by Ann Rule
Joyce Johnson telephoned the University Hospital and, to her surprise, she found that there was indeed such a vitamin research program. In fact, the next massive vitamin administration was to be given that very afternoon at one P.M. Johnson alerted University of Washington police and asked them to stand by when the test subjects reported.
Sure enough, the officers spotted a tall, slim man with bushy reddish brown hair, thick glasses, and a drooping mustache. His name was Jim. However, it wasn’t Jim Otto; it was James Edward Ruzicka. And he had had his last massive dose of vitamins.
Ruzicka was charged with one count of attempted rape while armed with a deadly weapon, one count of second-degree assault, and a second count of rape. He gave a five-page statement to Joyce Johnson. Yes, he agreed, he had met Tannie Fletcher when he asked her for a cigarette. Then she had asked him to have sex with her, and, according to Ruzicka, he had obliged and accompanied her to a nearby alley.
But Tannie had said “Jim” had forced her into a muddy park. And detectives found footprints in the ground there that exactly matched the bottom of Tannie’s “waffle-stomper” shoes.
Although both rape victims identified Ruzicka as their attacker, he finally admitted only to the rape of Tannie Fletcher. He was subsequently convicted and certified as a sexual psychopath. His ten-year sentence was suspended on the condition that he take part in the sexual psychopath program at Western State Hospital.
This sexual offenders program may well have been one of the reasons that Washington voters restored the death penalty. It was a program that allowed its participants incredible freedom. The premise was that locked doors suggested that the hospital staff did not trust the sexual psychopaths. Counselors argued that unless the inmates felt affirmation and trust from their captors, they would never get well. The program featured frequent passes on the grounds and then into Steilacoom where the hospital was located, and finally into other Washington cities. Of course, the patients had to “prove themselves” before they were given more freedom.
Viewed in retrospect, this philosophy of the mid-seventies was an almost Utopian “feel-good” therapy approach, in tune with the times where everyone did their “own thing.”
James Ruzicka stayed nine months at Western State. After some months inside where he attended group therapy faithfully and participated in an appropriate manner, he was granted a number of leaves.
On January 31, 1974, he failed to return to the hospital after an unsupervised twelve-hour pass.
On Friday, February 15, sixteen-year-old Nancy Kinghammer stormed out of her West Seattle home shortly after six in the evening. She and one of her sisters had disagreed over which television show to watch. It was a relatively minor sibling disagreement, but Nancy was angry. Her family assumed she had walked down the block to visit friends and would be back in a few hours.
But Nancy did not come home. By three-twenty the next afternoon, her worried father had called all her friends and even contacted West Seattle High School administrators where she was a junior. No one had seen her. Her father was convinced she had not run away; she had taken neither extra clothes nor money with her when she left.
The tall, brunette teenager was simply gone.
It was even less likely that fourteen-year-old Penny Marie Haddenham should vanish from her home several blocks from the Kinghammer residence six days later. The red-haired, freckled youngster hadn’t even had a tiff with anyone. In fact, she had been laughing the last time her father had seen her. That had been at 6:30 in the evening of February 21 in a West Seattle restaurant. Penny had needed twenty dollars to buy material for a pantsuit she was making in home economics at Madison Junior High School.
Penny was a strong “B” student at Madison and her father had been glad to give her the money. The last time he saw her she was headed toward the fabric store a few blocks away. A friend’s mother saw her about 8:30 that evening. Nancy had stopped in to see the friend, who lived only four blocks from her own home and had been told she’d already gone to bed. Penny had been in good spirits then. She had said she was going home.
But, like Nancy, Penny had not gone home. And there was no way in the world her parents would believe she’d run away. She was too happy at home, too dependable, too concerned with her friends and schoolwork.
For the next three weeks, police, family, and friends looked for Penny and Nancy in vain. Seattle police detectives wondered if there could be any connection between Penny’s disappearance and Nancy’s. The only link they could find was the proximity of the girls’ homes. They had not known each other, they went to different schools, and they traveled in different crowds. Now, they were linked only by terrible speculation.
