A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (38 page)

"I've never heard a scream like that before. It was kind of a moaning scream like someone was being hurt, not like someone had just knocked the coffeepot off." The sheriff's office sent out a teletype on the missing couple to all police agencies in the area. They were described as Walter L. "Walt" Buckley, twenty-six years old, 5'9" tall. He weighed 180

pounds and had light brown hair and a mustache. Lori Buckley was 5'5", weighed pounds and had long brown hair. Their missing car was a light green Chevrolet Vega bearing Oregon plates: DRY255. Detectives canvassed the neighborhood along Cedar Court looking for someone else who might have seen or heard anything unusual during the early morning hours. But no one had.

A complete crime scene search of the duplex and its carefully tended yard disclosed more unusual or misplaced items. There was a Tab bottle cap on the kitchen counter, and bits of a Tab label and pieces of bottle glass under the sewing machine in the master bedroom. There were fragments of bloodstained glass behind the dresser on the north wall.

There was evidence of blood residue in the bathtub and on the drain plug. The clean, folded flower-patterned sheets that rested on the blue mattress were flecked with blood. A man's large sized T-shirt and a knit shirt taken from a clothing basket in the bedroom were slightly stained with some red material. All of the bloodstains were tested and proved to be Type A. An amazing response to the sheriff's teletype came from the Oregon State Police office in Lincoln City, a resort town on the Oregon coast. The state police reported that a Lori Buckley had been killed that morning in a traffic accident along the Van Duzer Corridor. The corridor is a winding highway between the Pacific Ocean coast towns and inland cities. The fatal accident in which Lori Buckley had been killed was almost fifty miles from the duplex where she lived. The detectives shook their heads. How could that be? How could the Blames have heard screams on the other side of their bedroom wall at three A.M. when Lori was in an accident so far away? If they had been men who believed in ghosts, which very few detectives are, they might have come up with some otherworldly scenarios. It took the Marion County detectives a number of phone calls before they established that Walt Buckley was alive but had been injured in the accident that killed his wife. The Oregon State Police said he had been taken to a hospital in Lincoln City in Lincoln County. The next report that seemed connected to the increasingly peculiar case was a call from Sergeant Lee Miller of the Polk County Sheriff's Office. Polk County lies between Marion County and Lincoln County and the Buckleys would have had to pass through it to get to Lincoln City. Miller said a hiker had found a pile of bloody bedding sheets, blankets, a bedspread, and a mattress pad among the forest undergrowth along Mill Creek Road in Polk County. Jim Byrnes checked the description of the bed linen against that of the list of the bedding found in the Buckleys' duplex. He found many similarities. Byrnes and Dave Kominek left Salem and headed over to the coast.

Crime lab technicians went to Polk County to pick up and bag the blood-soaked bedding found along a narrow dirt logging road. When Jim Byrnes and Dave Kominek arrived at the scene of the fatal traffic accident, the Buckleys' Vega had already on Highway 18 P.M aware that there was precious little daylight left. But they could see where the Vega had gone off the shoulder of the road. It had crushed vegetation when it went over the bank and then dropped about twelve feet through a thick stand of fir trees. The two Marion County investigators commented to each other that there were no skid marks or torn-up areas on the shoulder of the highway, there were only parallel tracks in the soft dirt and grass. Oregon State Troopers Michael Luka and Wayne Price had been the first to respond to the report of the accident. A log truck driver had called for help over his CB radio. The trucker told the troopers that he had seen a man lying beside the road shortly after eight that morning. He had managed to call for an ambulance by relaying his emergency request through two other CB-ers. "Then I got out of my rig and ran to help the guy in the road."

"Did he say anything?" Luka had asked.

The trucker had shaken his head. "He kept repeating, Lori.

Lori." Then I looked down through the trees and spotted the green car down in there." Luka and Price told the Marion County detectives that they found Lori Buckley lying outside the Vega. Her feet had been partially under the right door, and her head was resting on a pillow.

Someone had covered her with coats. But Lori Buckley had been dead for a long time when the troopers got to her. They had photographed her body where it lay in the fir forest, and then released it to a mortuary. Her husband, Walt Buckley, had been rushed to Lincoln City for treatment.

