Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (15 page)

Renae missed the Easter service at church on April 11,1982. She had a terribly sore throat. Don Hendrickson finally coaxed her into seeing a doctor. “I’ll go with you; I’ll hold your hand,” he kidded. And he
did
hold her hand while an emergency room doctor examined her. She had strep throat, and she had to stay in bed for days, taking penicillin and trying to swallow the soft foods that Barb Hendrickson brought over to her.

April 14 was a Wednesday—just as it had been a Wednesday when Charles Campbell attacked Renae and Shannah in 1974. It was sunny but blustery, and the bright periods alternated with overhanging clouds. Daffodils, dogwood and fruit trees were in bloom, and spring had almost arrived. Except for the fact that Renae was sick, everything was normal. Barbara ran over in the morning to see how she was and found her a little better. She promised she would be back in the afternoon. Renae watched television and tried to read a little.

“Barb went out to the end of our driveway to get our mail that afternoon,” Don remembers. “She met Shannah coming home from school and told her to tell Renae that she’d be over soon to make Jell-O. I remember it was 4:20 when Barb asked to borrow my watch; she wanted to use it to check Renae’s pulse.”

Barbara Hendrickson then headed toward Renae’s house. There were no loud sounds from the Wicklund home, nothing to alarm any of the neighbors. She was gone for quite a while, but Don didn’t think anything of it. She and Renae and Shannah often visited for hours.

It seemed to get dark earlier than usual that evening. A gale-force wind battered the Hendrickson house. Don glanced at the spot on his wrist where his watch usually was and then got up from his chair and checked a clock. He discovered that it was almost six. His wife had been gone for an hour and a half.

Don put on a jacket and walked down his driveway, across the street, and up Renae’s long driveway. He usually went in through the sliding glass doors to the kitchen area. The glass doors were partly open and he paused.
That’s odd,
he thought, and then he slid the doors open more and stepped into the house.

“The house was
so
quiet,” he said later. “It was unlike anything I’d ever heard before—or since. Totally still. And then, as I got further into the house, I heard something—water running from a faucet somewhere.”

It was the faucet in the kitchen sink. He turned the spigot off and listened for some other sound. There should have been three of them in the house—Barb, Renae, and Shannah—and they always made enough noise for six. He listened again, but he heard nothing. Don looked around the kitchen and shuddered involuntarily when he saw that a chair had been knocked over near the dinette set. That wasn’t right. Renae always kept everything so neat. The silence kept Don from calling out to his wife or Renae or Shannah.

Donald Hendrickson found them in a few moments of horror that he will never forget.

He had left the kitchen and moved slowly toward the short hallway that led to the bedrooms. He found Barbara first. His wife of thirty-four years lay motionless in the hallway, her throat slashed, the arteries severed. Even as he knelt beside her, he knew she was gone. A halo of blood soaked the carpet beneath her head and stained her beautiful prematurely silver hair. It was a scene that Don Hendrickson would never, ever be able to erase from his memory.

His wife’s throat had been slit from one side to the other with a razor-sharp knife, allowing the blood to course out of her jugular vein and carotid arteries. She could have lived only moments before she bled to death.

Numb with shock, Don got up from Barbara’s side and continued to make his way down the hall. He didn’t want to, but he had to see what was behind the other doors. Shannah’s bedroom was empty. He moved to Renae’s bedroom next, pausing at the door before he made himself turn and look inside.

They were both there on the floor. Renae was nude—her body hideously bruised and her throat slashed with macabre efficiency. Shannah lay across the room from her mother. She had been almost decapitated by a knife’s merciless edge. Nine years old, with her throat cut. All of them dead.

Automatically Don Hendrickson picked up the phone with nerveless fingers and dialed 911. Then he walked outside to try to make his mind function. “I heard a car engine start up,” he said. “It was Renae’s next-door neighbor and her daughters, and I ran out and shouted at them, ‘Shannah and Renae are dead!’ But they just looked at me, and then they got out of their car and ran back into their house. I think they were afraid of me because I was acting so wild.”