Penny was found first. On March 12, a newsboy cut through the woods edging the Fauntleroy Expressway in West Seattle. The wooded area was made up of deciduous maple trees with only a few clusters of evergreens, and the ground was covered by a deep carpet of brown leaves. Although the freeway was close by and there were several houses at the edge of the woods, the wooded area itself was as isolated as the center of a forest.
The boy stopped in his tracks, transfixed with horror at the sight in front of him. A girl hung from a tree, her neck bent sharply to the side. It was so quiet that the boy’s own involuntary cry and the pounding of his heart seemed to echo and re-echo through the trees.
Police patrol units soon responded to the boy’s phone call. The officers looked at the body of the red-haired girl hanging from the bare limb; it was obvious she had been dead for some time—days at least. They made no effort to approach closely, but called for homicide detectives.
Seattle homicide detectives Roy Moran and Bernie Miller noted that the girl’s feet were almost touching the ground, her body leaning back against a slight embankment angling down from the tree. She was not bound; there was just the rope around her neck attached to the limb. The petite girl was dressed in jeans, a yellow nylon jacket (whose right pocket was turned inside out), and platform boots. Her purse was nearby and some items spilled from it were not far away in the leaves. A thorough search of the area turned up a pantsuit pattern envelope and some gray wool and gray silk yardage.
Could it be a suicide? If this was Penny Haddenham, and her description matched that of the body in the woods so closely, it seemed impossible that she would have taken her own life. She had been such a happy girl. But it isn’t unheard of for teenagers to take life’s small problems very, very seriously. Teenagers think they will live forever, and sometimes they make dramatic gestures and find that they cannot turn back.
As darkness descended, the body was carefully cut from the tree—not at the noose—but farther along the rope so that the direction of the fray marks could be studied. If the girl had committed suicide by hanging, the fraying would point upward; if someone had killed her first and then hoisted her up over the tree limb, the fraying would slant downward.
Uniformed officers guarded the scene all night. With the first light of day, there would be a further search. There was no doubt now that the body hanging from the tree was Penny Haddenham; the state of decomposition indicated she had been there for a week or more. The question was how she had gotten there. How could a smiling, joking fourteen-year-old girl end up a suicide? Or, more likely, how had some sadist enticed her away from her own neighborhood and forced her into the woods to die this lonely death?
The postmortem examination on the 5’2”, 110-pound girl quickly eliminated any possibility that Penny had killed herself. She had died from hanging—asphyxiation—but she had been raped before she died: Her underclothing and jeans were soaked with semen. Her killer had obviously redressed her after the attack and then hanged her to make it look like suicide.
Once again, detectives went over the scene where Penny had been hanged, where she had waited for ten days for someone to come and find her. It was not an easy scene to search with the thick leaf carpeting obscuring the ground, but they found some interesting items. The most damning was a fishing knife, its
point honed to a fine edge. It lay half under a cover of leaves, its tan taped handle blending in with the leaves. The killer had probably dropped it and been unable to find it in the dark. It had not been out in the elements long, no longer than Penny’s body had hung there.
Penny should have had seven or eight dollars left in her purse when she headed home after purchasing the material (and two forbidden packs of cigarettes, according to her best friend), but her purse had had no money at all in it when she was found. The cigarettes had been found, sodden with rain, on the ground beneath her feet.
When Penny Haddenham’s body was found, the fear that Nancy Kinghammer was dead—murdered too—was exacerbated. On Saturday, March 16, detectives, patrol officers, and sixty Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts scoured the neighborhood where Nancy had vanished. They searched through empty houses, woods, vacant lots—anyplace where a body could have been secreted. Penny had not been far from home; detectives didn’t feel that Nancy was either.
