A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  When he was sixteen, Ruzicka was paroled from Fort Worden. He stayed free for six months and eventually was sent to a youth camp in Mason County after a burglary conviction. Still, he tried to run away, and after a year, was transferred to the Green Hill State School for Boys in Chehalis.

  The runner still ran. During one of his escapes, he was involved in three burglaries. They were penny-ante stuff; he stole $160 from a Texaco station, $400 from a dry cleaners, and broke into a drugstore—but fled before he could take anything. He pleaded guilty to one charge and the other two charges were dropped. In July 1968 he was sentenced to fifteen years at the state reformatory at Monroe.

  A month later, Carl Harp was arrested and sentenced to the Monroe facility. Harp’s path through his teenage years had not been that different from Ruzicka’s. Neither had had secure home lives, and they had both been involved in drugs and thefts. Harp resented women and referred to them in obscene terms. He felt the world had treated him badly which, indeed, it had—and he cared about no one.

  Harp’s first adult arrest was on December 30, 1967, in San Luis Obispo, California, when he was charged with possession of stolen property. He was eighteen years old. On August 11, 1968, he was arrested by Seattle police after he robbed a grocery store in the south end of the city. He had held a .22 caliber starter’s pistol to the head of a small boy while he ordered the clerk to “Give me the bills, or I’ll blow his head off.”

  Carl Harp, who also used the aliases “Troy Asin” and “Carroll Lowell Trimble,” was sentenced to the Monroe Reformatory despite his plea that he was a drug addict and had needed money for a fix.

  And so it was that, in the winter of 1968-69, James Ruzicka and Carl Harp met—two men of almost the same age and of remarkably similar backgrounds. Each was a smoldering cauldron of rage that transcended anything we might imagine. They came to prison on robbery and burglary charges, but any forensic psychiatrist who reviewed their case files could have warned that their potential was for violent sexual crimes.

  Although the two convicts both wore thick glasses, that was the only physical similarity they shared. James Ruzicka was 6′ 1″ tall and weighed 155 pounds. Carl Harp, who was only 5′8″, weighed 162 pounds. Ruzicka looked like a poet with his finely hewn features, while Harp’s face was flat and bland. But it was Harp who was the poet. He was probably the smarter of the two; Ruzicka had tested at 100 to 109 on the Otis IQ scale, which put him squarely at “average.” Both men were cunning and manipulative.

  In the worst possible sense of the term, Ruzicka and Harp were kindred spirits. No one but the men themselves can know what they talked about in their moments in the yard or when they worked on the kitchen crew, but at some point Harp shared his prized alias with Ruzicka. From that point forward, they agreed that if they should get free and if they were stopped by the law, they would each give the name “Troy Asin.” That would be their private joke and it would certainly confuse the damned cops.

  There is little question, though, that the two men spoke of rape and of the pleasures inherent in controlling women absolutely through fear and intimidation. The little boys who had followed their mothers through a series of marriages and who had been buffeted about from one home to another had grown up resentful of females and obsessed with sex.

  James Ruzicka and Carl Harp had a plan to be free. All they needed was an opportunity. Ruzicka recalled that opportunity for prison authorities sometime later.

  “I escaped from the Honor Farm. Harp and I left together. I would guess it was about seven-thirty P.M. on November twentieth [1970], when we took off. I didn’t really plan it, but I had thought about it several times when I was on the farm. I had heard earlier that evening that several guys were going to jump me and beat me up because I had been flushing the toilet all hours of the night and this had upset them. I guess it kept them awake. I had found some Pruno [prison liquor made from fermented potatoes or fruit and yeast and hidden from the guards] out in back of the kitchen, and after I had some of it, I suddenly decided I just had to get out of there. I guess Harp had been thinking about taking off too, so when he saw I was going to escape, he came with me. We cut across the field behind the kitchen, then crossed the railroad tracks and on into the brush. We spent the first night near the fairgrounds, right outside the town of Monroe. The next day, we found an old abandoned house and sort of holed up in it. Harp and I separated at that time and we met again, later, in Seattle.

