by Burl Barer
Dear Reader:
Some crime cases continue to haunt us long after the jury has returned its verdict. Violent in the extreme, the St. Pierre case is one of the most powerful of all.
Domineering and mentally damaged, discredited ex-Marine Paul St. Pierre returned to Tacoma, Washington, where he ran roughshod over his younger brother, Chris, and lived a lifestyle of drugs and drunken violence. Paul’s best friend, Andrew Webb, was a head-injured sociopath from a dysfunctional home where incest and child molestation were tragic aspects of family history. Young Chris St. Pierre watched in horror as Andrew and Paul committed cold-blooded murder, and kept the severed head of one of their victims in a bucket on the back porch.
When Chris finally revealed all to Detective Yerbury of the Tacoma Police Department, all three were charged with first degree murder. What began as a story of murder and madness became a legal thriller so shocking that one judge declared a mistrial, and another became so outraged at the prosecutor that he stormed out of the courtroom.
In this newly updated edition of Head Shot, Edgar-award-winning author Burl Barer provides new information and insights on this case and the two surviving convicted killers—who, released from prison, recently attended their high school reunion.
Already hailed by experts, reviewers, and readers, Head Shot will enthrall and amaze you. Sit back and enjoy a fascinating story, told by one of American’s finest investigative journalists.
If you would like to comment on Head Shot, we’d love to hear from you at [email protected].
Don’t miss Burl Barer’s other real-life crime thrillers, available from Pinnacle!
With my best wishes,
Michaela Hamilton
Executive Editor, Pinnacle True Crime
HEAD SHOT
Burl Barer
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
http://www.pinnaclebooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Dear Reader:
Title Page
Prologue
PART ONE
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
PART TWO
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
PART THREE
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Afterword
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
UPDATE FOR 2012 EDITION
Copyright Page
Whensoever a mother seeth that her child hath done well, let her praise and applaud him and cheer his heart; and if the slightest undesirable trait should manifest itself, let her counsel the child and punish him, and use means based on reason, even a slight verbal chastisement should this be necessary. It is not, however, permissible to strike a child, or vilify him, for the child’s character will be totally perverted if he be subjected to blows or verbal abuse.
—’Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the
Writings of ’Abdu’l-Bahá
As the breeze blows, the slender trees yield.
Today, you will see two souls
apparently in close friendship;
Tomorrow, all this may be changed.
—’Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks
Prologue
The headless corpse of twenty-two-year-old John Achord and the faceless remains of twenty-year-old Damon Wells were recovered from shallow graves near Elbe, Washington, on June 19, 1984. Christopher St. Pierre, twenty-one, directed authorities to the severely decomposed bodies after telling Tacoma Police shocking details of their violent deaths, subsequent secret burials, and the ghoulish premeditated decapitation. Prior to these disclosures by St. Pierre, no one even knew that Achord and Wells were dead.
Most important, Christopher St. Pierre identified the killers. He named names and revealed all. The first shared name was that of mentally diminished and alcoholic Paul St. Pierre, his own brother; the second was a longtime friend and neighbor—tall, handsome, brain-damaged, and violent twenty-four-year-old Andrew Webb.
“Andrew Webb was my high school sweetheart, and I spent, or wasted, more than fifteen years married to him,” said his ex-wife, Anne. “At first, I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world. That didn’t last long. If you want an example of typical Andrew Webb behavior, ask Nellie Sanford and her children about their 1983 night of living hell.”
PART ONE
One
July 5, 1983
Nellie Sanford, forty-five, and her son Shane Sanford, eighteen, were awakened at 3:50 A.M. by incessant pounding on their back door. Mrs. Sanford was first to reach the rear vestibule; Shane stood behind her as she nervously inquired through the locked door, “Who is it?”
“Joe,” was the mumbled reply. Curious, Mrs. Sanford cautiously unlocked the door, eased it open only an inch or two, and peered through the crack. “Who’s there?”