Police helicopters took aerial photographs on the chance that a body with bright enough clothing might show up from that vantage point. Throughout the day, the search proved fruitless. It was almost five and growing dark when one detective returned to a vacant lot at the corner of Andover and Avalon. The lot had become a very convenient, if unofficial, dumpsite for the community …
Unerringly, almost as if he had some kind of psychic clue, Detective George Cuthill walked through the blackberry brambles and garbage until he came to a pile of boards, cardboard, and junked furniture. “I think she may be under here,” he muttered.
Bit by bit, as the pile of junk diminished, the remains of a human being were exposed to the fading sunlight. It had been five weeks, and the nearly nude corpse was much deteriorated, the only seemingly alive part of it the long brown hair and the bright rings still glittering on the fingers. A green scarf was tied around the neck of the body, which had been wrapped in white drapery material and towels, fabric that seemed too new to have been part of the debris dumped in the lot.
Dental charts, the rings, and a watch gave absolute proof that the body was Nancy Kinghammer’s. There was no way now to find what had killed her; the method vanished with her flesh. But a sexual motive was apparent because Nancy was found naked.
Two girls had been raped and murdered in less than a week in a quiet family neighborhood. Residents asked what kind of prowling animal was loose in West Seattle? Detectives had a knife, a towel, and a strip of white drapery to tie the killer to the bodies, but where could they start looking? There was nothing in either girl’s background that indicated they might have known their killer. He had probably been a stranger who waited on a dark street until they were alone.
An arrest in Beaverton, Oregon—almost two hundred miles south of Seattle—brought some answers, but also more questions. Washington County, Oregon, detectives called the Seattle Police Department with a request for information on a man named Troy Asin.
The man in the Washington County Jail was tall, slim, and had dark red, bushy hair.
The Oregon offense which had landed “Troy Asin” in jail sounded familiar to Detective Joyce Johnson. A thirteen-year-old girl had phoned the Washington County Sheriff’s office to report that she had been raped. She and a girlfriend had met her bushy-haired, mustachioed man and his friend near a penny arcade in Portland. After talking with the junior high school girls for a while, the men said they had decided to ride the bus out to Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, with the teenagers. Once in Beaverton, they had all gone to a pool hall restaurant for something to eat. The man with the mustache, the one who said his name was “Troy,” had offered to walk one girl home.
She didn’t get home; instead she was raped at knifepoint in a churchyard and when “Troy” finally let her go, she had stumbled out sobbing to call the sheriff. “Troy” was apprehended almost immediately as he walked near the pool hall; his thirteen-year-old victim pointed him out to a Beaverton patrolman.
In the Washington County jail, he gave his name as Troy Asin. The Oregon officers were slightly suspicious of his identity as he had no papers in his wallet that listed that name. “Troy Asin” had given a home address in the West Seattle area of Seattle, however, and a routine request to verify Asin’s identity had reached Seattle detectives shortly after Nancy Kinghammer’s body was found.
When Beaverton detectives questioned Asin about the rape, he maintained an attitude of calm disbelief. He insisted that the thirteen-year-old girl had been completely willing—even grateful—for the act of intercourse in the churchyard. In fact, he said that she had told him she was glad she wasn’t a virgin anymore because her friends had been calling her a prude.
“When I asked her if she wanted to ball, she didn’t say yes or no so I figured she wouldn’t mind,” he said easily. Asin seemed to be puzzled that the girl had called the police.
The name “Troy Asin” baffled Seattle detectives at first. “Moniker files” brought up the name all right, but it was one used by a parolee from the Monroe Reformatory named Carl Harp. He had used that alias, or variations of it, for years. But Harp’s physical description was nothing like that of the man in custody in Oregon—not unless he’d grown a half a foot and dyed and permed his hair. “Troy Asin” wasn’t exactly “John Smith.” There couldn’t be two men who had accidentally picked such an unusual pseudonym.
