by Burl Barer
“Youso ran into the house screaming and yelling hysterically,” Webb later recalled, “and he was searching for a knife, saying he was going to kill himself. Paul and I tackled him. He said he was in an accident and thought he had killed some people. His head was bleeding and [so was] his knee, and he didn’t have a shirt on. We asked him where the accident was, but we couldn’t get any sense out of him because he was too drunk.”
“Andrew Webb took me to his house and left me there overnight,” confirmed Youso. “The next morning, Andrew came and picked me up from his house. He said Paul St. Pierre had shot somebody.” Chris St. Pierre later accorded Youso further explanation. “Chris told me that this guy had pulled some kind of weapon out on Paul. He said it was a very big steel blade, that’s what Chris had told me.”
“When I arrived home, there were two holes in the carpet that had been cut out, and there was no padding where the holes were—it was all the way down to the wood. It appeared to me that there was blood on the wood. Chris St. Pierre and I removed the rest of the carpet with the holes in it,” admitted Youso. “Chris St. Pierre had poured lacquer thinner over one of the spots where the hole was, and had sanded the spot he had put the lacquer thinner on. I believe the spot was blood.”
As for dumping John Achord’s head into the river, Youso acknowledged removing the bucket from Chris St. Pierre’s station wagon, walking to the bridge’s midspan, and pushing the bucket off into the water below. He also helped dispose of the Gerber knife used to kill Damon Wells. “Chris St. Pierre and I had taken the knife in Chris’s car and threw it out on a freeway on-ramp. I threw out the Gerber knife,” Youso explained, “because Chris St. Pierre did not want anything of Paul St. Pierre’s around.” Advised of his rights, and following his sworn statement, Anthony Youso was arrested by detectives.
While Youso was being booked into the Pierce County Jail, Sergeant Parkhurst attended an autopsy performed by Dr. Lacsina on “two unknown males found on 6-19-84 in Lewis County, Washington.”
Dr. Lacsina carefully examined the severely decomposed body of Damon Wells, stuffed in a mummy-style sleeping bag, while Sergeant Parkhurst looked on and took notes. “The victim’s body is soiled, and there are sticks and brush protruding—especially from the neck area. There is an obvious throat wound, and the victim’s mouth has extremely protruding and crooked front incisors. There are no facial features on the victim.”
Identification Technician Christian was able to fingerprint a portion of the right thumb after Dr. Lacsina removed the thumb’s skin, and Christian soon confirmed an exact match to the known thumbprint of Damon Wells.
As the autopsy continued, Lacsina found two stab wounds on the left side of Wells’s back, and two puncture wounds to the left lobe of his left lung. In the final analysis, Damon Wells died exactly as Christopher St. Pierre had described. Someone cut open Wells’s throat and stabbed him twice in the back. He died from severe blood loss. “The cause of death is attributed to each multiple stab wound,” Dr. Lacsina reported, “as well as slashing wounds to the neck.”
As for the other recovered body, Sergeant Parkhurst reported that “prior to the autopsy and external examination, the body of the subject was fully X-rayed. I notice that the victim has been decapitated and his head is missing.”
Lacsina and Parkhurst tried taking the victim’s fingerprints, but the skin was so decomposed that it was sliding off the body. Dr. Lacsina removed the loose skin from the victim’s left hand, washed it thoroughly, and then put the victim’s skin on over his own in “an attempt to create a surface which would allow printing and possible latent comparison. This failed,” said Parkhurst, “because the victim’s skin was too wet and the ink would not cover adequately the victim’s finger.” They agreed to try this technique again when the skin was dry.
Piece by piece and item by item, clothing and personal items were taken away from the body. “Dr. Lacsina removed the shirt of the victim, which can be described as a pullover polo-type shirt with a collar. It is in such a soiled condition that it is impossible to tell the original color. It is also observed that there are several cuts in the back of the shirt.”
Lacsina turned the body over and scrubbed the back clean. Sergeant Parkhurst immediately noticed several knife wounds in the victim’s back. Dr. Lacsina confirmed that there were at least twelve knife wounds, all caused by a double-edged blade. Opening the victim from the back, Dr. Lacsina examined the hemorrhaging resulting from these stab wounds.
