Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (34 page)

It was 7:50
P.M.
when the mobile radio at the base camp crackled. “We have the girls,” was the terse message. “Have an ambulance waiting.”

Doug Engelbretson, whose area of expertise was homicide investigation, waited anxiously, straining his eyes for the sight of lights coming back down the road from Troublesome Creek. Finally he hurried forward as the search-and-rescue rig emerged from the woods with two passengers on board.

Both were girls, but there was no time for Engelbretson to get much information about what had happened. One girl—the sixteen-year-old, whose name was Maeve Flaherty—was loaded at once into the waiting ambulance, which headed toward Providence Hospital in Everett. Kari Ivarsen, who said she was eighteen, seemed to be in shock but otherwise uninjured. She was taken where she could get warm and have some food.

Doug Engelbretson learned that Maeve Flaherty was alive when she reached Providence Hospital, but that she was in critical condition from a gunshot wound and was undergoing surgery.

Engelbretson waited until Kari Ivarsen was finally able to talk. He assured her that Maeve was alive and receiving expert care, but he did not mention how critical Maeve’s condition was. Even though time was of the essence in finding the person who had shot Maeve, Engelbretson could see how delicate Kari’s grip on reality was. He questioned her gently about what had happened up there in the deserted woods. As she spoke haltingly, he listened, horrified. Kari Ivarsen spun out a tale of twenty-four hours of shattering terror.

Kari recalled how she and Maeve had planned to walk out of the woods to Index the afternoon before. “Al didn’t want us to go, but we were afraid to stay,” she said.

“Afraid?” Engelbretson asked.

“The snow—it was so deep—and we thought we might freeze. And there were funny scratching noises on our cabin at night.”

Kari said that she and Maeve had put on as many clothes as they could to protect them from the freezing temperatures and had begun the nine-mile hike toward town. “We must have been walking for about an hour and a half when all of a sudden Maeve just fell forward into the snow. She just kind of keeled over.

“She seemed to be kind of out of her head,” Kari remembered. “I didn’t know what had happened, but I was scared. I started crying and screaming for Al, because I knew he would help us if he was around.”

She said that Al was supposed to be following them into town, but he had sent them on ahead. She was relieved when Al heard her screams and caught up with them.

“I saw Al coming, hurrying to help,” she said. “But before he got to us, he turned around and fired his rifle at something behind him.”

“What was he shooting at?” Doug Engelbretson asked.

“He said there were two men on the ridge who were shooting at us. He shot at them to drive them off,” Kari said.

Kari said that she and Al considered trying to get Maeve down to Index for help, but they knew it was too far. Somehow they managed to get her on her feet, and, half-carrying her between them, they finally made it back to the cabin.

Kari closed her eyes, remembering a nightmare. “I remember saying, ‘Maeve, you’re in shock,’ and she said, ‘Yes, yes, I’ve been shot.’ And I said, ‘No, no:
you’re in shock.’
But then I undressed her and I held the flashlight over her back, and I said, ‘My god, Maeve, you
have
been shot!’”

Kari said that she and Maeve had been so thankful to have Al there. “He said he had worked for a veterinarian in Kansas,” Kari told Engelbretson. “He said that he knew enough about medicine to get the bullet out.”

Al had taken complete charge of the situation, according to Kari Ivarsen. “He told me to get clean snow to pack the wound in Maeve’s back to kill the pain. Then he took this huge bread knife from the kitchen table, and he cut a large
X
across the wound.”

Kari had watched him work over Maeve. He seemed to know what he was doing, but he couldn’t find the bullet. She didn’t know why they had to take the bullet out right away, but Al said they had to.

“Every time Maeve moaned from the pain, Al packed more snow on the wound to freeze the area,” Kari said. “And then he said he needed something sharper,” Kari recalled. “He got a piece of glass—”

“Glass?” Engelbretson asked quickly.