This time, the reply was loud and clear. Two drunken men violently pushed open the door and forced their way into the house. One was twenty-three-year-old Andrew Webb; the other, his longtime friend and neighbor, Randy Nolan. Both men were armed with rifles and shotguns, which they now pointed directly at Nellie and Shane Sanford. Mrs. Sanford, by motherly instinct or raw nerve, immediately went on the attack. She grabbed Nolan’s shotgun, furiously trying to wrestle it from him. Shane jumped to his mother’s aid, but Webb beat him with the rifle butt, striking him repeatedly on the arms and shoulders.
The chaotic melee’s screaming, swearing, and shouting was soon punctuated by an explosive gunshot. A bullet accidentally discharged from Webb’s rifle blasted through the ceiling, pierced a bedroom door on the second floor, and buried itself somewhere in an adjoining bedroom. Sleeping in those bedrooms were Mrs. Sanford’s fourteen-year-old daughter, sixteen-year-old son, and a fourteen-year-old houseguest, Dennie Mason. Woken by the screams, they were terrified by the gunshot. It also drew the attention of Tacoma Police patrol officers Bahr and Troxel.
Originally dispatched to that part of town to respond to an excessive noise complaint—someone’s car stereo was disturbing the peace—the officers encountered what sounded like an explosion on the 2200 block of South Railroad Street. Officer Bahr, driving the patrol car in the opposite direction, pulled an immediate U-turn.
The officers didn’t see smoke, flames, or airborne debris. A hysterical fourteen-year-old girl was screaming on a rooftop, “They’ve got guns! They’re going to kill us all!” While she screamed, a teenage boy crawled out a second-story bedroom window. “He dropped about twenty feet to the pavement and then ran directly to our vehicle,” Officer Bahr later reported. “He was very upset, and he was repeating over and over, ‘They’re in the house; they’re going to shoot us; they have guns.’ ” Bahr and Troxel called for backup just as an angry blast of profanities erupted in a male voice from that same bedroom window. “Officer Bahr took a position of cover on the west side of the home, where he could see into the room where the subjects were located,” Troxel later reported. “I took cover at the southwest corner of the house, where the front and west side of the home could be seen.”
From behind a tree about twenty feet west of the open upstairs window, Bahr watched as Andrew Webb repeatedly struck Shane Sanford and then shoved a rifle barrel into the defenseless teen’s mouth. “You motherfucker,” Webb yelled, his voice a drunken slur, “tell me where the guns are or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”
The terrified Sanford begged for hi
s life. “Please, please don’t kill me! Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!”
Officer Bahr decided that the situation necessitated shooting Andrew Webb.
“I had my revolver drawn and I was taking careful aim,” Bahr reported. “Then Nolan entered the room, Webb slapped Sanford across the face, and Nolan pressed his shotgun against the terrified teenager’s chest and said, ‘Tell me where the guns are, or I’ll kill you.’ ”
Officer Bahr aimed directly at Webb—his target perfectly framed in the bedroom window. As Bahr applied pressure to the trigger, the window shade suddenly fell across his line of sight. With a clear shot no longer possible, Bahr holstered his revolver, quickly returned to his vehicle, grabbed a shotgun, and dashed back to cover. “Then I heard noise at the back of the house. The suspects were making a run for it.” Additional police officers arrived at the exact moment the two heavily armed intruders ran out the back door, attempting their getaway.
“Police! Freeze! Drop your guns!” Nolan dropped his shotgun and flopped to the ground, docile and compliant. Webb ran off, discarding his weapons and shoulder holster as he burrowed into nearby blackberry bushes. After twenty feet, he crouched down and awaited the inevitable. He didn’t have to wait long.
Both intruders now detained, Tacoma Police confiscated an impressive collection of deadly weapons, including a shotgun, .44-caliber handgun, .22-caliber long rifle with chrome-plated wood stock, and Webb’s .357 Ruger.
