Last Dance, Last Chance

by Ann Rule

  When Gerri Barker’s body was removed from the ditch and taken to the Thurston County Medical Examiner’s Office for a postmortem examination, the deputy medical examiners carrying the litter barely felt her weight; she was so thin.

  Gerri had been sexually assaulted and strangled. She also had a broken nose, a broken jaw, and a broken rib. She couldn’t have put up much of a fight. Rather, it looked as though she had been beaten by someone in a towering rage. The pathologist performing the autopsy estimated that she had been dead for less than 12 hours.

  Thurston County Sheriff Dan Montgomery’s detectives went to the apartment house where Gerri Barker was said to live. The manager said that she often frequented the bar at the VFW Hall in East Olympia in the late afternoons and evenings. The bartender there nodded when they asked about her.

  “She was in yesterday afternoon about 4:30,” he said. “We had to cut her off at about 8 P.M. She had had too much to drink.”

  But Gerri had stayed at the club, nursing a soft drink and visiting with other patrons. Jack Gasser, who was also a member of the VFW club, showed up about 11 P.M. He had stayed for only half an hour, but when he left, he was with Gerri Barker.

  “They know each other before?” a detective asked.

  “I think so. They’re both regulars.”

  The Thurston County detectives obtained Gasser’s driver’s license photo and started a check to see if he had any prior record.

  Back at Gerri Barker’s apartment house, her neighbors recognized the photograph of Jack Gasser. Frank Braun, the manager, told detectives that he had seen him there at least a half dozen times. In early June, he’d seen Gasser knocking loudly on Gerri Barker’s apartment door. “I knew she was home,” Braun said, “but she didn’t come to the door.”

  They must have cleared up their differences. Gerri had left the VFW Hall with Jack Gasser on the night she was killed, and witnesses said they were getting along fine. She hadn’t had a drink for three hours, but she was probably still slightly affected by the drinks she had had earlier.

  Detectives found witnesses in Gasser’s apartment building, which was only a half mile from the club, who recalled seeing the pair together in the hallway near his apartment the night before. “It was about midnight,” one woman said.

  When the investigators finally located Jack Gasser on Tuesday, July 20, he wasn’t at his apartment in Olympia; he was in Everett, Washington, 90 miles north, doing an audit for the Department of Social and Health Services. Although at first he denied any part in Gerri Barker’s murder, he didn’t put up a fight when his car was seized with a search warrant. He returned to Olympia the next day and turned himself in to the Olympia Police Department, where he was arrested. He was surprised by that and refused to give any statement. He had long since become con-wise and didn’t care for cops.

  Search warrants were obtained for his apartment. The detectives found human blood inside the apartment, in the doorway, in the stairwell, and in Gasser’s 1978 Mazda. It was not of his blood type, but it did match Gerri Barker’s.

  On Thursday, July 22, 1982, Jack Gasser faced Thurston County Superior Court Judge Carol Fuller, charged for the second time with first-degree murder. Fuller ordered that he be held without bail.

  On December 28, 1982, Jack Gasser was convicted of first-degree murder for the second time. With the sentencing matrix, his first possible parole date was set for June 7, 2012, when he would be 84 years old.

  Gasser began his third trip to prison in the penitentiary at Walla Walla, but alcohol and perhaps genetics caught up with him. He was no longer the good-looking young kid; he was an old man in poor health. Whereas he had once been charming, Gasser was surly and full of complaints, more so with every year that passed.

  Just before Christmas 1996, Jack Gasser was transferred to the Ahtanum View Assisted Living Facility. Located near Yakima, Washington, it is a kind of nursing home for convicts. He was angry about being there and refused to cooperate with intake workers who tried to fill out their forms and evaluations.

  “He is a 71-year-old inmate,” his report read in 1999. “With extensive medical problems, given his sentence structure, he will likely not survive until release.”