Snohomish County deputies arrived shortly. They took one look at the carnage inside the Wicklund home and radioed in for the homicide detectives. What they encountered on April 14 would mean days of working almost around the clock. The public had no idea at first how ghastly the triple murder was. The Clearview story hit the media as a very short, deliberately succinct news bulletin.

The detectives released almost no information: “Three people were found dead on April 14 in south Snohomish County….”

Lieutenant Glenn Mann and Sergeant Joe Belinc would head the probe. If anyone could sort out the real story behind what had happened in the little rambler in Clearview, these men could. In addition, they would have twenty-nine investigators working on the Wicklund-Hendrickson case before it was finished. Belinc had been the driving force behind the apprehension of Washington’s infamous Bellevue Sniper in the early 1970s. Now he had another headline case to work.

Someone had gotten into the Wicklund home, someone strong enough to overpower two women; the youngster could not have been much of an adversary. It appeared that Barbara Hendrickson had broken free and was, perhaps, running for help when she was struck down in the hall. It was even possible that Renae Wicklund and Shannah were already dead when Barbara Hendrickson entered the home. She might have called out to them, or she might have felt the same dread that her husband felt an hour later, might have heard the same thundering silence and been afraid—only to encounter the person with the knife and realize at the last moment that she had walked into horror.

The Snohomish County investigators spent hours at the scene, looking for bits of physical evidence that the killer might have left behind. The bodies were photographed where they lay before they were released to the Snohomish County coroner’s deputies. Saddened and shocked neighbors stood at the edge of the crime-scene search area, along with cameramen from the news media who shot footage of the body bags being loaded into a station wagon—hearse for removal to await autopsy. It did not seem possible to them that Renae and Shannah and Barbara were dead. This couldn’t have happened, not so suddenly and so quietly on an April day. One neighbor murmured how frightened she was, wondering if some madman was on the loose, waiting somewhere in the thick trees to strike again.

The investigators began a door-to-door canvass. They found no one who had heard or seen anything—but they did hear again and again that this was not the first time that Renae Wicklund had been the victim of a madman. Everyone knew that Renae had been attacked eight years before, and those close to her recalled that she had lived in a state of quiet terror ever since. She had feared that he might come back one day and wreak revenge upon her for testifying against him. No amount of reassurance that she had probably been a random victim, that he had probably forgotten all about her, could convince her.

She had seemed to know that she was doomed, that he—or someone—would destroy the safe walls she’d tried to build around herself and Shannah. And yet everyone described Renae as a wonderful person, a good friend, an intelligent hard worker. The extent of her friends’ and neighbors’ grief demonstrated just what a good person she had been. And so had Barbara Hendrickson. Once, Barbara had loaded a shotgun to protect Renae and Shannah. This time, she hadn’t had the opportunity to seize a weapon to fight back. The slash wounds across each victim’s throat stamped the killings as executions—cold-blooded, effective, designed to kill as if that was the murderer’s only mission. He had wanted them dead. It seemed that simple. The child? She couldn’t have harmed the killer, but she was old enough and smart enough to describe him, and so she had to die too. It seemed impossible that anyone could have had a grudge against a nine-year-old girl.

The detectives questioned Don Hendrickson, asking who he thought might have had reason to kill his wife and neighbors. He finally said, “The only person I could imagine that might have done this is the man who raped Renae.”

At the time, he could not even remember Charles Campbell’s name. Campbell was history, or he was supposed to be. But when the detectives checked on Campbell’s whereabouts, they were shocked to find out that he had been living and working a short distance from Clearview,
without supervision,
almost every day.

The word from the Department of Corrections was not only startling; it was appalling. Records showed that in October 1981—less than six years after his conviction for raping Renae Wicklund—Charles Campbell had been moved to a minimum-security facility known as Monroe House. He worked there as a cook, and he was still confined, but eligible for furloughs. On February 24, six weeks before the triple murders in Clearview, Campbell moved even closer to complete freedom: he was released from the prison itself and assigned to an Everett work-release residence two blocks from the Snohomish County Courthouse. This meant that he would work outside during the day, sleep in the facility at night, and had to follow strict rules. In his case, particularly, he was to abstain from alcohol and drug use.

