Head Shot

by Burl Barer

  Moore also arranged the equally complex same-day search for evidence at Salmon Beach. “The actual field operation started at seventeen hundred hours, and at seventeen twenty-five hours, we located a small white-and-black Nike tennis shoe approximately one hundred feet from the Upper Salmon Beach Road,” said Moore. “Per standard operating procedure, the shoe was not disturbed. The shoe was in reasonable condition with the shoelaces intact. The search continued for an additional three hours before the second tennis shoe was located approximately twenty-one feet, nine inches from the first find.”

  Evidence searches and homicide investigations are invariably challenging and time consuming. They require teamwork, patience, dedication, and persistence. “It seems that when we get called to a homicide,” remarked Yerbury, “it’s at three in the morning, it’s an outdoor crime scene, and it’s raining. Whatever the situation, you arrive at the crime scene, you get told the circumstances, and there are always lots of things that need to be done, and lot of doors that need to be knocked on. It’s not uncommon to have to go back to the same door four or five times. You have to keep working at it and working at it. You never know when you’re suddenly going to find out some important new piece of information.”

  Captain William Woodard of the Tacoma Police Criminal Investigations Division announced at 1:30 P.M. on June 22, 1984, that four suspects held in connection with the homicides of Damon Wells and John Achord were formally charged by the Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office. The names of those charged—Paul and Christopher St. Pierre, Anthony Youso, and Andrew Webb—were officially revealed for the first time.

  Stew Johnston of the Department of Assigned Counsel represented Paul St. Pierre, entering his plea of not guilty to all charges. On that same day, notice was sent to the Tacoma Police Department, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, and the Pierce County prosecuting attorney that Paul St. Pierre was henceforth represented by the Department of Assigned Counsel. In addition, on that same June 22, 1984, Paul St. Pierre, as client, signed a notice that demanded legal representation during any contact with police authorities.

  Stew Johnston filed the complete text of the notice with the court, saying, “My client is asserting in this notice his demand that legal counsel be present during any and all contacts by police authorities and their agents. All future contact can be made only through defense counsel, excluding contacts limited to administrative jail purposes. He does not wish to discuss waiver of his legal rights except in writing and in the presence of his or her legal counsel.” Paul St. Pierre’s assigned legal counsel would be Ellsworth Connelly and Jeffrey Gross.

  “The document may be filed,” said Judge Healy, presiding, “and the prosecutor’s office is charged with the responsibility of notifying law enforcement agencies.”

  Representing the prosecutor’s office was Assistant Deputy Prosecutor Carl Hultman. He immediately accepted this court-ordered responsibility. “We’ll do that. We’ll do so, Your Honor.”

  Less than a week later, Tacoma Police detectives took a sworn statement from Paul St. Pierre without presence of his legal counsel. Connelly and Gross were not present because the prosecutor’s office did not bother to inform them.

  “It was Paul St. Pierre who contacted us, not the other way around,” explained Detective Yerbury. “He sent a message to Detective Price saying that he wanted to talk to him. Before we talked to Mr. St. Pierre, we asked the prosecutor’s office if it was permissible. We even talked to Carl Hultman’s boss. Everything, they said, was OK.”

  The Tacoma detectives’ ethical action—seeking advice from the prosecutor—is admirable behavior. Many police departments simply go ahead with such interviews, and tell no one about it.

  “Prosecutors are bound by ethics,” explained Mike Grimes, former head of the Anchorage, Alaska, elite Homicide Response Team, “but police have none. We’re not obligated to adhere to American Bar Association standards—we’re not lawyers. If we tell the prosecutor’s office that a suspect wants to make a statement to us, the prosecutor is ethically obligated to inform the defendant’s lawyer. We have no such obligation. In many police departments, the policy is to get the statement first, inform someone about it later.”

  At 4:50 P.M. on June 28, Paul St. Pierre supposedly said, “I hereby make the following free and voluntary statement to Detectives Price and Yerbury, who have identified themselves to me as police officers of the Tacoma Police Department.” The wording is a prewritten template fulfilling legal obligations, and not the spontaneous statement of Paul St. Pierre. The next paragraph contains other required identifiers.

