next thing I knew, I was awake and I didn’t know where I was and I couldn’t find my clothes. I was alone in that dark room and he was gone. First, I tried screaming and screaming and then I remembered where I was and I tried to find my clothes, but every time I stood up, I’d pass out and fall down.”
“Was the rope still around your neck?” Nordlund asked.
“No. I kept trying to make my way to where the door was, but it was so dark and my eyes wouldn’t focus very good. I kept thinking that I’d rest awhile and my head would clear.”
It was obvious that Arden had lapsed in and out of consciousness—perhaps for hours at a time—all night.
“It finally got light out, but I still couldn’t see very well. I got the door open—don’t ask me how, because it was real heavy and you had to lift up on it. I called out, but no one came. I passed out two times on the path, and then I realized I had no clothes on. But I got to the apartment next door and tried to get help, but nobody answered the bell.”
Arden described how three or four people had walked by her as she lay bleeding on the sidewalk, begging for help. She had only a vague recollection of the paramedics working over her.
Arden still thought she’d been attacked by a Native American, but she was also sure that George had told her he worked as a bouncer at the Exotica. He’d been clean and neatly dressed. She thought he weighed about two hundred pounds.
Pat Lamphere asked her, “Would you recognize George if you saw him again?”
“Yes... yes, I’m sure of it.”
The interview was concluded and Arden was prepared for surgery to set her mangled jaw.
Pat Lamphere and John Nordlund headed back to their offices in the Public Safety Building, and they were surprised to find that Roger Pomarleau had called once again. “He said he found a photo of George Ayala,” Joyce Johnson said. “He brought i
t in, and he told me that Ayala had been living in some kind of ‘youth hostel’ before he moved into the Exotica. He may have meant the Green Turtle.”
The Green Turtle was a no-frills building in downtown Seattle with clean beds and a kitchen where travelers on a budget could cook their own food. It was well-managed, and considered safe. Old buses and vans left regularly from the Green Turtle for California with a motley bunch of travelers who had signed up for a reasonably priced fare. If he’d behaved himself, no one there would have questioned Ayala. Arden Lee had described him as clean and neat.
Roger Pomarleau had told Joyce Johnson: “Ayala’s probably a Caucasian-Spanish combination. He has such a big belly that he looks pregnant.”
“Is he on drugs of any kind?” Johnson asked him.
And Pomarleau had shaken his head. “As far as I know, he doesn’t use drugs or drink much,” Pomarleau recalled, “except he sniffed some kind of a liquid out of a brown bottle. I don’t know what that was all about.”
Johnson reported that Pomarleau had found that Ayala had charged several long-distance calls at the Exotica and that he would bring those numbers called in to Pat Lamphere.
Kit Mitchell, another of the Exotica’s managers, recalled hiring Ayala on April 16, paying him about one hundred dollars a week to bounce. Mitchell’s and Pomarleau’s recall of how long Ayala had worked for them didn’t match. Pomarleau said he’d only been there for a week, while Kit said it was six weeks.
“He came in on the first of June and said he’d been with someone who did something wrong and he had to leave town on a bus,” Mitchell said. “He said he was going to see his family. He sold most of his things: radio, TV—real cheap. He took his duffel bag and left in a cab for the bus depot.”
Mitchell gave the detectives a list of the phone calls Ayala had made, the last two on June 1. The calls were to Walnut Creek, California, San Francisco, and Texas. The two numbers called in Texas were the last calls. These numbers seemed to indicate that the rapist had headed for the Lone Star State.
On June 12, a photo of the Los Angeles George Ayala arrived. This photo, along with the one of the George Ayala from the Exotica, was included in a mug “lay-down” with six other photos of similar individuals. The L.A. George and the Exotica George didn’t look anything alike.
Lamphere and Nordlund went to Harborview Hospital and showed the photo montage to Arden Lee. She immediately picked number seven as her assailant. That was of George Allen Ayala, late of the Exotica. Yung Kim of the Korea Tavern also picked George Allen Ayala.
The investigators called the number Ayala had called in Texas on June 1. When they asked for George, they were told he was at work. Asked if George had recently returned from Seattle, the woman on the other end of the line said there were three George Ayalas in the family, and the “Seattle George” was the nephew. “I saw him just last Sunday,” she said. But when she realized who was calling her, she suddenly turned frosty and refused to give any more information.
Apparently, there were many, many families in Texas cities with the surname Ayala, but Pat Lamphere felt they had reached the right family. On June 14, she sent a teletype to Austin requesting information on George Allen Ayala. Word came back that the suspect was born on February 11, 1950. As he hit his teens, he began to build a lengthy rap sheet in Texas. Since 1967, he’d been investigated for charges including assault to murder, vagrancy, felony theft, suspicion of burglary, parole violation, burglary with intent to commit theft, and assault with a deadly weapon. He’d been discharged from parole six years before the attack on Arden Lee.
The San Francisco charges involving commercial sex (pimping), sexual assault, and dangerous drugs had happened since. Arden Lee had made an almost-fatal mistake in judgment. George Allen Ayala was not the kind of man a girl would choose to follow down a dark path—or even a well-lighted one.
Nordlund and Lamphere placed another phone call to Texas City, Texas. This time they spoke to George Ayala— not the suspect but his uncle. He insisted he hadn’t seen George Allen Ayala for some time, about seven years, although he called occasionally. “He called on the first of June and said he was in Seattle. I have no idea where he is now.”
