by Ann Rule
“In other words,” Vern asked again, “you felt he would have done you a favor in the years gone and that you would do him this ‘favor’”
“Well, it really wasn’t a favor. I don’t look at it as favor.”
“How do you feel?”
“I don’t.” Tuffy said stoically. “Because I really just did it for him.”
“What else?”
“I was under the influence of him all the time, you know,” Tuffy said wearily. “I was on his mind track. I wasn’t on mine.”
The confession was over. Two confessions really, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. This was the most unlikely killer either Sergeant Brimmer or Detective Henderson could have imagined. My God, Tuffy had been welcome in Morris’s home. He had been over there only a week or so before he shot Morris. Morris had been a mentor to him too, showing him wrestling moves. Morris would have walked toward Tuffy with as much trust as he would have walked toward Vern himself. Tuffy Pleasant would have been the last person in the world that Morris would have expected to point a gun at him.
But it didn’t matter. Morris was just as dead as if he had been shot by a complete stranger.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Angelo Pleasant’s arrest was headlined in the Yakima Herald-Republic. It was the end of the dreams Coydell and Andrew Pleasant had held so long for their children. All of their years of work seemed in vain now. Andrew had asked Vern to find out the truth, but when the truth rose to the surface—just as Vern had feared—he didn’t want to know it.
“Angelo and I always got along,” Vern remembered, “but the family felt that I had tricked their son into confession. It brought such shame and hurt to them that I think they needed to blame me—to feel I had used trickery. That was the end of our friendship. I had always known that it would be.”
The Pleasants’ shame was so unbearable they could not believe that it could possibly get worse.
The article announcing that an arrest had been made in the murders of Morris Blankenbaker and T. Glynn (Gabby) Moore was maddening in its lack of details. It wasn’t reporter Duane Dozier’s fault: the Prosecutor’s Office and the Yakima police were releasing very little information.
Pleasant is charged in a Yakima County Superior Court warrant with aiding and abetting an unnamed person in first-degree murder.
What did that mean? And who was the unnamed person? The article said that Angelo was being held under fifty thousand dollars bail. In reality, that meant it would take five thousand dollars and a promise of forty-five thousand dollars more if he should not show up for hearings. That was an awful lot of money to raise, and nobody close to Tuffy came up with it. He remained behind bars.
His arraignment was set for March 1.
Every article about Tuffy’s arrest reprised his glory days as a champion wrestler, just as Jerilee was mentioned in each retelling as having been married to both murdered coaches. The scandal burned brightly in Yakima.
At Tuffy’s arraignment, Yakima County Superior Court Judge Howard Hettinger revised the charges against him; he was now charged with two counts: first-degree murder in the shooting of Morris Blankenbaker and second-degree murder in T. Glynn “Gabby” Moore’s death. The first-degree murder charge stemmed from the “premeditated” aspect of Morris’s death, whereas Gabby Moore was deemed to have died while his killer was engaged in a felony, to wit: second-degree assault. Hettinger also revoked Tuffy’s bail and appointed two attorneys to defend him: Wade Gano and Chris Tait.
Angelo Pleasant’s trial date was set for April 19, less than two months away. Court watchers predicted that there would be delays.
There were those who murmured that the man who was ultimately to blame for the double murder was not the man locked up in the Yakima County Jail. But that man could no longer be made to answer for any misdeeds: Gabby Moore was dead, and the kid who had listened to his every thought and his every word so avidly now stared out through bars at a world that no longer held any promise at all for him.
Angelo “Tuffy” Pleasant soon had three attorneys. Adam Moore, arguably the best criminal defense attorney in Yakima County, was appointed by Judge Hettinger as chief defense counsel. He had more experience in murder trials than either Gano or Tait, and Tuffy was going to need as much legal help as he could get. Adam Moore and Jeff Sullivan had once again switched places. Now Sullivan was the prosecutor and Moore was the defense attorney.
As Jeff Sullivan explained, “Many of the players in our county’s trials are the same over the years—only the scripts change.” Sullivan viewed Adam Moore as a worthy adversary; he always would, no matter how many times they met on the legal playing field.
