A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (8 page)

He didn't have to teach, of course, because it was a school holiday, but he was due at the Lion's Share at eight that Friday night. Jerilee had to work all day at the bank, and Morris stayed home and looked after Rick and Amanda. He was so happy to have his kids back, to have her back. They needed time, but they would regain the comfortable, secure world they had known before Gabby moved in with them. While Jerilee didn't know if Gabby was still in the hospital, she hadn't heard from him and that was a good sign. "When I got home from work about six-thirty," she said, "Morris and the children and I went out to Shakey's for dinner, and Morris then took us home and dropped us off before eight o'clock." Jerilee had planned to stay home all evening on Friday, but a friend, Helen Crimin, dropped by around nine and asked her if she wanted to go and listen to Helen's husband play in his band. He was an officer on the Yakima Police Department and he and some fellow policemen had formed a band that was playing at a cocktail lounge called the Country Cousin. Helen's invitation sounded like fun. Jerilee called her mother-in-law and Olive said she'd be glad to look after Rick and Amanda if Jerilee would bring them over to her mobile home. Olive had bought the double-wide trailer to use as an office, and now she made her home there. "We stopped by the Lion's Share before we went to the Country Cousin so that I could tell Morris that I was going over there," Jerilee recalled. "We left about a quarter to ten. Then my girlfriend and I went down to the cocktail lounge and listened to her husband play ... oh, probably ten songs."

Although she went to the clubs with some trepidation, Jerilee was relieved to find that Gabby wasn't in either of them. She and Helen had a good time and she began to breathe a little more easily. "We left and went to my mother-in-law's to pick up the children and then we went straight home to Sixth Street. It was about eleven o'clock when we got home." When Helen Crimin's car pulled up in front of the Blankenbakers'

house, everything looked normal. Still Helen sensed that Jerilee was a little nervous, and she walked her and the children to the front door to be sure they got in all right, and that nobody was hanging around. The house was quiet. Everything was just as Jerilee had left it.

Hike seemed calm as he padded around, following her as she got Amanda and Rick ready for bed, a good sign that nobody had been in the house.

Still, Jerilee felt a little jittery with Morris at work, and she tucked the children in bed with her. She could move them after two when Morris got home. She didn't set an alarm clock, she knew she would wake up when she heard Morris come home. Something woke Jerilee at two. Some loud noise. She wasn't sure what it was, but she rolled over and looked at the clock next to the bed. It was right around two. "I realized Morris would be coming home soon," she said, "so I took the children out of the bed and put them in their own beds. Then I went back to bed myself." It was cold, and she snuggled under the blankets. She didn't fall back to sleep because it was only a few minutes before she heard Morris's car drive in back in the alley, its tires crunching on the frozen ground. "I heard our car door shut. And then I thought that I heard two more car doors shut, and Morris didn't come in." She wasn't worried. They had had three days without any trouble at all, and Morris had so many friends.

Hike hadn't even barked, as he would if a stranger were outside. She assumed that someone had asked Morris to go out for a couple of drinks after work and that they had followed him home to pick him up. She heard male voices coming from the back of the house someplace out toward the alley. They were excited sounding, high-pitched. She strained to hear what they were saying. It wasn't much maybe ten words or so. "I stayed in bed about a half hour," Jerilee remembered. "And then I got up and went to the back window and looked out, and I saw that our car was there. So then I went outside and went to the car and looked inside the car, and nobody was there so I went back in the house went back to bed."

Morris had actually been driving her car that night the forest green Chevy Malibu. It was parked there, and it looked just the same as always. She didn't expect Morris to be gone very long. While she was outside, Jerilee hadn't looked around very much, she was very nearsighted and she had removed her contact lenses, so it wouldn't have done much good to look around. But she did see her car parked in the back, and the Volkswagen that Morris usually drove was in the carport.

They were both there, and that was enough to ease her mind.

It was dark and it was cold and she could barely see her hand in front of her face. Once inside, Jerilee shivered at the thought of going back outside. Vaguely uneasy, she read for a while until she fell back to sleep.

