Shocking True Story (18 page)

There was a slight hesitation. "Well, I don't rightly know," she said. "Let me ask him."

Though she pressed her palm to the mouthpiece, I heard her call out: "Some reporter writin' a book wants to talk to you about Janet Lee!"

A voice came through loud and clear: "Tell 'em I'll talk with him! I want the whole world to know what kind of woman that bitch is! Tell him to come right on over."

When she got back on the line and repeated what I had already heard, I explained that I was a couple hours away, and if I left immediately I could be there around dinner time. I was not fishing for an invitation by any means—far from it—but that's what I got.

"Then you can have supper with us. Makin' cabbage-stuffed buns tonight," she said cheerfully.

I scrawled a message for Valerie, begging for forgiveness and pledging undying love. I was doing this for us. For the kids. For that dream house with hardwood floors we would build one day. On Sunday we'd take a drive to the Olympic Peninsula and let Hedda and girls run around on the gray sands of some desolate stretch of the Washington coast.

It will be fun,
I wrote.

Thursday, August 29

I HAD DRIVEN PAST THE KERR RESIDENCE several times on previous visits to Timberlake. The last time was that terrible evening when I found Danny Parker's mother dead in the hallway of her tidy little home. As I understood it, the investigation was making some progress. What I had learned from Martin Raines, however, troubled me greatly. The cyanide that killed June Parker was a component of a mix used by gardeners to rid their vegetable patches of rodents. Weasel-Die was ninety-nine percent filler and one percent sodium cyanide. One little taste, however, was the last thing a weasel or mole would ever get. I knew the product quite well. The killer in my book
Over the Counter Murders
had killed her husband when she refilled headache capsules with the deadly poison ten years before. The crime lab in Olympia had sent a sample on to a chemist at the University of Washington for additional analysis. Another sample was earmarked for the FBI—though it was such a low-priority case that it was doubtful chemists there would process it any time soon.

A pack of dogs barked from a rusty chain link kennel enclosure next to the metal gleam of the brand new double-wide trailer that Paul and Liz Kerr shared with Paul and Janet's daughter, Lindy. The dogs riveted my attention, the way large, threatening animals always did. They were a Siberian Husky and Gray Wolf cross, and they seemed hungry. They were also scary, but I knew they came with the territory. Breeding with wolves was popular out in Nowheresville. One man even raised a pit-bull/wolf cross and advertised them as great pets for kids. I preferred droopy-eared Hedda.

The pungent smell of dog urine pierced the cool air. On a hot day in summertime, I was certain the place would stink to high heaven.

A three-year-old girl ran down the front lawn and crossed the road.

"That was Lindy," Liz Kerr said as she emerged from the other side of the yelping kennel. "Sent her to the neighbors. She's heard plenty about her mother and I guess we just don't want her to hear any more of this garbage."

"I can imagine," I said. "It must be very hard on such a little girl."

Liz nodded and motioned me around to the front door of the mobile.

"She really doesn't remember her mom much, which I guess is a good thing. " Liz tossed a hunk of meat over the kennel wall, sending the dogs into a slobbering and yelping frenzy.

"Come on in," she said, smiling. "Paul's watching the tube."

Liz Kerr looked to be in her forties, though she could be younger. She had deep brown hair with a skunk-tail streak, a thin face, and under her eyes, circles as dark and clear as lines left by thick-tipped Magic Markers. Her features were small and pleasant. She might even have been pretty before hard knocks keeled her over. She was cautious, but friendly, and despite the fact that she had stirred her dogs into a bloody riot, I thought she was pretty nice.

The stinky smell of cooking cabbage seeped unpleasantly from inside as she pushed the aluminum front door open. I wasn't hungry in the least.

"Dinner will be ready in five minutes," she announced.

"Great. Smells great," I lied. "I'm starved."

"Paul!" she called out, her voice loud and clear. "That reporter is here!"

"Get him a beer and send him in here," the voice I had heard over the phone shot back from another room.