Loretta Scott had been granted immunity from prosecution on any charges stemming from her involvement with the suspect Colt .22, which was still undergoing ballistics tests.
It seemed that there would be no more surprises. Almost routinely, Tuffy’s attorneys asked that he be examined by a psychiatrist to see if he was mentally competent to stand trial. Dr. Frederick Montgomery asked Tuffy the usual questions and gave him tests designed to point out any aberrance that would indicate that he did not know the difference between right and wrong at the time of the two shootings or currently.
After Montgomery’s evaluation, there was no further mention of an insanity defense. It was possible that Tuffy had been partially brainwashed, but he was not insane under the law or clinically.
CHAPTER TWENTY
There was startling news about the Blankenbaker-Moore murders in the March 19 edition of the local papers. After listening to additional statements purportedly made by Tuffy Pleasant, Yakima detectives arrested his younger brother, Anthony Pleasant, nineteen. He too was booked into the Yakima County Jail, charged with first-degree murder in Morris Blankenbaker’s death and held without bail.
Dick Nesary, the Yakima police’s polygrapher, had run a number of lie detector tests on the men awaiting trial. Nesary, who had administered over eighteen hundred polygraphs, had reported that Tuffy Pleasant’s first tests in January had been inconclusive. On March 18, Tuffy was put on the polygraph again and had implicated his own brother in Morris’s murder. Adam Moore and Chris Tait thought another polygraph might verify that accusation; this test was done at the request of the defense team.
With Vern Henderson, Chris Tait, and Jeff Sullivan observing out of eye range, Nesary administered a Backster Zone Comparison Test to Tuffy—basically asking one question in two different ways, with control questions in between.
Nesary had never talked with Tuffy before the January 10 polygraphs, although he was aware of Tuffy’s athletic fame. In January he had found Tuffy talkative and friendly. Now, two months later, he found himself talking to a different man.
“When I first started to run him on March 18,” Nesary said, “he was a rather quiet, subdued type of person, and I had to pull things out of him to get him to talk in the pretest part.”
Nesary listened as Tuffy told him who had shot Morris; it was a different story than he had told Vern Henderson. “He stated he was there and so was Anthony and Anthony was the one that had actually shot Morris Blankenbaker,” Sergeant Nesary said.
Tuffy had worked hard in his life, and his hands were callused, not the best mediums for the Galvanic Skin Response test because they would not produce the classic “sweaty palms” reaction. Nesary also noted that Tuffy’s breathing patterns were irregular. But he didn’t think either condition would change the results of the polygraph significantly.
The results of the March 18 lie detector on Tuffy Pleasant surprised Nesary and caught the prosecution team off guard. Although Nesary was a Yakima police sergeant, he read the three charts he had taken on their own merit. Tuffy had told him that his brother Anthony shot Morris Blankenbaker, and Nesary said that his responses seemed to support that.
“In my opinion, he was truthful to the questions asked pertaining to the shooting situation…”
Jeff Sullivan had had no choice but to order an arrest warra
nt for Anthony Pleasant, and on Thursday, March 18, Anthony was arrested. Later that day, Nesary got a call from Vern Henderson. “Come on down here,” Vern said. “We want you to run Anthony.”
Wanting to be absolutely certain that his reading was as accurate as it could be, Nesary ran six charts on Anthony Pleasant. Anthony too had “breathing problems,” irregular respirations brought on perhaps by nervousness and the shock of having just been arrested.
In the end, Nesary’s findings provided more shockers. “On the question, ‘Did you shoot Morris Blankenbaker?’ when the subject answered ‘No,’ it’s my opinion that he was untruthful.”
Vern Henderson, Bob Brimmer, and Jeff Sullivan were set back on their heels. All of their investigation thus far had indicated that Tuffy—and not Anthony—was the shooter in both murder cases. Now one of the city police department’s own sworn officers was telling them that his read of the polygraph tests indicated the reverse.
