Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (18 page)

By December, 1974, Donna Howard could no longer hide the strain of living in a house torn apart. Here it was the Christmas season, and her family was living a sham. Russ was hardly ever home; he’d slacked off the alcohol treatment and gone on as before.

Donna had tried so hard to do whatever Russ seemed to want, hoping that they could get along better. One of the things he had wanted was to buy a new house. Donna hadn’t wanted to move, but she’d gone along with it. They bought a house on Tieton Drive, and they would be moving in January. It seemed ridiculous when the marriage was so shaky, but she thought a new house
might
shed a happier light on the marriage—kind of a geographical remedy to a seemingly insoluble situation.

In mid-December Russ got home very late one night, and he was drunk. An argument ensued, and he hauled off and belted Donna twice in the head, practically knocking her out. That scared her. When her head stopped spinning she called the sheriff’s office and filed a report. Donna told the officer responding that she was going to see her lawyer the next day, that she would be filing for divorce.

Russ hitting her was the deciding factor. Her lawyer was worried about Donna. He had advised her to file many times before, but Donna had always backed out. Now she was determined to divorce Russ and seek sole custody of her two daughters. She told Bobbi that she was resolute. “I was positive in my heart,” Bobbi remembered, “that she was going ahead and getting the divorce.”

Fay Moss suspected things had come to a breaking point, too. “Donna was always the kind that never complained.
She
was the one who would always go up to the rest of us, look us square in the eye, and say, ‘How are you? How are the kids?’ and she really wanted to know. But this one time in late December I said to her, ‘Donna, how are
you, really?’
She just broke down and cried and responded, ‘Not good. Just not good.’”

Russ Howard was between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If he didn’t divorce Donna, Sunny was going to dump him. If Donna divorced him—as she was threatening to do—he might lose his kids, and the equity in their new home as well. Since the original down payment for the old house had come from Donna’s family, he suspected a judge would award Donna the new house.

Perhaps to punctuate that she, too, meant what she said, Sunny had broken up with Russ as 1974 turned into 1975. Both women in Russ’s life were fed up.

What he really wanted were his kids, the new house, and Sunny. On January 9, 1975, Russ Howard had a long talk with Sunny, and he confided an idea he had. She didn’t really believe him; she thought it was the liquor talking.

On that same January 9th Donna’s friend Fay Moss was visiting in Ellensburg. “I was talking to a friend who went to Yakima often, and I said, ‘Ellie, call Donna. She
really
needs a friend right now.’”

Fay remembered her phone conversation with Donna Howard in December, and it had left her with anxiety over her old friend. Donna had cried during that call, and Donna
never
cried. “She had told me that she was sorry that she hadn’t been able to make it over to Seattle to visit. Then she said, ‘I’m changing a few things in 1975. We’re moving to Selah on January first. This should prove very interesting. I’ll let you know more.’”

Fay Moss didn’t think the real changes in Donna’s life had anything to do with the new house. She knew Donna, and Donna was talking about something that would mean far more upheaval in her life than simply changing addresses. It had something to do with her marriage. Fay worried about Donna all day on January 9th, and she made up her mind to drive on down to Yakima and see her the next day. “But I didn’t. A winter storm blew in, and the roads were so bad that I turned around and came home. When I got home I learned that Donna was dead.”

Donna Howard was forty-two years old when she died on January 10, 1975. It happened so quickly; it was 9:27 on that bitter, icy morning in Yakima, Washington, when Russ found her. Emergency medical technicians pronounced her dead at 9:47.

How ironic that Donna Howard of all people should die in a stable, when she had loved horses since before she could walk. It just didn’t make sense. It would take almost a dozen years before it did.

Donna and Russ and the girls hadn’t quite finished moving everything out of the house on Galloway Road. Russ and Donna took their girls to school, and then they headed back to the old house. They passed some of their neighbors, and Russ and Donna waved.

Russ told the medics that they had put on a pot of coffee, and a little later he went into town to the hardware store to buy a mailbox for their new house. Then he stopped at a doughnut shop and picked up a dozen fresh doughnuts, explaining that he was taking them back to share with Donna. He talked to a number of people at the hardware store and the doughnut shop that morning. He had even written a check at the hardware store. Always talkative, Russ had seemed particularly gregarious.

His call for help came in just minutes before 9:30. A woman had been injured out on Route 8, Box 741. A fire department medic responded along with Yakima County Sheriff’s Office Patrolmen Jerry Hofsos and Ron Ward.

A worried Russ Howard led them out toward the loafing shed where the family’s two horses were kept. He explained that he and Donna were doing some last-minute moving and repairs. He had gone into town to get some supplies they needed, and he’d thought he would surprise Donna with some fresh doughnuts. But she hadn’t been in the house when he got back, nor had she responded to his shouts. He figured Donna was over at the neighbors’ house because she often visited there—but they hadn’t seen her either. He felt as if he had wasted precious minutes looking in the wrong place.

When Russ trudged through the deep snow out to the barn area he had found Donna. She lay in the loafing shed, just as she still was—except for the quilt, which he’d placed over her. The fire department medic knelt beside her and removed the quilt.

Donna Howard lay on her back with her left arm raised, her face turned to the left. Her right hand was pinned palm down beneath her right buttock. The medic felt for a pulse in the carotid artery in the neck. There was none. Donna Howard’s eyes were slightly open, but the pupils were already fixed and dilated. Her body was warm, but she was dead.

