Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (3 page)

Bonafaci performed the autopsies. He found that the blond victim, now confirmed to be Beverly Johnson, had died as a result of exsanguination (bleeding to death) from her neck wounds. He detected no significant trauma to her brain, chest, or abdomen. Oddly, there were no positive signs of rape beyond her nakedness—no bruising on the inside of her thighs or tearing of her vagina or rectum. The second girl (who was still called “Jane Doe”) had also succumbed to exsanguination, although she
did
have two scalp bruises, suggesting she had been struck on the head. There were, however, no signs of underlying brain damage. Apparently, this victim hadn’t been sexually assaulted either.

Still, Beverly Johnson’s nudity and the fact that “Jane Doe’s” clothing was in disarray certainly suggested that rape had been attempted.

It was sick and ugly. They hadn’t been robbed, they might not have been raped, yet someone had coldly slit their throats. Were the detectives looking for someone who got his thrills merely from the act of killing? They hoped not, because that was the most dangerous breed of killer of all.

The only living witness to what must have been terrifying violence was the now-crestfallen dog. He was housed in the county jail, wolfing down dog food and water as if he were starved. Even if he recognized the killer, he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone. If he did snarl or the hackles raised on his neck when confronted with a suspect, it was doubtful that any judge would allow that as testimony.

As soon as news of the double murder hit the media, Bill Patterson and his men were deluged with tips from citizens. One migrant worker reported that three or four men he had never seen before had offered him a ride from a tavern in Chelan. “They drove me up to Knapp’s Coulee and said if I didn’t give them everything I had, they’d kill me on the spot,” he said. “I gave them my wallet with all my I.D. and thirty-five dollars. They dumped me and left me out there. They left driving down towards Entiat.”

He described the thieves as “hippie types” with full beards, and said they were driving either a two-door Chevy or a Pontiac. Knapp’s Coulee was quite close to where the bodies had been found, but the incident had happened days before the victims’ probable time of death.

An elderly couple reported that they’d driven past Old Downey Road on September 25. They had noticed a plume of dust as if a vehicle had just gone up the road, but they saw no one. When they came back some time later, they had seen a 1969 or 1970 light green or blue Ford pickup with a canopy turning from Old Downey Road. There wasn’t a lot of traffic there, so they remembered it. They had heard a dog barking somewhere too, but hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.

The dog couldn’t have been the dead girls’ gray dog; he was miles away, at the crime scene, and Patterson couldn’t make a case out of a dust trail and a pickup truck. More important, the witnesses had seen the truck five days before the bodies were discovered. The victims would still have been alive on the 25th, although it was possible they might have been camping back down Old Downey Road at the time.

Another lead seemed to have no connection—at first. A bank teller who commuted down Highway 97 called to say that she had seen a reddish brown dog that looked to be an Irish setter mix north of Knapp’s Tunnel three or four times during the week. “I saw him first on Sunday—the 28th—and then on Monday and Tuesday. He was pacing up and down beside the road as if he was lost. He had a red bandanna tied around his neck.”

The dog found with the victims couldn’t possible be described as “reddish brown” in color, but it too had been wearing a red bandanna around his neck. Was it possible that the girls had been traveling with
two
dogs?

That question was answered when Lieutenant Harvey Coles from the Lincoln City, Oregon, Police Department called with information on the dead girls. As their I.D.s indicated, they had both lived in the “Miracle Mile” resort area along the Oregon coast. Coles said that Patricia Weidner had a boyfriend there, who might have known of her plans, although he hadn’t yet been able to locate the man.

As it turned out, both young women had friends and family in Lincoln City who had begun to worry about them. His voice trembling, Pat Weidner’s father told the detectives that she had a scar on her forehead and a surgical scar on her left knee.

And so did the unidentified victim. There was no question that Pat Weidner and Beverly Johnson had been found. Their friends said they had planned to hitchhike to the Wenatchee area to find jobs for the apple harvest.

Early on the morning of October 2, friends of the dead girls arrived to identify their bodies and offer whatever help they could to the sheriff’s investigators.

“They had their dogs with them,” one young woman said. “Charlie is a husky mix, and Silas is a kind of retriever-setter mix. Those dogs wouldn’t let anyone near Beverly or Patty. They felt safe because of the dogs. Patty’s dog would tear anyone apart who tried to hurt her!”

Well, Charlie had stayed with them, but the investigators hadn’t seen anything of Silas. There
was
the red dog the bank teller had seen close to the road, but he was gone now.

The victims’ friends from Oregon identified Beverly Johnson’s purse and said, “Both of them had knives with them—to use in camping out.”

They recognized the one knife in evidence, but the other knife was missing. Beverly and Pat were experienced at camping. In fact, Patty had been living with her boyfriend in a tepee near Lincoln City. According to her friends, Patty Weidner always traveled with her backpack, sleeping bag, spices to cook with, pots and pans, and extra clothes. Beverly had had her backpack and she carried a four-man tent. They had planned to come back to Lincoln City after apple-picking season.

They were described as independent young women who made their own way. Patty had been working as a waitress in Oregon, while Beverly clerked at a health food store. But they’d reportedly become bored, and thought the trip to Washington sounded like fun and a chance to make quite a bit of money in a short time.

The detectives learned that a friend had driven the women about ten miles out of Lincoln City on Wednesday, September 24, leaving them at a good spot to catch a ride hitchhiking. Their destination in Chelan County, Washington, was more than three hundred miles away.