Nesary himself was startled; he had made mistakes in his readings of lie detector results only rarely, and that was because he had worded control questions incorrectly or because he had been given the facts wrong. Usually, he said, mistakes tended to favor defendants rather than hurt them.
Undoubtedly, the defense would attempt to enter the reversely weighted polygraphs into Tuffy Pleasant’s trial. Just as surely, Prosecutor Sullivan would fight to keep them out. It would be impossible, however, for the results of lie detector tests to be admitted into evidence and presented to a jury, unless both sides stipulated to their admission.
On March 30, Tuffy Pleasant reneged on his confessions and pleaded not guilty to both charges during his pretrial hearing. Vern Henderson was nonplussed. He had heard Tuffy’s confessions: Vern knew that Tuffy knew things that only the killer could have known. But it was more than that. There had been a despair in Tuffy’s words as he told of shooting two men he had cared about, emotion that Vern didn’t think could be manufactured. If Tuffy was scared and having second thoughts, that was understandable, but Vern didn’t believe they had arrested the wrong man.
Among the defense motions entered that day was a request for a change of venue. Tuffy’s attorneys argued that there had already been so much publicity about the cases that it would be impossible for him to get a fair trial in Yakima County.
Adam Moore said that radio, television, and newspaper reports had been “highly inflammatory” and that there was no way an impartial jury of twelve people could be picked. Mike Brown, an investigator for the public defender’s office, said that he had taken an unofficial survey of community attitude toward the case. Although Brown’s techniques might not have been considered sophisticated in a large city, he said he had checked the pulse of opinion in Yakima. He had been to “three barbershops and three beauty parlors” within the city limits. His survey of employees showed a unanimous response that they had all heard rumors about the double murders. Brown said he had also interviewed twenty-eight people in The Mall and fourteen people in Sunnyside—twenty miles southeast of Yakima. Of those forty-two, only nine said they had not heard of the cases. Of those who did know of it, however, just three had formed opinions as to Tuffy’s guilt or innocence.
According to Brown, they all thought Tuffy was guilty.
“This case stands like a Goliath over previous county murder cases,” defense attorney Adam Moore told reporters as he explained his request for a change of venue. “Drugs, romance, and jealousy are the fabric upon which this motion is woven.”
Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan demurred, citing other cases just as sensational which had been tried within Yakima County. Judge Carl Loy ruled that he felt that Angelo Pleasant could get a fair trial in Yakima and that he would not move the trial to Seattle, Spokane, or some other city in Washington. “The publicity has been factual rather than evidential,” Loy commented succinctly. He said he had seen no signs of prejudicial reporting and that media versions of the cases’ progression had, in his opinion, “met bench-bar-press guidelines.” Although Loy agreed that there had been a great deal of publicity in the Blankenbaker-Moore case, he attributed that to who the victims were and to the bizarre circumstances of the killings.
It was clearly not the kind of case that local reporters were going to bury on the back pages. However, given the gossip circulating through the Yakima Valley, the newspapers had been remarkably circumspect.
Still, reading the papers, Vern Henderson shook his head. Romance and jealousy … and now drugs. The whole case, as it appeared in the headlines, was beginning to sound like a regular soap opera.
The rumor mill ground on, fueled with no other ammunition than speculation, imagination, and half-truths.
On April 8, there were more headlines and yet another suspect under arrest. Kenny Marino, Tuffy Pleasant’s best friend and also a member of the 1972 championship wrestling team, was arraigned on charges of second-degree murder in Gabby Moore’s death. While both Pleasant brothers were being held without bond, Marino’s bail was set at fifty thousand dollars.
Prosecutor Sullivan would give no details but said only that the investigation was continuing. If things went on as they had, it seemed as if the murder case were going to tarnish every wrestler close to Gabby Moore.
Now two of Coydell and Andrew Pleasant’s sons were charged with murder. Anthony was to go on trial May 3, two weeks after Angelo’s trial was to begin. None of it made much sense to the public who could only speculate on their alleged motives for murder.
