A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (40 page)

It would seem to be one of the least likely spots in America where the solution to a murder would be a textbook case of forensic science.

Columbia County extends northwesterly so far above the rest of Oregon that it almost seems as if it is a piece of Washington that broke off as the Columbia River coursed through it. It isn't a big county, 744 square miles, thirty-one thousand total population. Sells is a former teacher who fulfilled his dream of becoming a lawyer the hard way. He went to law school nights and supported his young family during the day. Sells, whose sense of humor belies his profession, would be the district attorney in Columbia County for more than two decades and serve as president of the Oregon District Attorneys' Association. In the second week of February 1976, Marty Sells was faced with his greatest challenge. Rainier, Oregon, is a little town with fewer than two thousand residents. It sits at the edge of the Columbia River amid forested countryside, some twenty miles north of the county seat at saint Helens. A deceptively fragile-looking bridge connects Rainier to Kelso-Long view on the Washington side of the great river. Until the events of February 9, Rainier was seldom in the news, it was like any small town, with its share of gossip and secrets, where everyone knew one another. Hilda Victoria "Vicki" Brown lived in Rainier. She was a tall striking blonde whose Finnish origins were evident in her bright blue eyes and high cheekbones. At 5'91/2" and 140 pounds, Vicki was not the helpless type, she was slender but strong and could work beside any man. And she had to work. She was only twenty-five, but Vicki had a nine-year-old daughter to support. Her teenage marriage had failed years before. Vicki worked as a school bus driver, wrestling the huge yellow vehicles around the winding back roads near Rainier. Vicki was buying a house in Rainier, where her mother, to whom she was emotionally close, also lived Vicki Brown didn't lack for male companionship. Her vibrant good looks and sensual nature attracted men easily. She wrote her dating experiences down in a black diary, something that might have given some of her suitors pause had they known of her penchant for keeping records.

But she was a good mother, and never left her daughter alone. If she planned to go out, she either left her child with her mother or with the family of Myron Wicks,* who, with his twin brother, Byron,* oversaw the bus barn for the school district. Byron was the boss, and Myron the chief mechanic. On Monday, February 9, 1976, Vicki left her little girl at Myron's house while she drove the after-school activity bus. It was the last school bus of the day and she transported high school students who stayed late for after-school sports and other extracurricular activities. The run lasted from five to six-thirty, and the Wickses expected Vicki to pick her daughter up shortly after that. When seven, and then eight o'clock, came and went, they decided that Vicki must have had an unexpected date. They took her daughter over to Vicki's mother's house for the night. Vicki's mother was vaguely worried, it just wasn't like her daughter to go off without making special preparations or leaving word with someone. But then, Vicki knew that the youngster was safe at the Wickses and that they would take her to her grandmother's house if they couldn't care for her. When Vicki did not show up for work on Tuesday morning, it was a different matter entirely. Vicki Brown always arrived at school on time for her bus routes.

Her bus was the reparked in its place in the six-stall bus barn just behind the high school. But where was Vicki?

A highly reliable senior at the high school recalled that he had seen Vicki bring the bus in the night before around 6:30. He was sure it was Vicki. He had even waved at her, and she waved back. He had ridden with her oflen enough so that he recognized her, even from a distance. Asked if he had seen her leave the barn after she parked the bus, he shook his head. "I walked into school after I waved to her, so I didn't see her leave." Vicki's worried relatives and friends checked her house, hoping against hope they would find her. But she wasn't there. Inside, everything seemed completely normal, as if she had stepped away for just a short time. There was a brown-paper package of almost thawed frozen steak on the counter. Vicki had obviously left it there because she had planned to be home to fix supper the night before. But they found no indication that she had been been home at all after she finished her late bus run. Her mother could locate no one who had seen Vicki leave the bus barn after she parked her bus in stall 21. Vicki's family notified the Rainier police as soon as they left her house. The Columbia County Sheriff's Office and the Oregon State Police were also alerted.

It would take twenty-four hours before Vicki, an adult, could officially be considered a missing person. It was still possible that Vicki had found someone whom she really wanted to spend a few days with, someone who had swept her off her feet so completely that her normal predictable patterns were tossed aside. Possible, but not very likely.

