Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers

by Ann Rule

  Nancy Brooks, with her PTA-mother facade, seemed like the last person in the world who would ever become involved in criminal intrigue. She was a wife, mother, friend, and dog trainer. She dressed conservatively, keeping her hemlines well below her knees—no matter what fashion dictated. She wore sensible shoes with Cuban heels, and she often wore dark-rimmed glasses.

  As the Stahl marriage continued to come apart at the seams, Rose Stahl’s good friend Nancy was beside her, listening to her complaints about Art and her worries about how she could support her children if Art moved out. The huge trust fund would go away if Art went away. Nancy patted her hand, poured her another cup of tea, and told her there had to be a way to work things out.

  Meanwhile, Art’s journal of marital misery grew thicker. There were times now when he actually felt afraid of Rose. He decided he could no longer keep his diary in the home they shared, so he locked the thick stack of pages in his desk in his office at the university. Sometimes he felt a little foolish about saving his writings and wondered why he even bothered to keep them. But he did keep them. If anything ever happened to him, he would leave some kind of record behind of the shambles his married life had become.

  By the middle of 1974, Art Stahl realized that there was no way he and Rose could ever live together in harmony. He wasn’t so sure he would live at all if he stayed with Rose. He was not an aggressive man, but Rose was certainly a hostile and aggressive woman. One night in September, he had the temerity to change the channel on their television set. There was a show he wanted to see, but Rose, who was working in the kitchen, was angry that he had switched away from what she wanted to see.

  According to his diary, Art looked up to see her storming toward him with a butcher knife in her hand. She shouted, “Some night I’m going to stick a knife between your ribs, and you won’t know what night it is.”

  He stared at her, horrified at her rage and convinced she meant what she said. Art Stahl was a prudent man, and he saw that he no longer had a choice. He had tried reasoning and counseling, but now he knew he had to go. On October 3, 1974, he left the family home in Bellevue and moved into an apartment.

  It was wrenching to leave his little sons behind. He had always intended to provide for Rose and their children, and he had been in the process of drawing up a will that would leave the principal amount of his trust to Rose, with substantial sums to all of their children—his, hers, and theirs. As it was, if he should die, Rose would take his place in the trust management. She would work with the financial adviser on the East Coast to decide how the money would be spent.

  Stahl, of course, provided full support for Rose and the children, even while he maintained a separate residence.

  Nancy Brooks and Rose Stahl continued to be best friends and to hash over the state of Rose’s marriage—and they remained active in dog show circles.

  Art Stahl was beginning to build new interests of his own. He started taking a class in an obscure medical art: reflexology. He enrolled in the evening course offered by the Experimental College Program at the University of Washington. It was held at a health center a block away from the north precinct of the Seattle Police Department, and it dealt with the healing techniques that reflexology offered, the premise being that all the ills, aches, and pains of the human body could be made well by the skilled application of foot massage.

  Instead of the needles used in acupuncture, a trained hand on the right spot of the foot could allegedly cure almost everything. The once-a-week classes were to continue through November 26.

  Whether Art really believed in the benefits of reflexology or not, it was an interesting concept, and he met new people. Aside from his classmates in the science of the human foot, the only others who knew he was studying reflexology were his estranged wife, Rose, and, through her, Nancy Brooks, although Art might have mentioned the classes to a few of his teaching associates at the university.

  Nancy Brooks had reestablished her acquaintance with Bennett LeClerk sometime in 1972. The awkward, nerdy teenager she had known in California had meta-morphosed into an entirely different person in the decade since she had befriended him and his mother.

  Bennett had called her Bellevue home and asked to speak to Nancy. At first, she had no idea who he was. He had changed his last name and was no longer using his mother’s name.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said smoothly. “You would know me as Claire Noonan’s son. I used to do magic tricks for your kids in California.”

