A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (51 page)

Two girls had been raped and murdered in less than a week in a quiet family neighborhood. Residents asked what kind of prowling animal was loose in West Seattle? Detectives had a knife, a towel, and a strip of white drapery to tie the killer to the bodies, but where could they start looking? There was nothing in either girl's background that indicated they might have known their killer. He had probably been a stranger who waited on a dark street until they were alone. An arrest in Beaverton, Oregon almost two hundred miles south of Seattle brought some answers, but more questions. Washington County, Oregon, detectives called the Seattle Police Department with a request for information on a man named Troy Asin. The man in the Washington County Jail was tall, slim, and had dark red, bushy hair. The Oregon offense which had landed "Troy Asin" in jail sounded familiar to Detective Joyce Johnson. A thirteen year-old girl had phoned the Washington County Sheriff's office to report that she had been raped. She and a girlfriend had met her bushy-haired, mustachioed man and his friend near a penny arcade in Portland. After talking with the junior high school girls for a while, the men said they had decided to ride the bus out to Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, with the teenagers. Once in Beaverton, they had all gone to a pool hall restaurant for something to eat. The man with the mustache, the one who said his name was "Troy," had offered to walk one girl home.

She didn't get home, instead she was raped at knife point in a churchyard and when "Troy" finally let her go, she had stumbled out sobbing to call the sheriff. "Troy" was apprehended almost immediately as he walked near the pool hall, his thirteen-year-old victim pointed him out to a Beaverton patrolman. In the Washington County jail, he gave his name as Troy Asin. The Oregon officers were slightly suspicious of his identity as he had no papers in his wallet that listed that name.

"Troy Asin" had given a home address in the West Seattle area of Seattle, however, and a routine request to verify Asin's identity had reached Seattle detectives shortly after Nancy Kinghammer's body was found. When Beaverton detectives questioned Asin about the rape, he maintained an attitude of calm disbelief. He insisted that the thirteen-year-old girl had been completely willing even grateful for the act of intercourse in the churchyard. In fact, he said that she had told him she was glad she wasn't a virgin anymore because her friends had been calling her a prude. "When I asked her if she wanted to ball, she didn't say yes or no so I figured she wouldn't mind," he said easily.

Asin seemed to be puzzled that the girl had called the police. The name "Troy Asin" baffled Seattle detectives at first.

"Moniker files" brought up the name all right, but it was one used by a parolee from the Monroe Reformatory named Carl Harp. He had used that alias, or variations of it, for years. But Harp's physical description was nothing like that of the man in custody in Oregon not unless he'd grown a half a foot and dyed and per med his hair. "Troy Asin" wasn't exactly "John Smith." There couldn't be two men who had accidentally picked such an unusual pseudonym. The mystery of the identity of the man charged with rape in Oregon was solved when Seattle detectives checked the address "Asin" had given. The home, occupied by a married couple and two other women, was only a block from the lot where Nancy Kinghammer's body had just been found. The woman who lived there said that the man in Oregon sounded like her ex-husband: James Edward Ruzicka. In a remarkable show of civility, her new husband had allowed Ruzicka to stay with them after he had walked away from the sexual psychopath program at Western State Hospital. "He was here from February first to February twenty-fifth," she said. When the detectives asked Ruzicka's ex-wife if anything was missing from her home, her answer was one of the biggest jackpots of information any homicide detective ever hit. Yes, she answered, she had found that some towels, some white drapes, and a fishing knife were missing. She added that Ruzicka had asked her to leave the back door unlocked on March 3, and when she returned home, she found $37.95 in cash missing. Ruzicka had not returned after that, and she hadn't heard from him since. The ex-Mrs. Ruzicka was asked about any memory she might have of the night of February 21, the night Penny Haddenham vanished. She recalled that night well, because "Jim" had left at absolutely broke. When he returned after 10:30 P.M his coat had been covered with mud. He had had seven or eight dollars when he came home (exactly what Penny Haddenham's change from the twenty-dollar bill her father gave her would have been after she bought material and two packs of cigarettes). "He told me that a man had given him the money for helping him change a tire," Ruzicka's former wife said. "That was how his clothes got all muddy." She identified the knife found at the scene of Penny Haddenham's hanging site as the one missing from her house.

