by Ann Rule
It would be days before the widespread investigation could be coordinated and evaluated. Lieutenant Jim Byrnes wanted to talk to Walt Buckley. Maybe Buckley would have some explanation as to why the edges of his story didn’t come together cleanly.
Byrnes talked first with the emergency room nurses at the Lincoln City Hospital. They had treated Walt Buckley at nine A.M. when the ambulance brought him in. One nurse said that his arms were stiff and shaking and that he had appeared to be in shock. He had cried out the same phrases over and over: “Lori—where is she? I couldn’t stop. Lori yelled. I couldn’t stop the bleeding,” and “It’s my fault.”
“If he was acting, he sure was a good actor,” the nurse commented. She said that Buckley had stared into space and cried intermittently as he was being treated.
One thing had been a little odd. Walt Buckley’s feet had been very cold, as they would expect in someone who had lain out in the cold of a February night for hours. But his body was warm—so warm that his temperature was up one degree above normal. The staff had thought it was strange that he hadn’t shown signs of hypothermia.
They had sedated Walt Buckley and he had grown a little calmer. He had talked of how he and Lori had gone out to have a nice dinner. He told them he was a college student, majoring in accounting. He had explained that Lori was supposed to be in Salem that morning so she could have braces put on her teeth. But when the nurses asked, “Was Lori your wife?” he had started to cry again.
Jim Byrnes had to wait until almost six before he was allowed to talk with Walt Buckley. A local physician checked Buckley to be sure that he was well enough to talk to Byrnes. As the doctor left Walt’s room, he nodded his consent and said, “He wants to talk to you and is very alert.”
Jim Byrnes had a fairly good idea what had happened to Lori Buckley. He didn’t believe that Lori had been alive when the accident occurred; he felt she had either been dead or very badly injured when the Vega had pulled away from the duplex on Cedar Court at 4:30 in the morning.
Now, as Dave Kominek stood by, Byrnes’ read Walt Buckley his rights under the Miranda ruling, and the widower signed the MIR card as Byrnes questioned him casually about subjects unconnected to the accident. He wanted to be sure that Buckley was alert enough to be questioned about his wife’s death. Byrnes was surprised to find him as stable as the doctor had indicated.
Asked what he remembered about the night before, Walt Buckley first repeated a version of the evening’s events that, in essence, corresponded with what he had told troopers earlier. He said Lori had been very tired when she came home from school the day before. He had suggested that they go out to dinner so that she wouldn’t have to cook. Lori had agreed happily to that, so they had driven over to the coast, leaving about six. He estimated that they had eaten dinner about eight at the Pixie Kitchen in Lincoln City.
“What did you order?” Byrnes asked casually.
“I had the salad bar plate, and Lori had the combination plate.”
Then, Buckley said, they had gone to Salishan Lodge where they had after-dinner drinks and walked on the beach. Oregon beaches are wonderfully smooth and wide when the tide is out, and tourists walk on them all the time. But Byrnes wondered how many people might have wanted to be out there after ten at night with a cold February wind blowing.
He said nothing about his thoughts.
It had been very late, Buckley said, when they started home. Much too late, really. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was. He sighed heavily as he said that he had fallen asleep at the wheel.
“The last thing I remembered was Lori yelling ‘Walt!’ and then the car ran off the road.”
Walt Buckley had tears in his eyes as he recalled how he had tried to help his wife. He had covered Lori up the best he could and tried to talk to her, but she hadn’t responded at all. Finally, he had crawled up the bank to get to the road. He had hoped a car would come by and he could signal for help. But they had lain there for hours before the log truck stopped.
Jim Byrnes let silence fill the hospital room. Neither he nor Kominek said anything as Buckley stared down at his own hands. And then Byrnes told Walt Buckley that the sheriff’s office had sent deputies to his home early that morning—and what they had found there. He asked Buckley if he and his wife had been lying next to the wreckage of their car after midnight, who was it who had been screaming and moaning in their duplex at three A.M.? Whose blood had stained their mattress and left telltale spatters around their house?