It became even less likely later on February 10 when one of the mechanics saw a peculiar stain on the inside wall of the bus barn. The barn was dim inside and badly lighted. When the work crew came to work that morning, they had found it was even dimmer, the main light was out.

Someone had unplugged its extension cord at the wall. Dexter Bryson,*

another mechanic, looked at the smears on the wall and scoffed, "Oh, that's just oil." It was later in the afternoon when someone noticed a pool of some liquid right outside the doors to the mechanics' office on the far end of the barn. The ground was groveled there, and the sticky, mahogany-colored substance looked suspiciously like blood. But then, everyone was spooked by Vicki's disappearance and they soon realized that it might only be transmission fluid. Determined to find out, the mechanics did a comparison test. They poured transmission fluid over the gravel. It spread out immediately and practically disappeared into the gravel. It didn't seem to have the same properties as the thick clotting stuff they had found and it was a different color. They found Vicki's green Mazda parked in front of the high school wood shop just next to the barn. The hood wasn't warm, it had been parked there a long, long time, probably since the night before. As the search for Vicki continued, police noted all the cars around the bus barn. Dexter Bryson's vehicle, a gray green 51 Chevy pickup, sat parked just outside the double doors on the other side of the mechanics' office. When Rainier police were notified of the pool of red fluid and the smears inside the bus barn, they asked for help from the Oregon State Police.

(In Oregon, the state police work felony investigations as well as traffic accidents.) Captain V. L. Kezar assigned Lieutenant George Winterfeld and Criminal Investigator Dean Renfrow to assist in the search for Vicki. Columbia County Sheriff Tom Tennant put his chief investigator, Captain Bruce Oester, at the disposal of the investigative crew. D.A. Marty Sells felt that Oester could aid most in deploying the search of the area, while Winterfeld and Renfrow would handle the scene at the bus barn and interview any witnesses who might turn up.

Criminalists from the Oregon State Police Crime Lab in Portland would test the fluid found in the bus barn to see if it was, indeed, blood, and, if it was, to determine if it was animal or human. As night fell, Vicki had been missing more than twenty-four hours, her fellow bus drivers and employees of the bus barn were bafffled. They searched the area around the barn, the high school, and the athletic field and found nothing. Dexter Bryson volunteered to walk up into the fir and alder sapling forest behind the barn. He was back in only minutes, holding what looked like a woman's water-soaked purse at the end of a stick.

"It's Vicki's. I poked the stick in just enough to see her wallet with her name in it," he said. "I found it floating in a little pond back there." The twenty-three-year-old mechanic hadn't found anything else that belonged to Vicki in the woods. Still it didn't look promising. The fact that her car and her purse were both located so close to the bus barn made investigators feel that Vicki had not left the area of her own accord. If Vicki Brown had been injured, she had to be found quickly.

Daylight ended early and February nights were cold. She would surely die of exposure if not from wounds she had suffered if she wasn't found soon. Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts, Coast Guard helicopters, the National Guard, the Civil Air Patrol, search dogs flown down from Seattle and Tacoma, the Argonauts (a diving group), and local groups with picturesque names like "The Stump Bumpers" and the "Over-the-Hill-Gang" from Mount Hood joined every lawman in the area who could be spared from other duties. But there were so many places to look: forests, caves, wells, ravines, even the tumultuous Columbia River was searched, at least to the degree that it could be searched. The Oregon State Police team concentrated first on the bus barn. With every discovery they made, hope diminished for Vicki Brown. Using powerful floodlights, the troopers could see that something or someone had been dragged or carried along the front wall of the barn, leaving great splotches of dried blood on the rough wood. The attack, and surely there had been an attack of awful ferocity, appeared to have begun in stall 21. That was where Vicki Brown had parked her bus. It looked as though she had either been dragged or had run into the end stall, Number 20.