“The wounds were antemortem,” stated Parkhurst. “That means they occurred before death. The heart had to be beating at the time the wounds were inflicted.” Further examination revealed more knife wounds in the neck area. “Dr. Lacsina removed the body organs, and stab wounds were observed in the area of the liver.”
Chris St. Pierre swore that Paul St. Pierre killed John Achord by shooting him in the head with a .45 automatic. This fatal head wound, and the bullet lodged in the victim’s skull, prompted the decapitation and the subsequent disposal of John Achord’s cement-encased head into the Puyallup River. The autopsy performed by Dr. Lacsina revealed that John Achord did not die from a gunshot wound. John Achord was stabbed to death.
Four
Paul St. Pierre prized his Gerber Fighting Knife, Christopher St. Pierre was handy with a hatchet, and Andrew Webb’s reputation included proficiency with any pointed object suitable for throwing, jabbing, or stabbing. Andrew Webb was deadly with a blade, but unlike Paul St. Pierre, Webb didn’t carry a deadly weapon on his person every hour of the day.
The sixth child of nine born to Lowell Webb and Dolores Armstrong Webb, Andrew Webb was raised in a close-knit family of four brothers and five sisters, all nurtured by a loving and protective mother. His father, a dedicated Christian, was hardworking and loud hollering; he harbored a marked disdain for the show of any emotion other than anger.
Modest in income, unassuming in presentation, and reassuringly old-fashioned, the Webb family valued the Bible, honesty, loyalty, and unflinching dedication to the higher standard to which those who arise to serve the Lord are continually summoned. All nine children were uncommonly close, especially Andrew Webb and his two younger sisters.
Anne Webb later said, “He told me he tormented them just for the hell of it. He gave me the impression that he made his little sisters do things whether they wanted to or not. And he said that he wasn’t the only one in the family taking advantage of the girls, either. If you aren’t safe with your own brothers, who can you trust? Who can you turn to? That’s abuse, and these folks were so Christian, so devout, and also so screwed up that brothers and sisters were doing that, and it was normal for them!”
According to Anne, her husband gave every indication that sexual, emotional, and physical abuse were intrinsic aspects of Webb family life. “Oh, yes,” insisted Anne, “from what I understood from Andrew, incest was as much part of their lifestyle as grace before meals or prayers at bedtime.”
“It is so sad to acknowledge that our home, our family, was very troubled,” said Gail Webb, the eldest offspring of Lowell and Dolores, who is professionally educated in the study of child abuse. “The tragic truth is that we lived in a household characterized by anger and inappropriate behavior. It is even more heartbreaking when you consider how honestly sincere Mom and Dad were. They were doing the best they could, considering where they came from, and how they were raised.”
“You can try to clean it up all you want,” stated Marty Webb, “but the moral and emotional soil from which the Webb children drew sustenance was irrevocably polluted.”
“The first polluted soil someone should dig up would be Dolores’s dad, Grandpa Armstrong,” insisted Anne.
Dolores Armstrong entered the world in 1932, the middle child of six born to destitute Oklahoma sharecroppers who owed more than they owned. The only way out of debt was the way out of town. Under cover of darkness, the eight indigent debtors scurried away to Arizona.
Laboring migrant workers, the Armstrongs
were poor in all—save God. Their unyielding faith in the Bible, and a firm belief in prayer, softened the material world’s harsh realities. Sadly, neither steadfast devotion nor prayerful supplication restrained Mrs. Armstrong from deserting her husband and youngest children, leaving ten-year-old Dolores as primary caregiver to her two younger siblings.
Within a few years, Dolores blossomed into puberty. Her physical charms were undeniably attractive, as was the intensity of her religious convictions. The local church’s new family pastor found that all attempts to resist Dolores’s charms, or his own desires, were of no avail.
“In other words, the pastor was screwing her,” commented Marty Webb, “but the way Dolores told the story, that wasn’t the first time that guy had banged a postpubescent parishioner. I guess he did the same thing at the church he was at before.”
After prayerful consideration, the pastor came to believe that a power greater than himself wanted him to leave town. When his replacement arrived, he was no less tempted.