Jim Byrnes, whose flinty blue eyes had intimidated scores of suspects, watched Buckley’s reaction. Despite the sedation, Buckley was nervous. Sweat dotted his forehead and he sighed deeply. Even so, while Walt Buckley began to modify his version of his wife’s death in the accident attempting to make his recall fit the facts he now realized the detectives knew—he refused to give a complete statement.
Instead, he talked around what had happened, coming close to something terrible and then veering off into extraneous detail. He admitted a great deal without really admitting anything. He said that he hadn’t meant to hurt Lori. He talked about putting her in the back of the car, but then he mentioned that he thought he had heard her moan once as he drove through Salem.
The back of the car? Salem? Buckley had finally changed his story from that of the highway accident fifty miles from Salem, and Byrnes realized that he was talking about what had happened on Cedar Court.
“I drove to a doctor’s office by the freeway but the lights were out,” Buckley said weakly.
As Jim Byrnes and Dave Kominek stared at him, Walt Buckley repeated over and over again, “I was going home.”
What did he mean by that? Had Buckley actually driven to the Oregon coast with his dead or dying wife and then changed his mind and headed toward his home? That was possible.
Walt Buckley was scared, worried about what would happen to him if he told the whole truth.
Byrnes asked him if he knew District Attorney Gary Gortmaker. (Gortmaker had arrived at the hospital a short while before. Gortmaker went to the scenes of homicides and worked side by side with detectives.)
“I don’t know him but I’ve heard of him,” Buckley said.
“Do you want to talk to him?”
Buckley nodded, and Byrnes and Kominek left the room.
Gortmaker pulled a chair up to Walt Buckley’s bedside and answered his questions about the legal ramifications of the situation. After they had talked quietly for several minutes, Gortmaker stepped into the corridor. He told Jim Byrnes and Dave Kominek that Walt was ready now to tell them what had really happened to Lori Buckley.
The story that Walt Buckley told proved once again that no one can really know what goes on behind the closed doors of a neighbor’s home. The most serene facade can hide turmoil beyond our most wild imaginings. What appears to be an ideal marriage can be, in reality, a bomb waiting to explode. As Walt Buckley spoke, the detectives quickly perceived that the neat and tastefully decorated duplex on Cedar Court had not been a real home at all, but only a stage where a massive deception was played out.
Walt Buckley admitted there were things in his marriage that even Lori had never known. He said he had managed to live two lives, not for weeks or months—but for years.
Their families, their friends, and Lori’s school associates had been under the impression that they had had a perfect marriage. The Marion County detectives had already learned that in their preliminary interviews. Everyone they had talked to when they were searching for the missing Buckleys had described them as a loving couple.
Lori Buckley had always seemed happy at school and was a well-liked and competent teacher. She often talked about Walt’s upcoming graduation from college. Although she loved her job, Lori had been eager for Walt to begin his career so she could resign from teaching and start having a family. Still, she had never seemed to resent the fact that she was the sole breadwinner in the marriage. She had not only paid the bills with her teacher’s salary, but she was putting W
alt through college.
And she had never mentioned any quarrels—not to her family, her friends, or other teachers.
As Walt Buckley began to talk about his real life, the detectives listening remembered that his and Lori’s friends had described them as “a beautiful couple.” They had both loved to play tennis, and several friends had recalled that Lori and Walt often did things on the spur of the moment, including drives to the coast. They had taken carefully planned vacations too; during the summer of 1975, they had gone off on a junket to Europe.
Everyone they had interviewed had told the investigators that Lori had been as cheerful as always on her last day at school. She would have been tired—just as Walt said in his first statement—because she had stayed late working on a chili dinner for the school. Detectives knew that she had left for home around 4:20.
No one—no one—had described Walt Buckley as a man with a temper or as an abusive husband.
