Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (32 page)

Rose Stahl testified in support of her close friend Nancy. Rose admitted that she and Art had had a marriage marked by ups and downs, but she denied ever threatening to kill him. She certainly had not offered to pay $1,000 to have him shot. She had never discussed any of her financial problems with Nancy. “My husband would not have approved of that,” she said calmly.

Although it is rare for defendants in cases of murder or attempted murder to take the witness stand, Nancy Brooks’s attorney evidently felt she would make a good impression on the jury. Dressed modestly, as always, Nancy Brooks squeezed her husband’s hand as she rose to defend herself.

She testified in a soft voice, recalling that Bennett LeClerk had come back into her life a few years before. She had met him at a shopping center in 1973 and gone to see his house. She’d met “both his wives.” They had confided that they had difficulty deciding who should answer when a caller asked for “Mrs. LeClerk.”

Nancy Brooks said that the last time LeClerk had come to her house he’d worn all black and had carried a gun and a syringe full of poison meant, she said, for the husband of one of his mistresses.

Bennett’s lengthy visits to the Brookses’ Bellevue home had become a nuisance. She said she’d finally had to tell him not to come again because the neighbors were talking, but she said he could phone her. “You’re making it up because your husband is jealous,” she said LeClerk had raged. “All men are jealous!”

Asked by her attorney to try to remember all her contacts with twenty-eight-year-old Bennett LeClerk, Nancy Brooks said he had called her in the fall of 1973—twenty months before this trial—and he had said that one of his wives was pregnant and the baby was due in January. He thought Nancy might like to come and visit his mother when she came to Washington.

“And the next time?”

“It was probably in May—May of 1974.” Nancy Brooks said she was just out of the hospital after having a neck fusion. Bennett was once again calling her and begging her to meet him, asking if he could come over and see her. “I told him he would have to call first—but he never called.” She said he was very upset over a woman named Brenda Simms—“the one woman he could really love.”

In September 1974, Nancy Brooks said, Bennett called again. He told her he had been drinking saki and taking Valium, Empirin, and codeine for a back injury. He asked her if she wanted to invest in something, and she had said no.

In October he called again, threatening suicide because everyone had deserted him.

“I believed him,” she told the jury earnestly. “He was begging for just one hour of my time.” She testified that she had agreed to meet him in Everett on October 25 only because he told her he was so depressed that he would kill himself if she refused. “I didn’t want his suicide on my conscience.”

Bennett wanted her to intercede with Brenda, who was leaving him. Nancy refused, but suggested he get counseling. She mentioned the name of a psychiatrist, she testified, and he became enraged. She then said she had friends who had gone through counseling and that it had helped them a great deal. No, she said, she “thought” she had not mentioned the Stahls by name.

Oddly, though, Bennett had referred to the Stahls as if he knew them.

Nancy Brooks blushed as she said LeClerk “got fresh” and put his hand beneath her blouse during the meeting in the cocktail lounge. After three hours he walked her to her car and threatened her by saying: “I’ll run the show. You will meet me again. I know where your daughter rides, and she’s beautiful. If you want to keep her face in that condition, you’ll meet me.”

He also threatened her husband, she testified. “He told me that if he couldn’t get him, someone else would.”

She had been terrorized by Bennett LeClerk, she told the jury. But had she told her husband—or the police or her attorney? No, she had not. “I was so scared,” she explained to Prosecutor Roy Howson.

Asked if LeClerk had scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin during their meeting, she said she could not recall.

Despite her terror, Nancy Brooks said she had met LeClerk again on October 31. This time, she embellished what she had told Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo. They listened, amazed. They had been led to believe her visit to LeClerk’s home had happened much earlier and in the presence of his wives.

Now she said that Bennett had forced her from the Holiday Inn to his home at gunpoint. He had shown her his shrine, his shower, and his bedroom. He had subjected her to sadistic teasing, laughing hysterically. He had shown her the Buddha downstairs and told her the orange dragon was modeled after him.