Even though Campbell was literally free for much of each day and within a dozen miles of the Clearview home where the 1974 attack had occurred, even though he was housed two blocks from the Snohomish County Courthouse, there was no notification to the sheriff’s office. Some might say it was like dumping a fox in the chicken house without letting the farmer know.

On the night of the murders—April 14—Charles Campbell returned to the work-release residence obviously under the influence of alcohol. His blood alcohol reading was .29—almost three times higher than Washington’s legal level for intoxication. Tests also detected the presence of morphine, codeine, quinine, methadone, and cocaine!

Because he had broken the cardinal rule of the halfway house, Campbell was taken back to the Monroe Reformatory. Of course, by then, Renae Wicklund, Shannah Wicklund, and Barbara Hendrickson were dead. They had neither been consulted nor informed about Campbell’s early release in February. What happened to them was shocking, but the most shocking part of the horror was that it was preventable. There were so many ways the inexorable path to violent murder could have been blocked.

Back in the Monroe Reformatory, Charles Campbell was charged with three counts of aggravated first-degree murder on April 19, 1982. With the news that Charles Campbell had been charged with the three murders, citizens of Snohomish County—and, indeed, citizens all over the state—began to react with disbelief and anger. The owner of Rick’s Clearview Foods, Rick Arriza, placed a petition in his small grocery store, where the victims had shopped, asking for signatures from residents demanding the death penalty for Campbell if he was convicted. People came from all around the state to sign it.

Along with the anger, there was fear. The number of women reporting rapes and other sexual assaults dropped dramatically. Women were afraid to report rapes. If they couldn’t be sure that the men who had attacked them would be put away for a long time, if they had to fear violent reprisal, then they decided that it was safer just to forget what had happened—and try to live with it.

Sheriff Bobby Dodge, Lieutenant Mann, Sergeant Belinc, and their crews of detectives worked under great constraint. They had a job to do which required an orderly progression to bring a solid case against Campbell. They would not—could not—talk to reporters, and they took the flak stoically. Snohomish County sheriff Bobby Dodge did appear on television decrying the system that had allowed a man like Campbell, with all the crimes he’d been convicted of, back into the same community where the crime against the Wicklunds had occurred—and without any notification to law enforcement authorities.

On May 1, 1982, Charles Campbell, now twenty-seven, appeared before Judge Dennis Britt and entered a plea of innocent. He was ordered to undergo psychiatric testing. Possibly a defense attorney would use the results later to enter a plea of innocent by reason of insanity. The hugely tall Campbell wore handcuffs and leg irons, and spectators were searched with metal detectors before they were allowed into the courtroom. Campbell wanted to go to Western State Hospital for testing, but the roster of sex criminals who had escaped from that mental hospital to do more damage to innocent citizens was too long already. Judge Britt ordered that Campbell would meet with psychiatrists in his jail isolation cell.

The first reports on Campbell’s six years at the Monroe Reformatory indicated that he had a good record there. Parole board members were aware that Campbell had made a suicide attempt in custody in 1976, and he had been watched closely by the board, but they refused to comment on the prisoner’s psychiatric records. Campbell’s attorneys said he had acknowledged that he had a problem with alcohol and drugs and that he thought himself a “borderline case” who “snapped” when he was drinking and blacked out.

In a case that grew steadily more bizarre, the
Seattle Times
reported that one of the witnesses interviewed by homicide detectives was a drug and alcohol counselor who had participated in a program in the Monroe Reformatory until about 1980. According to records of her former employer, the young female counselor had resigned because she had broken one of the first rules of counseling by becoming romantically involved with her “patient.” The patient was Charles Campbell. The woman refused to comment, but a relative admitted that Campbell had been a visitor in their home in early 1982 while he was on a furlough from prison.