  Jack Gasser knew the prison system well, and his subsequent evaluations reflected his discontent at his present quarters. He would have much preferred to be at the new and modern prison facility, Airway Heights Corrections Center, due to open soon, where he felt the accommodations and amenities were more pleasing. Airway Heights also had a section for minimum security prisoners, although even now Gasser was still considered a medium risk.

  Doctors suspected he had either had a stroke or was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He said he could not walk with a walker or push himself in his wheelchair. He commandeered other prisoners to help him, insisting that he was unable to care for himself.

  Jack Gasser bombarded his corrections counselor with demands. He still wanted a transfer to Airway Heights in April 2000. He claimed he wasn’t strong enough to stay at Ahtanum, but the impression he gave was of a manipulator and malingerer.

  He still wasn’t eligible for the new prison, but he was happier when another prisoner was assigned to serve as his wheelchair pusher and to stand by his side when he used his walker.

  The public tends to think of convicts as young, strong, and tough, but those with life sentences grow old in the system. Jack Gasser had never lost his air of barely repressed hostility—even when he needed help getting in and out of bed and went everywhere in a wheelchair.

  “He is 74 years old,” his last report read. “His percentage to re-offend is 31.1. This is his second time for the same crime…He has not done a lot to improve himself. If released, he would still be very dangerous…”

  Had she lived, Donna Woodcock would be 76 now, but she has been gone for 54 years. When retired King County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney John Vogel heard about the murder of Gerri Barker, he summed up what any number of detectives and grieving relatives thought: “He should have been hanged in 1948.”

  Retired Homicide Lieutenant Austin Seth, 87, agrees. “No one will ever really know how many women Jack Gasser killed. He spent a lot of time in prison—but he was free and traveling around Washington State for 25 years. I know that I, for one, will never stop wondering what the whole story is.”

  The Killer Who Begged to Die

  Like Jack Gasser,there was another man who served his time in prison in the Northwest and who was paroled when he should have stayed locked up. He himself knew he shouldn’t be walking free. In the end, he felt he should not be allowed to live. And yet, he had to fight his way through crowds of people who wanted to save him. His is a backward or “inside-out” kind of story. When I wrote about him the first time, I never expected to write about him again.

  But I did.

  The only thing at all flamboyant about the neat little motel on Seattle’s Aurora Avenue North was its name: the Eldorado. When Bertha Maude Lush bought it, it had seen better days. That was why she could afford it. She cleaned it up and kept it spotless, and she made sure that it was always freshly painted.

  Before Interstate 5 was built, Aurora Avenue was the main route from Seattle to Canada and points north. Back in the thirties and forties, the Eldorado was considered modern. Now it catered to those who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—pay the asking price for a night in one of the huge glass-and-stone motels that had sprouted along the new freeway.

  Many of Bertha’s guests were return customers, visitors from Vancouver, British Columbia, who made it a habit to stop there on trips to shop in Seattle.

  Ironically, it was the reasonable cost of a room at the Eldorado that drew a killer there.

  Bertha Maude Lush, sole owner and proprietor of the Eldorado since her partner’s death 18 years earlier, had worked all her life to gain a modicum of security. Originally hired to take a man’s job during World War II, Bertha was in the wave of women personified as “Rosie the Riveter.” She rode the bus to work
at the Boeing Airplane Company every day until she’d put in enough years as a mechanic to retire.

  In May 1974, Bertha was in her 60s, and she had never married. She was a loner, devoting all her energies to keeping her motel going; the travelers she dealt with were enough company for her. She had a car, an old white Studebaker, but she never drove it any more. She even banked by mail. Maybe it was because she had begun to be afraid—although she hated to admit it.

  But she was a woman alone, dealing with strangers every day of her life, in an era when the small-business person had abundant reason to be afraid. Mom-and-pop grocery stores and small motels were robbed frequently.

