MADNESS, SEX, SERIAL KILLER: A Disturbing Collection of True Crime Cases by Two Masters of the Genre Read online

  MADNESS

  SEX

  SERIAL KILLER

  Gregg Olsen and M. William Phelps

  Copyright © 2014 by Gregg Olsen and M. William Phelps

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the authors.

  Table of Contents

  THE SERIAL KILLERS DOWN THE ROAD

  Ted

  Gary

  Robert

  Photo Archive I

  DANCE WITH THE DEVIL

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  THE EASTBOUND STRANGLER

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  NOTHING THIS EVIL EVER DIES

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Photo Archive II

  About the authors

  M.William Phelps

  Gregg Olsen

  Also by M. William Phelps

  Also by Gregg Olsen

  THE SERIAL KILLERS DOWN THE ROAD

  by Gregg Olsen

  IT’S AS TRUE AS THERE ARE STARBUCKS ON EVERY CORNER. When it comes to the Seattle area and serial killers, if you swing a dead cat (fitting, right?) you’ll surely hit a body dumpsite. We’ve had so many of them here. We don’t brag about it, of course. But we don’t deny it, either. We just know that serial killers are a part of the Northwest.

  They just are.

  My coauthor M. William Phelps has had his own brush with serial killers – both as the star of Investigation Discovery’s Dark Minds, and more tragically, his own sister-in-law was murdered by one. He’s talked about that crime extensively and along with his expertise as a crime author, is proof positive that he knows of what he speaks.

  I’m no M. William Phelps, that’s for sure. But when I look at the trajectory of my life I can easily see where my path has crossed that of a serial killer. More than a time or two. In fact, at least three. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time. The first serial killer that I’ll mention here was the inspiration for Fear Collector, my latest thriller.

  Ted

  WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, MY PARENTS TOOK MY BROTHERS AND ME to Lake Sammamish State Park, east of where I grew up in the suburbs of Seattle. It was July 14, 1974. When we arrived it was so busy, so wall-to-wall packed with people, cars and boats, that we could not find a place to park the car. My dad circled the parking lot once or twice and gave up.

  So much for a family outing.

  Shortly thereafter we learned that two young women went missing from the park that very day. I can still see Denise Naslund and Janice Ott’s photographs in my mind. I think many of us in the Northwest picture those girls. They were beautiful, young, with cascades of dark hair.

  They looked like many of the girls who would fill the pages of the Seattle Times for many years.

  With Denise and Janice’s disappearance, we finally had a name for the menace who was stealing our sisters, girlfriends, daughters. “Ted.” We also knew he had a VW. His arm was in a sling. He’d asked some girls to help him get his sailboat onto his car. Some refused. Janice and Denise had helped the stranger.

  Theodore Robert Bundy had been at Lake Sammamish that same day my dad circled the parking lot before giving up and heading back home. We – meaning all of us in the Pacific Northwest – were in the midst of a murder spree that changed and challenged what we thought who and what might be evil incarnate. Ted was handsome. Educated. He was charismatic and charming. He trolled college campuses for women, who some psychologists later said resembled a girlfriend who had jilted him.

  As nearly everyone who studies crime knows, Ted is one of the worst serial killers in the annals of crime. Not for his number of victims – another of Seattle’s own, Gary Ridgway beats Bundy’s horrific kill count by almost double. Ted admitted to killing 35 before being put to death in Florida’s electric chair. He was the worst because he just didn’t seem like the type. There was nothing “weird” or “creepy” about him.

  Before Ted we always thought a murderer looked scary. Not like the boy next door.

  Songs always bring me back to the time and place. The number one song at the time we went looking for that parking space at the lake was “Rock Your Baby” by George McCrae.

  Gary

  TEN YEARS LATER, WHEN I WAS 26 AND NEWLY MARRIED, my wife and I worked at a camping company creating the content and art for its membership magazine. The offices were located near SeaTac Airport and our apartment was in Federal Way, about ten miles south. Every day we’d commute on Military Road past Star Lake, a dilapidated shopping center, and a pet cemetery. During that time the news had covered a series of murders attributed to a man dubbed the Green River Killer – for the location of one of his primary body dump sites.

  Swing a dead cat? Oh yes.

  In March of 1984, the remains of four women – Delores Williams, seventeen; Terry Milligan, sixteen; Sandra Grabbert, seventeen; and Alma Smith, eighteen – was discovered. There were others there too, including Gail Mathews, twenty-three and Carrie Rois, fifteen.

