A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (14 page)

Brimmer found two guns in the bedroom section of the living room.

A loaded shotgun leaned against the wall, and a 30-30 lever-action rifle, a Marlin, was lying under the bed. It too was loaded. "l unloaded both of the weapons," Brimmer said later. "I smelled the barrels. There were no empty rounds in the chambers, and there was no odor of fresh burnt gunpowder in either." All the while the detectives moved around the Moore apartment, taking pictures, measuring, Gabby Moore's body lay on the little throw rug. They all assumed he had suffered a fatal heart attack. But, because of the recent murder of Morris Blankenbaker, they were taking extra care as they processed the apartment. They looked in a trash can in the kitchen and saw the Ten high whiskey bottle with perhaps a "finger" of liquor in the bottom. Brimmer was unable to bring up any usable prints, only prints on top of other prints that left unreadable smudges. Brimmer and Detective Howard Cyr stood over Gabby Moore's body.

He looked quite peaceful now in the darkest moments of the long Christmas Eve-Christmas Day night. Whatever had killed him, he had died, it appeared, almost instantly. It was time to have his body removed.

Chances were that there might not even be an autopsy not with his history of high blood pressure. Brimmer knew, of course, that Gabby had been hospitalized for hypertension only a month before. "We had taken measurements, we photographed the scene, and there was absolutely no evidence," Brimmer recalled, "and then I got down on my hands and knees and I was looking at this small rug on which he was lying and I detected a small spot." Brimmer enlisted Cyr to help him roll Gabby's body over so that he could investigate the speck of red on the rug. Probably catsup or something. "We moved Mr. Moore from his original position," Brimmer said.

"At that point in time, a quantity of blood oozed from the body through this opening in the left shoulder area." The detectives, who were rarely startled by anything, were shocked. Even with their combined years of experience in investigating deaths, they couldn't believe that there could be this much free blood and not one spot on Gabby Moore's white T-shirt. They could see now, however, what had happened.

Gabby Moore had been shot in the side beneath his left armpit. As long as he lay on the cold linoleum floor of his kitchen with his own considerable weight compressing the wound, the blood was walled back.

There had been no sign at all that a bullet had pierced his body.

But once they changed the position of his body, the huge amount of blood inside his chest had begun to seep through the wound beneath his left shoulder. It didn't gush as it would from a live person whose heart's beating would pump it out in geysers. The blood only leaked as any fluid would through an inanimate object with a hole in it. Somewhere along the way, the tangled skein of Gabby's and Morris's personal relationships seemed to have caught them up and trapped them until they had come to a place where they could not get free. And now neither of them ever would.

It was eleven A.M, on Christmas Day. But it did not seem like a holiday in the clean white room where a bright light illuminated the metal table and the air smelled of dried blood and disinfectant. Dr. Richard Muzzall bent once again to perform an autopsy on a most unlikely murder victim Thirty-three days to the hour since Morris Blankenbaker's postmorten exam, it was Gabby Moore's turn. Some of the men in the room had been there on November 22: Besides Muzzall, there was Sergeant Brimmer and Detective Vern Henderson. Detective Howard Cyr was there too, and Jeff Sullivan joined them now. The young prosecuting attorney had been elected to office the year before. He and his seven deputy prosecutors took turns being on call to attend autopsies. Sullivan knew it was vital that someone from his office be present at postmortems. When Bob Brimmer had called him before dawn on this Christmas Day, he had elected to forego a celebration with his family. Moore's death astonished him as much as the rest of them.

"Up to that point," Sullivan recalled, "I felt that Gabby was somehow involved in Morris's death, but I'd been out to the hospital and I knew he couldn't have done it himself We figured maybe he had hired someone to do it. When Gabby was shot too, I didn't know what to think." All of them watched intently as Muzzall lifted his scalpel and made the initial cut. Muzzall's first gross examination of the body of Gabby Moore, forty-four years and three days old, was that he had sustained a gunshot wound to the tert posterior, lateral chest. That was all, there were no other mj urles. Muzzall made the first Y-shaped incision from shoulder to shoulder, and at the midpoint, a vertical cut down to the pubic bone.