  “I finally got to Seattle late that night and went directly to the University District. I stayed in the district for about three weeks. I slept where I could—at whatever ‘crash pad’ I could get into.”

  While he was free, he met a pregnant woman who had a little girl. He considered her his fiancée. She was one of the few women he ever felt compassion for. “One day I took my fiancée and my little daughter [not his child, but the daughter of the woman] to Bremerton to see my stepdad because I wanted his permission so I could marry my fiancée. The woman my stepdad was married to excused herself from the house and left. A few minutes later, the police were at the front door. I heard them ask if I was there so I ran to a back bedroom. The police came in the house so I jumped out the window, and they pounced on me.”

  Ruzicka had been gone two months before he was arrested. After he was caught and returned to prison, he married the woman and felt proud to give her unborn baby his name. Their marriage lasted just a year. The breakup of this marriage only served to substantiate Ruzicka’s belief that emotional involvement with a woman was an open sesame to getting hurt. “You get to know each other and then the bottom drops out,” he said. “That’s why I don’t want to get emotionally involved with anyone for fear of getting hurt.”

  Despite his escape, James Ruzicka was paroled from Monroe on November 4, 1971. He was con-wise, and a decade of perverse sexual behavior had blossomed into a need for violent sex. Carl Harp, also recaptured, was paroled from Monroe two weeks after his friend. Essentially lone wolves, they went their separate ways, but, in a sense, they followed the same trail.

  “Troy Asin” was loose.

  It was January 18, 1973 when Nina Temple*, a twenty-one-year-old department store clerk, left her job in downtown Seattle around 4:30 and headed to the bus stop where she would catch the bus to her Capitol Hill apartment. She was tired, her feet hurt, and she thought longingly of getting home. While she waited, a tall, bushy-haired man asked her for directions and she pointed out the bus he should take. It happened to be the Number 9 bus she was taking. “You can catch it here,” she told him.

  When Nina exited through the rear doors of the bus, she didn’t notice that the man got off too. She bent her head against the north wind that was blowing rain against her face. It was only five in the afternoon, but it was already dark and she hurried as she walked away from the lighted storefronts of the Broadway District. Huge homes, once single-family dwellings, had long since become apartments and boarding houses, their gardens gone to weeds except for stubborn laurel hedges and a few rosebushes.

  Nina Temple was unaware of the man who kept pace with her as he walked on the opposite side of the street. She didn’t see him at all until she opened the door to her apartment house and stepped in out of the driving rain. Suddenly, there he was—right in the lobby with her. He murmured something about knowing someone in the building, but he didn’t seem to know where his friend’s apartment was. Before she could even move, he pinioned her with a strong arm around her waist and pressed the sharp edge of a four-inch knife against her neck. Then he wrestled her down the dark stairs to the basement.

  In the black abyss beneath the stairs, he held her close as he told her that the “pigs” had shot his brother. “He’s bleeding to death,” he panted. “He sent me to get a girl to help.”

  “But why?” she blurted. “Why me? I don’t know anything about first aid.”

  The bushy-haired man said that his brother was on parole and that he couldn’t risk calling a doctor, and he shoved his knife harder again
st her flesh to coerce her to come with him.

  There was nothing she could do. She was afraid to scream and she let him lead her back up the stairs, across a street completely empty of traffic, to another rooming house. It was a large, turreted house with leaded glass windows; a “Peace” symbol drawn on cardboard was tacked on the door’s frame. Hopeless, she saw that the lobby of this house was empty too. The man pointed to stairs leading to the basement. “My brother’s in there.”

  As he dragged her down the steps, she looked where he gestured. There was nothing but padlocked storage bins made of wood slats, designed to hold tenants’ belongings. There was no brother. She was alone in the basement with the man and his knife. Nina prayed that she might hear the voices of someone coming, but there was no sound at all but her captor’s heavy breathing.