The man they were looking for appeared to have successfully escaped both from Seattle and from the detectives who tracked him. On June 27, Noreen Skagen received a call from Kit Mitchell. “I got a letter from George Ayala,” he said. “It’s postmarked San Francisco. I’ll read it to you. He says: ‘Sorry had to leave you. Had problems. Am home with family. Would appreciate your sending clothes. Sure is hot here in Texas. Will send address. George.’”
It was about to get even hotter in Texas for George. On July 6 at 6:30 P.M., Nordlund and Lamphere received a phone call from Constable J. B. Cucco of Harris County, Texas.
“We’ve arrested George Ayala for burglary down here. Understand you’d like to talk to him?”
They would.
Ayala, in a talkative mood, had volunteered to Cucco that he knew he was wanted in Seattle for “beating up a whore.”
“We’ve got a good burglary case on him,” Cucco said, “but we probably won’t proceed with it if you want him.”
The Seattle detectives said they would be more than glad to extradite Ayala and would send specifics of the warrant down to Houston, the seat of Harris County.
“George seems to want to talk,” Cucco remarked. “I think I’ll go on back and see if he’d like to waive extradition.”
Ayala told Cucco and his partner, Billy Mathis, that he thought he’d just as soon go back to Seattle. It was 6:00 A.M. on July 18 when John Nordlund and Detective Danny Melton arrived at the Harris County Jail. They took custody of Ayala, who said he would “ride this beef out in prison,” but he also hinted that he might commit suicide. He knew he was going to prison, but preferred Washington penitentiaries to those in Texas.
During the flight back to Seattle, Ayala inquired about Arden Lee’s health. Nordlund reminded him that he didn’t have to talk about the incident.
“She was a whore who said she’d get me off twice for forty dollars, but she went back on her promise.”
He seemed to feel he was justified in doing what he’d done to her. He said she’d tried to steal his wallet.
Nordlund and Melton stared at him, this cold man with no remorse at all for what he had done to another human being. Ayala seemed to feel justified in what he had done. “Well,” he sneered. “She tried to steal my wallet.”
Neither detective believed him.
When they landed in Seattle, Ayala seemed oddly anxious to return to the dark basement where the rape and beating had occurred. He was taken back there and he showed detectives the route from the Korea Tavern and how he’d gotten Arden into the basement. His statement agreed with Arden’s except that he insisted that she’d agreed to go with him for money. Finally, he admitted that he had put the rope around her neck and forced her into the cellar.
“She promised she wouldn’t tell the police,” he said, “but I got paranoid and I picked up a stick and started to hit her.
“I went back to work. I thought I’d go back later and check on her, and maybe call an ambulance, but I didn’t get around to it.”
Ayala’s written statement to Nordlund showed more violence on his part than he’d admitted during verbal statements. “I hadn’t bought the house. I just wanted to get her there. I was ahead of her and I think she started getting paranoid. She started screaming ‘Help me’ or something like that.
“I found the rope next to a bush and put it around her neck. I dragged her down the stairwell. She was crying. I didn’t want to hurt her or anything—I just wanted to talk to her.”
Ayala said that the victim had offered to perform fellatio, but that he’d stopped her because he didn’t want it then. “We were in the basement. It was dark in there. I took the rope off. I hit her. She was on the ground. I hit her with my hand open. I didn’t know if I should let her go or not. I picked up a stick from the floor
and I hit her about eight times. I could hear her kind of foaming from the mouth. I put my ear on her chest. I could hear her breathing. I closed the doors and took off.”
Ayala admitted he’d been in the Exotica the next day when Lamphere and Nordlund came looking for him, but he said the girls covered for him, giving him a chance to escape. “After you left, I closed the place and split.”
Ayala had hopped a bus for Galveston and gotten off in Houston. It was quite possible that he thought he’d killed Arden Lee when he left her in the basement of the deserted house. If she had not managed to crawl out to the street and finally summon help, she probably would have died alone with the rats and the spiders. As it was, she barely survived. Even as she seemed to be getting better, she developed pneumonia; somehow she fought that off, too.
She did recover, somewhat scarred, and with a niggling fear of the dark that she will probably always have.
George Allen Ayala pleaded guilty to an amended charge of assault and received a forty-year sentence.
One of the most helpful informants in the Arden Lee case did not fare as well. Roger Pomarleau, the owner-manager of the Exotica, was always on the lookout for fresh young talent to feature in the center window. He recruited a new employee in mid-September—only two months after George Ayala was arrested. Cheri Schak was a tiny blonde, only nineteen, and she was thrilled when she listened to the usual spiel that she would make one hundred dollars a night and tips for gyrating in the window of the Exotica and giving dance “programs” in the back rooms.
Since Pomarleau invariably ended up collecting a hefty percentage of “his” girls’ earnings, he was pleased with Cheri, who was more attractive than most applicants. He was so pleased with her that he invited her to his spacious, new condominium. He drove her there in his new gold Cadillac. His hospitality was so warm that Cheri was invited to share Pomarleau’s king-size bed.
It was an odd invitation since Pomarleau was still married to his sixteen-year-old wife. He assured Cheri that it wasn’t for any sexual reason. But, even so, he refused to drive her to her own apartment and she had no way to get home. Pomarleau slept in the middle of the bed—with Cheri on one side and his wife on the other.
