Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (35 page)

“This man we’re looking for,” he began, “isn’t the non-violent type he told you he was. He shot that little girl, and then he operated on her just to hurt her more. I don’t think he’s the sort of person you want to protect. You think about it. If you can help me, call me at home any time. Leave your first name or don’t leave any name at all. I’ll know.”

Handy and Digger nodded. “We’ll see what we can do.”

A day later an anonymous informant called Engelbretson. “The man you’re looking for is named Daniel Albert Prentice.* He’s AWOL from Fort Lewis, and he came from Salem, Oregon, to begin with.”

Before Engelbretson could ask more, the phone went dead.

Armed with this information, however, the Snohomish County detective was able to locate Oregon records on Prentice. The suspect was on probation out of Reedsport, Oregon, charged with assault with a deadly weapon. He had apparently managed to hide that fact from army recruiters, but Daniel Albert “Al” Prentice had shown a predilection for violence in the past. Oregon authorities promised to cooperate completely in locating the missing man.

Doug Engelbretson had assured Handy and Digger that they could trust him, and his word was good. It paid off several days later. He received a phone call at home that spurred him into action.

“Listen,” the voice began. “The man you want is being shuttled up to Canada after midnight tonight. He’s going out of Redmond on 405 to Bothell and then north to the border at Sumas. We know now that he’s not one of us—he wanted to kill that girl—and we won’t cover for him. He’s yours if you want to stop us along the road.”

“What will you be driving?” Engelbretson asked.

“A dark blue Chevy van—license number J78862. There’ll be three of us. He’ll be the short-haired man in the middle. Me and Digger will be the long-haired hippies.”

“Okay,” Engelbretson said. “We’ll intercept between Everett and Arlington. I won’t tell you where—you’ll act too nervous if you know. But we’ll be all around you.”

Engelbretson contacted Detective Sergeant Tom Hart at home in Arlington, and Hart said he would approach Highway 9 from the north. Detective Jerry Cook would come in from the east. A patrol car would approach from the west, and Doug Engelbretson and Frank Young would head toward Arlington from the south.

Sometime before dawn, Hart radioed that he had the van in sight.

“We’re moving in,” Engelbretson responded. “We should intercept at Frontier Village.”

It happened fast. One minute Prentice was relaxed and confident that he was almost free and clear in Canada. The next moment the van was surrounded by Snohomish County sheriff’s vehicles, marked and unmarked. Digger and Handy bailed out of either side of their van and out of the line of fire. But the officers didn’t have to shoot. Prentice was ordered out and told to lean against the van while he was frisked. He obeyed meekly.

“You’re under arrest for first-degree assault with intent to commit murder. I must advise you of your rights,” Engelbretson said, and he read Prentice his
Miranda
rights.

“What’s it all about?” Prentice asked casually.

“A sixteen-year-old girl,” Engelbretson answered tersely.

Prentice gave his name as Frank Fink.

One of the deputies, a man who had not been briefed on all the facts, moved in to arrest the long-haired duo who accompanied the suspect. Digger and Handy looked at Doug Engelbretson, a question unspoken in their eyes.

“They’re with us,” Engelbretson said. “Just let them move on.”

The deputy did as he was told, but he stood shaking his head as Digger and Handy drove off.

At sheriff’s headquarters, Engelbretson again informed “Frank Fink” of his rights. The suspect gave a statement, repeating his story of the unknown snipers who had shot at Kari and Maeve.

Engelbretson held up his hand and said quietly, “Dan, you’re not telling me the truth. You stalked those girls as if they were deer, didn’t you?…And then you shot Maeve.”

Suddenly Prentice shuddered, drew a deep breath, and blurted, “Yes!”

Although he claimed to have no explanation for why he had attacked the girls who thought he was their friend, he admitted that he had hunted them, stopping from time to time to draw a bead, and then dropping back until he got a better shot. He said that he had shot Maeve through the back because he’d figured the bullet would go right through her heart. If she had died, he planned to shoot Kari dead too.

After the first shot, he said, he came to his senses. He fell to the snow and asked himself why he had done it. Finally he made himself get up and go to them.

Master criminalist George Ishii, who headed the Washington State Police Crime Lab, did ballistics tests on the bullet taken from Maeve Flaherty’s neck and the .22 rifle Prentice had abandoned in the cabin. Under a scanning electron microscope, all the lands and grooves matched perfectly.

Daniel Prentice went on trial in Snohomish County Superior Court on August 5, 1971. Deputy Prosecutor David Metcalf presented the almost unbelievable case to a jury of Prentice’s peers. Maeve Flaherty and Kari Ivarsen took the stand to recall the frigid night when their trust in Prentice turned to terror.