"Better take one for him, too. " Liz handed me a couple of cold cans and pointed me in the direction of the living room.

Paul Kerr was stretched out on a brown and tan plaid sofa. The back of his head had left a slightly greasy transfer on the armrest furthest from the television. His big toe poked through a hole in his thick, white work socks at the other end. He was no more than a worn-out thirty-year-old. He was a logger, like his father and grandfather before him. He had such rough, callused hands I doubted it was possible for him to leave a fingerprint. His forearms were massive and the skin hammock of his stomach slipped over his Peterbilt belt buckle. Pockmarks on his face from teenage acne were the only reminders that he, like his wife, Liz, he had once been very young.

"So you want to know about Janet and her mother, huh?" he said after I introduced myself and gave him a beer. Spray from his flip-top hit my face.

"You caught me," I said, jokingly as I searched for something to wipe the sudsy spray off my mustache and eyebrows, both of which were in need of a good trim.

"Well, I'll tell you, you haven't got a clue about those evil bitches. Hell, if I were you, I'd sleep with one eye open. Heard you've been talking with those she-devils up at the prison."

"Yeah," I said. "Just a couple of times."

"Ever say anything about me?"

"Not really. Nothing comes to mind, anyway."

I didn't feel that it was the best time for me to tell him that Janet had told me Paul had only one testicle and had once considered an operation to have a ping pong ball inserted into his scrotum to give him the bulge he was sorely lacking. At least he thought so. Janet had not done much to assuage her husband's manhood. Whenever they got into a screaming match, Janet's heart-stabbing nickname for him was "One-Ball Paul."

Better not bring that up.

Or the story Connie Carter had confided about how Paul had molested Lindy and attempted to sell her into white slavery off the loading dock at the Timberlake Lumber Mill, where he delivered trucks of logs each week.

No, it wouldn't be how I would start the interview. Just not a good idea
.

Liz Kerr served cabbage rolls as we chatted and watched
Wheel of Fortune
. The rolls were actually pretty good and I ate three. Paul had at least seven and Liz consumed two. I washed the food down with another beer and suggested that after
Wheel
was done spinning we could turn off the television and talk about the case that landed his ex-wife and former mother-in-law in prison.

"After
Jeopardy
," Liz insisted.

And so we watched, and after it was over, Liz turned off the TV on the intro to
Dancing With the Stars
and we talked. Liz brought out a Tupperware container of Snickerdoodles and matching Snap-on Tool mugs of coffee. Paul, however, stuck with his beers. Lindy stayed down at the neighbor's. Though I only saw her that moment when I first arrived, evidence that a little girl lived in that house was everywhere: a painting of a turkey taped on the front of the refrigerator, a Barbie with butchered hair on the floor by the TV and a stack of little girl's laundry on the redwood burl coffee table. Lindy Kerr was a sweet little thing. And from what everyone was telling me, she was without question at the center of the mess.

About three and a half hours with the Kerrs, I was on my way home in the LUV with the goods to write the next chapter of
Love You to Death
. In fact, all I had to do was transcribe it from the thoughts in my head.

♦

Love You to Death

PART SIX

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND ALWAYS guaranteed long lines at the supermarket and fried chicken buckets full of rain. It had been that way ever since Paul Kerr could remember. He got off work from the mill in time to run home, shower, change to a clean T-shirt and jeans and get to the store to pick up supplies for a weekend camping trip with his buddies. They planned to meet in the parking lot at the Fred Meyer discount store at seven before driving to the ocean for three days of camping, beer and good times. Paul packed a little bag of pot into the zippered compartment of his backpack. Others would carry more illegal goodies, though that wasn't all they were bringing. One buddy found a couple of girls with nothing better to do. One was a honey blonde teenage checker from the discount store named Michelle McMahon. She was a nice enough girl. Made it to work on time. Lived with her parents. And when the opportunity came up to do some thing a little different, a little dangerous, she jumped at it with trampoline-like abandon. She told her folks she was camping with her best friend and her family.

