Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (7 page)

“And Nick promised he wouldn’t. But then he said, ‘I won’t go unprepared either.’ I have no idea what he meant by that.”

The case was becoming murkier. Despite his claim, it seemed that Nick Kyreacos had known something about Ellich’s murder. He’d been to see Dick Reed and Don Strunk in their offices only the day before. Now, Florrie Pappadopolis said that she thought Nick had called his attorney before he went to meet the woman in the alley.

He had, and he had also called Detective Don Strunk. Strunk remembered that the phone call had come in about 3:45
P.M.
—just as he was leaving the office at the end of his shift. Kyreacos said his lawyer had told him not to meet with a stranger in an alley, and Strunk told him that was good advice. He and Dick Reed were investigating the Ellich killing, and Kyreacos should stay out of it.

As Don Strunk was talking with Nick Kyreacos, Stan Tappan was walking up the Cherry Street hill to get in his truck and go to work at the mortgage company. He and Kyreacos were at least a dozen miles apart, two men on different errands.

Dick Reed questioned the witnesses who had come forward. A clerk in a Ballard area radio and electronic store remembered Kyreacos well. He had rushed in about 4:30
P.M.
that Tuesday. Although there were several customers waiting in line, he pushed his way to the head of the line. He told the clerk he was looking for a small tape recorder. Then he picked out a unit about four by seven inches, tested it, and slipped it into his coat pocket, asking, “If I don’t like it, could I return it later?”

“I told him ‘Yes, until seven,’” the clerk told Dick Reed.

Next, Reed talked to the teenage boy who had appeared at the shooting scene, claiming that he knew Nick Kyreacos. He was calmer now, but still seemed frightened.

“You knew Nick Kyreacos?” Reed asked.

“Yeah—he lived in my neighborhood. He called me about 5:30 Tuesday afternoon and told me he needed ‘a favor.’”

The boy recalled the odd conversation he’d had with the man who was dead now. “He said, ‘Look kid, I’ve got to meet this woman in an alley downtown. It’s got something to do with a guy I knew who got murdered.’ He needed me to go along—but all I had to do was be a witness.”

“How can I be a witness if I don’t know anything about it?” the teenager had asked warily.

“You don’t even have to be right there. I’ve got walkie-talkies,” Kyreacos had told him.

“Why does this woman want to see you?”

“I’ve got some theories on that,” Kyreacos had said excitedly. “Either she really wants to give me some information about Branko or maybe she’s some kind of relative of his and she wants to set me up—or have the police set me up. Maybe she’s going to blackmail me.”

“That sounds dangerous,” the boy recalled saying. “I wouldn’t go if I were you.”

“Nahh,” Nick had said. “I’ve got this knife and this pistol—it’s a starter’s pistol but it looks real. I’ll scare him with it.”

The kid told Dick Reed he had wondered why Nick was talking about a
man
when he’d said before that it was a woman he was meeting.

Nick and the kid had driven through the rain to downtown Seattle; as they neared the alley at Pike and Boren, Nick pulled over to a small grocery store and said he had to make a phone call. “I gotta call in to work to be sure they don’t need me for the night shift,” he’d explained to the boy.

As Nick grabbed his coat, the teenager had seen the tape recorder under it. Apparently, they were going to use that as well as the walkie-talkies. Nick said something into it, and then played it back—to be sure it had recorded. It had. He slipped the tape recorder under his lavender shirt, tucking it a little behind and to the left side of his body. He’d clipped a small, round $1.98 mike to the collar of his tee-shirt, and then put his bulky, fleece-lined jacket on. The tape recorder was completely hidden.

Surprisingly, Nick Kyreacos hadn’t seemed too apprehensive, but he’d warned the boy, “If anything happens, you just call the police and then drive my car home and tell my wife.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Just do what I say,” Nick had said.