The jury quickly returned a verdict of guilty, and on September 17, Prentice was sentenced to twenty-five years in a Washington prison.

Doug Engelbretson had found his man, beginning with only a description and a false name: Al. Amid those endless acres of snowdrifts he had found one of the most dangerous criminals he had ever hunted. Handy and Digger had held the key, and while they had no reason to trust cops, they
had
trusted Doug Engelbretson and he had kept his word to them. They would return to what they did, and the quiet-spoken detective would go back to his work.

Handy and Digger, the conscientious objectors who knew they were placing themselves in jeopardy but felt Prentice was so dangerous they had to take the chance, have long since moved on from Index to an unknown destination. The war in Vietnam that they deplored is over. For a short time, they fought a different kind of violence.

Maeve Flaherty recovered from the bullet wound that almost killed her, but she was left with semiparalysis in one hand and memories of terror that never quite went away. She and Kari had believed in a kind of love that was idyllic but dangerous—a love that included a trusting acceptance of everyone they met. They were ultimately disillusioned by Al. And yet they found the purest, most selfless kind of love in Handy and Digger.

And, I might suggest, in Doug Engelbretson who would not rest until their attacker was safely behind bars.

One question has always puzzled me. On the first night that Maeve and Kari heard an animal thrashing and scratching against their cabin, Al was
inside
with them. He could not have made the initial noises they heard, although it was certainly Al who made noise later that night when he said he was hunting rabbits. Who—or what—was outside their cabin? Could it have been the dread Sasquatch who scrabbled at the walls of the girls’ cabin that wintry night in February? No one will never know.

In retrospect, Maeve Flaherty and Kari Ivarsen came to realize that the monster they tried to escape from was not nearly as dangerous as the one they ran to for protection.

Today Kari and Maeve are women nearly fifty. Maeve suffered permanent physical damage from her bullet wound; both of them still carry a heavier emotional burden.

T
he trials
culminated at Christmas, but the case had begun close to another holiday weekend. The tragic story of Jody* and Arne Kaarsten* first made headlines on July 6, 1966, the Wednesday after a long Fourth of July weekend. It was only a little over two weeks past the summer solstice, and the sun rose early in the Northwest that morning. Although dew still clung to the grass, it had been daylight for more than three hours when twenty-three-year-old Arne Kaarsten appeared at his next-door neighbor’s house in the suburb of Kent, where the one-story homes were built close together. It was typical sixties mass-produced construction where the same three or four floor plans were repeated in every third or fourth house; only different colored paint and varied landscaping made the homes individual. For the most part, this was a neighborhood of young married couples.

It was a little before 8:00
A.M.
when Arne Kaarsten pounded frantically on the kitchen window of Ted Pearce’s home. Pearce looked up, startled, to see Kaarsten, dressed in a bathrobe, carrying his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Terry.*

“There’s something the matter with Jody,” Kaarsten gasped.

Pearce took the little girl and handed her to his wife. Then he followed Kaarsten, who was already running back toward his own home. Arne entered his house through the sliding glass doors at the back, which Pearce knew opened into the dinette.

Pearce stepped inside and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. “There,” Arne said, pointing to what looked like a mound of blankets in the living room. “There she is.”

Pearce moved closer until he could make out tufts of blond hair protruding above the blankets. He shoved away an overturned coffee table and snatched the covers back.

Twenty-two-year-old Jody Kaarsten lay absolutely still beneath them. She was face down and wore only a pair of bikini panties and a short quilted robe that was bunched up around her shoulders. Her panties had been pulled down just below her buttocks.

Numbly, Pearce touched her wrist. It was still warm, but he couldn’t feel any reassuring pulse to show that her heart was still beating. He knew that she needed a doctor, but he could not imagine what might have happened to her. He wondered if she had somehow injured herself falling off the couch. While Arne stood there silently, Pearce ran to the phone and picked up the receiver.

There was no dial tone.

“Stay here, Arne,” he said. “I’ll run next door and call an ambulance.”

Pearce was back within minutes. Arne hadn’t moved. He seemed to be in shock.

“Ted, I think there’s something around her neck,” Kaarsten said quietly.

Pearce looked, but he couldn’t see anything. He had to pull the blankets down and lift Jody’s long blond hair away from her neck before he saw the man’s necktie that cut deep into the tender flesh there. He tried to loosen it, but the garrote had been twisted around her throat so tightly that he could not even get his fingers beneath it.