With the burgeoning list of murder defendants and arguments over when and where the trials would take place, little official attention was paid to an event that took place in that strange spring of 1976.
On April 18, Jerilee Blankenbaker Moore Blankenbaker quietly married for the third time. Where Gabby had been fourteen years older than she, and Morris three years older, Jerilee’s new husband was seven years younger. He was Jim Littleton, twenty-two. Littleton worked in the grocery business. A handsome young man, his lifestyle and interests bore little similarity to either Morris or Gabby, except that, like them, he was very protective of Jerilee. His ambition was to be a successful businessman. He had no interest in playing sports or coaching.
Olive was shocked to learn of Jerilee’s marriage. So was Vern Henderson. He remembered that Littleton had been one of the pallbearers at Morris’s funeral services, although Henderson had no idea who Jim Littleton was or what his connection to Morris and Jerilee had been.
It was not that Morris’s family and friends didn’t want Jerilee to go on with her life; it was just that it seemed too soon. Morris had only been dead five months and Gabby four when the woman who had been married to both of them appeared to have stepped completely out of the mess she had made of her life over the past few years. Of course, she would still have to testify in the trial—or trials— coming up.
People wondered if hers wasn’t a rebound marriage. And maybe it was in the beginning. Jerilee had been searching for a secure family unit ever since her parents divorced when she was in high school. Now, even before the first daffodils bloomed on Morris’s and Gabby’s graves, Jerilee had a new husband and a new family. There were a few snide comments in Yakima about “the merry widow,” and “I wonder how long this one is going to last?” but Jerilee and Jim kept such a low profile that the gossip and jokes soon died.
It wasn’t just Jerilee who had been through hell. The double murders had left a number of women emotionally adrift. Olive Blankenbaker had withstood blows before and come back, and she now proved that she could do it again. She was back at work, back in the midst of life. She would not allow either her illness or the loss of her son to destroy her. She didn’t care what the doctors had told her—she was going to survive.
Tuffy Pleasant’s girlfriend, Rene, was six months pregnant and already raising a toddler. Although Tuffy had not been the most constant of lovers, she had always figured they would be together for good one day. Now Rene didn’t know what was going to happen, but she feared she might be left all al
one after Tuffy’s trial.
And Coydell Pleasant was trying to adjust to the horror of having two sons in jail awaiting trials on murder charges.
The March polygraph test results and the subsequent arrests of Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino meant that Vern Henderson had to find more witnesses, enough so that they could absolutely account for both Tuffy’s and his brother Anthony’s movements on the nights of the murders. Tuffy had given them a reprise of his movements on November 21, but they needed someone who had seen him on his peregrinations that Friday night. And, with accusing fingers also pointing at Kenny Marino, there was yet a third suspect to backtrack on. The investigators devoutly hoped that there would be no more suspects in this increasingly convoluted investigation, but it was within the realm of possibility that Anthony Pleasant and Kenny Marino had been present just before—or even during—the murders of Morris Blankenbaker and Gabby Moore. However, the Yakima County investigators doubted it.
Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Sullivan and Yakima Police Detective Vern Henderson were about to become partners in a sense— if improbable ones.
Both Tuffy Pleasant and Joey Watkins had mentioned the name of one of the three people whose party Tuffy had joined at the Red Lion on the night of November 21. There had been two women and a man that Friday, and Tuffy said he had “caught a lady” that night.
Armed with the name of the man in the party, Sam Berber, and the information that the trio had come from Pasco, Washington, Vern Henderson and Jeff Sullivan headed for the Tri-cities area, which had burst from the desert with the advent of the Hanford atomic power project during the Second World War. (Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland are rarely referred to separately by Washingtonians.)
Henderson’s and Sullivan’s investigation led them into a mostly black neighborhood in the Tri-cities, where the black detective and the blond Irish prosecuting attorney drew a lot of attention. “They used to take one look at us and say, ‘Here comes Shaft and young Mr. Kennedy.’” Vern Henderson laughs. “They’d never seen a black detective before and Jeff did look just like John Kennedy. We made quite a pair.”
