Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (12 page)

Bill Clifton received a phone call from a woman who lived in Poulsbo, a community with a mostly Scandinavian population, about fifteen miles north of Winslow. Solveig Hanson* told Clifton that she’d become acquainted with both Lori and Kip Rennsler within the last few months.

“I need to talk to someone about Kip,” Solveig Hanson said. “There are some things that have worried me.”

The attractive woman seemed relieved to talk to Clifton, but her hands shook slightly as she lit a cigarette. She said she had had various business dealings with Kip Rennsler and that they were friends. “But, before you ask, it was purely platonic. Kip was completely in love with Lori.”

She shook her head, trying to find a way to describe her concerns. “But something changed with Kip. In the last two weeks, he’s visited me half a dozen times. The thing is that each time, his actions became more complex and peculiar than the last. He became obsessed—I guess you’d call it that—to the point that he was beginning to frighten me. He seemed to be seized by the idea that he wanted to help others, and he would go into some detail about people—”

“In what way?”

“Well, he came to my house on Christmas Eve, and he absolutely insisted that I go shopping with him to get groceries for a needy family,” she said. “I agreed to go with him to a supermarket, and he must have spent about $200 buying groceries. Then we drove to a house where he said a poor family lived and he carried the groceries to the front door.”

Solveig said she had been touched by the gesture, and she had attempted to praise Rennsler for doing such a generous thing. “But he became very upset and wouldn’t let me even mention it,” she said.

Since Christmas, Solveig said she had heard often from Rennsler, and he had seemed to grow more disturbed all the time. “The last time he visited me at my home, he was talking irrationally—very fast—and not making any sense. He seemed to have so much to get out that he wouldn’t let me answer or say anything at all. It was just a shower of words coming from a pressure cooker.

“Finally, I got up and left the room to go to the bathroom, just to get away from him for a moment. But he followed me and pounded on the door with his fist, insisting that I hurry out because he had so much to tell me. He had me scared.”

Solveig Hanson said she had finally pushed Kip Rennsler gently toward the door and locked it behind him.

However, on the Sunday night before the murders, her phone had rung six or seven times. “Each time I answered, no one spoke—but I could hear hard, labored breathing. I can’t say for sure it was him, but I just felt it was Kip.”

It was easy enough to check. At that time calls from Bainbridge Island to Poulsbo were toll calls. The phone company pulled up the Rennslers’ records and found that eight calls had been made to the Hanson residence after midnight on Monday morning.

It was beginning to look as if Kip Rennsler himself might have been the monster who erupted in his own home. Any number of people who believed they had known him well referred to how he “wasn’t himself,” and to the bizarre way he had begun to act during the holiday season and afterward. He had functioned well in his job and in the community, although it must have become an enormous struggle for him to keep whatever demons were driving him from surfacing. If he’d bombarded Solveig Hanson with ideas that didn’t make sense, had he also frightened his wife with his distorted thoughts?

The new information wasn’t nearly enough to mark three brutal deaths as “Closed” in the sheriff’s files. Somehow, investigators would have to do a psychological autopsy of a dead man if they had any hope of understanding the enormous “Why?” that still existed.

What had caused Kip Rennsler to implode?

He had no business pressures because he was doing extremely well at his bank job—but he had become extremely morose and frustrated when he couldn’t get the loan to buy the lodge in the rainforest. He was said to be in love with his wife, but he had certainly spent a lot of time with Solveig Hanson in Poulsbo. Perhaps she wasn’t interested in him, but he had called her repeatedly in the wee hours of the morning when he had either just killed his family or was about to. He may well have felt tremendous guilt at even contemplating an extramarital affair.

Then again, it was beginning to look as though Rennsler had succumbed to a psychosis, perhaps one triggered by some recessive gene buried far back in his family tree. His recent actions certainly seemed insane. All his manic ravings might have ended in utter horror for so many other people.

A Seattle doctor said he’d treated Kip Rennsler for a duodenal ulcer in the recent past. He had found Rennsler to be under some tension, but hadn’t found that unusual for a businessman in a fast-paced world. The physician had prescribed a mild tranquilizer, a routine drug for someone under stress. The drug carried no risk for mania or psychosis as negative side effects.

One of the other vice presidents at Old National Bank recalled that he had gone to lunch with Kip Rennsler on December 31. They were coworkers, but not really close. The officer recalled that Rennsler had asked him, “Have you seen a change in me lately?”

“I finally said, ‘Yes, you seem much more happy and outgoing.’”

Rennsler had then gone into a complicated explanation of his new attitude and how happy he was because he had decided not to let things worry him as he had done in the past.

“I feel I’ll be a better person to work with,” he confided. “I’m not going to let finances bother me as much.”

The other bank officer had assumed at the time that they were talking about New Year’s resolutions and hadn’t been too concerned that Rennsler had suddenly chosen him as a confidant. He knew that Rennsler’s efforts to buy the hunting and fishing lodge had failed spectacularly, and figured that was what he was talking about.