There was no question that the Walt and Lori Buckley who had been in the accident along the Van Duzer Corridor were the same Walt and Lori Buckley who lived on Cedar Court. But Jim Byrnes and Dave Kominek were still trying to figure out just how they ended up miles away, almost at the Pacific Ocean. Walt Buckley had given statements about the accident to Trooper Price both at the scene and at the hospital. According to Price, he had explained that he and his wife had left Salem the afternoon before. They had planned to drive to the coast for dinner.

They had eaten at the popular Pixie Kitchen in Lincoln City. He said they had decided to drive south a short way to have an after-dinner drink at the lounge in the plush Salishan Lodge. Buckley told Price he and his wife had left for Salem about midnight. They were on their way home when the accident occurred. Buckley said they had lain in the ditch beside the highway all night waiting for help. He had done what he could to make his wife comfortable and to keep her warm. The ambulance attendant who had transported Walt Buckley told the detectives that Buckley had been very tense so tense that he had held his arms tight against his chest. Both of his fists were tightly clenched and full of dirt and grass. He had kept his eyes closed and mumbled incoherently as the EMT checked him for injuries. Although he had appeared to be seriously hurt, his injuries had proved to be only superficial. It had looked like a normal, if tragic, accident. At her husband's request, Lori Buckley's body was scheduled to be embalmed as soon as possible.

However, the mortician who removed her body from the accident scene had been busy that Wednesday afternoon and several hours passed before he began the embalming procedure. He had just made the first cutan incision into the femoral artery of the thigh when the phone rang and Dave Kominek told him to stop immediately. Nothing was to be done to the body until the accident investigation was complete. Kominek went to the mortuary and viewed the corpse of Lori Buckley. He noted immediately that she had suffered many, many deep cuts around her face and shoulders. It would take a complete postmortem examination to establish the cause of death, but her injuries seemed far too severe to have been sustained in a car wreck in which the vehicle was damaged as slightly as the Vega had been. There had been only minimal damage to the right front fender and grill. The windshield on the right, where Lori had reportedly been sitting, was shattered in a wide "spiderweb," but it had not been broken clean through. It was safety glass The Highway Accident with no sharp edges that might have cut her face and upper body. Odd.

Kominek received the clothing that Lori Buckley had worn when she was found. He looked at the blood-soaked blue-and-white checked blouse and the jeans. There were no cuts or tears in the clothing. Marion County detectives questioned even what seemed obvious.

They interviewed personnel at both the Pixie Kitchen and the Salishan Lodge about the evening of February 24 to see if anyone remembered serving the Buckleys. The Pixie Kitchen, which was usually jammed with lines of people waiting to get in, had been rather quiet on Tuesday night, but none of the waitresses remembered serving the couple. One waitress said she would have remembered Lori particularly because she had been saving to get braces for her daughter and she noticed anyone with a similar dental problem. The Pixie Kitchen cashier said there had been no out-of-town checks or credit cards used by customers on Tuesday night. The cocktail waitresses and the bartender at Salishan Lodge were positive they had not served drinks to the Buckleys. It would be days before the widespread investigation could be coordinated and evaluated.

Lieutenant Jim Byrnes wanted to talk to Walt Buckley. Maybe Buckley would have some explanation as to why the edges of his story didn't come together cleanly. Byrnes talked first with the emergency room nurses at the Lincoln City Hospital. They had treated Walt Buckley at nine A.M. when the ambulance brought him in. One nurse said that his arms were stiff and shaking and that he had appeared to be in shock. He had cried out the same phrases over and over: "Lori where is she? I couldn't stop.

Lori yelled. I couldn't stop the bleeding," and "It's my fault."

"If he was acting, he sure was a good actor," the nurse commented.

She said that Buckley had stared into space and cried intermittently as he was being treated. One thing had been a little odd. Walt Buckley's feet had been very cold, as they would expect in someone who had lain out in the cold of a February night for hours. But his body was warm so warm that his temperature was up one degree above normal. The staff had thought it was strange that he hadn't shown signs of hypothermia. They had sedated Walt Buckley and he had grown a little calmer.