Suddenly Arne cried out, “I forgot about the baby!” Pearce knew he was speaking of seven-month-old Peri Lynn, whose room was just down a narrow hallway leading from the living area. Arne ran now toward his younger daughter.

“Oh, my god!” Kaarsten’s voice chilled Pearce. “The baby, too!”

Hoping against hope, Pearce ran to the nursery. He found Arne staring down at the motionless baby. “No, no,” Pearce began, “she’s just sleeping.” But then he saw the pink satin ribbon—the kind used to decorate stuffed toys. It was embedded in Peri Lynn’s neck just as the necktie encircled her mother’s throat. Instinctively he reached out to get it off the baby’s neck. But like the necktie, the ribbon was cinched too tightly for him to remove it by hand.

“Quick, get me a knife,” he said to Arne Kaarsten. Understandably, Kaarsten seemed to be too stunned to help much. Instead, he led Pearce into the kitchen and pointed at the cabinets. Pearce rummaged through unfamiliar drawers until he came up with a paring knife. He ran back to the baby and cut the ribbon. Still, Peri Lynn did not move.

Now Pearce returned to Jody Kaarsten. He sliced once, twice, and once again at the tie that was wound three times around her neck. Finally it fell free.

But Jody Kaarsten did not move either.

Pearce knew that they needed all the help they could get. Again he ran home and called the Kent Police. However, the dispatcher determined that the Kaarsten home lay outside the boundaries of the small Seattle suburb and transferred the call to King County Police. He learned that the county police had been dispatched at the same time the ambulance call was logged and were already on their way.

It seemed as though hours had passed, but it had only been five or ten minutes. Ted Pearce returned to his stricken neighbor. He noted idly that Arne Kaarsten wore trousers, a T-shirt, and a bulky plaid robe. Arne kept repeating a litany: “Why did it have to happen to her? Why did it have to happen to
her?”

Pearce didn’t know if Arne was talking about his wife or his baby. Despite his neighbor’s pleas that he go next door, Arne was adamant about remaining in his own home. He stared at his dead wife fixedly, as if he could will her back to life.

Two ambulance attendants came hurrying up the front walk, carrying a resuscitator. Skillfully the EMT turned Jody Kaarsten over and fitted an airway into her throat so that they could force air into her lungs. The machine made her breasts rise and fall artificially as air filled her lungs. Arne stood nearby and watched, transfixed, as his wife seemed to have miraculously come back to life.

“Is she breathing?
Is she breathing?”
he asked sharply.

The EMT shook his head, explaining that the breathing was really just an illusion, dependent on the machine. There were no signs of life at all. Arne sighed deeply.

Neither Jody nor Peri Lynn responded to the desperate efforts of the rescue team to save them. They had been dead too long before their bodies were discovered.

No one yet had asked why or how. It was hard enough just to accept that it had happened at all.

King County Patrol Officer Bill Gorsline arrived at the neat ranch home a moment later, followed shortly by fellow Patrolman Ken Trainor. Both urged Arne Kaarsten to leave his home. Finally he agreed to go next door with Pearce.

Gorsline glanced around the living room and saw that it was basically clean—the carpet vacuumed, the furniture dusted—but now it was in disarray. A woman’s purse, its contents spilled out, lay on the floor beside the overturned coffee table; the change purse appeared to have been opened and pawed through. A diaper bag rested untouched on one chair, but a can of baby powder lay on the floor next to Jody Kaarsten’s head. A copy of a book,
The Hospital War,
was on the floor nearby.

As Gorsline and Trainor waited for detectives from the Major Crimes Unit in downtown Seattle to respond, they moved carefully around the house. They saw that the bathroom floor was littered with curlers, bobby pins, and a diaper pin; the bathroom rug was twisted and had been pushed or pulled partway into the hallway.

Ken Trainor posted himself at the front door of the Kaarsten home to keep anyone from contaminating the crime scene. He heard a loud rapping sound and turned around. He was startled to see that Arne Kaarsten had returned to the house and was knocking on the living room window to attract his attention. Fighting exasperation because he knew the distraught widower was probably not responsible, Trainor beckoned to Kaarsten to come outside. But Kaarsten shook his head and signaled for Trainor to follow him.

“I’ve got something important to show you in the backyard,” Kaarsten insisted.

“Look here,” Kaarsten said, as they walked over the damp grass. “I was walking toward the house and I dropped my cigarette lighter. Then I kicked it accidentally, and it slid up against the house.”

Trainor nodded, perplexed, wondering what Kaarsten was trying to say.