There had clearly been tremendous damage to the organs in the upper part of Moore's body and it was necessary to remove the front ribs and the breastbone so that the coroner could examine the dead man's heart and lungs. Gabby Moore had died from a massive hemorrhage "secondary to a bullet wound passing through both chest cavities and the heart," Muzzall explained. "After entering the muscles of the left posterior chest, the bullet struck the fourth rib hereon the left," he said, pointing. "Then it deflected. That changed the angle of its course so that it traveled transversely through the chest passing through the left lung, entering the left side of the heart what we call the pulmonary outflow tract where the right ventricle pumps blood into the lungs." Seldom had any of the men in the quiet room seen such damage from a lone bullet. Muzzall showed them where the slug had passed out the right side of the heart and through the right lung, lodging finally underneath the fourth rib on the victim's right side. "There are approximately two thousand cc's of blood in the left chest," he said. "That's about four pints. I'd say fifteen hundred cc'sthree pint sin the right chest, and another three hundred cc's in the pericardial sac the membranous sac that surrounds the heart." Half the blood in Moore's body had gushed out into his chest cavities, and yet only a slight fleck of red had stained the rug beneath him. Muzzall likened the bullet's effect on Moore's heart to cutting a garden house with an ax. "You hemorrhage out exceedingly rapidly," he said. "I'm sure that he lost consciousness within less than a minute and was probably dead in three or four at the most." Pathologists often use metal probes to figure the angle at which a bullet enters a body. Dr. Muzzall inserted the probe and showed the investigators watching that the bullet had entered directly below the victim's left armpit at the fourth rib, a shot into his "side" in laymen's terms. Had the bullet continued down at the angle it entered, forty-five degrees, Muzzall said that he doubted that it would have been a fatal wound. It probably would have gone through a portion of the left lung, but in all likelihood would have missed the heart and come out somewhere in the front of the chest. However, once it hit the fourth rib, it deflected. The probe went horizontally across the chest, following the path of the bullet that had penetrated the heart and both lungs. At this point, Muzzall's conclusions didn't seem as important as they would later. What did it matter the angle at which a bullet had entered? Or that it had traveled inside the body? Gabby Moore was dead, he had been dead almost from the moment he hit the kitchen floor. Muzzall retrieved only one bullet, a.

22 caliber slug, that was very distorted after it had smashed into the fourth rib on the left. These bullets are notorious for their unpredictability. They are small caliber and if they pass only through soft tissue, they do minimal damage. However,. 22s cut through the air with such velocity that they have been known to kill a target a half mile away. A larger caliber bullet stops a victim in his tracks and knocks him down, doing tremendous damage. The speeding. 22 slug is given to tumbling when it hits a bone and is far more likely to ricochet than a larger bullet. A .22 slug that comes into contact with a bone is like a car without a driver bouncing heedlessly from one obstacle in its path to the next. Gabby Moore had been alive at eleven P.M. the night before christmas Eve. He had been alive, according to his former father-in-law, at 12:15 A.M. when Dr. Myers talked to him on the phone and the two planned a lunch date for December 26. He was dead when his son came home an hour to an hour and a half later. What had happened during that vital and mysterious time period?

Had someone forced hisor her way into Gabby's apartment, pulled down the blinds to hide what was going on inside from the neighbors, leaving the back door propped open with a brick to assure a quick and fluid getaway?

Ever since Morris Blankenbaker's murder, Gabby Moore had been telling intimates that someone was stalking him too, and that he was afraid for himself and his family. No one had taken Gabby very seriously when he insisted that someone was trying to get to him, just the way they had got to Morris. He had tried to tell Jerilee about it, to convince her that not only was he innocent of any implication in Morris's death, but that he was in danger too. He had sworn to Jerilee that he would prove to her he was not involved in any collusion in Morris's murder. Had he had to die to prove his innocence to her? Or was it possible that the real answers to two seemingly senseless murders were more bizarre than anything a fiction writer could possibly dream up? Now Gabby was dead too, murdered too. The answers were not going to come from him. Although both of the victims were coaches, both had been shot with a. 22 caliber gun, both had been married to the same woman, and both had been killed during the holidays, there were dissimilarities too. Just as he had during the Blankenbaker autopsy, Dr. Muzzall had removed a blood sample from Gabby Moore to check for any alcohol content. Morris had had no percentage of alcohol at all in his blood, Gabby's reading was almost.