“Andrew Keith Webb cheated death on the first day after the Fourth of July, 1983,” Detective Robert Yerbury of the Tacoma Police Department commented several years later. “If the upstairs window shade hadn’t dropped, it would have been curtains for sure. That wasn’t the first time Andrew Webb cheated death, and it wasn’t the last.”
It also wasn’t the first time Andrew Webb, loving husband, father, and employee of Royal Donuts, had attacked the Sanford residence. This was Webb’s third armed assault since January. In March, Webb and unknown accomplices, armed with guns and a baseball bat, had stormed into the Tacoma home of Thomas Shannon and Richard Daylo. “Again, they were yelling about missing guns,” explained Yerbury. “Webb’s accomplices hit Mr. Shannon across the knuckles ten or twelve times with the baseball bat, and then Andrew Webb grabbed Mr. Shannon by the hair and punched him in the head. Webb, and whoever was with him, left that house and immediately went to the Sanford residence, crashed in with the same method—pistol and baseball bats—and ransacked that house again looking for missing guns.”
“We were at a loss as to who committed those two assaults on the same day in March, and we didn’t have any lead as to the identity of the assailants. Mr. Webb took care of that when Nolan and he were arrested at the Sanfords’. We had three incidents—two on March third, and one on July fifth—where an armed Andrew Webb entered a house claiming things have been stolen from him. He admitted to all three assaults, but refused to say who was with him on those first two.”
Many of the boys who grew up in the same neighborhood with Webb and Nolan could have named the men most likely to have accompanied Webb on a mission of that nature. Andrew Webb had friends he could count on—Cory Cunningham and Paul St. Pierre. “Paul St. Pierre and Andrew were good buddies, although Cory and Andrew were superclose since childhood, all of them had known each other for years,” recalled Webb’s former wife, Anne. “Andrew even lived with Paul St. Pierre for a while after I kicked him out. But the kind of friendship shared by Paul and Andrew was based mostly on drinking, taking drugs, and playing tough with guns—not a very firm foundation for true emotional intimacy. Anyway, almost a year after the Sanford incident, Paul hauled off and shot Andrew point-blank with a forty-five automatic. Andrew survived, but their relationship never recovered.”
Neither, some say, did the city of Tacoma. The fallout of Webb and St. Pierre precipitated an avalanche of disturbing accusations, conflicting confessions, and shocking revelations of death and dismemberment.
“Everything started crashing down,” recalled Detective Yerbury, “at precisely eight fifty-two, Saturday morning, June 9, 1984, with a single gunshot followed by a frantic phone call.”
June 9, 1984, 8:52 A.M.
Helen Lorentzon, morning waitress at Ray and Gene’s Tavern on Tacoma’s Pacific Avenue, looked up when she heard the front door open. Standing in the doorway was an agitated and obviously inebriated young man in his early twenties. His light brown hair was badly disheveled, and his blue jeans and plaid shirt were liberally blotched with blood.
“Call the cops,” he blurted out. “Someone’s been shot!” He pointed down the street toward Ericson’s Auto Body. “There! The house across the alley from Ericson’s. He’s bleeding real bad.”
Lorentzon dialed 911 and summoned the police. The bloodstained man took the phone from Lorentzon, identified himself as Jim Mullins, and insisted that the cops “step on it.” Then, with the same speed as he had entered, Mullins ran away.
“Officer Boik and I arrived at the tavern almost immediately,” said Officer Lowry in his official report. “We had no information other than that someone called from Ray and Gene’s and that there had been a shooting.”
As the squad car pulled up, Lorentzon ran out. By 8:55 A.M., the responding officers and several others dispatched as backup had arrived at Ericson’s. “Between the body shop and the first house south, I saw three men apparently attempting to enter a parked Dodge Challenger,” Boik reported. “These men were later identified as the suspect Paul St. Pierre, the witness Kevin Wiggins, and the victim Andrew Webb. It appeared as if St. Pierre and Wiggins were trying to help Webb inside the vehicle. I could see that Webb was in pain, and his clothes were covered with blood.”
