Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (8 page)

There was no question that Tappan knew Kyreacos better than he had said. Tappan had chased the waiter, and as much as they hated to accept it, it appeared that he had deliberately shot him. It was all there on tape. It would take ballistics tests and a lot more questioning to find out what the real connection had been between the two men.

Detective Sergeant Ivan Beeson assigned two of his day-crew—Don Strunk and Dick Reed—as the prime investigators in Stan Tappan’s shooting of Nick Kyreacos. They had been afraid that this might happen. It wasn’t a matter of a conflict of interest—they were much too professional for that—but neither had ever found the main suspect in an inexplicable murder to be an old friend. Don Strunk and Dick Reed listened to the tape and their faces went white. It was clear that Tappan didn’t know that the whole shooting had been recorded, and they couldn’t tell him so until they had taken his full statement.

According to Stan Tappan’s first brief statement to the patrol officers, it was Kyreacos who brought the .45 to the alley. When Sergeant Beeson, Reed, and Strunk went to the hospital to talk with Tappan, he was recuperating from plastic surgery on his injured hand and assured them that he would be able to use it again, well enough to shoot a gun accurately.

They asked him to go back over the shooting, and Stan Tappan reiterated that it was Kyreacos who had had the .45. He said he had been forced to defend himself against a convicted criminal who had a lot more firepower than he did.

Only they knew that wasn’t true. They had already talked to a detective who was once Tappan’s patrol partner. Although he and Tappan had ridden as partners together for two years, the man was troubled. He told Dick Reed that Stan had been extremely apprehensive about Nick Kyreacos. “He said Nick threatened both him and Branko Ellich—and then Ellich was ambushed and shot. He said he was really afraid of Nick.”

Apparently, Stan Tappan had seemed so afraid that he met his old partner in the police garage on November 13 and told him that Kyreacos was hanging around his off-duty job at the mortgage company, and he needed a gun more powerful than a .38.

“I loaned him a gun that used to belong to my brother—a .45. He said he’d give it back to me.”

Frank Lee was the Seattle Police Department’s ballistics expert. He attempted to find the history of the .45, but found it was virtually untraceable. All he could be sure of was that it was a government model 1911 semiautomatic pistol. The bullet casings found at the scene had been manufactured in 1931 and 1967. The .45 was clearly used as what police call a “drop gun,” a weapon that can be deliberately left at a shooting scene to confuse an investigation. It cannot be traced either by manufacture or ownership.

Seattle police regulations at the time forbade personnel from carrying a weapon more powerful than a .38.

King County Medical Examiner Patrick Besant-Matthews performed the six-hour postmortem examination of Nick Kyreacos’s body. Besant-Matthews once shocked a courtroom during a homicide trial when he explained that he had honed his knowledge of the damage done by different caliber guns by actually shooting at corpses, as well as pigs.

However he had learned, he was expert at identifying the etiology of gunshot wounds. Kyreacos had been shot many times. He had a through-and-through wound in his left forearm, a wound to the front of his chest caused by a bullet that entered near the left nipple, coursed through the third rib, and ended in his right lung.

“That was fired from above,” Besant-Matthews commented, “and it would have been rapidly fatal unless he had immediate care.”

The forehead wound had been instantly fatal, and Kyreacos could not have spoken a word after that. There was no question that both of the fatal wounds had been caused by the .45.

But Stan Tappan had said that the .45 belonged to Kyreacos—not to him. Dick Reed and Don Strunk visited Tappan again in his hospital room. He was glad to see them, but he looked a little disconcerted when their sergeant, Ivan Beeson, walked into the room behind them. The faces of all three were grim and they didn’t respond to his welcoming smile.

The homicide investigators dreaded what they had to do next.

“Stan,” Dick Reed said, “I hate to do this but I have to tell you that Kyreacos had a tape recorder on him. The whole shooting is on tape. We’ve listened to it.”

