But I Trusted You: Ann Rule's Crime Files #14

by Ann Rule

  The crux of DuBois’s defense plan was that he was mentally ill and unable to differentiate between right and wrong at the time of his crimes. Under Washington State law, this means “unable to perceive the nature and quality of the act.”

  The prosecution did not deny that the defendant was clinically mentally ill, but the State contended that he was legally aware of what he was doing as he stabbed Penny DeLeo thirty-one times and assaulted the other two joggers.

  Now, his mother dabbed at tears as she painfully recalled her first marriage. She testified that her former husband’s outbursts usually began as he sat in silence at the foot of his bed. Predictably he would get up and begin to beat his head against the wall.

  When this happened, Lee, who was only a toddler, screamed in terror. At one point, when he was eighteen months old, his father had pulled a gun on his mother.

  “I grabbed the barrel of the gun and was shot through the hand,” she recalled. “Then I shot my husband. I don’t remember how many times.”

  Their one-and-a-half-year-old child was showered with his parents’ blood, still warm as it saturated his clothing. Although his mother had carried him from the bedroom, he continued to scream so frantically that she could not calm him down. It was a major emotional trauma for the child.

  The couple had been treated in the trauma unit of Harborview Medical Center, and they both survived. No charges were brought, but their union was shaky from then on. They eventually divorced after a five-year marriage.

  “When my husband got that way,” Dr. Sue DuBois testified, “I’d reach for a pitcher of ice water I kept in the refrigerator. Throwing it on him was the only way to get him to come to his senses.”

  She made no attempt to diagnose what was wrong with him, but it’s likely that he was bipolar, with a tendency to be depressed more of the time than ebullient. His violent rages could not be controlled without his getting a face full of water and ice cubes.

  It is quite possible that Lee had some genetic input from his father’s mental health issues, but it was difficult to say whether nature or nurture had turned him into what he had become.

  Dr. DuBois told the court that she herself usually jogged in Seward Park each morning.

  “What do you think would have happened if you had gone to Seward Park the morning of the eighth of August?” defense attorney Aaron asked.

  “It’s very scary to me,” Lee’s mother replied. “Based on his unusual behavior—he stares at me blankly and sits on his bed the way his father did sometimes—and because I’m a jogger, it could mean, I guess, it could have been me.”

  For the lay members of the jury, the possible psychological aberrations were getting very heavy indeed. An Oedipal attachment, perhaps? A teenager who felt both dependent on and resentful of his mother?

  The psychiatrists called to testify all had opinions about what was wrong with Lee DuBois. Those testifying for the Defense said that he was a paranoid schizophrenic who heard voices and believed himself to be possessed by evil spirits. Those speaking for the prosecution deemed him sane under the M’Naughton Rule and fully responsible for the consequences of his actions.

  After twelve hours of deliberation, the jury signaled that they were hopelessly deadlocked on the question of legal sanity as it might apply to the defendant. A mistrial was declared. Ten jurors had voted for conviction, with two holding out for acquittal by reason of insanity.

  They were dismissed, and plans for a new trial began.

  In late April 1979 DuBois went on trial again for the same charges. The second trial, like the first, was lengthy and involved. It lasted for two and a half weeks. But the outcome was different this time. On the third of May, the jury deliberated only five hours before returning a guilty verdict.

  Lee Wayne DuBois faced a life sentence.

  Justice for Penny DeLeo, Tricia Long, and Janet Carroll was dealt with under our criminal justice system. But never for Joyce Gaunt.

  Joyce Francine Gaunt never had much of a chance in life. She was mentally challenged from birth owing to fetal alcohol syndrome. Her mother had ingested far too much alcohol during her pregnancy, damaging Joyce before she was born.

  Joyce’s murder has never had closure. Detectives worked hard on her homicide, but there were still a number of questions that demanded answers—especially in light of the August crimes in Seward Park. And, indeed, of other homicides that came years later.