Police approached with guns drawn, ordering the men to freeze and put their hands above their heads. St. Pierre let go of Webb and tossed his car keys toward the police. Kevin Wiggins obediently placed his hands above his head and stepped aside from his blood-drenched companion. Released from all support, the seriously wounded Andrew Webb fell backward into the dirt. Detective Yerbury later commented. “Andrew Webb, despite being shot at close range with a forty-five automatic, cheated death.”
Lowry ran over to Webb and immediately noticed the wound’s seriousness. “It was a bullet entrance wound in the right side of the chest, and an exit wound on the left back side of his abdomen. He didn’t say anything to me. The fire department arrived on the scene and immediately began to treat Mr. Webb.”
Boik repeatedly told the apparently drunken Wiggins and St. Pierre to keep their hands up and away from their bodies. Paul St. Pierre repeatedly brought his hands down. “I finally told him to place his hands on the hood of the car,” recalled Boik. “I attempted to do a pat-down search but he was very uncooperative. I noticed a long, hard object in St. Pierre’s left rear pants pocket. It was a black magazine for a forty-five-caliber gun, loaded with at least five fully jacketed forty-five-caliber ball ammunition.”
Paul St. Pierre resisted and tried to pull away. Officer Lowry, coming over to assist, saw that St. Pierre was continually pulling his black T-shirt over the front of his jeans.
“I lifted up the shirt,” reported Lowry, “and saw the brown leather holster clipped to his jeans. We took it into evidence, and Boik handcuffed St. Pierre, who refused to tell us anything.” He also refused to provide his true name—he told them he was Chris St. Pierre, his brother.
Kevin Wiggins was no more helpful and kept violently throwing his arms around. The officers calmed Wiggins’s windmill-like extremities by handcuffing him and stuffing him in the back of a squad car.
“We still had no idea what had happened,” said Lowry. “We didn’t know who, or how many, were involved. Officer Langford positioned himself at the back of the residence while I entered through the front. I wanted to make sure that there were no other victims or assailants.” Lowry noted several blood splatters on the porch and an exceptionally large pool of fresh blood on the kitchen floor. “There was also a fresh bullet hole in the ref
rigerator door,” he noted in his official report, “and on the floor, away from the blood, was a forty-five shell casing.”
While the ambulance transported the near-death Webb to the hospital, the drunken Paul St. Pierre and Kevin Wiggins were retained in separate squad cars for individual questioning. Tacoma detective Robert Yerbury, who handled the inquiry, arrived within twenty minutes of the initial call.
“I already knew both Paul St. Pierre and Andrew Webb,” Yerbury said years later. “The first time I met them was several months earlier. Andrew Webb was with Paul St. Pierre when there was a violent altercation at a grocery store during which Paul St. Pierre shot and wounded a man named Kevin Robinson. We investigated the matter and determined that Paul St. Pierre acted in self-defense, and no charges were pressed. Andrew Webb and I, of course, saw each other again when he was arrested after his assault on the Sanfords.”
Detective Yerbury was also aware that Paul St. Pierre shared the house on Pacific Avenue with several roommates: Donald Marshall, Mark Perez, Tony Youso, and Paul’s younger brother, Christopher St. Pierre. Andrew Webb, recently separated from his wife and child, had also lived there for a while.
“It was Chris who rented the house in the first place,” said Yerbury. “He worked next door at Ericson’s, and it was Mark Ericson’s dad who owned the rental house. When I got the call telling me the address, I knew exactly whose house we were going to.”
A two-story brown wood-frame dwelling almost completely obscured by large bushes, the essentially good quality rental didn’t look its best under the St. Pierres’ care. The unkempt lawn, perhaps mirroring the nature of its recalcitrant caretakers, was high, weed infested, unruly, and full of broken beer bottles. The home’s interior reflected a sense of decor best described as contemporary disheveled, with beer bottles and clothing randomly strewn about. There was also an authentic 1984 industrial-strength bong—a large marijuana pipe.