The immediate cause of death seemed to stem from some manner of head injury; there was blood streaking Donna’s forehead, running back into her thick brown hair, which was virtually soaked with blood from some terrible head wound. Mere inches from her head one wall of the two-sided shed had thick scarlet stains, as if someone had taken a paint brush and daubed on two swaths. Almost directly opposite and a foot or so above Donna’s left elbow one swath was horizontal, the other vertical.

Donna wore bell-bottom jeans, rubber galoshes much too big for her feet (unzipped), a white sweater, a dark quilted jacket (open), and gloves. Her sweater was pulled up, exposing flesh at her waist. Her jeans were wrinkled oddly, too, pulled up slightly toward her knees. Her clothing looked almost as if someone had dragged her by her feet. Her galoshes nudged a salt block placed there earlier for her two horses.

“I found her like this,” Russ Howard explained. “I covered her with a quilt, and I called for the medics.” He had not moved her at all, he said, fearful of injuring her further.

The fire department and the responding deputies had, of course, called detectives for backup. In all cases of violent death—accidental or deliberate—detectives must investigate. Detective Sergeant Bob Langdale and Detective Ray Ochs responded to the scene to assist in the initial probe.

The sheriff’s men took pictures of the scene, but that was all. The barn and the house were a good distance apart. There was nothing in the house that seemed out of place. There wasn’t much to photograph. The cause of death seemed obvious: one of Donna Howard’s beloved horses had spooked and kicked her in the back of the head. She had lain there until Russ returned.

Pictures remaining in police files show a pretty woman with a lithe, perfect figure lying stretched out on the icy ground of the loafing shed. Over toward the slatted open side there is a plaid quilt and a Bekins Movers’ blanket. Beyond, a blizzard has kicked up, and the snow and sky meet in never-ending white.

Neighbors rushed to comfort the bereaved widower, who blamed himself for not being home when Donna needed him. “One of her horses must have kicked her,” he said. He couldn’t describe his feelings. “I don’t know how you describe something like that. I felt a combination of grief and rage, not knowing where to vent the rage.”

One of the first things Russ did after Donna’s body was removed was to contact Sunny Riley. He told her that Donna was dead, and he explained the events of the morning. Sunny was appalled, even terrified by what he related. But Sunny still loved Russ despite what he had told her. She kept her knowledge to herself.

Donna’s family was stunned by the news of the tragedy. That Donna should be killed by the very animal she loved was incomprehensible to them. She had been around horses her whole life; she talked to them in some unspoken language, and she trusted them more than she trusted most people. Moreover, she was no neophyte who didn’t know how to approach horses.

Dr. Richard Muzzall, the Yakima County coroner and a local surgeon who had gone to Ellensburg High School with Donna, performed her autopsy on January 11th. Although he was a board-certified surgeon, Muzzall had no special training in forensic pathology. He noted the back of the skull where it had been shattered and found the damage consistent with a blow from a horse’s hoof. He also found a second fracture of the skull, on the upper right side, a small ovoid (oval-shaped) depressed fracture. That puzzled him, given what Russ Howard had told him about the accident. Muzzall was not as sure about the cause of that wound as he was about the occipital fractures, and he made a note to go to the loafing shed and find out what had caused that.

When he went back to the horse shed Muzzall spotted three stacked railroad ties that made up part of the wall adjacent to where Donna Howard’s body was found. The top tie had been broken off raggedly at some time and had a sharp, jagged piece of wood protruding. That might have caused the small single fracture.

Muzzall deduced that Donna had been bending over, cleaning a horse’s hoof, and that she had been kicked by one of the horse’s other hooves, knocked headlong into the tie, and then propelled backward, her head sliding across the side of the shed, leaving the two bloody swipes. She had finally come to rest flat on her back with her legs stretched out. That scenario might explain how her skull was fractured both in the back and on the top, and why the smaller top fracture’s shape bore no resemblance to a horse’s foot size.

Muzzall’s postmortem report was only a page long, and the conclusion was death from multiple skull fractures due to horse kick. He noted the two areas of fracture and a third finding—a bruise on the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand. That bruise bore the imprint of the fabric of the glove Donna had worn. At the bottom of the autopsy report the summary diagnosis listed the fabric-pattern bruise as having been found on the
left
hand. A minor oversight, but one that would have been
very
important to a forensic pathologist.

A bruise in the webbing between the thumb and the forefinger is a classic defense wound. What part of a horse could have given Donna Howard such a bruise? And why hadn’t Muzzall proofread the autopsy report?

Outside of major metropolitan areas there are few trained forensic pathologists, and even the best sometimes disagree with one another on a close call. Indeed, in many rural and thinly populated areas coroners are not even required to be physicians. Muzzall had drawn his conclusions from the information available at the time and with the training that he had. Later several forensic pathologists would agree with him; others would not.

Neither Detectives Langdale and Ochs nor Yakima County Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Sullivan could come up with enough probable cause to arrest anyone for killing Donna Howard. It was, they were forced to conclude, a tragic and ironic accident.

Donna was buried, and Russ Howard and his daughters pulled their lives together, living in the new house. There wasn’t much insurance on Donna’s life—only $17,000—but Russ would receive social security benefits for the minor children.