The mystery of the identity of the man charged with rape in Oregon was solved when Seattle detectives checked the address “Asin” had given. The home, occupied by a married couple and two other women, was only a block from the lot where Nancy Kinghammer’s body had just been found. The woman who lived there said that the man in Oregon sounded like her ex-husband: James Edward Ruzicka.
In a remarkable show of civility, her new husband had allowed Ruzicka to stay with them after he had walked away from the sexual psychopath program at Western State Hospital. “He was here from February first to February twenty-fifth,” she said.
When the detectives asked Ruzicka’s ex-wife if anything was missing from her home, her answer was one of the biggest jackpots of information any homicide detective ever hit. Yes, she answered, she had found that some towels, some white drapes, and a fishing knife were missing. She added that Ruzicka had asked her to leave the back door unlocked on March 3, and when she returned home, she found $37.95 in cash missing. Ruzicka had not returned after that, and she hadn’t heard from him since.
The ex-Mrs. Ruzicka was asked about any memory she might have of the night of February 21, the night Penny Haddenham vanished. She recalled that night well, because “Jim” had left at 6:30 absolutely broke. When he returned after 10:30 P.M., his coat had been covered with mud. He had had seven or eight dollars when he came home (exactly what Penny Haddenham’s change from the twenty-dollar bill her father gave her would have been after she bought material and two packs of cigarettes).
“He told me that a man had given him the money for helping him change a tire,” Ruzicka’s former wife said. “That was how his clothes got all muddy.”
She identified the knife found at the scene of Penny Haddenham’s hanging site as the one missing from her house.
It looked as though James Ruzicka, “The Guinea Pig Rapist,” had cut a leisurely swath of terror since he’d left the grounds of Western State Hospital. His alibi in Beaverton, Oregon, about merely obliging a willing girl sounded familiar to Detective Joyce Johnson. “Jim Otto James Ruzicka” had also claimed that Tannie Fletcher had propositioned him. He either suffered from some delusion that women found him sexually irresistible, or he chose to gloss over the fact that he had actually forced himself on his victims.
James Ruzicka’s trail, from Western State Hospital to West Seattle to Oregon, was traced as closely as possible. He apparently had made at least two trips south into Oregon. In Eugene, a hundred miles south of Beaverton, a forty-eight-year-old housewife told police that she remembered him all too well. The mother of eight children, she had quit her job so she could take care of her
husband who was terminally ill.
A tall man with wildly curly hair had come to her door and asked for a ride into Eugene. “He called himself ‘Jack,’ ” she recalled, “and when I told him I couldn’t take him anywhere, he held a knife to my throat, tied me to my bed … and raped me.”
Then “Jack” had stolen money from her children’s rooms and, still holding the knife to the woman’s neck, demanded that she drive him to downtown Eugene. “Along the way, he told me a story about some friend of his leaving a knapsack beside the road for him. I knew it was just an excuse to get me into the woods so he could rape me again.”
She had had no choice but to let him lead her into the woods. All she wanted to do was survive and her mind raced feverishly as she submitted to a second sexual attack. “Then I told him I had lost my car keys on the ground,” she told police. “I guess he believed me because he went back to the road and started hitchhiking. I had my keys all along, and I ran to my car and headed in the other direction. He told me if I called the police, he would come back and kill me and my family.”
Few would question that James Ruzicka’s diagnosis as a sexual psychopath had been accurate. Now, all circumstantial and physical evidence pointed to the conclusion that he was also a merciless killer. Detectives believed that he had murdered Nancy Kinghammer exactly one year and one day from Nina Temple’s rape in the basement of the Capital Hill rooming house.
While James Ruzicka was locked up, awaiting trial, the first “Troy Asin” was still free.
Carl Harp had left the Monroe Reformatory a few weeks after his friend James Ruzicka. He presented a bland, cooperative facade to his parole officer and was given a “conditional discharge from supervision” on April 2, 1973. By this time, his “other half” had raped two women—at the very least.