“Yes…just a piece of broken glass, and he filed it down until it was pretty sharp, and he started probing with that.”

Next, Kari said, Al took a broken pool cue and stuck it in the ugly bullet wound, saying he could feel the bullet but that he needed tweezers to get it out.

Kari told Doug Engelbretson that she had begun to sense that something was not right. A growing horror had risen in her, she said, as she watched Al working over Maeve, who was in and out of consciousness at this point.

“He was enjoying it,” Kari said.

“What do you mean?”

“Her pain was turning him on,” she said. “I realized he wasn’t trying to help her—not really. He was enjoying sticking the knife and the glass and that pool cue into her.”

With that awful knowledge, Kari said she had begun to wonder who had really shot Maeve. They hadn’t seen anyone except Al. They had only his word that snipers were firing at them. Al had a gun, and she had learned that he was behind them all the time they were walking, although they had not heard or seen him. It was as if he was stalking them like deer or rabbits.

Kari said she thought as fast as she could. If she panicked, she knew that neither she nor Maeve would get out of that cabin alive.

“I told him that maybe we’d better let her rest awhile,” Kari said. “I told him I would fix her some hot soup, and maybe that would give her some strength.”

To her great relief, Al had agreed. Maeve couldn’t eat much, but Al stopped trying to operate on her. She tossed and fretted, but occasionally she was able to take a few sips of soup. Kari said she felt a little more confident that Maeve would survive, because she could see very little blood from the wound, except for the irritation Al had caused by probing for the bullet.

“Still,” she told Englelbretson, “I was afraid that Maeve might be bleeding internally. I thought about walking down to town by myself to get help, but I couldn’t leave Maeve alone in the cabin with Al, and I didn’t know if I could find the road in the dark. Besides, if Al really had shot Maeve, what was to stop him from discovering Kari was gone, shooting Maeve again—and then tracking Kari down in the night?”

It was full dark by then, and Kari knew that none of them would be able to get out of the woods until morning. She was frightened that Maeve wouldn’t live that long, but she didn’t know what she could do to save her.

“I sat up all night, watching over Maeve,” Kari said. “I watched Al, too, and it looked as though he was sleeping. His gun was on the other side of the cabin. I wondered if I could reach it before he did if I went for it.”

At 7:30
A.M.
, it began to get light outside. Maeve was still alive, and Al didn’t seem to suspect that Kari no longer trusted him. From time to time he said he probably should go for help. When she heard that, hope rose in Kari, but two hours passed and Al made no move to leave.

Finally, at nine-thirty, Al did put on his coat. Kari waited for him to pick up his rifle, but he left it leaning against the wall. He promised to come back with help as soon as he could. Hours passed, with no sound but the crackling of the fire and the wind whistling around the cabins. It was bitter cold, and Kari expected that it would start to snow again at any time.

“Finally I said, ‘Maeve, we’ve got to try to walk out, or we might be here all winter.’ And I got her on her feet and dressed, but the minute I got her out the door, she fell down and couldn’t move. She said one of her arms didn’t have any feeling.”

Kari would not leave her friend alone. So the two girls went back into the cabin, which had become their prison. They waited. And waited. And waited.

Kari said she realized that she had been a fool to believe that Al would send help. If he had shot at them—and she believed now that he had—why would he send someone to rescue them?

Kari admitted to Engelbretson that she finally began to panic. Maeve would die up there, and then she might, too. She didn’t know where Al was—maybe hiding outside, waiting to play some more of his sick games. Still, she felt she had to do
something.
Another night was coming on, and the icy cold had already begun to creep into every corner of the cabin. No longer thinking clearly herself, Kari said she tried once more to get Maeve on her feet and moving toward Index.

“And then,” the pretty girl said, smiling faintly, “we went outside, and the snowmobiles found us.”