  Joyce spent her short life being shuttled from one foster home to another. Her last was in a group home on Capitol Hill in Seattle’s central district. She attended Pacific School, an institution for special needs children. It was hoped that she might one day be able to live on her own, and even hold a job. She was able to take buses by herself, to perform simple chores, but her lack of reasoning power hindered her. She was often stubborn, confused, and unhappy over her mental limitations. On occasion, she ran away from the group home, resentful of the discipline and restrictions there.

  On February 16, 1978, she was seen waiting for her regular bus at 4:30 p.m. as dusk settled over Seattle. She should have been home by five or a little after. Her houseparents became anxious as the hours passed and she didn’t arrive at the group home. A few minutes past midnight, their phone trilled and they leapt to answer it. It was Joyce, and she talked to the housefather. She would not say where she was, but she didn’t sound as if she were in trouble. If she was in danger, she didn’t realize it.

  Her houseparents urged her to come home, and she quickly hung up. Or perhaps someone with her hung up the phone.

  Nine hours later, Joyce Gaunt’s pathetic body was discovered in Seward Park—close to the bathhouse and only a short distance from where Penny DeLeo would be found six months later.

  Joyce, too, was nude, and lying on her face. Someone had crushed her skull with a heavy object, and she had been strangled.

  From that day to this, no one knows where Joyce Gaunt spent the night of February 16 or how she reached Seward Park, many miles south of the group home where she lived. She would have been as trusting and naive as a child of eight or ten, yet she looked like a fully developed woman.

  Seattle detectives have wondered if there is any connection between the death of Joyce Gaunt and Lee DuBois’s spate of violence six months later. The crime scene is the same, the MO is very similar, but DuBois declined to discuss this earlier killing. And so the case of Joyce Gaunt remains open. It’s even possible that she was an early victim of the Green River Killer—Gary Ridgway—who also left victims in Seward Park as he prowled King County in the eighties, leaving at least fifty young women dead.

  Each of these teenagers—Lee and Joyce—met a tragic end. DuBois, whose background was full of promise, who came from brilliant parents, and who lived in an apparently happy home where finances were never a problem, served years in prison.

  Joyce Gaunt, whose life was blighted even before birth, had no life ahead of her at all. Perhaps each of them was so scarred by early influences that there could be no other fate for them than what they drew.

  Penny DeLeo’s fate is harder to contemplate. The little boy she left a note for is close to forty now. Nothing can ever make up for the loss of his mother during his formative years.

  Several of the detectives who worked on DuBois’s case(s) have passed away, and all the rest have retired.

  Dr. Susan DuBois remained married to Lee’s stepfather until the elder DuBois passed away in 2007.

  As far as I can determine, Lee DuBois has been out of prison for years. He is listed in local phonebooks. There is no public record of his re-offending.

  THE DEADLY VOYEUR

  Except for the fact that it is often torn by violent winds and thunderstorms, Enumclaw, Washington, has always been considered one of the safest towns in the state. Set in the far southeast reaches of King County, it’s a small town in the very nicest, homiest sense. It snows more there, and summer gardens freeze over sooner there than in the rest of the county, because its elevation is higher. Only 6
,000 people lived in Enumclaw in the midseventies; some commuted thirty-five miles to Seattle or to Tacoma. More were farmers or worked in the businesses that serviced the town itself. Enumclaw wasn’t known for anything but the county fair and a bakery with the best homemade bread in the state.

  In short, it has always been the kind of town where a city dweller will go for a Sunday drive and inevitably begin to think about selling his split-level house in Seattle’s spreading megalopolis, to opt instead for the quieter life of Enumclaw.

  Only a generation or two ago, it was the sort of town where you could send your kids down the road to the store and never have to worry about it.

  That was back in the day.

  But then in the eighties and nineties, the elusive Green River serial killer left the bodies of some of his hapless teenage victims near Enumclaw. It was a tempting place to hide his forbidden carnage because the town sits surrounded by designated wilderness areas, dams, and rivers, all in the massive shadow of Mount Rainier.