The children slept peacefully in the other bedroom, and Hike snoozed on the floor beside her. At five, Jerilee woke with a start. She was cold, and the other side of the bed was empty. Where was Morris? This wasn't like him. She tried to remember if he'd said anything about going somewhere after work, and she couldn't remember a thing. She was positive he had planned to come home after the Lion's Share closed. She couldn't very well call the police. What would she tell them?

That her husband was three hours late getting home? There were probably a lot of husbands in Yakima who were a lot later than that. But Morris would have called her.

Jerilee dialed the number she had for Mike Blankenbaker Morris's half brother. "I called Mike and asked him if he knew what Morris had planned to do after work," Jerilee said. "He said that he was going to come straight home to me. So then I was worried and I said, Well, the car is here but he hasn't come in." And Mike said, Well, just stay where you are and I'll come down and check things out."" Jerilee was beginning to feel a little less nervous. She said that she would take Hike with her and look around outside the house. "I think it will be okay," she told her brother-inlaw. He promised to wait on the phone while she checked.

Jerilee's hand was steady as she put her contact lenses in. There had to be a simple explanation for where Morris was. It wasn't like him to drink too much, but, if he had, he was probably asleep at a friend's house. "I went out the front door and the dog ran ahead of me and started growling and barking at something on the ground. I couldn't tell right then what it was," she recalled quietly. "But when I got there, I saw that it was Morris...." Shock the kind that congeals the blood and makes the heart race out of sync also dulls the senses. When something bad happens, so bad that the world will never, ever be the same again, the human mind cannot take it in all at once. Jerilee Blankenbaker had not yet acknowledged that her world had changed forever. At that moment, as she moved toward the man who lay facedown on the snowy ground, she had the tremendous strength that comes with an adrenaline rush. He lay just inside the gate, his feet pointed back toward the alley. He had fallen forward in an almost perfectly straight line. "I rolled him over," Jerilee said, speaking of a man who weighed pounds. "And tried to pull him toward me. l felt his face and I thought I felt something on his face. I thought it was mud at that time. And he was really heavy. l mean, he didn't help me at all...." A long time later when she spoke about it, Jerilee Blankenbaker's voice had the thinnest layer of calm over the remembered terror of that moment. "I took a hold of his jacket on his right side and rolled him toward the house, which would be north, and then I pulled him into a sitting position toward me with his jacket.... And I think that I tried to hear a heartbeat. .. and then I laid him back down." Jerilee remembered running inside the house and picking up the phone where her husband's brother still waited on the line. "Mike," she cried. "Come quick. Morris has blood all over him."

Within a few minutes, Mike Blankenbaker was on his way to help Jerilee, and, he prayed, to help his brother. And so were the Yakima police.

Dennis Meyers had been a patrol officer for the Yakima Police Department for six years, and he was working the early shift four A.M. to noonon November 22. He got a call from the police dispatcher at 5:03 that morning to proceed to 210 North Sixth Street "in regards to a subject at that location being covered with lots of blood." That was all Meyers knew at that point. He half-expected to find some drunk with a bloody nose. He was seven blocks away from the location when he got the call, and he was there in a few minutes. Meyers saw a woman standing in front of the house.

"She was standing there and crying."