Mirror Images It looked as though James Ruzicka, "The Guinea Pig Rapist," had cut a leisurely swath of terror since he'd left the grounds of Western State Hospital. His alibi in Beaverton, Oregon, about merely obliging a willing girl sounded familiar to Detective Joyce Johnson.

"Jim Otto James Ruzicka" had also claimed that Tannie Fletcher had propositioned him. He either suffered from some delusion that women found him sexually irresistible, or he chose to gloss over the fact that he had actually forced himself on his victims. James Ruzicka's trail, from Western State Hospital to West Seattle to Oregon, was traced as closely as possible. He apparently had made at least two trips south into Oregon. In Eugene, a hundred miles south of Beaverton, a forty eight-year-old housewife told police that she remembered him all too well. The mother of eight children, she had quit her job so she could take care of her husband who was terminally ill. A tall man with wildly curly hair had come to her door and asked for a ride into Eugene. "He called himself Jack,'" she recalled, "and when I told him I couldn't take him anywhere, he held a knife to my throat, tied me to my bed. ..

and raped me." Then "Jack" had stolen money from her children's rooms and, still holding the knife to the woman's neck, demanded that she drive him to downtown Eugene. "Along the way, he told me a story about some friend of his leaving a knapsack beside the road for him. l knew it was just an excuse to get me into the woods so he could rape me again."

She had had no choice but to let him lead her into the woods. All she wanted to do was survive and her mind raced feverishly as she submitted to a second sexual attack. "Then I told him I had lost my car keys on the ground," she told police. "I guess he believed me because he went back to the road and started hitchhiking. l had my keys all along, and I ran to my car and headed in the other direction. He told me if I called the police, he would come back and kill me and my family." * X Few would question that James Ruzicka's diagnosis as a sexual psychopath had been accurate. Now, all circumstantial and physical evidence pointed to the conclusion that he was also a merciless killer. Detectives believed that he had murdered Nancy Kinghammer exactly one year and one day from Nina Temple's rape in the basement of the Capital Hill rooming house. While James Ruzicka was locked up, awaiting trial, the first "Troy Asin" was still free. Carl Harp had left the Monroe Reformatory a few weeks after his friend James Ruzicka. He presented a bland cooperative facade to his parole officer and was given a "conditional discharge from supervision"

on April 2, 1973. By this time, his "other half" had raped two women at the very least. Harp had a good job working as a shoemaker and repairman at the Bon Marche department store in South Center, a huge mall in south King County. Like his "twin," Harp had had unsatisfactory experiences with women, finding them untrustworthy. His first marriage ended when he discovered his wife was working in a body painting studio in Seattle, and that she had been arrested for prostitution while he was in prison.

His second wife simply left. Carl Harp lost his job in the shoe department when a female employee complained that he was writing her obscene letters. He feigned amazement, he had only been trying to "create a relationship" with her. While James Ruzicka was out of circulation and temporarily out of the headlines, Washington State was jolted by a terrifying sniper attack along one of its freeways. May 14, 1973, was a Monday, a wonderfully sunny spring day in Bellevue, Washington, drivers could finally roll their windows down without fear of being blasted in the face with rain. Interstate 405 freeway runs along the east side of Lake Washington from Renton on the south to Mountlake Terrace beyond its north shore. It has always been a tremendously busy freeway, day or night, workers in the Renton I Boeing plant clog 405 during morning and afternoon rush hours. But at three in the afternoon as he headed back to his office, Abraham Saltzman, fifty-four, who sold houses for a living, was enjoying relatively light traffic. He had gone out as a favor to give another realtor a jump start when his battery went dead. Abe, a short man with a bald head and a heart of gold, had a wife, daughter, a sister, and brother who loved him, and he had a list of former clients who swore by him. He was the kind of realtor who would rather let a commission go by than sell the wrong house to the right people. Now, the middle-aged realtor drove his dark Plymouth Fury skillfully beneath the 520 overpass. As his sedan emerged into the bright sun, Abe Saltzman's world exploded. A bullet he neither saw nor heard ended his life. He died at once, his hands on the wheel, his car veered sharply to the left, across traffic lanes, into a ditch and then hit the grassy embankment. At the same time, John Mott, another motorist, was driving with his left elbow on the doorjamb of his car. He heard nothing just felt a flash of white-hot pain. His head whipped to the left and his mind numbed with shock as he saw that his elbow was virtually gone. Somehow, he managed to get his car stopped.