However, as he spoke now, it became rapidly apparent he had kept many secrets from Lori. Yes, she had been paying his tuition and supporting him. She had believed that he was about to get his bachelor’s degree in accounting. She had been so proud of him, and thrilled that he might become a special agent with the FBI.
But it had all been an incredibly intricate sham. In reality, Buckley had been dropped from Oregon State University in 1974—an academic suspension. He had then enrolled in Linn-Benton Community College, but anyone who checked his records would see that he hadn’t completed any courses. He hadn’t even paid his tuition. He had left home each morning with his briefcase as if he were going to school, but he didn’t go to college classes. And he hadn’t had schoolbooks in his briefcase; he had carried copies of Playboy and Penthouse. He spent his days as he liked, returning home at the right time had he been going to college in Corvallis, which Lori believed.
There was more to Buckley’s machinations than Detective Kominek already knew. In looking through papers in the Buckleys’ duplex, seeking some clue as to where the couple might have gone, Kominek had discovered that Walt Buckley had been playing games with Lori’s bookkeeping and their household accounts. It was apparent that each month, after Lori had written checks for the proper amount of the bills, she had given them to Walt to mail. But he hadn’t mailed them; instead he had made out new checks for smaller amounts. This had left most of their bills only partially paid, with a growing accumulation of debt. Kominek had found many overdue accounts, and he had also seen where someone had altered the bills that came in so that this wouldn’t be apparent.
It looked as if Walt Buckley had been “skimming” money from their joint bank account, but that was puzzling too, because he hadn’t removed the money from the bank; he’d only written duplicate checks for lesser amounts. There was no explanation for that double-ledger bookkeeping, although he might have been planning to withdraw a very large sum at some future time.
Walt Buckley had filled out a fifteen-page application to the FBI, just as he had told everyone, and it was dated February 19, six days before he killed Lori. But he had never submitted it.
Of course Walt Buckley knew that the FBI wouldn’t hire him. He had no college degree in accounting. He hadn’t been going to college for two years.
Buckley continued his confession, describing the house of cards that had just grown higher and higher until it was bound to tumble. It may have been on the last night of her life that Lori Buckley finally discovered Walt had dropped out of school. There would be no degree for Walt, she would not be able to stop teaching, and there would be no babies. Worst of all, she discovered that the man she trusted implicitly had been lying to her for years.
Buckley said Lori had been angry with him that Tuesday night when she walked into the living room and found him “wasting his time watching television.”
That’s how it had started, at least in Walt Buckley’s memory. The argument had been over television. He had fallen asleep on the couch watching the set, and she had turned it off and called him a “rotten whore.” When he had fallen asleep, Lori had been sewing. He wasn’t sure what made her so angry.
How long she had known the truth was debatable. It must have been a sickening shock for her to discover that all her plans had evaporated. They were behind in their bills and she wondered where all the money had gone. She had bragged to everyone about how well Walt was doing in college; she had even been planning a party for his graduation.
Walt said that Lori had been furious with him—angry enough to threaten to leave their home at three in the morning and go to her mother’s house. When he walked into their bedroom, she had been slipping on her shirt. “When she told me she was going to her mom’s house, I picked up the quart bottle and hit her until it broke.”
“What kind of bottle?” Byrnes asked.
“I hit her with a Tab or Safeway Diet Coke bottle.”
He wasn’t sure just what kind of bottle it was. He said he recalled only that it was a clear quart bottle. “I don’t remember if the bottle broke the first time I hit her or not.”
He did remember that Lori had been sitting on the bed, and the bottle had been on the dresser.
“She was mad and wanted me to stop watching TV and go back to school. I didn’t want to disappoint her. I got mad and hit her. I put pillows over her to stop the bleeding. Blood was everywhere.”
Buckley said he had carried Lori and the stained bedclothes out to the car and headed out of town. But he was sure he heard her moan when they were driving on Cherry Avenue. He said he stopped in a parking lot, but when he checked her, she was dead. He knew he couldn’t go home, so he had headed toward the forest in Polk County. He had planned to leave both Lori’s body and the bedding deep among the fir trees.