  All the time I was working at the camping company, Gary Ridgway, a truck painter, who lived a mile two away from our office, was hunting in our midst – and had been since 1982 when the first victims were found along the banks of the Green River. His MO was simple. He invited young prostitutes into his vehicle, took them to his home or to a remote site, and strangled them to death.

  While we were going on with our normal lives, going to work, out to dinner, catching a plane for a vacation from the Northwest gloom, Ridgway was doing what he did. Relentless. Shark-like. No one knows for sure how many he killed – he admitted to 49 so that he’d be spared the death penalty. Some experts think the number of his victims could be doubled.

  He’s a killer, a coward, and the state showed more mercy than he ever did.

  The number one song when the Star Lake cluster of bodies was found was “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins.

  Robert

  WHEN I WAS IN MY MID-THIRTIES AND THE FATHER of two, we decided to move our family to Olalla, Washington, a tiny community on a peninsula across Puget Sound from Seattle and Tacoma. It seemed like a better place to raise two young girls. On my first day there, a woodworker told me about Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard and her serial killing spree around the turn of the 20th century. I was intrigued and eventually wrote the book, Starvation Heights. Today, I live on land that was platted and named for one of her victims.

  But Dr. Hazzard is not the serial killer whose path I crossed that I’m including here. I’m thinking of another.

  On August 25, 1995, word circu
lated that a woman’s body was found up on Peacock Hill Road in Olalla. She’d been wrapped in a sleeping bag and tucked into a ditch on the side of the road about a mile from where I live. Her name, we learned, was Patricia Barnes. She’d been many things in her sad life, including homeless. She’d last been seen in the Seattle area.

  It was only later that we learned that Patricia was a victim of Robert Lee Yates, Jr., a man who’d murdered more than a half dozen women in Spokane and other parts of Washington state. His spree went undetected by his wife and five children for years. Like Ridgway, he targeted street girls (though oddly, his first victims many years earlier were a young couple out on a date).

  While most victims were dumped in rural areas like near our home in Olalla, one had been buried outside Robert Yates’ bedroom window in Spokane – right under his wife’s nose.

  The Yates case was messy story of an Army National Guardsman, a pilot, an upstanding citizen, masquerading as normal. It was about a man who sought power and sex and showed not one whit of mercy. While I don’t favor the death penalty as a rule, I’m glad that he’s now on Death Row. I wish Ridgway was there, too.

  For a long time, when I drove down Peacock Hill, I tried to find the spot where Patricia had been dumped like garbage. There was no marker like there often are for accident victims. I haven’t thought about her in a while. And yet I know someone out there misses her.

  The number one song the week Patricia was murdered was the “Macarena” by Los Del Rio.

  I’m sure wherever you live, you can think of terrible crimes that happened nearby. Maybe the next town over? From where I live, all I have to do is look around.

  The serial killers in the Northwest were – and maybe still are – all around us.

  Photo Archive I

  Ted Bundy

  Gary Ridgeway

  Linda Burfield Hazzard and her husband Samuel CHazzard

  DANCE WITH THE DEVIL

  Behind the Scenes of Investigation Discovery’s “Dark Minds”

  by M. William Phelps

  Introduction

  THIS E-BOOK SHORT IS DESIGNED AS A behind-the-scenes look at the investigation and production process involved in filming my Investigation Discovery series, “Dark Minds.” My hope in writing these shorts is to give the viewer of the series a deeper understanding of what I do, how I go about choosing cases, and why my involvement in these unsolved murders is, of course, for the purposes of entertaining an audience on television. But more importantly, it’s my hope to shed new light on cold cases—some of which have gone unsolved for nearly 40 years—and, with any luck, unearth new information. With the public’s help, serial murder cases are solvable. That is the model we work under on “Dark Minds.”

  Each case I chose for this series was done with the help of my production company, Beyond Productions, and what is the best group of people in television at Investigation Discovery. Each focuses on a series of murders that I believed needed the careful and renewed attention of a hungry investigator willing to bang on doors, ask tough questions, reach out to the people who didn’t want to talk to police, and uncover information that could further the investigation along.

  Our hope is to reignite a stagnant investigation, not to walk into town and point fingers. I didn’t want to play in the same box as other journalists had before me, and even some investigators, as a particular case evolved. What purpose would questioning the work of others serve? My aim was to rattle the cage of the case with the hope that, along with the assistance of the public and my expertise and experience, a little bird flew out and led police in the right direction.

