Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (20 page)

Greg Canova worked as a deputy prosecutor in the King County Prosecutor’s Office from 1974 to 1981, ending up as the senior deputy criminal prosecutor in that office. Canova was brilliant, honest, and persistent. He rarely lost a case, and he garnered respect from both conservative and liberal factions. Greg Canova had helped draft Washington State’s new capital punishment law. Tall and handsome, with a luxuriant mustache, a quick legal mind, and a deep, confident voice that served him well in the courtroom, Canova had been so successful a prosecutor that he was already something of a legend at thirty-five. Canova candidly attributed some of his wins to luck. “Luck plays a part. In the past I’ve won some cases I probably should have lost and lost some I figured to win. You can never be sure with juries.

“I always go in thinking I can win. If you don’t think you can prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, then you shouldn’t ever file a case.”

The other half of the new team—Bob Keppel, Canova’s investigator—is one of the smartest detectives this reporter ever knew, respected all over America for his intellectual approach to investigation. A former track star, Bob Keppel was a young homicide detective in the King County Police Department with only one case under his belt when he found himself plunged into one of the biggest cases of his—or any other homicide detective’s—career: the “Ted Murders” that began in the Northwest in 1974 and ended in Florida in 1978.

(“Ted” turned out to be Ted Bundy, who died in the electric chair in Starke, Florida, on January 24, 1989. Just a day before he died, Bundy, who was suspected of murdering anywhere from twenty-five to three hundred young women all over America, confessed some of those murders to Bob Keppel. He viewed Keppel as his intellectual equal, and the two had jousted many times. Indeed, many experts suspect that Bundy’s offer to “advise” Bob Keppel and several F.B.I. special agents on how to second-guess serial killers was the basis for
Silence of the Lambs.
Keppel let Bundy
think
he was a respected advisor—just to keep dialogue open between them.

In 1975, using what now seems to be an archaic computer system, Keppel narrowed a field of 3,500 suspects in the “Ted Murders” to only five, and Ted Bundy was one of those five. Keppel’s methods were right on target when Bundy was arrested for similar crimes against pretty dark-haired women in the Salt Lake City area. The rest is, of course, criminal history.)

With the expertise he gained in being one of the lead detectives in the “Ted Task Force,” Bob Keppel has been called upon by probers in dozens of serial murder investigations in this country. When Canova recruited Keppel away from the King County police, he knew what he was doing. Even so, he had to lend Bob Keppel back to the Green River Task Force for two years.

Greg Canova and Bob Keppel were just what Donna Howard’s family had needed for a long, long time; they had become disheartened by years of butting their heads into bureaucratic brick walls. Bobbi Bennett would not give up until someone was convicted for what she believed to be Donna’s murder.

Bobbi carried her campaign to reopen the investigation into Donna’s death to the governor’s office, and her arguments were cogent and persuasive. Then-Governor John Spellman asked the Attorney General’s Office (specifically Canova’s unit) to look into the Howard investigation in late 1981.

At that time it was a moot point. Canova
had
no investigators. In March, 1982, Bob Keppel came aboard, and the probe began in earnest. Keppel would practically wear a groove in the I-90 Freeway across the mountains to Yakima, interviewing and re-interviewing. He talked to the original detectives, and to Ray Ochs and Jerry Hofsos, who were more than eager to continue the probe. He questioned the paramedic who had been at the scene of Donna’s death. He found neighbors and hardware store employees, and perhaps most important, Keppel questioned Sunny Riley.

Meticulously Bob Keppel reconstructed a case that was already seven years old and seemed to be as dead as the victim. In truth, it was about to have a whole new life.

The problem, Greg Canova felt, had begun with the first autopsy. The report was only one page long, and that page stated that the wrong hand bore the defense bruising. Moreover, it had not been a complete autopsy because her death was deemed accidental. The investigating stopped, any physical evidence was tainted or obliterated, the body was buried, and the case collapsed like a straw fence in a windstorm.