It was almost right at 6
P.M.
as he told this witness to stay behind the Cadillac dealership so he would be out of sight. Although the battery-operated walkie-talkies had worked earlier, the teenager wasn’t able to get a response from Nick as he strode toward the dealership. Nick was still close enough to hear a shout so the boy said he’d called out, “Nick! Nick! I can’t hear nothing!”

But Kyreacos kept on walking, and the boy paced behind the building as he had been told. A short time later, he heard sounds like a car backfiring. “I thought that was what it was,” he said. “We were pretty close to the freeway entrance on Pike.”

Back in the days of film noir, there were a number of detective movies that were filmed from the viewpoint of a man about to die. In 1946, there was even an eerie imaginative movie starring Robert Montgomery called
The Lady in the Lake
in which the camera was focused as if it were, indeed, the eyes of the main character.

On the night of November 20, the real story would be played out through the
voice
of a dead man and the
ears
of those who ministered to him.

When the medical examiner’s investigators Lombardini and Ryan wheeled the gurney carrying Nick Kyreacos’s body into the morgue—at the time a shadowy edifice located on Queen Anne Hill—they went about what seemed a routine procedure.

It was anything but.

On the morgue scale, the body weighed 170 pounds and measured 5 feet 6 inches. As Nick Kyreacos’s clothing was removed, a battered and spent slug tumbled out. The investigators were quite sure that it was the .45 bullet that had pierced his forehead, going through his brain and exiting four inches behind his right ear. Finally it had become entangled in his jacket. They also found a small black pistol, loaded with blanks, in his pants pocket.

But that wasn’t the most startling thing they found. Medical examiners occasionally discover all manner of secrets that the suddenly dead can no longer hide—men wearing women’s underwear, men
and
women who have lived as the opposite sex, thick rolls of money secreted in shoes, socks and belts, wigs, glass eyes, penile implants, foreign objects inserted in the body during kinky sex acts. Fortunately, the dead can no longer be embarrassed and secrets discovered in the morgue are kept there.

Now, Lombardini and Ryan were amazed to see that the shooting victim had a tape recorder nestled in the small of his back. There was a wire, almost shredded now, leading to a dented round microphone clipped to Nick Kyreacos’s tee-shirt. Recording devices were bulky and awkward three decades ago; the “state of the art” then was far from the minuscule mikes and recorders available today. This tape recorder was the size of a hard-cover book and not that easy to hide.

The M.E.’s investigators stared at it for a full minute, tempted to listen to the tape, and then Lombardini muttered, “The detectives at the shooting site probably have no idea about this. We need to tell them pronto—we can’t take a chance of messing this up or breaking the tape.”

They immediately notified Sergeant Bruce Edmonds and his men, who had returned to homicide headquarters. Even though it was very late, they were still working on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building, sorting out the evidence they’d collected in the alley.

It was 2:40
A.M.
when Edmonds and George Marberg arrived at the morgue. They tried to rewind the sixty-minute tape but, anticlimactically, found its four batteries were dead. The detectives rushed to an all-night drugstore and purchased new batteries, racing back to the medical examiner’s office.

Finally, the four investigators—two from the morgue and two from the police department—watched as the tape rewound to its beginning. They pushed PLAY and held their breath, wondering if anything caught in the tape would be meaningful to the shooting investigation.

Detective George Marberg would eventually listen to the tape a dozen times. “It still sends chills up my spine,” he remarked later.

The tape began with Nick Kyreacos identifying himself, his voice sounding upbeat and cheerful, as if he was enjoying whatever adventure he was about to undertake. He was talking to someone else, someone with a young male voice.

“We are now recording. Stay around the general area. I’ll just talk a little bit. When I say ‘Out,’ don’t talk anymore.”

The tape caught sounds of traffic, car tires on wet pavement, horns honking far away, someone coughing. Kyreacos spoke again, “Can you hear me?”

There was no answer.

“Can you hear me?”
There was still no response. It must have been at this point that the walkie-talkie signals between Kyreacos and the boy were blocked by buildings.