  Bertha Lush’s neighbors kept an eye on her, noticing when the “No Vacancy” went on at night and the office lights dimmed, but they tried not to let her know that they were watching over her. She was fiercely independent, and she wouldn’t have liked it.

  Only Bertha’s closest relative knew that she kept a gun hidden in a clothes hamper behind the office. She had never had to use it. When the time came that she needed it, she didn’t even get the chance to reach for the gun.

  The weekend of May 18–19 was a national holiday in Canada, and Bertha Lush had welcomed many familiar guests on Saturday. These preferred customers, along with some new clients, filled all the units by 3 P.M. and allowed Bertha to turn the “No Vacancy” sign on early.

  It was much later—a quarter after ten that night—when one of the guests pounded on the door of the manager’s office. He had returned to the motel to find his unit double-locked, and he needed Bertha’s master key to get in. But no one responded to his knock. Exasperated, he peered through the glass. He didn’t see Bertha, but the lights were on, and his eyes were drawn to a scarlet smear along the pale aqua wall inside.

  It was such a large stain that he ran to a nearby pay phone and called the police.

  Patrol officers responding to the motel found the door to the office firmly locked, but they could see evidence of a violent struggle inside. They asked the police radio dispatcher to call the motel’s phone. They could hear it ringing, but no one answered. The officers broke out a pane of glass in the door to gain entry.

  There was no one in the office, no one behind the counter. The officers opened a door leading to the rear area and stopped. They could see now why the phone had rung unanswered. A woman lay motionless just inside the door, the back of her head virtually destroyed. The three patrolmen shut the door and put in a call to homicide detectives.

  Detective Sergeant Ward Dutcher and Detectives P. R. Forsell, George Cuthill, and Jess Cook responded. They worked their way into the crime scene gradually, careful to stick to a narrow path so they wouldn’t contaminate any evidence that might be there. First, they looked at the outer office. Ironically, a cross hung on one wall bearing the inscription “Peace to All Who Enter Here.”

  Next to it hung a scroll with a prayer often known as the Serenity Prayer, used by Alcoholics Anonymous, but also cherished by many people seeking tranquility:

  God Grant Us the Serenity

  to accept the things we cannot change,

  Courage to change the things we can, and the

  Wisdom to know the difference

  Both sentiments were now spattered and streaked with what must surely be blood. If the woman who lay facedown in the living quarters was Bertha Lush, she would never again be able to change anything. When the guest who had called police described the motel owner-manager, there was no doubt that the dead woman inside was Bertha Lush; she still wore the green house dress, blue sweater, and white shoes she had worn when the man checked in. The witness said Bertha had given him his change from her black leather wallet, which had quite a bit of money in it at that time.

  The black wallet now lay beside the dead woman, and it was empty. The motive for her murder was obvious. So was the weapon: a blood-encrusted ball peen hammer rested against the victim’s right leg.

  This was going to be one of those investigations rife with clues, but the detectives didn’t know at the outset how very little those clues would help. It might have been better that they had no expectations—because it wasn’t going to be easy.

  The detective crew at the scene was soon joined by Homicide Detective Lieutenant Pat Murphy and George Ishii, director of the Western Washington Crime Lab, with his assistant, Bob Sullivan. Ishii pointed out that the attack had begun behind the counter in the outer office. There were marks on the plywood walls where the hammer had glanced off, and a formidable amount of blood had gushed from the victim’s head wounds and stained the floor and walls there.

  The killer had then dragged the woman into the living quarters in the rear so that she could not be seen through the glass in the office door.

  Bertha Lush’s living quarters were filled with the accumulation of many years of living: papers, family portraits, letters, books, and other memorabilia, and none of them had been ransacked. Her killer, it seemed, wanted only cash. He had probably been in a hurry and had been too apprehensive to search for money Bertha might have hidden in her apartment.