Dolores’s father, a known faith healer, knew that the town’s new man of the cloth was also his daughter’s new lover. For impressionable teenager Dolores Armstrong, firm, upright religion was now forever coupled with unbridled, albeit secretive, sexuality. Her father didn’t punish the pastor; instead, he punished his own daughter.
Dolores’s runaway mother, Mary, would often make clandestine raids on her former household, kidnap the youngsters, and seemingly abandon Dolores to face her father’s uncontrolled anger. Dolores, however, perceived her mother’s intent differently—this was not abandonment; this was being entrusted with responsibility. Mary Armstrong knew Dolores’s strength of character. Her daughter would continue to sacrifice her own dignity for the well-being of her younger siblings until they could be freed permanently from their father. Mr. Armstrong, antagonistic toward his better half, initiated forceful campaigns of paternal retaliation and child reclamation. The two traumatized youngsters were repeatedly dragged from parent to parent, and state to state. Through it all, Dolores acted as surrogate mother, doting big sister, and oft-beaten caregiver, to her devoutly religious and dangerously violent father.
At sixteen, Dolores Armstrong met Lowell Webb at church in the little town of Glendale, Arizona. She was there to pray; he was there to sing. Mr. Webb, ten years older than Dolores came from stock as plain as his face. He was the younger and less handsome of two boys growing up in Bakersfield, California.
“Sometimes he says his mother ran a dance hall,” remarked Marty Webb, “other times he says it was a whorehouse.” The environment’s purported licentiousness created a heady atmosphere that a young boy such as Lowell Webb could find both physically stimulating and morally detrimental. Lowell Webb and his brother, Dick, were separated soon after their parents’ divorce. The extended family took in better-looking Dick, but Lowell was handed over to foster care when his father ran off to join the circus.
As he grew up, Lowell Webb and his well-worn Bible were inseparable. He had neither need nor desire for modern tomfoolery. If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for him. His dream profession, the career to which he aspired, was that of a licensed preacher of God’s Holy Writ.
As patriotic as he was devout, Webb enlisted in the air force early in World War II. He wanted to be a paratrooper, but bad arches kept him stateside working as a clerk. After the war, he returned home to the church. Through hard work and dedication, he gained his long-coveted preacher license. His gift for sharing the gospel, and his pleasant singing voice, earned him a place in a traveling gospel group, where attractive teenager Dolores Armstrong first met him.
“Actually, Dad had a dream in which he saw the face and heard the name of the woman God wanted him to wed,” stated Gail Webb. “This is true. Well, when he first saw Mom and heard her name, he absolutely knew that she was the one from God. There was no way around it. She was for him, and him alone.”
Although Lowell was firmly convinced Dolores was his marital destiny, she was still firmly under the control of her father. The only time she was on her own was when she was in school, at church, or doing mission work. To date and woo her, continual travel and creativity were imperative. Lowell also had to scour the railroad yard to find the empty boxcar that often served as his sweetheart’s domicile.
Dolores and Lowell became Mr. and Mrs. Webb in January 1951. The happy couple rejoiced in the marriage and their first child, Gail, was born exactly nine months later.
Several years and locales later, including Los Angeles, birthplace of their first six children, the Webbs made it to Tacoma, Washington, in 1963. Mr. Webb landed a decent job in downtown Tacoma, and Dolores, having graduated from nursing school, began working at St. Joseph Hospital. Lowell also served as an assistant pastor, and the church graciously provided housing until the family got on its feet. The family first lived in the back of the church building. Next they moved into a former Japanese internment camp converted into low-income housing, then into a more pleasant rental home, and finally, in 1966, the Webbs bought their home on D Street—a purchase realized by direct result of an honest-to-God miracle.
Lowell had an auto accident in which he was rear-ended by the other driver with such force that Lowell’s car was pushed through the intersection, almost hitting three Catholic nuns. The nuns were a godsend, and excellent witnesses.
The insurance company asked Lowell Webb how much he would take to settle the matter out of court. “I’ll have to pray about it,” said Mr. Webb, and came up with a number that seemed to repeat itself over and over: $12,000.
