Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (11 page)

Shaken but determined, the detectives held a hurried conference. “We’re going to be flooded by demands from the media and thrill seekers as soon as this gets out—which is probably about now,” Clifton said, “and we’re going to have to have enough men out there to keep them on the
other
side of the gulley.”

The Kitsap County investigators had not even positively identified the dead yet. They found boxes of papers and more notebooks in the living room and the den. Each had the name the neighbor had given them, and from the paperwork it did appear that the dead man was undoubtedly Kip Steven Rennsler, a vice president at the Old National Bank.

Although they were in deep shock, the neighbors who had seen the body were quite sure the naked man
was
Rennsler. “I went over there,” one woman said, “because one of Kip’s coworkers at the bank called me. He’d been calling the house many times—and was either getting no answer or a busy signal. That kind of scared me, so I went and got a neighbor man to go over there with me. Well, we went in, and the first thing we saw was the phone hanging down by its cord. The gentleman with me went further in, and he saw a man’s body. He just turned around and came back out.”

“The phone wasn’t off the hook when we got here,” Clifton said.

“I know. The neighbor man hung it up, just kind of a reflex,” the woman said.

That was disappointing news for the detectives. If there had been fingerprints left on the phone, they might have been matched to a suspect’s. Chances were that they were smeared and useless now.

The question that screamed the loudest was
“Why?”
These people had been a nice little family, living in a nice little house that they’d fixed up themselves. Why would anyone want to savage them in this way? These weren’t normal murders—if, indeed, there was such a thing. This was maniacal overkill, something straight out of a nightmare.

Detectives and deputies were out canvassing door to door, asking neighbors if they knew anything about the Rennslers or
anyone
who might want to hurt them. So far, no one did. Asking neighbors if they’d heard anything wasn’t helping. The Rennslers’ house was isolated enough that their screams or calls for help couldn’t have been heard. Waves washing onto their beach would also muffle sounds.

The neighbors who’d called for help said that the front door of the yellow house had been ajar when they arrived. It was January and it was cold. Why would their door have been partially open? Would they have felt safe enough in their house, cut off from the road by a ravine and a little bridge, that they didn’t bother to lock their doors? That hardly seemed likely. Probably the killer or killers hadn’t bothered to close the door when they left.

Searching for a motive, Bill Clifton kept returning to Kip Rennsler’s occupation. “He was vice president of a bank. It wouldn’t be the first time somebody who wanted the combination to a bank vault went to a bank officer’s home and held his family hostage. Maybe Rennsler had that kind of information, but probably he didn’t. But that doesn’t matter. If someone
thought
he did, it wouldn’t be hard to chart his movements.”

The detective chief tried to find a scenario that fit this tragedy. “OK,” Clifton began, “the neighbors say that Kip Rennsler took the seven ten
A.M.
ferry like clockwork every day. By a quarter to eight, he was in downtown Seattle. But suppose he was sick today and he stayed home? Suppose somebody came to the house expecting to find only the woman and the little boy, planning to hold them hostage, while they called Rennsler and forced him to come home by threatening their lives? But Rennsler was
in
the house today, so that would have thrown their plans into chaos.

“The woman and the boy were in nightclothes, and Rennsler was nude. Maybe he just got out of the shower. He could have come rushing out and put up one hell of a fight.”

That was true. Rennsler was muscular and strong, but he would have been taken unaware. He probably could have subdued one man, but there might have been more.

There was another possibility. Lori Rennsler was a beautiful woman. She might have been the target. Somebody could have watched her on the beach, stalking her as she went into Winslow for groceries or to the library, and become obsessed.

“Erotomania,” one detective said. “That’s what they call it. People fixate on someone they don’t even know. And some of them don’t quit until they have that person in their power.”

According to their usual schedule, Lori and Stevie were alone in the secluded house after 6:30 every week-day morning. It was a perfect setup for a sexual psychopath—a woman alone before dawn, a little boy, and a small puppy, in a house far away from everyone at the end of a long driveway.

But on this Monday morning, they hadn’t been alone; Kip had been home. The entire family had perished together.

“Why didn’t Rennsler call in sick?” a detective asked.

“I don’t know,” Clifton said, “but we’re going to talk to his coworkers, and see what they have to say.”

“And Lori Rennsler is fully clothed. There’s no indication that she was raped.”

“It’s weird,” Clifton agreed. “I gotta tell you this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

It was almost dawn when the crime scene technicians—led by Les Cline—had finished processing the house. They were looking for fingerprints, hairs, fibers, shoe prints in blood, matchbooks, cigarette butts, torn bits of cloth,
anything
that didn’t seem to fit. Before they finished, they had thirty envelopes for George Ishii to examine at the crime lab. They took scores of photographs, recording ghastly tableaus that might be very important in a courtroom one day.

They found Kip Rennsler’s clothing in his son’s room. His blood-spattered athletic shoe rested next to the mattress on the floor, and when they lifted the mattress, there was a pile of men’s clothing underneath: trousers with jockey shorts still inside, a tee-shirt and a dark-colored wool sweater, as well as Kip’s other shoe. The clothes were saturated with blood. Oddly, this blood was still wet, where the blood in the other rooms had dried. Perhaps the attack in Stevie Rennsler’s room had occurred sometime after the other violence. The room was stifling hot; a space heater glowed red in the wall, turned to its highest setting.

Les Cline held up the white tee-shirt and studied the stain on it.

“Check Rennsler’s chest again for me,” he murmured to no one in particular.

“Why?” his assistant, Jay Mossman, asked.

“Just check it closely and count the wounds.”

“Four,” Mossman answered as he returned from the den/dining room area.