  “My name is Paul Joseph St. Pierre, I am twenty-five years of age, and was born in Bellingham, Washington. I am single and reside at [house number] South Pacific, Tacoma, Washington. I have lived in Tacoma for twenty-one years. For the last two months, I was employed at Royal Donuts in Tacoma.”

  Paul St. Pierre’s description of Damon Wells’s Salmon Beach demise closely matched his brother’s version. “Andrew Webb told me he was going to go grab my knife. The knife is a double-edged Gerber Fighting Knife. He went and got the knife.” Missing, however, was any reference to Wells’s threats of retaliation or attempts to run away. Despite bragging to Roy Kissler about cutting Wells’s throat, Paul St. Pierre gave all the credit to Andrew Webb.

  “My brother, Andrew, and I were beating up Damon Wells. He was almost unconscious when Andrew took out the knife, grabbed Damon by the hair, and slashed his throat about four times and then stabbed him in the back.”

  As for the death of John Achord, Paul St. Pierre said that Achord and he were watching the Rambo video First Blood. Everything was fine until, “John got up and started walking around my house. I told him to sit down and watch the movie. He just looked at me and pulled out his pocketknife. I told him he should sit down. At that point, I thought he was going to stab me. I had my forty-five in my hand and he could see it. He started coming at me with the knife. I told him to stop, but he wouldn’t, so I shot him in the head in self-defense. The reason I’m telling you this is because I don’t want to take a murder rap that I didn’t commit, and I shot John Achord in self-defense. Sometime last year, I picked up this girl hitchhiking... .” Paul St. Pierre inexplicably segued directly into a brief narrative seemingly unrelated to the deaths of Damon Wells or John Achord.

  “When we got to her apartment,” St. Pierre continued, “I dropped her off and she told me to come back later that night. When I returned, there were two Banditos that are in an outlaw motorcycle club. These two Banditos told me they were going to kill me and take my motorcycle. They started coming at me, and I pulled out my forty-five, which I have a permit for, but I did not shoot them because I felt my bike was not worth killing them over. So I let them steal my motorcycle. This is all I want to talk about, thank you.”

  The significance of this motorcycle incident eluded both police and prosecutors. The answer, if there were one, would require an extensive investigation with no apparent bearing upon either homicide. Hence, the matter was never pursued. In truth, this peculiar narrative was Paul St. Pierre’s convoluted way of revealing his motive, admittedly oblique, for “teaching Wells a lesson.” Andrew Webb’s motive was one that police and prosecutors could easily identify, back up with evidence, and present to a jury. It was a motive, however criminal, that “made sense.” Paul St. Pierre’s motive made less criminal sense, but it was sensible to Paul St. Pierre. For him, everything was about “getting even,” explained Ben Webb. If he couldn’t retaliate against individuals, he would “get even” with the event or experience. Paul St. Pierre would re-create scenes of personal humiliation, acting them out with himself as victor rather than victim. That night of terror for Damon Wells was one of those reenactments. The Bandito incident to which St. Pierre referred was more violent and degrading than portrayed in his statement. They beat him up severely, took his shoes, and made him walk home in the dark to “teach him a lesson.” In the Salmon Beach reenactment, Damon Wells played the part o
f Paul St. Pierre; Andrew Webb, Christopher St. Pierre, and brother Paul played the Banditos. Paul St. Pierre’s intention was to give this small, weak stand-in for himself the beating and long shoeless walk home that would make things somehow “even.” The treatment by the Banditos was another instance of Paul St. Pierre suffering the humiliation reserved only for the weak and the outnumbered.

  All hell broke loose when Paul St. Pierre’s lawyers found out police took a statement from him without requesting their presence or asking their permission. Ellsworth Connelly, assigned counsel for St. Pierre, was furious. “Do you think for one second that would have happened if they had simply picked up the phone and said, ‘Your man wants to make a statement. We have him down at the police station, will you come down?’ Of course it wouldn’t!”