The investigation took an odd turn when Patty’s boyfriend was located—not in Lincoln City—but in jail in Chelan, arrested on October 3 for being drunk and disorderly. That put him in the top spot as a suspect.

Detective Tillman Wells interviewed Brad King and found him very upset, though no longer drunk. “I saw Patty and Bev* on September 24,” King said in the interview. “It was a week ago Wednesday, and they asked me to come with them—but I wasn’t ready yet. So I told them maybe I’d see them up here. I did come up, but I didn’t get to Wenatchee until Tuesday the twenty-ninth. I couldn’t find them, so I went ahead and got a job up at the Lucky Badger orchard and I worked there through the week. I didn’t even know what had happened to them because I was out in the orchards working until Saturday night.”

He sighed and stared at his hands. “I went into this tavern and I heard some guys talking about what happened to Bev and Patty. I just lost my head and went nuts. It’s my fault—if I’d gone with them when they asked me, they’d be alive now.”

No matter how much Patty’s boyfriend appeared to be grieving, Wells didn’t take his story at face value. He checked with the Lucky Badger orchard and with the victims’ friends in Lincoln City. He was able to verify Brad King’s alibi absolutely. It would have been impossible for him to be in both Chelan and Lincoln City on the Sunday that detectives believed the young women died. They’d already been dead for at least a day when Patty’s boyfriend left Oregon for Wenatchee.

After the
Wenatchee Daily World
ran a story about the double homicide asking for help from the public, more leads began trickling in. One witness was sure she had seen the two young women on Thursday. The woman worked as a waitress at the Mineral Wells lodge restaurant near the summit of Blewett Pass. Most people driving to Wenatchee from Seattle take I-90 east, crossing Snoqualmie Pass and then veering north to cross Blewett Pass, which comes out about 18 miles from Wenatchee. The rustic Mineral Wells restaurant is the only place to eat near the summit.

“It was Thursday when I saw them,” the waitress told Bill Patterson. He showed her several photos of young women, and she picked out Beverly Johnson easily. “That’s her—the blonde,” she said. “She and another girl spent the night of September twenty-fifth in the campgrounds here. They ate dinner here on Thursday night and then had an early breakfast on Friday morning.”

“Were they alone?”

“They were for dinner. But they were with two men for breakfast—”

“Can you describe the men?”

She shrugged, searching her memory. “All I can say is they were white, maybe in their early twenties—both about five feet ten with dark hair. One of the men paid for breakfast. The girls’ two dogs waited outside.”

“So the women left with these two men?”

“No. I think the men drove off toward Seattle, and the girls waited outside for at least an hour, trying to catch a ride. I never saw the men again,” she said. “I got busy and I didn’t see the girls get picked up. They were just gone the next time I looked outside.”

Who were the two men, and was it possible that they had come back to pick up Beverly and Patty? Patterson had a stroke of luck this time—or so it seemed—when he got a call from Deputy Tony Fitzhugh of Okanogan County, Washington. Fitzhugh had received a call from a man named Jeff Hunt.*

“He’s willing to talk with you,” Fitzhugh said. “He was evidently with the girls for a while.”

Jeff Hunt turned out to be a hitchhiker himself, and said he’d met the women out on the road. “I was hitching out of The Dalles, Oregon,” he said, mentioning a town on the north side of the Columbia River, where it divides Washington from Oregon. “I met these two girls on Thursday at the intersection of the road that goes to Vancouver, Washington. They were headed to central Washington too, and they had two dogs with them. We all caught a ride with a fellow from Vancouver and he took us to Mineral Springs. We got in the campgrounds there around seven that night and decided to camp.”

Patterson nodded, but he wasn’t sure about this guy. Beverly and Patty were sure taking the long way around if they were going to Wenatchee. They could have caught a ride north on 97 to Wenatchee. Vancouver meant backtracking—but then, hitchhikers can’t be choosers.

“So,” Patterson continued, “did the girls talk to you much?”

“Not really. They were quiet—almost antisocial—until I said I knew about apple picking, and then they had a lot of questions. But they told us what their names were: Bev Johnson and Patty Weidner.”

Maybe the man from Vancouver—whose name Hunt didn’t know—had been a nice guy and driven them more than 200 miles from his home to be kind, or maybe he had expected “repayment” for his trouble. If the latter were true, he had been disappointed. Hunt said they all slept in their own sleeping bags, and the girls’ dogs growled at anyone who came close to them.

There were no hard feelings apparently. “I bought breakfast for all of us Friday morning,” Hunt said. “The guy who gave us a ride headed back to Vancouver. I think he said he worked in some kind of factory there. The girls said they wanted the spot in front of the restaurant, so I walked about a mile up the road. I had to wait an hour, but I got a ride into Cashmere. I never did see the girls come by, so I don’t know who they got a ride with.”

“Do you think it’s possible the guy from Vancouver changed his mind and came back?” Patterson asked.

“I don’t think so. He was pretty mellow, and he seemed anxious to get to work. They were going about 70 miles north and he wouldn’t have wanted to take them that much farther. And those dogs wouldn’t have let him get near Patty or Bev.”

In the end, the friendly driver’s whereabouts didn’t really matter. Someone else had seen the girls later on Friday.

Detective Tillman Wells talked with a long-haul truck driver who felt sure he’d seen Patty and Beverly on Friday, September 26.

“It was right about a quarter to one in the afternoon,” the witness told Wells. “I was on Maple Street in the north end of Wenatchee and I saw these two pretty girls with backpacks, and their dogs were with them.”

“Could you describe them?” Wells asked.