  ” I’ll have to tie you up, of course,” he said. He bound her wrists with rope until it cut into her flesh. And then he carefully crossed one of her feet over the other and tied her ankles. He took off his T-shirt and gagged her with it. She could smell his perspiration and fought to keep from vomiting. While she lay there helpless, he urinated in a corner of the basement.

  Returning to Nina, the stranger yanked her slacks and panties to her ankles and pulled her bra up to her shoulders, exposing her breasts. Then he stared at her as she lay helpless, naked, and trembling. He straddled her body, but he was unable to achieve an erection; his impotency sent him into a violent rage.

  Nina managed to choke out some words past the gag, taunting him. “Why don’t you just kill me?”

  “Don’t worry,” he answered. “I will.”

  And then he set about trying to do just that. Again and again, more than a dozen times, his closed fists thudded against Nina Temple’s jaw. She could feel her head bounce off the concrete floor and then slam into it again. The pain in her jaw was so intense that she almost lost consciousness.

  When he stopped hitting her, she felt his strong fingers close around her throat as he began to choke her. Pinpoints of light exploded behind the darkness in her eyes. She went limp and pretended to be dead.

  Oddly now, Nina’s would-be killer became concerned; he patted her cheeks gently and talked to her, urging her to live. But as soon as she responded, he became violent again. She realized that he was actually kneeling on her neck, using his entire weight to suffocate her.

  Nina decided she had nothing left to lose. She wasn’t going to let him kill her without a fight. Although her hands and legs were still bound, she managed to raise her feet high enough to kick some metal bedsprings that leaned against one wall. The springs clattered and clanged, distracting the man who was intent on raping her. Using her teeth and her tongue, she loosened the gag enough so that she could scream—and she did—over and over.

  The sound of running feet thundered overhead and the bushy-haired man suddenly leaped off her. When she opened her eyes, he was gone.

  Nina Temple saw the flash of a match above her head, and then heard a different male voice gasp, “Oh, my God.” Gentler arms picked her up and carried her from the basement. An ambulance rushed Nina to nearby Harborview Hospital. ER doctors found that she had suffered a broken jaw and severe contusions all over her face, a badly cut lip, and rope burns on her wrists and ankles. Her face was so swollen that she was unrecognizable.

  While Seattle Police Sex Crimes Detective Joyce Johnson waited for Nina Temple to emerge from deep shock, the young man who had rescued her said that he had passed a man running up the basement steps as he ran down. “I drew a sketch of him right after the ambulance took the girl away. Would that help?”

  Johnson assured him that it would, and he handed her a pen-and-ink sketch of a thin-faced man with thick curling hair and a drooping mustache.

  Once Nina Temple was able to talk, she was a good witness. She described the tall, thin man with the deceptively gentle face and thick glasses. She too remembered his distinctive mustache. He had told her his name was Jim.

  When she left the hospital, Nina viewed a dozen mugshot books of sex offenders’ photographs, but she didn’t find “Jim.” Joyce Johnson was worried. The man who had attacked Nina Temple seemed to harbor tremendous rage against women, far more than most rapists. She was afraid they were going to hear more from him.

  She was right. Only a month later—on Valentine’s Day—the man with the mustache surfaced again. This time his victim was a nineteen-year-old girl—Tannie Fletcher. * Tannie and her husband, Jon*, hadn’t been married long, but with him, she finally felt safe after a childhood marked by continual upheaval. They had found temporary living quarters with a friend in the University District of Seattle, but they both hoped to get jobs so they could have their own place.

  Tannie soon found that local papers required payment in advance for “Work Wanted” ads so she printed up several cards and tacked them on bulletin boards in coffeehouses and supermarkets around the district. She said she was seeking work as a housekeeper/nanny. Only one person responded. The man who called her explained that his house was difficult to find by the address alone. She agreed, therefore, to meet him on a corner of N.E. Fiftieth and Fifteenth Avenue N.E., near where she lived, at eight P.M. on Valentine’s night.