The officer walked up to the woman who led him around to the south side of the house and showed him a man lying on his back. It was still almost dark and Meyers used his flashlight to examine the "man down." The fallen man wore jeans, athletic shoes, and an open down jacket. His right leg was crossed almost casually over his left, and his arms rested on the ground. There was a great deal of blood on his face and seeping into the grass and snow next to his left hand. Meyers didn't recognize the man, but the woman told him that it was her husband: Morris Blankenbaker. Everyone in Yakima knew Morris, but it would have been hard for anyone to recognize him with so much blood on his face. More police began to arrive and Meyers tried to calm Jerilee Blankenbaker, who was still sobbing and nearly hysterical, as Officer Terry Rosenberry knelt beside the supine man and checked for signs of life. None were discernible. While Meyers and Rosenberry and Patrol Sergeant Pleas Green waited for Sergeant Robert Brimmer, the Yakima police's chief investigator of homicides and a nineteen-year veteran of the department, they did not approach the body. Time seemed to stretch into hours, but it was actually only fifteen minutes until Brimmer arrived. The patrol officers led him back to the body, and he noted that the blood on the ground was clotted, whatever had happened had occurred some time before the police were called. It was an eerie scene in the gray half-dawn. An empty Budweiser beer bottle nudged the dead man's right foot and a section of Lincoln log lay near the body, left behind, probably, by the victim's small son. A dark green Chevrolet was pulled up beyond the gate area, near the alley. Brimmer directed Meyer to check it out, and he found that Morris's keys were still in the car, dropped on the floor on the driver's side. His bank statement lay on the seat. Just as Morris had no locks on his exterior doors, he didn't bother hiding his keys. He had not expected trouble. Don Washburn of the Yakima Ambulance Company was also a deputy coroner. Actually, the ambulance service had gotten the first call for help from the Blankenbaker house, and it was the ambulance company that had called the police. Washburn had driven in around 5:25 A.M. It was he who officially pronounced Morris Blankenbaker dead. He had been dead for hours, rigor mortis the condition where a human body "freezes" into position after death had begun. The victim's jaw and shoulders were already hard to move. It was difficult to be certain with so much blood, but he seemed to have been shot in the face.

There appeared to be a bullet wound an entry wound through his upper lip. It was the ambulance attendants who put a sheet over the body not police procedure because evidence can inadvertently be transferred from the body to the sheet and vice versa. Brimmer wasn't happy to see this and removed the sheet carefully so that they could take photographs of the body. Two decades later, sheets would be flung over the bodies of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. It is a natural reaction to shelter the dead from prying eyes. Morris Blankenbaker, Yakima's football hero and a friend to scores of people, was lying dead, staring blindly as snowflakes dotted his body. With his "wife" sobbing hysterically and his small children inside the house, it had seemed the decent thing to do.

Then with the help of the investigators, the ambulance attendants lifted Morris's body to a gurney and put it in the ambulance for the short trip to the saint Elizabeth's Hospital morgue to await autopsy. The police at the scene searched the grounds for more evidence.

Brimmer, Rosenberry, and It.

Bernie Kline combed the area at the south side of the house, along the wire fence between the yard and the apartment house, and moved on to the back where Morris's car was parked, and then into the alley itself. They had to use their flashlights at first. Sometimes, the refracted beam of a flashlight can help find minute bits of evidence as it hits the shiny side of a shell casing, a bullet fragment, a key, something that might lie hidden on the lawn or beneath a bush. The grass hadn't been mowed and it was three or four inches high. They searched trash cans in the alley in the faint hope that someone had tossed the murder gun away in hisor her flight. They found nothing.

They desperately needed to find some piece of physical evidence that could lead them to Morris Blankenbaker's killer. His executioner, really. They already had part of a possible scenario. Morris Blankenbaker had arrived home stashed his keys on his car floor, and strolled through the gate of his yard. Quite probably, the open beer bottle had been in his hand. A man in fear of his life would not have been carrying a bottle of beer. His ex-wife had found him lying on his face and had somehow managed to turn him over. It would have taken the kind of strength that lets women lift cars off their children, Morris was a big man, a solid man, and she was such a delicate woman. The blood on the ground would have come from his facial wounds, he had bled profusely in the moments before he died. In her vain attempt to save his life, Jerilee had managed to flip Morris over, the blood marked where he had lain. Maybe an autopsy would give them some information. Maybe there was a bullet in Morris's head that they could trace to a gun. From the appearance of the wounds, Brimmer's long experience suggested to him that the gun had been a small-caliber weapon possibly a. 22. Carefully, as a pale sun cast light on their cheerless work, Brimmer's team measured every inch of the Blankenbaker yard and the porch, and then measured again from one set point. Later, this would enable them to triangulate their findings and place the body and all the bits and pieces of evidence so fewin the exact spot where they had been found.