  “A person in custody can only waive the assistance of counsel in the presence of his or her lawyer,” explained Jeffrey Gross. “The presence of the assigned counsel restrains the suspect who is motivated by fear, intimidation, ignorance, or unreasoned impulse. Our client had been given his Miranda rights. He’d been arraigned in court. On top of that, he already told them that he wasn’t waiving his constitutional rights. A judge would have to rule on whether or not the statement of Paul St. Pierre could be admitted in court.”

  Those who knew him theorized that what motivated Paul St. Pierre to contact Detective Price was simply that he couldn’t let Chris be the only St. Pierre to have his version of events professionally noted and transcribed. Paul St. Pierre wanted equal time and equal attention.

  “It’s difficult to describe,” offered Marty Webb, “but if you heard the way these guys talked on the phone, and the way they acted, it would be real clear that Paul St. Pierre thought the whole thing was really cool. Just take a look at his mug shot—the booking photograph—the picture they took of him when he was arrested. He’s smiling, for God’s sake! He liked being in the newspaper, and he probably just loved being a well-known murder suspect. I think the whole thing made him feel powerful, tough, and controlling—and that’s what he liked best.”

  Paul St. Pierre’s official statement to the police was different from his informal statement to Roy Kissler. The possibility that he exaggerated his participation in Wells’s death when confessing to Kissler gained credibility when he also bragged to fellow inmates at the Pierce County Jail.

  Inmate Gordon Gibson voluntarily shared details of St. Pierre’s jailhouse confession with Detective Yerbury. According to Gibson, on June 22, the day St. Pierre was formally charged, St. Pierre was eager to see if there was anything about him in the newspaper. “The guard came and got the newspaper from us and gave it to him,” Gibson explained. “I and Mike Compton [another inmate] asked him why he murdered those two guys. He said the guys were pricks.” Concerning the decapitation of John Achord, St. Pierre said that he had to cut the head off because of evidence. He also told his fellow prisoners about putting the head in cement and throwing it in the river.

  Paul St. Pierre, a well-practiced braggart, added to his list of informed confidants by sharing details of the Achord incident with Terry Kauslarich, a pal of Jim Fuller’s. “The first part of June, I was at Paul St. Pierre’s house working with Jim Fuller on Paul’s brother’s car,” said Kauslarich. “Every time I see Paul, he’s always bringing up the subject of doing somebody in. So when the subject came up, Paul said that what he would do would be to shoot somebody in the head and cut off his head so there would be no ballistics nor dental identification. He said he would throw the head somewhere separate from the body. He admitted shooting three or four people. I was also talking to him about some people who had ripped me and Fuller off—Cindy Brewer and Gary somebody—and Paul wanted to go out that night and take care of them. He said, ‘Let’s just waste them.’ I didn’t realize that he was serious.”

  “More and more people came forward with their own stories about Paul St. Pierre,” acknowledged Yerbury. “And once those guys were in the Pierce County Jail, we heard from other prisoners and we got more anonymous phone calls. Some of them were valuable, some of them not. Someone called Crime Stoppers and told us that John Achord’s head was buried under a doghouse in the St. Pierre’s backyard, and someone else called to say the head was thrown into the Nisqually River.” Jim Green, who’d known Paul St. Pierre since grade school, told Officer Hargrove that Paul St. Pierre bragged to them that he “shot someone in the face and ditched him.”

  “It seems everyone had something to say to the police except Andrew Webb,” recalled his former sister-in-law. “While Chris, Paul, and Tony Youso were telling plenty, Andrew just got his court-appointed lawyer and kept his mouth shut tight.”

  Assistant Deputy Prosecutor Carl Hultman filed for amended charges against the St. Pierres and Andrew Webb on July 2, 1984. Originally, the three were charged with murder in the first degree, kidnapping in the second degree, and third-degree assault. The requested revised charges, if approved, would specify first-degree aggravated murder—a death penalty offense. Hultman was not done upgrading criminal charges, and on July 12, he requested increasing the kidnapping charges against the St. Pierres to first degree.