“I couldn’t leave her there,” he said regretfully. Instead, he said he had dumped all the bedding and some bags with the broken bottles near Buell, Oregon. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave his wife’s body there or in the river.
Buckley said he couldn’t face what he’d done and that he had taken a bottle and tried to kill himself. But he didn’t have the nerve. And so he had driven farther and staged an automobile accident, deliberately driving his car off the road and over the embankment.
The windshield had not broken in the accident, so Buckley said he had broken it himself. Then he had lifted his wife’s body and positioned it near the car. After that, be had crawled up to the road. He admitted he had told the troopers that he had fallen asleep at the wheel.
“Had you been drinking—taking drugs?” Jim Byrnes asked. Buckley shook his head. “I only had one drink all day. I’ve never taken speed or barbiturates.”
He had no excuse for killing his wife, not really. He said he had no medical problems, and he had never suffered from blackouts—he just knew there had been an argument.
Jim Byrnes arrested Buckley at 8:25 P.M.; a guard was placed outside his hospital room for the night until he could be returned to the Marion County Jail.
Part of the puzzle was solved. Lori Buckley’s killer was under arrest, but the investigation wasn’t over. The question of why Walt Buckley had struck out at Lori so violently bothered the detectives.
Dave Kominek attended Lori’s autopsy. State Medical Examiner Dr. William Brady and Dr. Joseph Much, the Marion County Medical Examiner, performed the postmortem exam. Lori Buckley had suffered a number of deep, gouging wounds to her scalp, forehead, neck, nose, and shoulders and left upper back. There were no wounds below her breasts except for defense wounds on her hands and arms where she had tried valiantly to fend off the cutting edges of the broken bottle.
Lori would have been left terribly scarred from these wounds and she would have lost a great deal of blood, but, according to Dr. Brady, she would not have died. None of the bottle wounds were fatal. Death had come from suffocation or asphyxiation, but not from manual strangulation. The hyoid bone at the very back of her throat was not cracked and there were no finger or ligature marks on her throat. It was more likely that Lor
i’s killer had held a pillow over her face. Her lungs were fully expanded and discolored, which indicated trapped air. Perhaps Walt Buckley had been trying to stop her screams.
Walt Buckley came very, very close to getting away with murder. If no one had heard Lori’s two screams, if the neighbors had not been at home, there might not have been such a careful investigation of the automobile accident. Lori Buckley would have been embalmed and buried, and her widower would have been the object of concern and pity. He would have had plenty of time to return to their apartment and destroy the blood-soaked mattress, throw away the bits of broken bottle and wipe up the bloodstains. Since everyone, even their closest friends and relatives, thought their marriage was so loving, questions might never have been raised.
But questions were raised, and a thorough investigation followed. The Vega probably would not have been checked had the state police not been forewarned. When the car was processed, it held many clues that warred with the theory of an accident. Technicians found that the passenger side of the windshield had been broken from the inside, but the force had not come from a round, yielding object like a human head. Instead, some sharp, hard instrument had been used, centering the focal point of force in a small area.
The backseat was folded down and there was Type A blood in the far rear inside floor as well as in the wheel well. A gold rug in the back was stained with blood. Lori had not ridden in the front seat on her last ride; she had been in the back, already dead.
Her blue sneakers and a broken Tab bottle were on the floor in the front, along with a bloody hand towel.
When it was coordinated with what was already known, the cache of bedding found in the forest in Polk County was very important. Alone, without being linked to all the other information detectives and criminalists had unearthed, it would have been almost impossible to identify and might never have been connected to a fatal “accident in another county.” As it was, the flowered sheets were found to be identical to bedding back in the Buckley duplex. The bloody bits of a broken bottle were stained with Type A blood, Lori’s type. A dishcloth wrapped around a chunk of broken bottle matched Lori’s dishcloths. In all, twenty-two items had been taken from the woods and tagged into evidence.