“Then something doesn’t add up,” Cline said. “If you’ll look at this tee-shirt, there are only
three
holes. Two on the right and one on the left. Rennsler was stabbed three times with his clothes on, and then for some reason, his shirt was taken off and he was stabbed again.”

“Why?”

“You tell me. What kind of a nut would stab a man three times, take all his clothes off, lay a mattress on them, and then stab him again? It would make more sense if they’d forced Lori Rennsler to disrobe, but they didn’t.”

“Unless the killer was a woman,” a deputy said.

“No way. There isn’t one woman in a thousand who has the strength to use a knife the way it was used here.”

The investigators believed that Stevie Rennsler had been stabbed in his bed as he slept—and died there. Someone had then carried his body into his parents’ bedroom. His father had probably collapsed for a time on the bunk’s box spring and somehow managed to crawl or stagger into the den where the killer found him. There were more red stains on the dinette table—in a peculiar pattern, as if a man’s hairy chest had slid across the table. A chair in front of the dinette set had been knocked over.

“Rennsler made it to the table, knocked over the chair, then reeled over to the child’s table and collapsed on his back and died,” Clifton said. “He may have been trying to make it to the phone. Maybe he
did
make it, knocked it off the hook—but was too weak to talk by then.”

A deputy stationed on the bridge came to tell the investigators that three of Kip Rennsler’s coworkers were waiting in the parking area beyond the small bridge. They had caught the first ferry they could to Bainbridge Island after being notified of the tragedy.

They were almost mute with shock, but said they wanted to help in any way they could. Then, for the first time, the sheriff’s detectives had to look at a suspicion they hadn’t even considered, something so seemingly alien to human nature that their minds hadn’t even gone there.

“Kip hasn’t been himself lately,” one of his close work friends began. “I’ve known him and worked with him for about eight years. Something’s been worrying him, and I can’t say what. I guess I could say that he’s been overly preoccupied with really minute details. He seemed to just worry them to death, obsessively. He missed an important appointment this morning at nine. Some men might do that—but not Kip. He was always on time and he scheduled everything. That’s why I kept calling him.”

Another coworker recalled that when Kip Rennsler had left the bank on Friday night—three days earlier—he had carried with him two cardboard boxes, “about the size of a case of beer,” and a white paper bag.

They weren’t full of money. The crime-scene investigators had already found those boxes and the bag; they held office items like mimeograph paper, address labels, and staples, things he often used to do bank work at home. His coworkers said that he also edited a magazine for his antique bottle collectors’ group. He might have been taking slight advantage of the bank by bringing home office supplies, but that paled in contrast to what had happened in his home.

The third bank employee said he was the one who had tried in vain to call the Rennsler residence twice that morning, between 9 and 9:30. The phone rang, but there was no answer. “When I tried again at eleven thirty, the line was busy. I tried several times over the next few hours, and I finally asked the operator to check. She said the phone was off the hook.”

At that point, the coworker was alarmed enough to call the Rennslers’ neighbor. He considered himself a close friend of the Rennsler family, and things just weren’t adding up.

“Kip and Lori—and Stevie too—were supposed to have Sunday dinner with my family at my house yesterday,” he continued. “But Kip called and canceled on very short notice. That wasn’t like him.”

None of Kip Rennsler’s fellow employees knew why he’d been so nervous lately. He was doing well at work, and as far as they knew, he and Lori were very happy together. He wasn’t in debt and his health seemed excellent. And yet he had been jumpy and preoccupied.

A check of Old National Bank records showed no irregularities at all. Kip Rennsler most certainly was not an embezzler. His accounts were accurate to the penny.

The man who had found Rennsler’s body said he had given Kip and Stevie a ride the day before—on Sunday afternoon. “I saw them walking quite a ways from their house, and I offered them a ride. Kip seemed upset and he was acting kind of strange. He seemed very tired and he told me that he and Stevie had been walking for a long time.”

The woman who had called the sheriff’s office called again to say that she remembered seeing a car parked close to the Rennslers’ footbridge sometime Sunday afternoon. “It was Sally Newland’s* car,” she said. “Sally is a good friend of Lori’s.”

Detectives contacted Sally Newland, who was shocked at her friend’s death. Shocked, it seemed, but not totally surprised. “I saw both Lori and Kip yesterday,” she began slowly. “It was very, very odd. First, I met Kip and Stevie walking along the road. I asked Kip if he wanted a ride home, but he said no, and then he told me he was taking Stevie for a ‘long, long, walk.’

“I asked him if anything was wrong, and he said there wasn’t but that Lori was very upset. He asked me to stop by their house and tell her that everything was all right.”

Sally had driven to the Rennslers’ house right away, and found Lori in tears. “She told me that Kip had been acting ‘funny,’ and he had asked her to take Stevie to the neighbors’ house. He said he wanted to ask her one question, and she could answer either yes or no. She said she’d told him to just forget it.

“Lori told me that Kip had been behaving very bizarrely for about a week. She had tried to get him to talk with her, but she just couldn’t get through to him. I had to agree with her about Kip. I wish I could put my finger on it exactly—but he was just
different
somehow.”

One thing had occurred that might have upset Kip Rennsler. He had been trying to put together a deal to buy a historic lodge in a rainforest near the Washington coast. He didn’t have the full down payment, and he’d been seeking a large loan to cover it. He’d been trying to finance the hotel for almost a year.

The investment would be a huge step for the young couple, and Lori wasn’t enthusiastic about his quitting his job and moving them to Quinault, where they would probably have to live in the huge old lodge. But Kip had been very high on the project, and had been terribly depressed when he couldn’t make it come together.

For most people, that would have been a disappointment—not a cataclysmic event. But Rennsler had taken it hard.