Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (19 page)

Only Donna’s family could not accept the cause of death on the death certificate. Nothing added up. One might attribute the family’s doubts to grief and denial. And yet…

Bobbi Bennett sought—and found—refuge in her religion, but her growing faith only heightened her conviction that it was her duty to Donna to see that the real killer was punished. Bobbi knew how unhappy Donna had been, knew of her decision to divorce Russ, and knew that he had physically attacked her sister less than a month earlier—an attack so violent that Donna had been left almost unconscious. Bobbi Bennett was convinced that Russ Howard had killed Donna, but she had no idea in the world how to prove it.

With her family’s backing, Bobbi hired a private detective.

One of the startling pieces of intelligence the private investigator reported was that a young woman named Sunny Riley was living with Russ and his daughters. Donna was barely in her grave when Sunny moved in during February. Ostensibly she had been hired as a baby-sitter to care for the girls. Since Russ was a traveling seed salesman, it made sense that he had to have household help, but Donna’s family was suspicious. The private investigator pretended to be a real estate agent and talked with Sunny. There was no question that she was living in Russ’s home full-time. And she didn’t strike him as the baby-sitter type.

Four months later, in June—the month when Donna would have celebrated her forty-third birthday—Russ Howard and Sunny Riley were married, ending the arguments among townspeople over whether Sunny was a baby-sitter or a girlfriend.

There were reasons that the June wedding was not as romantic as it might have been. Sunny Riley was a woman tortured by conflicting emotions. She
did
still love Russ no matter what her suspicions were, and she had wanted to marry him for a long time. But she was frightened, too. Russ had confided things to her that she wished she had never heard. Whatever he might or might not have done, Sunny was absolutely convinced that she was just as responsible under the law as he was. Indeed, Russ often reminded her of her complicity, and she believed him when he said she would be in terrible trouble, too, if she ever revealed what he had told her.

She had been afraid to marry him and afraid
not
to marry him. She had gone along with the wedding plans, she would say later, because she kept hoping something or someone would intervene before she and Russ made it to the altar. For his part, Russ was quite aware that a man’s wife cannot be forced to testify against him in a court of law.

No one intervened, of course, and the wedding went off without a hitch. Sunny did her best to block her fears out of her mind; at times she was able to completely submerge her doubts. Once they were married Russ didn’t seem to worry much at all about the law. He seemed quite secure. The coroner had agreed with his version of Donna’s death, and so had the prosecutor and the sheriff. Let the past bury the past.

But Donna’s sister Bobbi was not about to let that happen. She knew nothing about how to investigate a murder when she began her quest, but she read voraciously, and she soon gleaned a great deal of information. One afternoon while she was sitting in a beauty parlor chair she read about Thomas Noguchi, then chief medical examiner of Los Angeles County.

Bobbi Bennett got in touch with Noguchi and asked him and an associate to review Donna’s case. After doing that they agreed that it at least warranted a more complete autopsy.

Yakima County D.A. Jeff Sullivan agreed to an exhumation order, and a second postmortem examination was performed on Donna Howard’s body in late 1976. Forensic pathologist Dr. William Brady—then the Oregon state medical examiner—performed the autopsy with Dr. Bob Bucklin, an ex-assistant medical examiner for Los Angeles County, assisting. Dr. Muzzall, Jeff Sullivan, and Sergeant Langdale observed.

At length Dr. Bucklin concluded that he could not say with
absolute medical certainty
that the damage to her skull had not been caused by the kick of a horse. His inclination, however, was to
disagree
with Dr. Muzzall’s findings.

Dr. Brady prefaced his written report with the comment that pathological conclusions must take into account what was known to have been at the scene of a death—i.e., common sense combined with autopsy findings. A badly fractured skull and horses would tend to go together; unless other circumstances were known, Brady said he could not say what had caused the damage to Donna Howard’s skull.

The lack of a definitive decision on the part of either pathologist was a crushing disappointment for Donna’s sister. She had fought so hard to get the exhumation order and the second postmortem examination. It had been agonizing to go through, too—and now it seemed all for nothing.

For D.A. Jeff Sullivan there was still not enough probable cause to issue an arrest warrant charging anyone with murder. For the second time he declined to prosecute.

The world moved on. Donna Howard was dead, and that’s the way it was—to everyone but Donna’s family. Her parents grew older, their will to live weakened by the loss of their beloved daughter. Donna’s father would not live to see the end of the case.

Bobbi Bennett, however, never gave up. She read. She phoned. She wrote letters to anyone who might help her avenge Donna’s death. “Some people might say it took over my life,” she would recall later. “I made up my mind that I was not going to let her go until they did something.”

Over the years Donna’s family would spend thousands of dollars on the case, a case everyone else seemed to consider closed.

The marriage between Sunny and Russ Howard was a bumpy one. Perhaps it was inevitable that it would be. Sunny had fallen in love with Russ because he was fun, and she loved fun. But there was little hilarity once they were married; Sunny was scared and guilty about what she knew, Russ was gone a lot, and he continued to drink a great deal. For all intents and purposes the marriage ended in 1978.

Sunny left Russ and ran off with another man. But Sunny was adept at picking the wrong men. She found herself in an abusive relationship. Periodically things got so bad that Russ looked good, and she would phone him and beg him to come and rescue her. He would pick her up, bring her back, and help her get set up in an apartment or in his house. Until 1979 Sunny and Russ had some manner of a relationship, however tenuous.