“He wrapped the chain…around his arms, legs, waist,” she told the jury, “and he did barefoot karate kicks. He threw the chain toward me, and I jumped back and it fell on the floor.”

As the jury leaned forward, Nancy Brooks continued her story of her secret visit to the home of a man she claimed to be afraid of. She said he took her into his bedroom and then into the shower, explaining how “sexy” it was. He told her, she said, that he had brought “many women” there. He’d asked her if she could tell what was so special about the shower. When she shook her head in bewilderment, he showed her how he’d had the shower head mounted so that he could direct the spray wherever he wanted it.

Hesitantly, Nancy said that Bennett had pushed her down on the bed and tried to kiss her. She looked beseechingly at her attorney, “Do I have to say it all?”

“Try to paraphrase,” he said gently.

“He pushed me on the bed and tried to kiss me. He told me over and over what an exciting lover he was…a lot of rubbish like that. He showed me a bottle of cinna-mony liquid and put liquid from it on his finger and made me taste it, and he said it was part of his sex rituals.”

The defendant insisted that she had not had sex with LeClerk. Finally, she said, he let her go and drove her back to her car. Again she failed to tell her husband of her frightening ordeal.

She was positive that she had never mentioned the Stahls while she was with Bennett. Positive that she had not said a word about Art’s being brutal to his children.

She certainly had never contracted to have Art killed.

As Prosecutors Lee Yates and Roy Howson questioned Nancy, there was a hard edge to her answers. The softly modulated voice was gone now. She denied over and over again that she had been a go-between for LeClerk and Rose Stahl, the facilitator of a planned murder. She refused to look at the attorneys for the state as she answered them.

It was a lengthy trial. In his final arguments, Yates pointed out that Washington statutes declared that anyone who “aids, assists, abets, encourages, hires, counsels, induces or procures another to commit a crime is guilty and shall be treated the same as the person who actually commits it.”

Yates stressed that Nancy Brooks had known exactly what strings to pull to make LeClerk do what she wanted. She was Rose Stahl’s close friend. The women shared every confidence with each other. Nancy Brooks had known about the inheritance and the threatened divorce.

And she had also known just where Art Stahl would be on the night he was shot. She had known all the facts found on the napkin that Bennett LeClerk had carried. Who else would have provided him with the address and the description of the intended victim, right down to his license-plate number?

In the end, Yates asked the most salient questions: “Why Art Stahl? Why would LeClerk shoot Stahl, a man he didn’t even know?”

And that was the question that the jury could not answer satisfactorily without finding Nancy guilty. There was no other way to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Rose didn’t know Bennett. Bennett didn’t know Art Stahl. But Nancy Brooks knew everyone, and she knew just which buttons to push. The prosecution team didn’t deny that Bennett LeClerk was a bizarre man, a man who professed to have great power and strength, but he was also a man who could not stand rejection from women.

Nancy Brooks had known him since he was a disturbed teenager; she knew all his vulnerable places. Whatever her attachment to Rose Stahl was, it was intense. Nancy wanted Rose to be happy—and rich. The only way to facilitate that was for Art to be gone. Really, really gone. When all the circumstantial and physical evidence was evaluated, the only conclusion to be drawn was that Nancy Brooks, the sweet mother and wife, had manipulated eccentric Bennett LeClerk into within a fraction of an inch of outright murder. And she had done all of this as a favor to a friend.

The jury of eight men and four women, after deliberating for less than five hours, found Nancy Brooks guilty of attempted first-degree murder. The penalty for attempted murder was the same as it would have been if the murder plot had succeeded. Judge James Mifflin sentenced Nancy Brooks to up to life in prison.

At this writing, both Nancy Brooks and Bennett LeClerk have served their prison terms and been paroled. They have not come to the attention of Washington State authorities again. Like Nancy and Bennett, Rose Stahl has disappeared from the public eye. Art Stahl recovered completely from his gunshot wound and is alive and well two decades later.