While Engelbretson awaited word from the hospital, he talked to a young boy who lived near Handy and Digger. The youngster said his mother had loaned Al the .22 rifle. “I got that gun in a trade,” the boy said. “It was an Ithaca Model M49 that fired .22s short and longs.”

In Providence Hospital, doctors worked desperately over Maeve Flaherty. She needed surgery, but they had to get her strong enough to withstand it. When she was stabilized, they rushed her into the operating room.

Maeve was in surgery for hours. As the surgeon probed, he was astounded to find that only a miracle had kept her alive so far. A .22 caliber bullet had entered her back. If it had traveled in a straight line, it would have pierced her heart. But .22 bullets travel at high speed, and if they hit a bone, they are deflected and their paths altered. This bullet had hit one of Maeve’s ribs and changed course. The impact had caused the bullet to “mushroom” before it entered one of her carotid arteries—arteries present on either side of the neck that provide oxygenated blood to the brain. By a freak of fate, the mushroomed bullet had formed a crudely effective plug to prevent hemorrhaging. Had the bullet bisected the carotid artery instead of becoming stuck in it, Maeve Flaherty would have bled to death within three to five minutes.

As it was, the stoppage of blood to the brain on the affected side had acted like a small stroke. This explained why Maeve had complained of a lack of feeling in one arm and hand. Whether it would be permanent could only be determined by time.

Maeve’s doctors cautiously predicted she would live—
if
infection or complications didn’t develop.

Surgeons wondered why that tiny mushroomed bullet had not been jarred loose during Kari’s attempts to walk her friend out of the woods or during the rough snowmobile ride down through the drifts. And they thanked God that Al had not been able to reach it as he tried to remove it. The bullet that almost killed Maeve had also saved her life.

Detective Doug Engelbretson issued a wanted order on a young white male, five feet eleven to six feet tall, twenty-three to twenty-six years of age, with medium blond hair two or three inches long, brown eyes, a three-week growth of beard, and a heavy mustache. The man might be called Al. Kari Ivarsen remembered that he had a scar on his right thumb.

Early Monday morning the investigative team from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office went back into the wilderness where they had rescued Maeve Flaherty. They found tracks in the snow, all leading toward Index. They found the ridge with the platform where Al had said he’d seen men shooting, but there were no footprints indicating that anyone had been there recently. There had been no snowfall since Maeve was shot, so the unbroken snow on the ridge pretty well wiped out Al’s story about snipers.

They did, however, find other tracks—tracks indicating that a lone stalker had trailed the two teenage girls as they headed for town and safety. Someone had moved stealthily along a creek bed just below the road the girls walked on. From time to time the tracks went up the banks of the creek bed, suggesting that the stalker had climbed to a spot where he could take a bead on the road.

Just as a hunter stalks an animal, a man alone had obviously stalked the helpless girls. Evidently he had waited until the opportunity for a perfect shot presented itself. Then he had fired.

Back at the cabin, the sheriff’s men found several knives sharp enough to probe for a bullet. Why, then, had Al used a dull bread knife, a piece of glass, and a pool cue?

“This man is a sadist,” one investigator said. “He wanted to hurt her as much as possible. If we don’t find him, I have a terrible feeling he’ll do it again.”

Deputy Frank Young, who was fairly new in the department, offered his time—on-duty and off—to Doug Engelbretson. Engelbretson, a former assistant police chief of Snohomish, Washington, and a seventeen-year veteran in law enforcement, was glad to have the help; they had at least twenty-five cabins to check.

It was almost March, and down in Everett, where their offices were, crocuses, daffodils, and pussy willows were budding out, but it was bitter winter in the mountains. Their breath froze and hung in the air as the investigators tromped through the drifts. They questioned every resident they could locate. Some locals had seen the elusive Al, but he had been very careful not to reveal anything at all about his plans or his background.

Doug Engelbretson talked again with Handy and Digger. They, of course, had every reason not to want to talk in any depth with a lawman. But Engelbretson knew they were opposed to violence of any kind.