Donna Howard had been dead for almost five years, but Sunny’s conscience still bothered her. If her niggling doubts hadn’t gone away by then, she figured they weren’t going to. In early July, 1980, Sunny went to a Yakima County deputy sheriff, an old friend from high school, and asked him a hypothetical question: “If I knew information about somebody that was going to be murdered, and then they were, and somebody told me more things—and I never said anything—would I be in trouble, too?”

Her deputy friend stared at her quizzically for a few moments, and then he assured her that
she
would not be the focal point of a sheriff’s probe.

Sunny replied that in that case, she had some things to say. However, she told him that if she
did
get charged with a crime, she was going to deny everything. Her friend took her down to the county detectives, who took a taped statement from her.

Bob Langdale had retired, but Ray Ochs was still in the detective unit, and Jerry Hofsos had moved up from patrol. What Sunny Riley had to tell them was riveting, to say the least.

Sunny began by reviewing late December, 1974. She said Russ Howard had told her that he planned to kill his wife. He had told her he was going to lure Donna out to the barn of their old house on the pretext of making some repairs that had to be done before the new tenants moved in. It would be only natural, he had said, for him to have a hammer with him. Then he planned to strike Donna with the side of his hammer because he thought that would make a wound resembling a horse’s shoe. His alibi would be that he had been in town at the time Donna died. He would go to town right after the crime, and he would make sure people in town remembered him.

On the day Donna died Russ had told Sunny he’d done it—but he said it had been more difficult to kill his wife than he expected. He confided that he’d had to hit Donna in the head three times before she died. The rest of his plan had been carried out just as he had outlined it to Sunny earlier.

The information that Sunny gave might well have been enough to indict Russ Howard for the murder of his wife. There were some problems, though; the things he had told her before marriage would be admissible in a court of law, but the confidences after marriage probably would not be. And then there was the fact that Sunny had gone right ahead and
married
a man she believed to be a murderer. A jury might wonder about that and find her a less than credible witness.

A polygraph exam administered by an expert from the Washington State Patrol indicated that Sunny Riley was telling the truth.

The Yakima County Prosecutor’s Office continued to mull over whether to charge Russ Howard. So much of the original physical evidence was gone. Donna’s bloodstained clothing, the quilt, the Bekins blanket had all been destroyed. The loafing shed had been repainted, obliterating the blood smears there. No investigator had ever found a hammer or, for that matter, even looked for one.

The railroad tie that Dr. Muzzall believed to be the instrument that made the oval fracture in the victim’s skull was now anchored in cement, part of a fence. No one had ever searched the barn or the house thoroughly for signs of violence; it hadn’t seemed important back in 1975 when the autopsy decreed accidental death.

Now it was too late.

Sunny ran scared. She moved around from place to place, fearful of reprisal from Russ. She moved to California with a new man and waited for word from Yakima authorities. Impatient now, she couldn’t wait for Russ to be arrested. But months passed, and nothing happened—at least nothing she could see.

The case was already more than five years old, and authorities were doing their best to make it as solid as possible before they moved on it. They figured Russ Howard wasn’t going anyplace.

It was 1981. Sunny was worried, and she was drinking. A few more drinks and Sunny was not only worried, she was angry, too. Russ had her furniture. She called him one night and suggested that they get married again. She pointed out that he was going to be charged with murder sooner or later, and if they were married, she couldn’t testify against him. Sunny figured this might make him give back her furniture. After the trial was over they could split up again, she reasoned.

The next day Sunny was sober, and she changed her mind about the plan that had seemed so good the night before. Russ had rejected her proposal anyway. But she had tipped him off that something might be happening that he didn’t know about. Still, he didn’t move from the Yakima area. He didn’t seem the least bit worried.

Russ Howard continued to have bad luck with women in his life. In the early 1980s he was living sporadically with a new woman and working part-time at a local tavern. One afternoon the couple came home together and talked for a few moments with Russ’s daughters and a friend of theirs who was visiting.

Russ left a little while later to go to work at the tavern, and his girlfriend went upstairs, apparently to take a nap.

A few minutes later the three teenagers heard a loud noise upstairs. They went up to investigate and found the woman dead on the bed, shot in the stomach. She clutched a gun in her hand.

The nearly hysterical girls called Russ at work, and he rushed home, managing to arrive even before the police did. When the police got there they found Russ standing next to the dead woman, the gun in his hand.

The bartender at the tavern told investigators that Russ had been there when the phone call came in from his daughters. His most recent girlfriend’s death was ruled a suicide.

This was the situation when two of the Washington State justice system’s most prominent figures entered the case. A special investigative unit of the State Attorney General’s Office was mandated by a new law in 1981 to conduct independent inquiries into criminal cases around the state, to offer assistance to counties, and indeed to prosecute in some instances. (At the request or with the concurrence of the governor or the county prosecutor.) It was to be basically a two-man operation, but those two men were quite probably the equal of a half-dozen less-skilled investigators and prosecutors. Greg Canova would head the unit as senior assistant state attorney general, and his sole investigator would be Bob Keppel, late of the King County Police’s Major Crimes Unit.