In the end, the argument for the healing powers of reflexology may have been strengthened. Art Stahl received what should have been a fatal—or at least a paralyzing—wound. But immediately after he was shot in the chest, a classmate removed his shoes and massaged the “heart healing” area of his feet. Who is to say that, at least in Stahl’s case, it wasn’t reflexology that saved his life?

W
ashington is
bisected by the Cascade Mountains. The state is rainy and mild on the Pacific coast and prone to hot dry summers and freezing winters on the eastern side. The mountains themselves often have snowy peaks year round. Skilled highway engineers have cut routes through the mountain passes, so that it is possible to cross the Cascades in all but the wildest of winter storms: White Pass, North Cascades Highway, Snoqualmie Pass, and Stevens Pass. The North Cascades Highway tends to close down for the winter first, and Snoqualmie Pass is the easiest route. Success for those who attempt to cross White Pass and Stevens Pass depends on the depth of the snowdrifts, the threat of avalanches, and the accuracy of weathermen.

None of these routes east from the Washington coast should be chosen by ill-prepared youngsters bent on running away—not in winter. Never in winter.

Maeve Flaherty* was sixteen years old in the winter of 1971. She lived in Seattle with her parents and brothers and sisters. Her father was a doctor, and the family lived in a more-than-comfortable home in one of Seattle’s nicest neighborhoods. Maeve was a pretty girl, short and a little plump. She had a pixyish sense of humor, and like many teens in the early seventies, she was caught up in a world where the young were protesting what they saw as the sins of adults. The Chicago Seven, the Beatles with their long hair and their message-filled music, and the National Guard shootings at Kent State were in the news. While their parents were listening to Dinah Shore and Lawrence Welk, teens were buying Janis Joplin, Three Dog Night, and Simon and Garfunkel—music that sounded like cacophony to the older generation. It has always been so, and it always will be, but the youth revolution of the sixties and seventies was stronger and more visible.

Maeve liked to think she was a rebel—but she wasn’t, really. She was a dreamer whose fantasies far outweighed her common sense. She was restless—eager to try her own wings. Whenever things didn’t go well in her life, Maeve ran. She had run away often enough so that her parents, at their wits’ end, considered putting her in a private girls’ boarding school. Although they would miss having her at home, they hoped that she would get strict supervision there.

Maeve was adamant that she would not go away to school. She would rather run away than wear a uniform and observe a curfew and go to a stuffy school. She began to formulate a plan. She didn’t tell her parents, of course; she needed time to prepare. By February 20, 1971, she was ready to leave. Maeve “triple-dressed”—and then some. She piled on layer after layer of clothes and jeans. That way, she wouldn’t have to carry a suitcase, which would certainly have sounded automatic alarm bells.

Maeve wouldn’t be running away alone. She had a friend whose views were much like her own. Kari Ivarsen* was eighteen—two years older than Maeve—and had lived away from her family for months. They both felt they were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. They saw their parents as having morals and rules right out of the Stone Age. They both believed that the world was a good place, that you could trust strangers because all people were good if they were shown love, because love transcended all danger. If they could have, Maeve and Kari would have journeyed to Woodstock in 1969 and participated in that giant muddy love fest where everyone got along wonderfully despite the dire predictions of adults.

Where Maeve was a cute and cuddly girl, Kari was absolutely beautiful. She was slender and graceful with the perfectly symmetrical facial features that made men swivel their heads to look at her. Having already proved she could get by very well without parental supervision, Kari assured Maeve that they would be perfectly fine once they hit the road. They would have fun and interesting adventures, and when they were ready, they would come back home.

The two girls arranged to meet away from Maeve’s home. They knew if they were to evade Maeve’s parents and the authorities, they had to avoid all their usual hangouts and get out of Seattle as soon as possible. They had saved some money, but not enough to rent a room or an apartment. If they ran out of money for food, they could work as waitresses or dishwashers. Figuring out how to survive would be part of the adventure of their new life.