  “Of course,” Nancy said. “You’re that Bennett.” It had been a long time, but she invited him to come and visit at the Brookses’ home. He came over that very day and stayed for hours, reminiscing. He stayed for supper and long after.

  Nancy stared at him, amazed. He had certainly changed. The skinny kid was now six feet two and weighed almost 200 pounds. He was dressed in a well-cut dark business suit. He said he lived in Everett, Washington; he had married a California girl, and they had moved up to Washington State. He told Nancy he had worked for a while as a jailer in the Snohomish County Jail and that he was studying to be a reserve officer.

  Bennett had always been a little strange. Although she didn’t bring it up, Nancy recalled that he had become upset if he heard about children being physically punished or abused—because he had suffered terribly as a child. He seemed quite urbane now that he was in his late twenties, but she wondered if his early insecurities still gripped him from time to time.

  In the series of events that began to unfold in Bellevue, Everett, and Seattle in the mid-1970s, it is well nigh impossible to give complete credence to any of the principal characters’ recall. The only way to tell the bizarre story is to give each person’s viewpoint, and let the reader judge who was telling the truth—or perhaps came closest to the truth.

  Nancy Brooks recalled that Bennett LeClerk came to see her frequently, always dressed in a dark business suit. He was not one to drop in for a quick visit; he invariably lingered for hours. He hung around until she was preparing supper for her family, and she felt that she had no choice but to invite him to stay. She began to hint broadly that she had things to do and places to go, but he never took it as a cue for him to leave. His presence became, she said, “intolerable.”

  At length, Nancy said she considered Bennett a nuisance and a pest. Her neighbors had begun to ask who he was, and her own children were puzzled about the man who came to their house so often and stayed so long. Apparently her husband was not jealous or suspicious. She never mentioned that he questioned her about the younger man who was becoming a fixture in their home.

  Nancy led a busy life with her dogs, her family, and her friends, and she finally told Bennett LeClerk not to visit her again at her house when her husband was away. “My neighbors are talking,” she said.

  According to Nancy, he became enraged. “We know we’re doing nothing wrong,” he said, “and I don’t care what society says!”

  But Nancy Brooks said she remained adamant: she would not have him hanging around her house. She said that he had stormed off and never came back to her house—except for one final visit.

  Who was this reborn Bennett LeClerk?

  LeClerk was different things to different people. He had indeed been employed as a jailer in the Snohomish County Jail in Everett, Washington. Members of the sheriff’s staff said he always wore green tennis shoes to work and that he liked to bounce off the walls with his feet to demonstrate his agility. He claimed to be a master in kung fu.

  Others who met him said he told them that he was fluent in many languages, including Russian, German, Japanese, and Sanskrit. He also said he was a speed reader who could read upside down and backwards faster than most people could read right side up and forward.

  He was reportedly a devout Buddhist and considered himself a Buddhist priest.

  None of these claims would make him undesirable as a jail guard; it was his attitude that cost him his job. According to fellow jailers, he was dismissed after a number of prisoners compla
ined about his brutality and his propensity for choking them out.

  With the demise of his career in law enforcement, Bennett LeClerk opened a business called the Cash Card Company. He apparently did well: he owned a home that would be worth $175,000 in today’s real estate market. He was still married to his first wife when he moved a second woman, whom he also considered his wife, into the house and began a ménage à trois. His second “wife” had money, and she and LeClerk bought a tavern together. It was called the Iron Horse, and it soon became a thriving operation. In addition to being adept at Sanskrit and kung fu, Bennett made great fried chicken, which the Iron Horse served nightly.

  His three-sided marriage lasted until Bennett’s first wife gave birth to a son. Soon afterward she took the baby and left him, returning to California.

  Bennett LeClerk, once a friendless teenager who put on magic shows for little kids, had become a kind of cult hero, even though his cult was small. Even when he had two “wives” living in his house, he wasn’t satisfied; he was an accomplished womanizer, apparently insatiable when it came to conquests of new females.