31. In Washington State, as in most states,. 10 is considered evidence of intoxication. Gabby Moore had done a remarkable job of convincing Dr. Myers that he had had only a "little" to drink. It was amazing that he was still standing when he was shot. For a person unused to drinking, much beyond. 30 is life threatening, Gabby had undoubtedly developed a tolerance to liquor over the past few years, but even so,. 31 was startling.

The killer had had the advantage over both victims, Morris had quite likely been taken by surprise. Gabby would have been too drunk to fight back. On Friday, December 26, the Yakima Hera/d-Republic headlined the news that another popular local coach had been murdered: "Tied to Blankenbaker Slaying? Davis Mat Coach Moore Shot, Killed." Dr. Myers was as shocked as anyone. After all, he had spoken to Gabby within an hour or so of his death. Now, he remembered an odd question that Gabby had asked him once something that had no meaning at the time. Gabby had wanted to know if there was any place on the human body where a person could be shot not in an arm or a leg, but part of the torso where it wouldn't be fatal. Myers had pondered the question for a moment and then said that most people could probably sustain a gunshot wound in the shoulder blade and it probably wouldn't hit any vital organs. From what he understood, Gabby had been shot somewhere near his shoulder. It was odd and troubling to think that what he had taken to be a casual conversation might have had a purpose, although for the life of him he couldn't imagine what that purpose might be. To the media's frustration, Prosecutor Jeff Sullivan was playing his cards very close to his vest, and anyone outside the investigation was getting very little information. "It's a real tragedy," Sullivan said. "I'm very concerned.

The police are working on it. So far we have nobody in custody, no answers." And, indeed, there did not seem to be any answers. From all reports, Gabby Moore had been his own worst enemy. Neither the Yakima Police nor the Yakima County Prosecutor had any idea who had reason to kill him. He had lost a lot of his credibility but not his popularity.

Revenge for Morris s murder seemed an unlikely motive.

Everyone who knew Gabby well knew he had been in the hospital when Morris died. It seemed unlikely that anyone would be so convinced that Gabby had a finger in Morris's murder that he had murdered Gabby in reprisal. Moreover, Morris Blankenbaker's friends were good solid guys athletes some the men who had worked climbing telephone poles with him, some who had gone to school with him. No, detectives couldn't believe that any of them had killed Gabby for revenge. They had no proof. Even if they had had evidence linking Gabby to Morris's murder, they would have gone to the police and not taken justice into their own hands. The obituaries for Gabby Moore were all glowing, reminding Yakimans of what he had done for sports in their town. No mention was made of the fact that Gabby Moore had been asked to leave Davis High School at the end of the school year. In death, he had somehow regained the respectability that he had lost in life. The quotes from his superiors made it sound almost as if the administration regretted firing him. Yakima School Superintendent Warren Dean Starr told the press, "We're shocked. He's been a fine employee and an outstanding wrestling coach. The administration is just sick about it." Funeral services for Gabby Moore were held on December 29, 197S, in the Central Lutheran Church in Yakima. Dr. Charles Wilkes of the First Church of the Nazarene officiated. Gabby's family suggested that memorials be given to the Davis Wrestling Team or Yakima Youth Baseball. There was a decent-sized group of mourners, but not nearly as many as those who had come to pay their respects to Morris Blankenbaker five weeks before. The apartment on Eighteenth Street that had become a shrine to Jerilee was vacated.

Derek Moore went to live with his mother, sisters, and stepfather.

Jerilee Blankenbaker looked for a way to pick up the fragments of her life. If she was afraid, few would blame her. Both of her husbands had been murdered within five weeks, and the police had no idea who the killer was. It was easy to imagine all kinds of frightening scenarios.

She wondered sometimes if she did have a phantom admirer, someone even more obsessed with her than Gabby had been. What if there was still someone out there who was watching her, now that the men in her life were dead? What had happened already was beyond comprehension. She could no longer believe in a safe, protected existence, she knew that the whole world could blow up without warning. For her, it had done so.