  Thursday, July 19, 1984, in the courtroom of Judge James Healy, all of Hultman’s amended charges were approved. Andrew Webb, however, was not subject to any increased charges. Carl Hultman asked the court for a continuance in the case against Webb, declined to provide the reasons for his request, and, as a result, was attacked by an outraged Paul St. Pierre.

  “He jumped from his seat and lunged for the prosecutor. It was wild—St. Pierre was chasing Hultman around the table,” recalled Detective Yerbury, “while jail guards were chasing St. Pierre. The guards caught Paul and wrestled him to the floor. It was potentially a very dangerous situation, and it’s one of those very tense emotional moments that only takes on a hue of humor several years later.”

  St. Pierre was forcibly removed from the courtroom, and Judge Healy ordered a special room prepared with closed-circuit television monitors. “This was so Paul St. Pierre could see and hear what was going on in the courtroom without being able to go after poor Carl,” Yerbury said. “He just won’t be able to behave himself,” Ellsworth Connelly confirmed to the court, “if he sees Carl Hultman.”

  “Paul was throwing one of his famous fits,” commented Wesley Webb’s ex-wife, “and as for Tony Youso—he got his case separated from the murder trials altogether. The big deal was what was going on with Andrew. The court proceedings that were supposed to happen against him were all ... postponed. There was something going on.”

  What was “going on” was Prosecutor William “Bill” Griffies of Pierce County was authorizing Carl Hultman to cut a deal with Webb. On the afternoon of Thursday, July 19, Hultman and Webb’s attorney, Larry Nichols, severed Webb from the others and assigned him a separate trial date.

  Shackled in leg irons, hands cuffed to chains around their waists, the three defendants appeared in Judge Healy’s courtroom on Friday, July 20. Tony Youso’s lawyer requested that his client be released to his parents until the trial. Carl Hultman objected, insisting that there was a high risk that Youso might make a run for it. Judge Healy agreed, and Youso remained behind bars. Paul St. Pierre’s bail of $1 million precluded any similar request.

  While Youso and the St. Pierre brothers were in Judge Healy’s courtroom, the Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office announced that accused murderer Andrew K. Webb was now the prosecution’s “star witness” against his former codefendants. Webb’s newfound status as witness for the prosecution was universally surprising; Paul St. Pierre’s July 20th plea of not guilty by reason of insanity surprised no one.

  Six days later, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Donald F. Allison examined Paul St. Pierre in the Pierce County Jail. Forensic psychiatry entails interpreting and combining concepts involving mental health, psychiatry, and the law. Associated with the Criminally Insane Unit at Western State Hospital since its formation in 1973, Dr. Allison evaluated offenders and alleged offenders
concerning their sanity at the time the offense was committed, and/or their competency to stand trial. His findings were then provided, as requested, to judges and lawyers. “We did from fifteen to sixty evaluations a month in that unit,” Allison confirmed.

  “July 26, 1984, was a very hot day in the jail,” recalled Dr. Allison. “Paul St. Pierre was in his shorts, and he showed some disturbing signs of the heat. I sat right next to the door, and the door was left open. He would occasionally stick his head out the door to see if anyone else was listening.”

  Allison’s diagnosis, based on his interaction with Paul St. Pierre, was that he suffered from a paranoid personality. “He wasn’t psychotic. He wasn’t neurotic,” explained Dr. Allison. “He had the feeling that people were out to get him. The prosecuting attorney was out to get him. The victim of the case was out to get him. He stuck his head out the door to see if anybody else was out to get him. It only took a little over an hour to make this diagnosis.”

  In their time together, Paul St. Pierre willingly shared his feelings and beliefs regarding his role in the family, his discharge from the Marine Corps, and concern for his younger brother, Christopher.

  “He was pretty mad at the Marine Corps because they kicked him out,” said Dr. Allison. “And he was somewhat unhappy concerning his relationship with his father—he felt that his father expected more out of him than he delivered. As for Christopher, Paul St. Pierre was especially concerned about his well-being.”

  Christopher St. Pierre, the one defendant who delivered evidence and information to the police, anticipated favorable treatment from the Pierce County prosecutor. When Andrew Webb cut a deal virtually to deliver the conviction of the St. Pierres, the brothers were infuriated.