Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (17 page)

Mike Lowry had read voluminous information on Campbell’s crimes, and he stared directly in the eyes of the strutting convicted killer. Seeing the danger there and remembering what he’d read of the last moments of Renae and Shannah Wicklund and Barbara Hendrickson, Governor Mike Lowry refused to commute Campbell’s sentence.

Late on the night of May 27, 1994, guards came to bring Charles Campbell to the gallows. Witnesses staring nervously at the window of the hanging room knew there was a delay, but they didn’t know why. Behind the scenes, Campbell was so frightened at the thought of his own death that he had to be carried from his cell. His legs would not support him.

When he entered the execution chamber, it was obvious that he could not stand to have the noose slipped over his neck. Finally, his legs were strapped to a board so he could stand atop the trap door.

A curtain fell over the window as the trap sprung, and minutes later, Charles Campbell was declared dead. He was the second person to be executed in Washington in thirty-five years.

Although the money was only a small measure of justice for Campbell’s three victims, Hilda Ahlers’s and Don Hendrickson’s civil suit against the state for failing to notify Renae Wicklund that he was on work release, living so close to her home, was successful. The grieving families were awarded $2.3 million.

For several years, Don Hendrickson was active in Friends and Families of Violent Crime Victims and Missing Persons, one of the first victims’ support groups in the country. There, he met Doreen Hanson, who had lost her daughter, Janna, eight years earlier to homicidal violence (see “The Runaway” in
A Rose for Her Grave,
Ann Rule’s Crime Files, Vol. 1
).

Don and Doreen got married and it seemed to be a happy ending after so much tragedy. But the things they had in common—grief and regret—were burdens instead, and they couldn’t sustain their marriage. They divorced a few years later.

Don Hendrickson died several years ago.

T
he state of
Washington is cut in half by the Cascade Mountains; Seattle and its environs are termed “the coast” by eastern Washington residents, even though the actual Pacific coast is many miles away. The west side of the state is moderate and lush, green, often sodden with rain. Eastern Washington has fertile fields, arid desert, the rolling Palouse Hills covered with a sea of wheat, and orchards as far as the eye can see.

Ellensburg and Yakima are in the middle of orchard country, of horse country. You put an apple or cherry twig in irrigated land there and it will take root overnight. Or so it seems.

These are western towns where even the bankers and the grocery store managers usually wear cowboy boots. There are rodeos, horse shows, and county fairs. Just as it does in every medium-sized town in America, an occasional scandal surfaces. Sometimes the scandals are homegrown: a love triangle exploding into deadly violence, or a family fight that ends in death. The shock waves that follow seem to occur only in small towns. Perhaps it is simply that big cities have so much violence that individual crimes don’t stand out as much as they do in small towns.

Donna Bennett was born on Flag Day—June 14, 1932; a few years later, her sister Blodwyn—who would always be called Bobbi—came along. Their parents were older, at least for that era, both over thirty when their girls were born. The Bennetts and their forefathers had lived near Ellensburg at the upper edge of the Yakima Valley for generations. They were horse people—not fancy-schmancy horse people, but genuine cowboys.

Possibly because they had waited longer to have children, Donna and Bobbi’s parents adored their two little girls. The Bennett girls were pretty, with shiny brown hair and huge brown eyes. Both Donna and Bobbi were born to ride horses, galloping joyously with the smell of sagebrush and apple blossoms in their nostrils. They grew up together, as close as sisters are meant to be.

Donna was already standing bareback on a horse at the age of three, her balance perfectly attuned to the horse’s gait.

When Donna was five she was chosen the “best-dressed junior cowgirl” at the Ellensburg Rodeo parade.

Donna and Bobbi attended Ellensburg High School. Donna was in the class of 1950, and her friends from those days remember her as clearly as if they had seen her only yesterday. She could be very serious and a little straitlaced, but when she was your friend, she was your friend forever. She didn’t have a lot of time for after-school activities because she had chores to do on the farm. She usually rode the bus right home after school, and she didn’t date much in high school.

But Donna’s dad had played the drums, and she did, too—the slender girl marching along in the Bull Dog band, keeping time on the bulky drums. Jean “Tex” Turner Parsons was the drum majorette, and Fay Griffin Moss and Gail Kelly Sether were flag twirlers. They were Donna Bennett’s best friends. Fay and Donna had known each other since fifth grade. They would stay close for all of her life.