  Tannie waited nervously. She had assumed that he lived in a house on one of the nearby corners, so she knocked on the door of one of the houses and asked if someone there needed a housekeeper.

  “Right on,” a woman said with a laugh. “But we can’t afford one. You’ve probably got the wrong address.” Tannie nodded and went back to the corner. She began to feel as if she were the target of a practical joke when, suddenly, she saw a man just beyond the streetlight’s circle of yellow. He was tall and thin and wore a ski jacket.

  “Tannie Fletcher?” he asked in a pleasant voice.

  “Yes,” she said with relief. “I thought we’d missed connections.”

  As he moved into the light, she thought he looked very young to require a housekeeper, but she needed a job badly, so she agreed to follow him down an alley that he told her led to his home. He said he had a very large house and he needed a full-time housekeeper. She darted a look at him and wondered if he was telling the truth; he wasn’t dressed very well.

  The alley opened onto another and then another. After about eight blocks, Tannie realized that she had been duped. There was no house. There was only a cold knife held now against her side. Tannie didn’t know it, but she was hearing the same story Nina Temple had heard a month before, “My brother’s hurt bad in the park. The pigs shot him and you have to help me stop the bleeding.”

  The petite girl was forced deep into Cowan Park at knifepoint. Tannie kept protesting that the sight of blood sickened her and that she couldn’t possibly help her captor’s wounded brother. Finally, he looked at her with an odd smile and said, “If you ball me, I won’t make you look at my brother. ”

  She wanted to stay alive. Thinking rapidly, she asked, “If I say yes, will you throw the knife away?” The man responded by flinging the knife into the bushes, but he said coldly, “Be nice. I still have a razor.”

  Fighting her revulsion, Tannie Fletcher submitted to rape. When the man had climaxed, he let her put her clothes back on. Perversely gallant now; he walked her back to within a block of her home. She thought he must be crazy.

  He talked to her as if they were truly lovers, as if she had made love with him willingly. “I want to be with you again,” he said in a soft voice.

  Tannie kept walking, nodding as if she agreed with him. He told her he had been in the Monroe Reformatory from 1968 until 1971, and that he had been married but was divorced. She lied, telling him she had once been in a girl’s training school.

  Expansive, taking Tannie Fletcher’s conversation as approval, he became even more talkative. He bragged about his extraordinary job. He told her he was part of a research project at the University of Washington—one where he was given massive doses of vitamins every day and received seventy dollars a week just to let them study him.
“It’s some research deal, ten dollars a day for doing nothing but swallowing pills.”

  He showed her a card with some medical phrases on it. It was too dark for her to read much of it, but she saw the name “Jim R.” Tannie felt a hysterical giggle rise in her throat. Was her abductor so revved up on vitamins that they had turned him into a rapist? Had she just gone through the worst ordeal of her life because the scientists at the university had given him too much Vitamin C or something?

  She said nothing when the man told her he would call her the next day, but she couldn’t control a shudder as he removed a pendant from his neck and placed it around hers as a memento of their meeting. All that mattered now was that she believed he was going to let her go. She wanted to get home alive.

  Terrified that he would come after her, Tannie Fletcher made herself walk normally as she headed away from him.

  If she ran, he would know she was frightened. Tannie’s husband found her crying hysterically, covered with mud from head to foot. At the University Hospital, physicians verified that she had been raped.

  While Tannie and her husband were at the hospital, two phone calls came in from a man who said he wanted to “apologize” to Tannie. He told the people who owned the home Tannie and her husband were sharing temporarily to tell her that “Jim Otto” had called.

  Detective Joyce Johnson studied the almost identical MOs used in the two attacks, reading first one victim statement and then the other. This “Jim” had to be the same man who had attacked Nina Temple. Everything fit. Johnson suspected that the “vitamin guinea pig” story was as false as his ruse about his brother being shot by “the pigs,” but it was all she had to go on. The pendant the rapist had given Tannie Fletcher was a disappointing piece of evidence; it proved to be a mass-produced bit of jewelry that could never be traced.