Lowell Webb paid $11,000 for the house on South D Street, and it was here that the nine siblings made friends with the neighbors: the Kisslers, Marshalls, Greens, Clarks, Nolans, Chollenders, and St. Pierres.
“We grew up a block away from each other,” remembered former neighbor Roy Kissler. “The Webb family lived three houses in from Forty-third Street; the Marshalls lived next door; the St. Pierres lived down around the corner on Forty-third Avenue, not far at all from Ericson’s Auto Body, just three or four houses off Pacific and across the street from the Forty-third Street Tavern. My family lived down on the next block off of Fortieth Street and D. There were other families, too, and everyone knew everyone else.”
How well D Street residents knew each other is subject for speculation. At a minimum, they knew names, games, and gossip just like in any other neighborhood. But awareness of, and empathy for, the interpersonal and spiritual battles waged behind closed doors was appropriately slim. Good neighbors respect boundaries; they don’t pry into the personal lives of others. Everyone on the block, suggested Roy Kissler, had his or her own issues, tests, problems, and spiritual challenges to work through. At one time or another, everybody plays the good guy, the bad guy, and the innocent victim.
Gail Webb admits seeing herself as an innocent victim throughout her entire adolescence—victimized by a stern, implacable God who was represented by equally demanding and wrathful parents. By her fifth decade, Gail recognized her parents’ perennial emotional martyrdom, and acknowledged the terror, trauma, abuse, exploitation, and sacrifice inherent in their haphazard upbringing.
“Mom yearned for normalcy and simplicity,” said Gail sadly. “She was committed one hundred percent to having a happy family, and by God, we were going to be happy whether we were happy or not.”
“No Sadness Allowed” was an unwritten rule in the home of the Webbs. It was okay to be happy, and it was okay to be mad, but you were never allowed to be sad. If a child was going to cry, he was to do it behind closed doors. “Imagine how much work it is for a kid, how much energy it takes, to act exactly the opposite of how you’re really feeling,” stated Gail. “You have to pretend all the time—pretend to be confident when you were scared, or happy when you were fighting back tears. I listened to Mom and Dad talk about God, and to me, God and Mom and Dad were very similar—they could never be pleased. I strained for perfection and always failed. No matter what I
did, it was never good enough. I tried to do everything exactly the way God and they wanted, until I was about seventeen or eighteen; then I just gave up and went the other direction. Both extremes were hell.”
“Speaking of hell,” added the onetime Mrs. Anne Webb, “the ‘religion thing’ was a real big deal to the Webb family’s whole life and personality.” Idiosyncratic extrapolations of biblical admonitions, leading to dogmatic interpretations characterized by threats of dire consequences, comprised Lowell Webb’s conversational armory.
“Lowell was always coming over to the house to chat. He would sit there and say the same things over and over again while I was trying to take care of the kids and housework. Once he said I was an unfit wife because I stopped doing housework to listen to him—that was very wrong of me—I should have kept working. He always talked about the same two topics.
“ ‘Well, you know I was never circumcised,’ he would begin, and then go into big detail about his sex organ,” recalled Anne. “Lowell gave this same spiel to all his daughters-in-law. I threw a fit, however, when Grandpa Lowell brought over some cookies, sat down, and talked about his penis to my thirteen-year-old daughter! Later I told my husband that I was sick and tired of his dad’s penis talk, and I never wanted to hear about that thing of his again!”
Hearing Anne’s reaction, Gail Webb laughed with a tinge of sadness. “Poor Dad. She didn’t understand what he was trying to say, even though he shouldn’t have said it at all.”
When Lowell Webb read in the Bible that circumcision was a sign of the Covenant, he felt excluded. Although circumcision was an outward symbol of inward truth, he felt his foreskin marked him to forever be seen as “outside” the Covenant. When Lowell Webb later internalized the words of the New Testament about “circumcision of the heart,” he felt much better.
“That made the difference to him,” said Gail, “realizing that the outward sign of being in the Covenant was the conscious decision to have a change of heart, an alteration of behavior, a revision of attitude, and a dedication to God’s Covenant—even if it involved personal pain or discomfort, that dedication was as irrevocable as circumcision.”