  But long before Gary Leon Ridgway began killing his estimated four to five dozen victims, there was another killer who tracked the innocent near Enumclaw. He was so angry and frustrated that he didn’t care who he attacked, who died, or who would live with jagged scars on their memories forever.

  The Enumclaw killer woke about 9:30 on the morning of Friday, March 22, 1974. He’d decided that he wasn’t going to work that day at the lumber mill. His wife and their two little girls were already up and eating breakfast in the kitchen, but he didn’t feel like talking to them. His plans were none of his wife’s business.

  He took a bath and then dressed in a print shirt and a pair of jeans.

  He felt edgy, so he gulped down three tranquilizers and waved his wife away when she asked him how many eggs he wanted. Gradually, he felt the pills begin to do their magic, although they didn’t work as well as they once had.

  Less than half an hour after he’d awakened, he was headed away from his wife and babies in his 1974 Pinto station wagon. Maybe he knew what he was looking for all along. Maybe he didn’t consciously think about it.

  He hated the Pinto already. He’d been proud of having a new car, but then he’d read that Ford Pintos were flawed and sometimes broke into towering flames if they were even so much as tapped from behind. He felt like he’d been taken, and now he was saddled with three years of payments for a piece of junk.

  He drove the new station wagon carelessly down State Road 169 to the neighboring small town of Black Diamond. He was looking for a tavern, but it was early, too early for most of them to be open. Finally, around eleven, he found a beer joint open for business in Black Diamond.

  He drank a lot of beer. Later he’d say “a dozen—maybe a half dozen.” He played a couple of games of pool. He left at half-past noon or shortly after and went looking for more beer. He found a supermarket and bought three twelve-ounce bottles, figuring he was saving money rather than buying it at the tavern.

  It wasn’t working anyway.

  Neither the beer nor the pills made him feel any better. As he drove, he began to think about all the things that were wrong in his life. Nobody ever cut him a break. He had bills—lots of bills—and that bugged him.

  He regretted now that he’d yanked his two tiny daughters’ arms. And he’d spanked them too hard. In spite of that, they still loved him and were happy to see him come home. That ate at his conscience.

  He sipped the beers and drove and thought about all the bad things he’d done; he counted all the people who’d been on his back—at least it seemed like somebody was always riding him for something.

  The green Pinto prowled the streets of Enumclaw as the afternoon passed. He wasn’t going anywhere. He could have taken any road out of town and it wouldn’t have mattered. His black thoughts kept him from seeing and appreciating the signs of spring in yards and green stretches along the highway: daffodils, bright orange-red quince sprouting on stalks that had seemed dead a few weeks earlier, pussy willows. Even the skunk cabbage that bloomed velvety yellow in the bogs beside the road were pretty from a distance. Up close its cloying smell was overpowering, and anyone who picked it found that out in a hurry.

  For this man, even spring was a miserable season. He might have decided to go home, but he kept driving. Without willing it, he wound up on the Enumclaw-Buckley highway. State Road 410 would eventually take him to Crystal Mountain, where there was a popular ski area, and mounds of snow still covered the ground.

  The teenage girl and the boy walking along Highway 410 in Enumclaw were enjoying the first faint aura of spring in the air. And that’s about all it was, too. It was still cold, freezing at night. Although the day before had officially brought the season into being, the trees in the wilderness woods were as leafless and dry as they’d been in November. But it wasn’t raining, and it wasn’t freezing in the daytime.

  And it was Friday afternoon, the best time in the week for high school students. The store they were headed for was a half mile or so down the road, and they neither wanted nor sought a ride.

  Camilla Hutcheson* was sixteen, auburn-haired and pretty. Keith Person was only fifteen, but he was already five feet, ten inches tall, while carrying 140 pounds on his lanky frame. He was still as slim as an arrow, but there was promise there of the man to come.