  In some of these cases, I worked closely with police; in others, I walked a fine line between talking to the family members of victims, interviewing witnesses (and even suspects), and being led astray by knuckleheads. I did so knowing all the while that I would hand over anything of significance I found to law enforcement. My goal—always—is to help law enforcement, never to get in the way or mock and make enemies of those people. Any cop I have ever interviewed can attest to my integrity and personal belief that murder cases are about the victims, their families, and the justice both deserve. My intention is to help families and victims of crime heal by providing answers—and, as a bonus, hopefully help to put scumbag killers in prison, where they belong.

  The idea of involving an actual serial killer in this hunt was something I had wanted to do for a long time. The information and insight only a (convicted and imprisoned) serial killer can add is so important when hunting these creeps, simply because non-sociopaths like you or me do not think the same way as a serial killer (sociopath/psychopath). I don’t feel people in general give that idea enough credence. A sociopath views the world differently. In order to understand that dark mind, and hopefully gain some insight into it (obtaining information that can help solve cases—yes, like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs). So who better to ask than someone who has walked in those same evil footsteps?

  His code name on “Dark Minds” is “13,” and he is a unique individual in this regard. It took John Kelly, the expert profiler I return to in every episode, ten years of conversations to understand how this killer could help—not through a television show, mind you, but in Kelly’s work (the TV show came later). I don’t want to get too far into this thread of “Dark Minds” here in my e-books, because I believe Kelly does the best job during the series of explaining 13’s role. And, obviously, 13 speaks for himself quite emphatically and chillingly.

  All that said, please enjoy this brief exclusive look at the series from my perspective as I go out and hunt these wackos. But understand that what you are about to read is my opinion. It is not the opinion of Investigation Discovery, Beyond Productions, John Kelly, or anyone else involved in “Dark Minds.” The e-book shorts accompanying the series are my own creation, the content based solely on my own findings and those interviews I conducted for the show and behind the scenes as I got to know my sources. I took extensive notes every day while on the road. I collected thousands of pages of documents. My intention is not to claim superiority over anyone, to speak for anyone, or to undermine other opinions on the same cases. I am merely writing about my personal experiences, feelings and recollections as I recall them.

  Any mistakes, errors, misquotes, etc., are on me. I accept responsibility. I simply want viewers of “Dark Minds” to be able to enjoy a deeper experience within the context of my work on the series. I hope these e-book shorts can accomplish that.

  Prologue

  IT WAS THE LOOK ON HER FACE AND THE UNMISTAKABLE pain present in her scratchy voice. The sheer need this woman harbored deep down to have an answer. It is a recurring theme serial killers leave in their wake: and they enjoy this part of it. Locked away in prison, their lives wasting away on death row or a small, dingy, smelly cell, some of their evil still has a hold on victims’ families.

  “Just find out who killed my daughter...” she said to me.

  My heart sunk. It was one of the first things Aletta Goodwin said to me as we spoke. She had asked me this on the telephone a few months before. “Can you prove that he did it?”

  He. Indeed, neither of us had to say his name.

  I thought I knew the answer to Aletta’s question. In fact, not only did I believe I knew who had killed Aletta’s 30-year-old daughter—Jane Goodwin, a name that has haunted me since 2007—but he was serving a life sentence in a Cheshire, Connecticut, prison. But that sentence was for murdering a Hartford, Connecticut woman, Carmen Rodriquez—this after strangling and stabbing a second victim he had once dated, Karen Osman, in 1983, a beautiful and young Rutgers graduate aspiring to one day be a veterinarian—and nearly killing a third after choking her unconscious and stabbing her multiple times in the chest during a brutal sexual assault. With a résumé like that, it was hard for me to exclude this monster from Jane’s murder. Plus, I had uncovered several pieces of information that connected him directly to Jane.

  The road to these conclusions and m
y “dance” with Edwin “Ned” Snelgrove, the devil in the title of this final episode of DARK MINDS (season one), actually began after I wrote a letter to him. Ned’s a two-time murderer who served eleven years in a New Jersey prison for killing Karen Osman (but was paroled with good time served) at Rutgers University, where Karen and Ned went to college together, and for later sexually assaulting and stabbing another woman, Mary Ellen Renard. I embarked on the journey of writing a book, “I’ll Be Watching You,” about Ned Snelgrove in early 2007. I had followed Ned’s case for many years. What follows in this e-book is the continuation of that story and how I came to the conclusion, in my opinion, that Ned could have had something to do with Jane Goodwin’s murder and turned that into an episode of DARK MINDS. For the first time, I am publishing original documents connected to Ned Snelgrove, including the chilling letters he wrote to me and a judge. Ned is a vicious serial killer—and his own words tell that story in a way only a man with the mind of a monster can.