Kyreacos kept talking anyway, obviously intent upon commemorating what was happening, perhaps still trying to contact his witness. “I’m approaching—time by my watch is six nineteen. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Girl coming down the street, going south. Waiting on the corner. Girl did not come down here.

“There appears to be an Indian woman coming down the street, wearing a raincoat. Walks very masculine. A little short lady. No one’s approached. No one coming near. I’m walking slowly up toward the alley now. Someone is peering at me from the hotel across the street from the car place. Man in orange coveralls coming up street. Car slowing down. No sign of anyone. Everything looks normal.”

The tape counter read five and a half minutes. It sounded as if Nick Kyreacos wasn’t sure
who
had summoned him to the alley but that he had powerful motivation to be where he was, suspicious and feeling the need for evidence of whatever might be said. It was almost as if he expected someone wearing a disguise—perhaps a man dressed as a woman?

“Walking in the upper part of the alley now,” his voice continued, a new nervous tautness apparent.

Suddenly, another voice cut in.
“Hold it, Nick!”

There were sounds of a chase, feet thudding and sliding, and heavy breathing. Kyreacos sounded surprised. “Hey! Cop chasing me. Stan Tappan—”

A shot rang out, a sharp crack on the tape. “Hold it!” a male voice called from some distance. And then the second male voice was closer to the tape recorder again. “OK, Nick—back around here.”

Edmonds and Marberg exchanged glances. They recognized the new voice. It was Stan Tappan.

“What’s the deal?” Kyreacos asked.

“You know what the deal is. I’ll tell you one thing, baby.
You have…had it.”

“You got a charge?”

“We’ll get a charge.”

“If you wanted me, why didn’t you come and see me?”

“Because—I’ll tell you why—”

Without warning, four or five shots sounded on the tape, and the men listening jumped as if a gun were firing right there in the morgue. Kyreacos’s voice was no longer deep, but the high-pitched scream of a creature in agony.

“Don’t!” he cried out. “Ahhhhh…Ahhhh…Ahhh! Don’t! God! Tappan, don’t. You’re wrong, man. You’re wrong. Don’t. Please, don’t—”

Five seconds ticked by. There was another shot, muffled. It sounded almost like a champagne cork popping.

The silence on the tape was palpable. No more screams. No more pleading from Kyreacos. And then there were two more shots, five seconds apart.

The tape ran on, recording emptiness. A minute. Two minutes. George Marberg looked at his watch, unconsciously timing the tape whirring without sound. None of them moved. Was it over?

No. There were more voices on the tape, but now it was as if the investigators were listening through the dead man’s ears.

A different male voice spoke: “We’ve already called the police. This guy is dead. He got shot right in the top of the head. You don’t think he’s still
alive?
Don’t touch him.”

Sirens caterwauled through the night, growing closer and closer.

Another voice: “They’re taking some guy to the hospital. Is an aid car coming?”

“One of
our
officers?” The policeman speaking sounded shocked.

“Yeah.”

There was a new sound, air whooshing into the body’s throat. And then a crackling, and they realized that it was paramedic George Barnes who had tried to “bag” the victim with his own breath and was now pulling Kyreacos’s jacket open, brushing the microphone—all unaware.

“Yeah,” Barnes’s voice said to someone. “He’s got one right in the chest.”

A young officer’s voice: “OK, Sarge—I got a .45 over here. The
fucker
is cocked and ready to go.”

Sergeant: “Leave it right where it is.”

Steadily, accurately, the mindless tape rolled on, recording shouts, sirens, police calls coming in to the squad cars blocking the shooting site. The man was dead, but the device on his body continued to record his surroundings until the hour of blank tape ran out and the batteries faded. It had gone with him to the morgue and then stopped.

Edmonds and Marberg were shocked at what they’d heard. Even as dozens of police officers still gathered at Virginia Mason to show support for Stan Tappan and his wife, displaying the camaraderie and concern that binds police officers, the two homicide detectives who had heard the damning tape knew that things were not at all what they seemed.