Someone had told them that there were scores of summer cabins around the Cascade foothills and the isolated lakes in Snohomish County just north of the King County line. Reportedly those cabins sat there empty during the off-season; their owners rarely, if ever, used them in the winter time.

Kari brought it up first: why couldn’t they “borrow” a cabin for a while? She envisioned a cozy hideaway with a roaring fire where no one would find them or bother them. They wouldn’t really be hurting anything; maybe later they could repay the owners for whatever canned goods or supplies they used. It wouldn’t be stealing—not really—since they intended to replace everything.

Neither girl knew anything at all about mountain survival. They figured they would learn as they went along.

One thing about Washington State that its residents appreciate is that they can leave Seattle and be in the mountains in an hour—or on a Pacific Ocean beach in an hour and a half. One can actually stand in the middle of Seattle and see the snowcapped mountains in the distance; tricks of depth perception make them seem close enough to reach out and touch.

Maeve Flaherty and Kari Ivarsen decided to head for those deceptively safe-looking mountains. They had enough money to take a bus twenty-six miles north to Everett, the Snohomish County seat. They knew how to make their way to Stevens Pass from Everett, hitchhiking through the little towns of Monroe, Sultan, and Startup, where Highway 2 began to climb toward the summit of the towering mountain range. They passed through Gold Bar and Index, and then stood beside the highway. They needed to find shelter before dark. Kari and Maeve had no real plans at all after that; that was half the fun—waiting to see what would happen.

The dream sounded good, and they fueled each other’s enthusiasm.

Almost three weeks earlier and some eighty or ninety miles south of the hideaway Maeve and Kari sought, a young man had also made plans to run away. But he didn’t run away from his parents and the boredom of school. He was escaping from the U.S. Army. He used the name Al, although that wasn’t his real name. The less people knew about him, the better he liked it. Al was twenty-one. He had been confident that joining the army would be the answer to all of his problems, but he found the rigors of basic training at Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma, more than he’d bargained for. He didn’t like getting up before dawn, he didn’t like hikes in the rain, and he didn’t like being told what to do every waking moment. Most of all, he didn’t like the idea of being shipped to a war in Vietnam.

Another soldier, who was from Washington State, had told Al about the cluster of empty cabins near Index in Snohomish County. He said that lots of the places up there were too deep in the woods to appeal to their city-dwelling owners in the winter. He directed Al toward Stevens Pass in the snowy foothills of the Cascades. From what Al could gather, a lot of people showed up there in the wintertime for reasons of their own.

The deserted cabins would be only the first phase of Al’s plan. He had studied maps to find a place where he could cross the Canadian border without a lot of questions from the border patrols. Once free of the United States, he hoped to get on a plane or a boat to Sweden. Reportedly, many American draft dodgers and servicemen like him, who were absent without leave, had taken refuge in Sweden. He had picked up on rumors that an active underground, run by conscientious objectors, would shelter runaways from military service.

Al figured he’d blend in—protective coloration, as it were—in Sweden. He was blond with a crisp wave of hair that fell over his forehead, and he had dark eyes under heavy brows. He was a handsome young man, six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and trim but muscular. He was also outgoing and convincing. People liked him and were drawn to him—especially women, whether they were little old ladies or young girls. All he had to do was grin. If there was rage just beneath his attractive facade—and there was—he hid it completely.

Al hitched a ride north to Seattle and beyond. He visited with some relatives near Everett and then rode with a truck driver through Sultan, Gold Bar, and Startup. He was looking for a place called Mineral City.

The truck driver shook his head. “Never heard of it,” he said, “and I’ve been driving Stevens Pass for years.”

That shook Al a little. According to rumor, Mineral City was a ghost town, a regular Shangri-la, with everything a man needed to live. Miners had abandoned the settlement decades before, but the buildings were still there. Al hadn’t located it, but he figured it was too small to show up on the map he’d bought at the service station. In truth, there was no such place.