"We're going to Seaside," she said. "They have a cabin just one block from the beach."

Seaside was a rinky-dink resort town of bumper cars and saltwater taffy stands on the northern edge of the Oregon coast. It was the kind of place the middle class swarmed to with the first sign of the elusive warmth of summer weather; a place that was still within the means of the folks of Timberlake.

Michelle's best friend, however, didn't have a cabin there. In fact, she had never been there before in her life. She didn't even have parents, not really. Michelle's best friend was a sixteen-year-old Timberlake High School dropout named Janet Lee Carter.

Paul Kerr was young and horny, and Janet looked pretty good. By the end of the first night on the beach, Janet was inside his sleeping bag, acting every bit the consensual adult she insisted she was. It was only the next morning when his buddy told him that she was jail bait and that he'd better watch his step.

"Her mom's a real bitch and already sent one guy to jail for molesting her. I'll tell you one thing, Janet was
not
molested. She's been screwing since she was twelve."

Paul Kerr ignored the warnings. He liked Janet. He also liked the idea of having a girlfriend. He'd been alone for a year.

Janet was also between boyfriends. She had recently dumped a drummer from a Timberlake bar band. She wanted a baby and he was unable to get her pregnant. She left him five days before the camping trip. In many ways, she was a girl on a mission.

Friends later recalled that Janet had told them repeatedly that she wanted a baby.

“She wanted someone to love,” Michelle McMahon said several years later. “She was out of control, and I think she knew it. She thought if she had a baby, she'd not only get a man, she'd have someone she could love.”

Janet and Paul spent the long weekend bombed. Janet told him that he was the best lover she ever had; Paul told her that he saw something special in her the minute he laid eyes on her. Others, of course, had told such stories to their one-night stands. Others had made the promises of phone calls and movie dates. Most of those were lies, of course. But not with Paul and Janet. Theirs wasn't true love. It was true convenience.

-

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE CAMPING TRIP, Janet moved into Paul's rented basement apartment at 44 Klipsun Avenue. She brought her waterbed and spent the first morning patching a leak after setting it up. She even cooked dinner that evening for Paul's arrival after work—hamburgers and crinkle-cut fries. If the first day was an indication, Paul Kerr would have thought that his life with Janet Lee Carter was pretty good.

Of course, it wasn't going to turn out that way.

Janet Lee was a drug user.

"The funny thing was," Paul Kerr said years after, "I could never tell when Janet was drunk or high. It never showed on the girl. No matter how much she drank. I could watch her drink and smoke pot for two days straight and no sleep... Hell, I drank plenty myself, smoked some, but never to the extent that Janet did. She even did needle drugs. She had a mole or something on her arm and she always shot right into that."

Janet also ran around like some kind of sex-starved decathlete.

"Good God. I should have known when she put out within three hours of meeting me on the camping trip to Seaside," Paul Kerr remembered. "What an idiot I was! Sometimes I figured she thought sex was the same as shaking hands with someone. 'Nice to meet ya, wanna blowjob?' Who knows? I caught her screwing a half dozen guys during the early days. One was an old boyfriend, a drummer. Another was some guy she met at the car wash—and she didn't even have a car at the time. When it came to opening her mouth or dropping her pants, there was no stopping Janet."

And there was her mother. If Janet was bad, Paul had seen the scary future—Connie Carter.

"Connie, even before Jan and I got hitched, was the mother-in-law from hell. She was a bigger drunk than her daughter. She was more of a slut. Once I met Janet's mom, I knew where Janet got all of her worst ideas. Sometimes I wondered if Connie was involved in some kind of sick competition with Janet.
First one to screw a dozen different men in a night wins the grand whore prize!
Connie was one of those women who hated men and I think she raised her daughter in the same way. Whenever Connie was around, I thought of an excuse to get lost for a few hours. Worked on my truck, went to the store, anywhere just to get away and stay clear."