It was clear from the look on Stan Tappan’s face that he’d been caught completely off guard. He was, if anything, more shocked than his fellow detectives had been when they listened to Kyreacos’s tape. He said nothing as he digested this information. Up until this moment, it had been his word against that of a man with a long reputation of breaking the law. Tappan had been a hero, a good cop who had suffered grievous wounds in a gun battle with a punk.

“You’re under arrest, Stan,” Reed said. “The charge is murder in the first degree. You have the right to—”

“I know. I know. I know that by heart.”

Reed finished the Miranda warning anyway, and then put a handcuff on Tappan’s uninjured right hand. He was transported at once to the infirmary at the King County jail in the upper floors of the courthouse. He was right across the street from his old office in the Burglary Unit of police headquarters, but his whole world had changed.

Dick Reed and several other homicide detectives went out for stiff drinks after their shift ended, but liquor didn’t help the sick feeling they had. Arresting a fellow officer is a terrible thing to have to do—but Reed had had no choice.

Chief of Police George Tielsch dismissed Stan Tappan from the department. His career as a police officer was probably over, even if he should be acquitted of the charges against him.

In a case that was already complicated enough, the FBI entered for a time. Although it seemed ludicrous, Tappan’s attorneys asserted that his civil rights had been violated. In Washington State, it is illegal to tape-record someone without his or her permission. If indeed Tappan had deliberately shot Nick Kyreacos and Kyreacos had recorded his own murder without informing Tappan that he was being taped, the defense team maintained, the former detective had been deprived of his civil rights.

Soon enough, that argument was tossed out, although the defense attorneys would bring it up again at trial. For Dick Reed and Don Strunk, the investigation was far from over. They sought anyone who might have been a witness to the shooting,
and
they looked for the mysterious woman who had twice called Kyreacos at the restaurant, the last time a few hours before he died.

They didn’t find the woman, but they did find Arthur Glidden,* a young construction worker who had been on his way to attend classes at Seattle Community College shortly after six on the night of November 30. He had stopped for a red light at Pike and Boren streets and he’d glanced idly at two men on the sidewalk. Something about their body language caught his interest.

“The tall man in the dark raincoat looked like he was holding a gun on the small guy,” Glidden told Reed and Strunk. “And then they disappeared into the alley. I was curious enough that I circled the block twice. The second time around, I heard gunshots. Now, I had to see what had happened and I circled back one more time. This time, I saw the guy in the dark raincoat kind of staggering or weaving out of the alley. I stopped my car then, and went over to some cops who had just arrived.”

Glidden was haunted by the face of the small man. “He looked right at me when he was being led around the corner. I recognized him lying there on the ground.”

The witness was something of a gun buff himself, and he said he owned both a .45 and a .38. He was positive that the tall man had been holding a .45, with a six-inch barrel against the short man’s arm.

There was another eyewitness, an elderly woman who lived on the third floor of the apartment house that abutted the alley. “I was watching the six o’clock news,” she recalled. “I thought the shots were on the news—and then I realized they were outside. I pulled my curtains back a little and peeked out. The man in the black raincoat had the smaller man’s right arm in his left hand. There was some ‘object’ in his right hand too.”

“Could you see what it was?” Reed asked.

“I’m not sure. I guess I looked away for a few moments, and then I heard more shots—maybe four or five. When I looked again, I saw the man in the raincoat limping into the parking lot at the mortgage company.”

As they made their way door to door around the shooting site, the detective team found a number of witnesses who had heard the shots: the woman courier for the message company, the manager of the Cadillac dealership, and medical personnel from the detox center who had rushed out to help the wounded men. But none of them had actually viewed the scene during the few moments when shots were fired. They had only heard the gunfire echo in the alley.

Stan Tappan was a confirmed womanizer, and, despite his marriage, the investigation turned up a few dozen women who were close to him in one way or another. Some of them had posed for him for nude shots, some worked with him, and some had dated him before his most recent marriage. But Dick Reed and Don Strunk never located the mysterious woman who had lured Nick Kyreacos to his death. They realized that even the woman herself might not have known why she was calling him; she might only have been doing Stan a favor.

More likely, she had read about Stan’s arrest, and didn’t want to become involved in the case.