He had talked of how he and Lori had gone out to have a nice dinner. He told them he was a college student majoring in accounting. He had explained that Lori was supposed to be in Salem that morning so she could have braces put on her teeth. But when the nurses asked, "Was Lori your wife?" he had started to cry again. Jim Byrnes had to wait until almost six before he was allowed to talk with Walt Buckley. A local physician checked Buckley to be sure that he was well enough to talk to Byrnes. As the doctor left Walt's room, he nodded his consent and said, "He wants to talk to you and is very alert." Jim Byrnes had a fairly good idea what had happened to Lori Buckley. He didn't believe that Lori had been alive when the accident occurred, he felt she had either been dead or very badly injured when the Vega had pulled away from the duplex on Cedar Court at 4:30 in the morning. Now, as Dave Kominek stood by, Byrnes read Walt Buckley his rights under the Miranda ruling, and the widower signed the MIR card as Byrnes questioned him casually about subjects unconnected to the accident. He wanted to be sure that Buckley was alert enough to be questioned about his wife's death. Byrnes was surprised to find him as stable as the doctor had indicated. Asked what he remembered about the night before, Walt Buckley first repeated a version of the evening's events that, in essence, corresponded with what he had told troopers earlier. He said Lori had been very tired when she came home from school the day before. He had suggested that they go out to dinner so that she wouldn't have to cook. Lori had agreed happily to that, so they had driven over to the coast, leaving about six. He estimated that they had eaten dinner about eight at the Pixie Kitchen in Lincoln City. "What did you order?" Byrnes asked casually.

The Highway Accident "I had the salad bar plate, and Lori had the combination plate." Then, Buckley said, they had gone to Salishan Lodge where they had after-dinner drinks and walked on the beach. Oregon beaches are wonderfully smooth and wide when the tide is out, and tourists walk on them all the time. But Byrnes wondered how many people might have wanted to be out there after ten at night with a cold February wind blowing. He said nothing about his thoughts.

It had been very late, Buckley said, when they started home. Much too late, really. He hadn't realized how exhausted he was. He sighed heavily as he said that he had fallen asleep at the wheel. "The last thing I remembered was Lori yelling Walt!" and then the car ran off the road."

Walt Buckley had tears in his eyes as he recalled how he had tried to help his wife. He had covered Lori up the best he could and tried to talk to her, but she hadn't responded at all. Finally, he had crawled up the bank to get to the road. He had hoped a car would come by and he could signal for help. But they had lain there for hours before the log truck stopped. Jim Byrnes let silence fill the hospital room. Neither he nor Kominek said anything as Buckley stared down at his own hands. And then Byrnes told Walt Buckley that the sheriff's office had sent deputies to his home early that morning and what they had found there.

He asked Buckley if he and his wife had been lying next to the wreckage of their car after midnight, who was it who had been screaming and moaning in their duplex at three A.M.? Whose blood had stained their mattress and left telltale spatters around their house? Jim Byrnes, whose flinty blue eyes had intimidated scores of suspects, watched Buckley's reaction. Despite the sedation, Buckley was nervous. Sweat dotted his forehead and he sighed deeply. Even so, while Walt Buckley began to modify his version of his wife's death in the accident attempting to make his recall fit the facts he now realized the detectives knewhe refused to give a complete statement. Instead, he talked around what had happened, coming close to something terrible and then veering off into extraneous detail. He admitted a great deal without really admitting anything. He said that he hadn't meant to hurt Lori. He talked about putting her in the back of the car, but then he mentioned that he thought he had heard her moan once as he drove through Salem. The back of the car? Salem? Buckley had finally changed his story from that of the highway accident fifty miles from Salem, and Byrnes realized that he was talking about what had happened on Cedar Court. "I drove to a doctor's office by the freeway but the lights were out," Buckley said weakly. As Jim Byrnes and Dave Kominek stared at him, Walt Buckley repeated over and over again, "I was going home." What did he mean by that? Had Buckley actually driven to the Oregon coast with his dead or dying wife and then changed his mind and headed toward his home?

That was possible.