What Greg Canova and Bob Keppel
did
have was a witness who had passed the lie detector test with no signs whatsoever of deception. Sunny Riley had come forward even though she was scared to death of being implicated. She was a woman whose lifestyle had changed from hedonistic to responsible. Sunny knew she would probably face some uncomfortable questions from Russ Howard’s attorneys—if this case ever got as far as a courtroom—but she was prepared to answer them.

Bob Keppel’s efforts to talk with Russ Howard himself were met with scorn. “I was amused,” Howard said later. “I never dreamed it would get this far, that anybody would take Sunny seriously.”

Howard confided to reporters that he felt he had antagonized Greg Canova and Bob Keppel by “laughing at them.”

Not so. He only intrigued them more.

The physical evidence came down to a few precious items that remained. There were the pictures taken by investigating officers that icy morning of January 10,1975. Blow-ups of the photographs and the recall of the Yakima deputies who were there indicated that there had been absolutely no hair, blood, or human tissue on the sharp end of the railroad tie. Some experts felt that since the ovoid fracture was a depressed fracture, the instrument causing it would have pierced the brain itself, however briefly, and probably come away with blood and tissue residue, and probably some hairs from the victim’s head.

Beyond that, Dr. Muzzall’s re-creation had Donna Howard kneeling to clean off her horse’s hoof. If that was true, why didn’t the pictures show dirt or snow on the knees of her jeans? In the photographs the knee portion of her jeans was clean.

Greg Canova and Bob Keppel had a picture in their minds now of how and why the murder had occurred. Russ Howard had wanted out of his marriage and had wanted to keep his children and his financial assets. So, as he had told Sunny, he had, indeed, managed to get Donna out to the loafing shed on some ruse. There he had struck his wife once with the flat of the hammer, expecting her to go down. But Donna had fought him, fending off the hammer with her right hand, protecting her head. The force of the hammer’s blows against the webbing between her thumb and forefinger had been so strong that it was not only bruised, but the actual weave of her glove was imprinted on her flesh. Twice more Russ had crashed the hammer against Donna’s head.

Then he would have dragged her body along the frozen ground on the Bekins blanket, arranging the corpse in the loafing shed where the two horses were. If Donna Howard had been kicked and simply fallen back, her shirt and jeans would not have been pulled up as they were in the pictures. That rumpling was exactly what would happen if someone had pulled her by her feet.

Donna’s body was warm when the sheriff’s men and the paramedic arrived, covered tenderly with a quilt. Russ had probably done that deliberately—to keep her warm while he was in town creating his alibi. Either that, or he had gone to town first and returned to carry out the rest of his plan.

The problem for Greg Canova and Bob Keppel in 1982 was how they were going to prove their theory of what happened in 1975 to a jury’s satisfaction.

The main piece of physical evidence was Donna Howard’s skull. Cleaned and dry and reconstructed, it would be examined now by some of the most expert forensic pathologists in the country.

Dr. Donald Reay, chief of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, examined the skull in July, 1982, and agreed that the damage did not seem to be from a horse’s hoof. The back of the skull, maybe—it had been shattered in nineteen pieces, and all manner of force could have done that. However, the much smaller ovoid fracture on the top right side of the skull was very unusual. An oval piece of bone had been broken clean through and forced through the skull against where the brain had been.

The skull was sent next to the Smithsonian Institution, where it was examined by a chief forensic anthropologist. He thought that the top single fracture looked as if it had been caused by a hammer. However, he said, “There’s someone who knows a lot more about this kind of injury than even I do—and that’s Clyde Snow.”

Clyde Collins Snow, Ph.D., forensic anthropology consultant and something of a legend. Big, gray-haired, and deceptively casual, Snow lives in Norman, Oklahoma, but he is rarely there. He may be in South America working over skeletons or in the Philippines reconstructing skulls of massacre victims. He is a witty and jovial man whose manner belies the grimmer aspects of his profession. Snow can tell all manner of things from a skull.