Stan Tappan’s trial began four months after Kyreacos’s death. He had lost close to thirty pounds in jail, and he strode past a circus of reporters, microphones, and television cameras with his eyes straight ahead and his jaw clenched tightly. Interest on the press bench was so intense that the sought-after location next to the prosecutor’s table—designed to hold seven—often had a dozen reporters packed so closely together that we could barely take notes.

Spectators lined the marble hallways and overflowed the available seats. Court deputies allowed new onlookers in one at a time, only as others left.

Bill Lanning was the lead defense attorney. A deceptively folksy, garrulous man who had many friends in law enforcement, he could be as clever as a fox in cross-examination. Lanning was assisted by Bob Bryan. Senior Deputy King County Prosecutor Michael Ruark spoke for the State, assisted by Deputy Prosecutor Marco Magnano.

Everyone in the courtroom was there to hear “the tape,” which had been held in a locked safe-deposit box in a Seattle bank. King County’s Chief Criminal Deputy Prosecutor David Boerner and Seattle Police Homicide Lieutenant Patrick Murphy had taken it there together, and both of them had to be present for it to be removed. The defense wanted it excluded from the trial, arguing that it would be inflammatory if the jurors should hear it. They likened it to a “television set with the picture blacked out,” hinting that Nick Kyreacos could have “pre-recorded” the tape, or edited it at the scene.

“There is a tremendous danger of convicting a man on a tape that can’t tell us what it hears,” Lanning and Bryan submitted.

Mike Ruark said the tape should be allowed to speak for itself. All the voices had been identified by credible witnesses and the chain of custody was impeccable. “This is not a vacuum situation,” Ruark said. “We have presented witnesses who verify every step of that tape and what it is purported to have recorded.”

The prosecution’s theory about what happened on November 20 was that Stan Tappan had arranged for an unknown woman to lure Kyreacos to the dark alley where Tappan had waited with
two
fully-loaded guns: his police issue .38 and the untraceable “drop gun,” the .45. Tappan had, they submitted, then accosted Kyreacos, chased him, and forced him back up the alley away from the street, where he had shot him quite deliberately as Kyreacos pleaded for his life.

That would account for the first spate of gunshots on the tape. The single shot might have been the coup de grâce, causing either the wound in Kyreacos’s forehead or that in his chest, more likely the former. And then, after the pause, there had been two more shots—some distance away from the microphone. Stan Tappan had suffered two wounds that turned out to be essentially flesh wounds. The .45 wound to his left hand had sliced only through the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger, taking with it some tissue and muscle. The prosecutors felt that the injury in the area of his waist looked as if he had intentionally tugged the fatty layer there away from his ribs and muscles to be sure a self-administered bullet wouldn’t damage any vital organs.

Painful? Certainly—probably far more painful than he had expected. Life threatening? No.

Stan Tappan maintained the same stoic mien throughout his trial, glancing occasionally at witnesses who had been close friends, and at reporters who knew him. Even as Judge David Hunter began to rule on whether the mystery tape would be admitted, Tappan betrayed no emotion.

Hunter said he did not believe that the Kyreacos tape contained a “private conversation,” as stipulated by statutes governing tape recording without the permission of both parties.

“I suspect the victim was going to have a conversation about bribing someone—something that he intended to record. He didn’t plan to tape his own death. The interpretation of the tape is open for both the defense and the prosecution. I find, therefore, that the state has laid a proper foundation for the admission of this tape.”

The press bench was on alert. Hunter specifically warned members of the media that the tape was not to be recorded. Just as Nick Kyreacos had carried a book-sized recorder to the murder, anyone in the media would have needed a very hard-to-hide device to capture the words about to fill the courtroom. One radio reporter had, of all things, a rubber chicken in his coat pocket, a running gag he perpetuated during courtroom breaks. Some of us wondered if he had somehow managed to hide a recorder inside the chicken. A local TV anchorman sat bolt upright, his attaché case balanced on his knees. He guarded his briefcase so carefully that he seemed the most likely suspect. The rest of us had only yellow legal pads and pens clutched in our hands, ready to write.