  He had an almost hypnotic effect on women. He met some of them in his various business enterprises, some came to the classes he taught in kung fu, and others attended Buddhist worship services, which he conducted in a shrine he’d had built in the basement of his home. Some said that he had his own little cult in his private shrine and that the religion he practiced was more like witchcraft.

  One would think that a man with money, women, and business success would be confident, but Bennett wasn’t. He could not bear to have even one of his women leave him or, worse, to have one of his seduction attempts fail. He could not take no for an answer without being plunged into depression.

  It is quite possible that he’d had a teenage crush on Nancy Brooks and that he had hoped to seduce her during one of his many lingering visits to her home. If that happened, she never admitted it, and she sent him away, triggering in him a rage and quite probably an obsession. He could not endure rejection in any form.

  Image was everything for Bennett LeClerk. He worked hard to create a macho image. He saw himself as a kind of Clint Eastwood figure—in the days when Eastwood was making spaghetti westerns. He affected an outfit that would have been almost laughable if he hadn’t taken it so seriously and if he hadn’t been such a large and threatening man: black shirt, pants, and boots; a black leather jacket; and a wide-brimmed black hat with a fuchsia band.

  At least one woman, Brenda Simms,* a lovely blonde, said that Bennett simply could not believe she didn’t want him as a lover. He even insisted that she leave her husband and come to him. She also said that he once forced himself on her. But she nonetheless continued to work with him at the Cash Card Company.

  Nancy Brooks knew Bennett LeClerk and Rose Stahl, but they did not know each other. Nancy had met them in entirely different phases of her life. In 1974 all three of them just happened to live in Washington State. Two Bellevue housewives and a businessman—kung fu instructor—Buddhist priest. They sounded like the cast of an experimental theater play.

  Early in November 1974, Sara Talbot, a teacher in Everett, Washington, twenty-six miles north of Seattle, was very troubled. After debating what she should do, she decided she had to go to the police, even though she was afraid they would think she was crazy. Finally she approached Officer Donald Rasmussen of the Everett Police Department and haltingly told him an incredible story.

  It concerned a man named Bennett LeClerk, who, she said, had once been a jailer in the Snohomish County Jail in Everett. (Rasmussen checked; that much was true.) Sara Talbot said that LeClerk was living with his second wife, although he’d never divorced his first.

  Sara Talbot said she had met LeClerk during a legitimate business deal. She described him as a very large man who seemed to be a confirmed philanderer. While she had avoided any personal relationship with him, she had observed him coming on to women, and she said he almost mesmerized them with his manipulative manner and his eyes.

  She told Rasmussen about the kung fu classes LeClerk taught and about his Buddhist temple. “He can speak many languages,” she said. He is an expert in explosives, a Special Forces veteran, and he has an IQ of 170.”

  If even half of what she was saying was true, she was certainly drawing a picture of an interesting character. Rasmussen explained that he still couldn’t see that this Bennett LeClerk had done anything illegal—unless he had, indeed, committed bigamy. He asked Sara Talbot why she was so concerned.

  “Because now he says he’s been hired to kill someone,” she blurted. “He says he’s a hit man and that he has to kill two men. The first one’s going to be next Tuesday. He says he’s doing it as a favor for a friend because the man is a sadist who’s cruel to his children. He says he usually gets $5,000 to hit somebody but that he will do this for only $1,000 because his friend asked him to do it.”

  Now Sara Talbot had Rasmussen’s full attention. LeClerk might be a braggart, but no law enforcement officer could look the other way when murder for hire was mentioned.

  “I didn’t pay too much attention to Bennett the first time he told me this assassin story—he does like to tell grandiose stories,” Sara said. “But now I’m frightened. He keeps insisting that I go with him and do the driving. I’m actually beginning to think there’s some truth to it.”

  Sara said she had stopped by the Iron Horse Tavern to pick up some fried chicken and Bennett had said in all seriousness, “What are you doing next Tuesday?”