The bus parked in that spot was encrusted with dried blood. There was blood on a fender over the tire, and there were a few strands of long blond hair caught in it. In the corner of that stall, they found a huge puddle of blood at the bottom of a two-by-six beam. Farther up, they noted a spray pattern of blood flecks. One investigator said softly, "It's just as if someone had sprayed it with an aerosol can." The physical evidence left behind gave investigators the basis to form a tentative scenario. It looked as if Vicki had been assaulted by someone waiting for her as she drove her bus into the barn around 6:30 on Tuesday night. But how could that be? The bus barn was not an isolated building, it was right in the middle of the high school complex. The wood shop teacher held night classes right next door, although, admittedly, the noise of sawing and hammering might well have drowned out screams. But then again, there had been a play practice for the senior play in the high school. Students and teachers were wandering all over. Before the investigation was finished, every student in the school would be questioned. However, while this was being done, the detectives were finding more and more evidence, and it was grim. They discovered a partial dental bridge caught under the door of stall 21. No woman would run away with a lover without her teeth. If the bridge belonged to Vicki Brown, as they feared it did, her dentist would be able to give them a definitive answer. District Attorney Marty Sells coordinated the entire case with his chief investigator, Phil Jackson, who had retired after many years in the Homicide Unit of the Portland Police Department.

Neither man had ever had a case like this one. State police detectives Dean Renfrow and George Winterfeld interviewed students and teachers at Rainier High School. They talked to the senior boy who had waved at Vicki Brown on the night of the ninth. They found a Murder Without a Body I I girl student who had been waiting for play practice to start.

It had been a little before seven when she stepped out on a rear balcony to sneak a cigarette. From that vantage point, she had had a clear view of the bus barn behind the school. She had seen nothing unusual, but she had heard something sounds of scuffling or fighting coming from the barn. It hadn't lasted long, and she had not been alarmed enough to report it to anyone at the time. One of the female teachers had pulled her car into the circular driveway between the barn and the school five minutes later. She parked next to gas pumps there and headed into play practice. She remembered seeing the girl smoking on the balcony. "I called out, Snuff that cigarette!"

" And then the teacher had heard a dissonant sound. She recalled that it had been a sharp report like a gunshot. She had stood listening for perhaps fifteen seconds, but there was nothing more. She had finally decided it must have been a car backfiring. She was sure of the time: 6:55 P.M. She had glanced at her watch. Things were beginning to fall together. A male student said he had driven into the driveway a little after seven. He parked his van behind a pickup near the bus barn. "I knew I wouldn't be blocking it because I recognized it as the school's pickup, and they wouldn't need to get out until morning." It had been a green-gray 1951 Chevrolet, and it had been the school's property until a few weeks before. One of the mechanics, Dexter Bryson, had bought it from the school, but the student didn't know that. The boy had then walked into the school, he said he had heard nothing and seen nothing unusual. Minutes later, one of his friends had walked out of the high school. As he neared the bus barn, he saw his friend's van, lights out, coasting down the driveway. He looked inside, expecting to see his friend driving. Instead, he saw a stranger a man wearing a black stocking cap and a dark jacket. He had a droopy Fu Manchu mustache and long sideburns. The boy ran inside the school to tell his friend that someone was trying to steal his van. When they came out the van was there, but the pickup was gone.

The boy who owned the van told detectives he was still angry. He had his van back, but someone had broken his wing window to get in. There had been blood on the window, on the steering wheel, and the gear shift. He had assumed the car thief had cut his hand on the window. He had used a paper towel to wipe the blood off.

Fortunately, he was able to show the state police investigators where he'd thrown the towel, and lab tests proved it was human blood. The description of the man seen coasting the van matched Dexter Bryson exactly. And Bryson had been one of the prime searchers for Vicki. Every time they looked around he had been there helping out. It was he, of course, who had found her purse, after he walked almost unerringly into the woods to the pond where it was floating. When they went to talk with him, the detectives noticed that Bryson seemed upset. There could be at least two reasons for that. He might simply be truly concerned about Vicki's disappearance. And then again, he might have a more malevolent reason for being so jumpy. Experience has taught detectives that some killer sand arsonists get a thrill out of putting themselves in the center of an investigation, of playing games with the very men and women who are trying to solve the crime. Dexter Bryson became decidedly nervous, however, when the investigators asked him to sign a consent to search his truck. He told them he didn't see what good that would do, and they explained casually that since his truck had been parked near the bus barn when Vicki vanished, the killer might have touched it or thrown some bit of evidence in the truck bed. Bryson finally gave his permission for them to search his truck, albeit somewhat reluctantly.