Other motorists heard ping-ping-pings against their cars. Only luck saved them from taking the bullets. Someone was standing high up on the hill that looked down on the freeway someone who was methodically aiming and firing with a bolt-action rifle. In the space of a few minutes, that section of 405 was alive with emergency vehicles, Washington State troopers, Bellevue police detectives, and paramedics who tried to calm the wounded and the terrified. Some motorists, stunned, had simply stopped their cars on the freeway. Some had hit the accelerator and raced past danger. John Mott was treated and rushed to Over lake Hospital. A young man in his early twenties, he would never again be able to fully extend his left arm, but at least he was alive. Abe Saltzman was not. There was no rush to remove him from his vehicle, no longer any need to hurry. Investigators figured the angle of fire and headed up the hill.

They didn't know if the man with the rifle was still there or not, he could have had them fixed in his gunsight as they climbed the steep bank. They found the place where he had stood, the grass and weeds stomped almost flat. With a metal detector, they found the brass casings ejected by a. 308 bolt-action rifle. The rifle itself was gone. So was the shooter.

There is a special kind of venom toward society that inspires someone to shoot anonymously and erratically at cars full of strangers. The shooter male or female? could have killed mothers, babies, entire families. As it was, those who escaped with only bullet holes in their cars were grateful for their lives. It could have been so much worse. But that didn't help Abe Saltzman's family, or the dozens of people who called him friend. The ma nand it was a man who had fired the rifle had made it safely away from the brushy area above 1-405. He smiled as he found a good hiding place and wrapped the. 303 bolt-action rifle in oiled plastic to keep it in good working order. He might need it again. On June 21, 1973, a little over five weeks later and some twenty miles northeast of the sniper shooting scene, two female camp counselors met a stranger on the trail. The young women, Lia* and Brook*, both twenty-one, were counselors at a religious camp for children near May's Creek Falls in the isolated wilderness in the Snoqualmie National Forest. In keeping with their religious beliefs, both were virgins, something of a rarity in the sexually permissive seventies, they intended to stay chaste until marriage. On this Thursday afternoon, the counselors had been given some time off and decided to go for a hike along a forest trail. It was the first day of summer and the longest day of the year, which meant, in Washington, that it would be light until ten P.M.. But it was only three when Brook and Lia were startled to see a man who was apparently camping near the trail. He was of medium height, blond, and wore glasses. From all appearances, he must have been in the woods for a long time. They nodded and said "Hi," as they headed up toward the trail head where they had parked their car. They were even more startled a little later when they saw the same man ahead of them on the trail. They couldn't understand how he had managed to get so far ahead. He hadn't passed them, apparently he knew the woods so well that he had taken a shortcut. He seemed harmless enough, though, and made idle conversation as he walked along with them. But some sixth sense made them uneasy. They exchanged glances, each girl letting the other know silently that she was nervous. When they got to the parking lot, Brook's eagerness to find her car keys was obvious. She rummaged around in her backpack, willing the keys to be there. And then, quietly but firmly, the man said, "Hold it." Lia and Brook turned around as if they already knew what was going to happen. The man held a revolver in his hand, and he gestured toward a steep bank off the parking lot. "Go down there," he said. "Don't hurt us," Brook said. "We'll do whatever you want."

"Don't kill us," Lia echoed. "She means it. Tell us what to do."

The stranger ordered them to walk over to a tree. They did as he told them. "Now take your clothes off," he said. "You can leave your shoes on." He used Lia's belt, looping it tightly around her neck and the tree itself so that she could not move without choking. He told Brook to lie on the ground near the tree. There was little question now about what he was going to do. They prayed silently that he wouldn't kill them as they watched him take off his shirt and unzip his pants. And then he orally sodomized one of the counselors and raped the other. They were so far from help that they knew it wouldn't do them any good to scream, and so they used their powers of reasoning. They told him he wasn't a bad person that he just needed help. Lia offered him a copy of the New Testament, saying, "Jesus can help you more than we ever could. " The rapist backed away, shaking his head, almost as if the Bible frightened him. They were sure he was going to shoot them. Instead, he turned around and disappeared into the woods.