Dr. Snow is not averse to checking out his findings with other experts, and in this case Snow showed Donna Howard’s skull to Dr. Bob Kirschner of the Cook County (Chicago) Medical Examiner’s Office, to Kirschner’s associates, and to Dr. Fred Jordan of the Oklahoma State Medical Examiner’s Office. They all agreed with Snow’s conclusion that the small oval fracture had been caused by a hammer. Kirschner particularly pointed out that he felt the wood from the railroad tie would have left splinters in the wound, and the wound would have left tissue on the railroad tie.

When Clyde Snow reported his initial findings to Bob Keppel he commented, “This case shines like a herring left too long in the hot sun.” That was Clyde Snow’s way of saying things were not as they had been reported to be.

After a meticulous examination of Donna Howard’s skull Dr. Snow sent a letter to Bob Keppel and Greg Canova. Donna Howard had not had a thin skull, easily shattered. Rather his exam had shown it to be slightly thicker than normal.

Snow noted, too, that the wood of the railroad tie would have been far too soft to have done the damage found in the ovoid fracture. “The fracture was caused by an object of high density with a flat face and a circular upper margin.”

Snow continued, “The critical feature of the cranium is the depressed fracture of the right fronto-parietal region. It is a classic example of a ‘fracture à la signature’ of a hammer. To me, this finding reduces the arguments about the remainder of the injuries to academic quibbling. Whether it was the first or last blow, or whether there was one, two, or three blows is of little significance…. Of course, one might speculate that a horse kicked the victim and then administered the coup de grace with a hammer. I don’t know about Washington horses, but Oklahoma horses have not shown that degree of dexterity….”

Snow felt that the back blow (probably two blows, according to what Russ Howard had allegedly told Sunny) had been delivered while the victim was still standing, and from the rear, where she could not see it coming. The depressed frontal fracture had occurred when she was lying on her back with her head turned to the left. The killer would have been standing over the victim at that point, and she could well have tried to cover her head with her hand.

Snow’s findings made a gruesome and pathetic mind picture.

Photographs of the blood patterns on the loafing shed wall were blown up to 11 x 14 prints and sent to Lt. Rod Englert of the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland, Oregon. Englert is one of the most respected experts in the United States on blood patterns. He spends much of his time traveling to testify in homicide trials and has presented over three hundred seminars on blood spatter analysis. Lt. Englert teaches detectives how to determine myriad facts from the silent testimony of blood—if blood is “high velocity” (gunshot wounds), “medium velocity,” or “low velocity.” Among the concepts he teaches are “bloodstain transfer” and “blood swipe.” In both of the latter, bloody objects come into contact with a surface not previously contaminated with blood and leave distinctive patterns.

Englert examined the pictures of Donna Howard’s body and the loafing shed and weighed the blood patterns he saw with the story told by Russ Howard and with the reconstruction of the “accident” by Dr. Muzzall.

Lt. Englert’s opinion was that Donna’s death simply could not have happened the way Muzzall had perceived. Donna Howard’s curly brown hair had been sodden with blood from the head wounds. But
had
she been kicked, had she bounced off the jagged railroad tie and then fallen backward, the blood patterns would have been higher, more diffuse, and well beyond the body. The pictures didn’t show that.

Instead, the two thick, bloody swaths in the picture looked as if they had been left as someone was lowering and re-positioning a body on the ground. Donna’s hair, so heavy with wet blood, would have left exactly those marks photographed on the wall: one swipe up and down and another side to side. The laws of motion would not have allowed Donna Howard to have been kicked into the railroad tie with enough force to penetrate her skull and then let her fall back so gently that her hair left those two solid stains on the white wall a foot away. A powerful kick from a horse would have sprayed blood in a diffuse pattern all over that wall.

The layman would never have thought of that. A surgeon, trained for other kinds of medicine, might not have seen what Rod Englert saw.

Donna Howard might not have known what was about to happen to her. One would hope she was not frightened by the steps behind her as she concentrated on something in the barn. The first blow might have knocked her unconscious as her skull shattered, and the second might have come hard upon the first. Perhaps she fell neatly on an already-spread Bekins blanket, only to be smashed once more on the top of her head because she still breathed. Perhaps she was still able to use one hand to try to block the hammer coming down.