  “I told him that I’d be off work at noon,” she said, “and he said, ‘Good. You will be with me on my hit next Tuesday.’ I actually think he meant it.”

  Rasmussen conferred with his superiors, and they set up a meeting with Detective Sergeant Don Nelson of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. The investigators were in a bind. First of all, they could not arrest this LeClerk before the fact—for something he might do. Secondly, Sara Talbot had no idea who the purported murder victim was, so they couldn’t warn him or her.

  If Sara Talbot refused to go along with Bennett LeClerk’s plans and it turned out he was serious, he would probably find someone else to aid and abet him, and that someone might not contact the police. It was a lot to ask of a woman who was as frightened as Sara appeared to be, but the authorities asked Sara to go along with LeClerk and make him think she was a willing accomplice.

  “Do you know where this person is supposed to be killed?” Nelson asked her.

  She shook her head. “But I got the impression that it’s to be at a community college about ten minutes’ drive from downtown Everett,” she said. “The only community college that close would have to be Everett Community College.”

  “You’ll have to go along with him,” Nelson said. “But we’ll be along with you.”

  Sara told the detectives that she was supposed to pick LeClerk up at his home at 6:30 P.M. on Tuesday, November 5. The hit was supposed to take place at 9:30.

  As she drove up to LeClerk’s home, Everett detectives Thomas Anglin and Truman Hegge, Rasmussen, and Snohomish County detectives Don Nelson, Don Slack, and Dick Taylor waited nearby in unmarked vehicles. They weren’t sure in whose jurisdiction the hit was supposed to occur, so both city and county detectives were part of the task force that would follow Sara’s car.

  Sara Talbot parked in front of the expensive home where Bennett LeClerk lived. He jumped into her blue 1970 Toyota, and she saw that he was dressed in a bizarre costume. He wore an army fatigue jacket and trousers and a black navy watch cap.

  He asked her to wait while he finished putting on what appeared to be theatrical makeup. His skin was naturally pale, and he darkened it until he was barely recognizable. To complete his disguise, he glued on a fake mustache and beard.

  He had one gun tucked inside his belt at the small of his back, and he showed her where he carried another in his fatigue jacket.

  The detectives, who were parked nearby, saw Sara’s blue car pull away, a
nd one by one they fell in behind her, often changing places with one another and occasionally passing her car so that it would not become apparent to LeClerk that he was being followed. From time to time one car would turn off on a side street, only to rejoin the covert convoy later.

  Almost from the beginning, nothing went as planned. They had expected the blue Toyota to head for Everett Community College. Instead, it gathered speed after it pulled onto the Interstate 5 freeway.

  “They’re heading for Seattle,” someone said on the radio. “They’ve passed the community college.”

  Once Sara’s car picked up speed, it was quickly swallowed up in traffic. Even she didn’t know which of the cars behind her held police, and Bennett seemed perfectly calm. He obviously had no idea that he was being tailed.

  They passed Lynnwood, and then Mountlake Terrace. In a few minutes, they would be crossing the northern boundary of Seattle. The Everett detectives radioed Seattle police and informed the dispatcher that a threatened hit was headed into their jurisdiction. They gave their location and asked for backup.

  The way Sara was changing lanes told the police that her passenger was giving her directions. Then suddenly they were caught in a traffic jam, and they could no longer see the blue Toyota. For a few heart-stopping minutes the sneaker cars from the north found themselves in a morass of unfamiliar streets along the west side of the University of Washington campus. LeClerk had lots of places in which to get lost here.

  The Everett and Snohomish County cars fanned out and, to their vast relief, spotted Sara Talbot’s car. She was just parking it, and, although they didn’t realize it at the moment, she and the hit man were only two blocks from the north end police precinct in Seattle. The stakeout team had the car in sight again, but where was the hit to take place, and, more important, who was the potential victim?