  The high school sophomores enjoyed each other’s company, although they weren’t a particularly romantic duo. They’d known each other since grade school, and they still liked each other. Sometimes, one or the other of them would entertain thoughts of moving their relationship ahead, but they each figured if that was meant to happen, it would—all in good time.

  Keith was born in Seattle, but he’d lived his whole life in Enumclaw. He was popular with his fellow students and president of the school’s ski club. His dad ran a local real estate firm. Camilla’s father worked as an aircraft mechanic for the Boeing Company. They were typical Enumclaw teenagers, they’d gone to school there since they were kindergartners and attended church there, and their idea of high excitement was attending a pep rally before a football or basketball game, or going to the county fair in Enumclaw, or the Western Washington Fair in Puyallup.

  Instead, these two attractive teens were about to walk, all unawares, straight into hell. There was no one around to warn them, and they weren’t prepared to defend themselves.

  The man in the green Pinto cruised along 410, spotted them, and executed a U-turn in the middle of the road so he could head back toward them.

  He had been driving without purpose, but now he had a plan.

  It was 2:14 on that Friday afternoon when the communications center of the King County Sheriff’s Office received a report from Harry A. De Lashmutt, a forest ranger assigned to the Mount Rainier National Park Service. The initial report mentioned only that there had been a shooting, something not at all uncommon in the wooded foothills. It could have been a poacher, someone target shooting who’d missed, or even the result of a fight.

  The location given was noted as being three-fourths of a mile east of the Mud Mountain Dam Road on Highway 410.

  Homicide and robbery detective Sergeant Len Randall was notified by radio, and he directed detectives Ted

  Forrester and Bruce Morrison to proceed to the scene. Detective Rolf Grunden headed for the hospital in Enumclaw to interview a victim who was reportedly under treatment there. After he’d alerted Special Operations that the team from the sheriff’s office would probably need auxiliary lighting at the scene—whatever it turned out to be—

  Randall himself drove to Enumclaw.

  Homicide detectives live their working lives on the edge of a powder keg. Days, even weeks, may go by when nothing happens, and there are also times when murders are almost predictable.

  No murder can be called routine—but a drunken husband shooting a drunken wife, or vice versa, is what might be considered a predictable killing. A mentally ill person with paranoid delusions, untreated, often becomes a predictable killer. Holiday gatherings,
old resentments, and too much liquor usually collaborate to keep detectives away from their own family celebrations.

  Although those who care about both the killers and the potential victims have worried about what might happen and even asked police to step in, the truth is that law enforcement’s hands are tied. Police cannot arrest someone for something they might do without invading the rights of a suspect-to-be; they can only pick up the pieces after it’s too late.

  Yet there are occasionally crimes so atypical, so senseless, and so heartbreaking, that even the most outwardly tough detective has trouble controlling his emotions. Perhaps that’s why a homicide unit is any police department’s “Ulcerville.”

  There would be witnesses waiting at the hospital to talk to Randall and Grunden, witnesses who, for once, had not been afraid to become involved.

  One was the Reverend Thomas J. Tweedie of Gig Harbor’s United Presbyterian Church. He and a friend, Robert McCleod, had been driving along Scatter Creek Road toward the Crystal Mountain ski area at about 1:30 on March 22. As they headed up toward the mountains, the air grew chill.

  Suddenly, as if she were indeed an apparition, the two men were startled to see a young girl run out onto the road from some bushes to their left. She was completely naked, and a thick scarlet rivulet of blood ran down one of her legs.

  The girl was crying hysterically and waving her arms.

  As they drew beside her, Reverend Tweedie and Bob McCleod stopped their car. The terrified girl immediately leapt into the backseat.

  Fighting to be understood through her shuddering sobs, she tried to explain what had happened.

  “A crazy man was chasing me, and he has a gun. He made me take all my clothes off,” she blurted, keeping her head below their car’s windows. “He’s still around here. We have to be careful!”