  Bertha Lush had been very cautious. Every door in both the office and living quarters had three separate locks—the usual doorknob lock and two deadbolt locks. The outer door of the office could be locked by merely pulling it shut from the outside, and it looked as though that was what her killer had done as he left, probably hoping to delay discovery of her body.

  And he had left in a rush. There was a suitcase in the office, possibly left there by the killer in his flight. It contained clothing that would fit an average-size male, from five feet eight to ten inches, 150 to 160 pounds. There were also some men’s toilet items and a tooled leather belt made in New Mexico among the effects.

  But there was always the chance that the suitcase had been left there by someone else—someone who had nothing to do with the murder and might even come forward later.

  King County Medical Examiner Dr. Donald Reay arrived at the scene at 1:30 A.M. and made a preliminary examination of the body. He estimated that death had occurred some two to four hours earlier, although he leaned toward the earlier figure. There was no rigor mortis as yet, and the body was still warm to the touch. Lividity had begun on the front of the body, as was to be expected because the victim had lain on her stomach. The dark purple striations of livor mortis always appear in the lowermost parts of the body, as the heart no longer circulates the blood.

  Bertha Lush had suffered many, many bludgeon blows to the skull and had almost certainly sustained fatal brain injuries. There did not appear to be any evidence of sexual assault; her pantyhose were still in place, and although her clothing was in disarray, that had probably occurred while she was dragged from the office into the back room.

  The body was removed shortly after 1:30 on Sunday morning, and Detectives Cook and Cuthill secured the crime scene at 3 A.M., leaving a patrol officer stationed outside the motel office to guard it until detectives returned to view it in daylight. Homicide detectives, accompanied by criminalist Ishii and departmental illustrator Ben Smith, were back early in the morning. The entire office and the victim’s apartment were dusted for latent prints.

  It looked as though the killer had washed up in Bertha Lush’s bathroom, and Ishii removed a water sample from the P-trap beneath; with any luck there might be enough blood suspended there to isolate its type.

  There were also red smudges on a fresh roll of toilet paper in the bathroom. It was a long shot, but there could be a usable print that would emerge after Ninhydrin processing, a technique that can lift prints from paper decades after they are left there.

  A paper sack near the suitcase in the office seemed to be empty—and it was, except for a sales slip. The slip was from a hardware item sold at Ernst’s Hardware, a well-known Seattle chain store. The item was a ball peen hammer. The death weapon was so new that it still bore a price tag. This sales slip matched that price tag. And the sale had taken place on May 18. How cruel, cold-blooded, and premeditated a killer wo
uld have to be to deliberately purchase a hammer with which to bludgeon an old woman! Had the killer already met Bertha Lush, or was the hammer a weapon he carried in case he needed it?

  Detective Benny DePalmo, working the Sunday shift in the Homicide Unit back at the office, read a teletype out of Salem, Oregon. It was an all-points bulletin on a convict named Carl Cletus Bowles, who had escaped from a conjugal visit to a local motel. The woman he’d gone to spend four hours with had been introduced to prison officials as his fiancée; in actuality, she proved to be his niece. Authorities believed that Bowles, who had killed a cop, might head for the Canadian border and slip across into British Columbia.

  The Eldorado Motel was right along such a route. Bowles was known as a vicious “over-killer,” and the person who had slain Bertha Lush had struck her approximately 28 times in the head with a hammer.

  DePalmo and Detective Ted Fonis called prison officials in Salem and asked for any information and mug shots available on Bowles and his niece. They learned that the couple had escaped through a rear door of the Motel 6 in Salem while a guard waited in front. The niece’s car was a white Thunderbird.

  It looked good for a while, especially when a patrolman in Seattle’s north end precinct reported that he’d followed a suspicious-looking couple in a 1962 white T-bird on the fatal Saturday.

  But a lot of suspects looked good. Detective DePalmo, along with Ted Fonis and Detective Wayne Dorman—the partners who would be assigned the follow-up work on the case—would have to sift through any number of suspects before they found their killer.