There
was
an area called Garland Mineral Springs, or Garland Hot Springs. It had once been a mecca for those who believed that the minerals in the spring water would cure all manner of physical ills. The springs were fourteen miles east of Index on the Index-Galena Road. The road wound north from Index and then east along the north fork of the Snohomish River and past the Troublesome Creek Campground and the San Juan Campground to Garland Mineral Springs before it meandered tortuously south back to Jack Pass and Highway 2. The road was used mainly by loggers. Garland Mineral Springs, a scene of former grandeur, was now in disarray. Lodges and buildings designed to attract health pilgrims had long since fallen into skeletal ruins.

In summer, the area Al sought was verdant and inviting to experienced hikers who were trail-wise and willing to venture so far from civilized roads. In February, however, it was buried in snowdrifts, and icy tentacles clung to the 100-foot fir limbs and the few buildings that still had roofs. The foothills were over 5,000 feet high here: Troublesome Mountain, Bear Mountain, Frog Mountain. This was no place for amateurs.

It was sometime around February 2 when the tall young man known as Al lowered himself from the cab of the logging truck and headed into the tiny town of Index. Beyond his clean-cut handsomeness, he was not particularly unusual-looking, but there are so few strangers in Index in midwinter that almost any newcomer is noted and remembered. In the summer, things are a bit different; vacationers come and go for a week’s hiatus from the city noise in the jerry-built cabins that dot the hills around the village. Strangers are commonplace in Index in August; they stand out in February.

Al had stopped for a beer in an Index tavern and made small talk with the bartender as he drank. The bartender noted that the stranger carried a duffel bag and wore jeans that had been slit up the outside leg seams and then laced together with rawhide. The young man, who said his name was Al, obviously wasn’t a complete novice about winter survival; he wore an orange-and-green field jacket, gloves, a scarf, a sweater, and heavy-duty brown boots.

He said he was from California and he carried a map, which he said would lead him to Mineral City. The bartender had never heard of such a place, but he nodded noncommittally. Fantasies are not unheard of in taverns and he had heard a lot of stories in his job. If the stranger thought he was going to find some magic place up in the woods, let him dream.

Some distance out of Index, two young men occupied one of the rustic cabins that were sprinkled through the woods. They had come by it honestly; they paid rent on it every month. The men, known as Handy* and Digger,* were conscientious objectors. By inclination and principle, they were opposed to violence in any form. Because of their pacifist beliefs, they were involved in the underground passage system that smuggled draft evaders into Canada. Although many would find fault with their activities, few would argue that their participation in the underground was for any personal gain. Handy and Digger took risks to help other young men who felt the way they did about war. In return, they received nothing more than the knowledge that they were following their consciences.

The man named Al wandered up the Index-Galena Road to Handy and Digger’s cabin a few days later. They gave him a place to sleep, fed him, and listened as he explained that he could not bear to hurt or kill anyone.

“I can’t go to Vietnam,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t shoot someone. I have to get to Canada.”

“We’ll help you,” Digger said. “We’ll get you there.” He and Handy explained that a lot would depend on the weather. Until they could assure him of safe passage into Canada, they would see that he had enough to eat and a place to stay.

The temperature dropped and the drifts grew deeper, and Al became something of a familiar sight around Index.

A few weeks later, Maeve Flaherty and Kari Ivarsen hitchhiked into Index. They were carrying supplies that they naively believed would see them through the mountain winter: several changes of clothing, a hammer, some nails, matches, and their eye makeup.

The two girls started walking up the Index-Galena Road away from civilization, looking for a cabin where they could settle in for the next few months. But night fell and caught them far from shelter. They managed to find a lean-to where they huddled together for the night, curling up spoon fashion to share their body heat. But it wasn’t enough as the night deepened and the temperature plunged lower and lower. In desperation, the girls managed to set fire to the shelter, and the hard wood burned long enough and hot enough to keep them from freezing. They were grateful to see a pale sun come up, saving them from what had seemed like an endless night.