Apparently, Kip Rennsler had talked to numerous people about buying the Quinault property for more than a year. When the news of the Rennsler family tragedy became public, a number of regular ferry boat commuters called sheriff’s headquarters. Kip had buttonholed a lot of people to talk about his grand plans. More intimate friends came forward to say that Kip Rennsler had been completely devastated when the deal fell through.

“He told me,” one man said, “that if he wasn’t able to buy that place, he didn’t know how he could face the future. I thought he was exaggerating, of course.”

Rennsler’s usual personality was that of a strong competitor, his friends told detectives. “He was the ultimate competitor,” an acquaintance said. “You know, the kind of guy who had to be the best and the first at
everything.
He had to win at games, and when we went on camping trips, he was always the first to get his tent pitched. A winner all the way.”

Lori Rennsler’s friends said that Kip had always been the absolute head of the household, and that he could sometimes seem domineering. “But he loved her—and Stevie—and she never complained. She accepted him the way he was.”

Perhaps Lori could
not
accept her husband the way he had become in the days before her death. Or perhaps she didn’t know how far his mind had slipped over the edge of madness.

The postmortem examinations of the Rennsler family took place as their friends and family made funeral plans. The pathologist looked especially for some kind of defect in Kip Rennsler’s brain that might have caused him to behave so bizarrely and violently, perhaps a tumor or a tangle of blood vessels that had caused an aneurysm or even a stroke. But there was nothing. The cause had not been physiological; it had been psychological.

Although it seemed unthinkable, Rennsler had apparently committed suicide by stabbing himself in the chest. Suicide by repeatedly slashing oneself is not without precedent, although it is extremely rare. The body tends to pull away from pain, and “hesitation wounds” are to be expected.

Rennsler had succumbed to the last of four stab wounds to his chest. The first three—which had stained his tee-shirt—were remarkably deep, but not deep enough to penetrate his heart or any other vital organ. The fourth thrust, however, had severed the intercostal artery on his right side, and his lung had filled with blood and collapsed, a condition called hemopneumothorax.

He would have lived several minutes at most after the fourth self-administered stab before literally drowning in his own blood.

He had a cut on one finger, but that was several days old, and probably accounted for the bandage detectives had found in the kitchen.

There was some—though not much—comfort to be taken in the findings on Lori and Stevie Rennsler. They had probably been asleep when they were stabbed fatally in their chests. There was no evidence at all of defense wounds on their arms or hands, and no bruising on their bodies.

The crime scene was cleared, and grieving family members were allowed to enter the yellow house to collect keepsakes and other items. All the evidence had been evaluated, and there was nothing at all to indicate that anyone other than the Rennsler family had been present on the Monday night they all died.

One relative came across a mass of torn paper fragments in Kip Rennsler’s sports jacket. She brought it to the detectives.

Tediously, they laid the ragged pieces of paper out on a flat surface, arranging and identifying them as though working on a jigsaw puzzle. At first, the combined scraps looked like a jumble of scribbled letters on wrinkled paper, but slowly, slowly, a pattern began to emerge.

The investigators realized they were looking at a letter, a twenty-five-page letter, judging from numbers on the bottom of some of the pages.

The letter made a horrible kind of sense, despite its rambling tone, and the fact that some sections were missing. It had obviously been intended for Lori to read, even though there was no salutation on the first page. No one will ever know if Lori Rennsler read the letter, but the chance is that she did not. Had she read this careening jumble of thoughts, she might have been forewarned of the depth of her husband’s mental illness. More likely, Kip Rennsler wrote the letter and then tore it into bits, believing that he could explain his thoughts to her verbally.

The letter was handprinted and many words and phrases were underlined heavily for emphasis.

It began:

There was a section missing, and then it went on:

And here the note trailed off into a stream of consciousness as Kip Rennsler struggled to make his mind do his bidding:

An explanation for the tragedy lay on the table in front of them, scattered thoughts on scattered notes. Kip Rennsler had completely lost touch with reality, and he believed that sacrificing himself and his family would save everyone in the world. On the last day of his family’s lives, he had undoubtedly been completely delusional, believing that he was making a noble sacrifice.

Perhaps the preposterous things he mentioned in the torn note became the verbal questions he asked his wife on the night of January 2. Expected to answer instantly, the horrified woman must have faltered in her shock. She may have asked her husband to face reality. Such hesitation would have spurred the final maniacal attacks.

Lori and Stevie probably died first, and Kip Rennsler may have been alive for hours afterward. Someone made the eight phone calls to Solveig Hanson, long after midnight. Someone carried Stevie’s body into the master bedroom so he could be with his mother.

One psychiatrist felt that the torn note was an indirect suicide note. Perhaps. Another diagnosed Rennsler as being a paranoid schizophrenic. Not likely. Thirty years ago, the term
schizophrenia
was a catchall phrase to diagnose all manner of aberrant behavior. It is more likely that Kip Rennsler was a manic-depressive whose disease had moved into a psychotic phase.