“So I bent over,” Kaarsten said excitedly, “and when I looked up I could see the reflection of broken wires in the telephone connection into the house. See?” He pointed toward the lower part of the home’s siding.

Trainor didn’t see. The wires were protected by a cover, and he couldn’t see any break at all. Only when he placed his fingers beneath the plastic box and pulled it clear of the house a bit was he able to discern a break.

“I’ll point that out to the detectives,” Trainor promised, leading Kaarsten away from the home once more. “Now, I think you’ll be more comfortable next door.”

Kaarsten left, but he came back several times, anxious to assist the investigators in their assessment of what had happened. Every time they turned around, he seemed to be in their way. It was a hell of a thing, they realized, for a man to lose his wife
and
one of his children like this, and he had to be in shock, but neither of them had ever seen a family member so determined to be part of the investigation.

Detective Sergeant George Helland and Detective Robert Andrews reached the Kaarsten home shortly before 9:00
A.M.
They saw that the 1,000-square-foot house was built on an open plan: the kitchen, dining area, and living room were actually one large room partially divided by counters. A door to the garage from the dining area stood half open. So did an outside door leading from the garage to the backyard.

A short central hallway led from the living-dining room to the nursery and then to Terry’s room on the right. The bathroom and master bedroom were on the left. Someone, probably Jody Kaarsten, had apparently been sleeping on the convertible sofa in the living room, because it was folded down to the bed position.

The bed in the master bedroom was unmade, and a man’s plaid bathrobe had been tossed across the end. A clock showing the correct time hummed away beside the bed.

Dirty glasses and ashtrays covered the tabletop in the dinette area. A single bowl half full of cereal stood amid the clutter.

Andrews photographed the interior while Helland made triangulation measurements. By measuring from Jody Kaarsten’s body to fixed points in the house, he could establish exactly where the body and pertinent evidence had been found—if he ever needed to do so—even after her body was moved to the medical examiner’s office. The two investigators dusted the exposed surfaces for prints.

They knew already that they were dealing with a case that defied any predictable pattern. A woman and a baby had been strangled in their own home—while an adult male and a small girl slept only a few feet away. While it was certainly possible for an intruder to enter a home and commit such brutal killings, the immediate question dealt with motive. The Kaarsten home was like any subdivision home a young couple just starting out might buy. The furniture was neat but inexpensive. There were no objets d’art, no jewels, furs, stereos, cameras—nothing to lure a burglar. Yes, Jody Kaarsten’s purse had been rifled, but they wondered how much money the young wife could have had?

If the motive had been a sexual attack, surely Jody Kaarsten would have cried out to her husband for help. But Arne Kaarsten hadn’t mentioned hearing screams. At this point, it didn’t look like a rape that had progressed to murder. Jody’s clothing was in disarray, but it had not been removed.

The clutter in the bathroom was odd. The rug rested halfway into the hall, and the curlers had been knocked to the floor, making it look rather as if she had been attacked while she was putting up her hair and then dragged to where she lay.

Even if rape
had
been the original motive, why would the killer have strangled little Peri Lynn? A seven-month-old baby could hardly have been a threat; she wasn’t even old enough to stand up in her crib, much less crawl out of it. She couldn’t talk. How could she have identified a killer?

Two-and-a-half-year-old Terry would have been more dangerous as a witness, but not much more. Two baby girls. Why would the murderer have killed the baby and left the toddler sleeping? Why hadn’t Arne Kaarsten heard anything during the night?

Helland and Andrews went over the exterior of the home meticulously to see if any doors or windows had been jimmied or forced. None of them bore any marks. Sergeant Helland knelt to examine the cut telephone line. Like Trainor, Helland was unable to see the severed wires until he lifted the plastic cap that covered the terminal ends. As the single lead from the outside wall entered the plastic cap, it split into two segments, each leading to a terminal. One of these leads had been cut a few inches from the terminal. This would have caused the phone inside to go dead instantly.

Helland carefully cut this segment at the terminal end so that the severed end could be examined by the FBI laboratories. Then he made a temporary connection so that detectives could use the phone during their preliminary investigation. It had already been dusted for fingerprints.

The bodies of Jody and Peri Lynn Kaarsten were removed to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office to await autopsy. The detectives stayed behind to bag and label everything in the house that might bear some trace evidence left by their killer.

As the morning progressed, more and more King County detectives spread out over the area, questioning neighbors in an ever widening circle around the Kaarsten home. The Pearces, living right next door, were the first people interviewed. They were almost as shocked as Kaarsten himself; they said they had seen Jody Kaarsten at midnight the night before. They could scarcely believe that she was dead.