All through high school and for years afterward Donna and Bobbi rode their horses in parades. “They rode in the Ellensburg Rodeo—and in the other parades,” Fay Moss remembers. “They were never in the royal court, though. I think it’s because their family wasn’t rich—and that’s what it took to get in the court. But they were so classy, sitting straight in their saddles. They were
real
cowgirls.”

When she was eighteen and graduating from Ellensburg High School a local newspaper picked Donna as the graduate with the prettiest eyes. It was true; she had huge doe-like eyes.

Donna and all her closest friends exchanged pictures. On the one she gave to “Tex” Turner she wrote, “Hi Tex, I can’t forget all the good times we’ve had. Parties and the jokes on our band trips. I wish you all the luck and happiness in [the] future and be good!! Love and Kizzes, Donna.”

Summertimes and after she had graduated high school, Donna performed as a trick rider at rodeos all over eastern Washington. She was wonderfully talented. Beautiful and slender, Donna wore bright satin shirts in rainbow colors, with sequined embroidery and pearl studs, tight pants, boots, and cowboy hats. Her picture brightened up many a county fair poster.

But Donna wasn’t just pretty; she was a superb equestrienne. An action photo from those days in the fifties shows Donna standing
atop
Bobbi’s white steed, Dana, her perfect body leaning tautly into the wind, her arms flung out exultantly as she performs a stunt called “The Hippodrome.” Bobbi is on the horse, too, her feet hooked into the stirrups as she drapes herself
backwards
down over Dana’s hindquarters, so close to the ground and the horse’s hooves that her long hair actually trails along the ground of the arena.

Both Bennett girls were as confident with horses as most people would be with a puppy. They were alternately atop, underneath, dragging, and cavorting as the horse trotted so fast that the wind whipped their hair. They were exquisitely coordinated, in their glory.

But they weren’t daredevils. They knew that horses could be skittish, and they took no chances. “Donna knew that you never put your head down to work on a horse’s hooves,” Fay says. “That you
back
up to a horse and present your least vulnerable part.”

Donna figured she would meet a cowboy one day and settle down. That was her world, and she met dozens of handsome young men at the rodeos. But another kind of man came along, and Donna Bennett was attracted to him in spite of herself, and in spite of her friends’ and family’s reservations. She met Noyes Russell Howard at Yakima Valley Community College and began dating him sporadically.

Russ Howard was handsome then—not a big man, but he had a good, compactly muscled build. He was about five feet nine—two inches or so taller than Donna. He combed his thick hair into a wave in front. The best thing about Russ was his gift of gab; he was a riot at parties. You could never predict what Russ would do next.

“He was fun, and he was crazy,” Fay Moss remembers. “I could see how she could be attracted to him.”

Donna and Russ dated off and on. For a while in 1954 Donna and Fay moved to Seattle and lived together in a little apartment on Republican Street—on what would become the site of the 1962 World’s Fair. Donna got a job as sales clerk at Best’s Apparel in downtown Seattle. By the time Best’s became the flagship store of Nordstrom’s, Donna had moved back over the mountains. Her picture often appeared on fashion pages in the
Yakima Herald.
She was so photogenic that department stores often asked her to pose, wearing their newest lines.

After college Russ worked in a number of jobs—selling shoes at first. Eventually he worked, in one capacity or another, with seeds, sometimes as a salesman for a seed company in the Yakima Valley and later as a seed inspector for the State Department of Agriculture. He was only two years older than Donna, but far more worldly. When they met Russ was already a pretty good drinker, and that put Donna off. She didn’t drink at all and didn’t want to raise a family with liquor in the home. She was young; she thought he would change his bad habits in time.

When Russ proposed Donna hesitated. But she kept going out with him, and it was soon obvious that the quiet rodeo rider was in love with the glib party guy. They were very different, but often opposites
do
attract. Donna finally said yes, and though she delayed the wedding a few times, Donna finally married Russ Howard as the fifties eased into the sixties. She was almost thirty; all of her friends had been married for years.

Donna’s family smiled determinedly at the wedding, but they worried. Donna’s friends could see that she wanted desperately to make a go of her marriage, and that she ached for a secure home in which to have children. Apparently it took her a long time to feel secure; Donna Howard was into her thirties before her two daughters, Lisa and Marilyn, were born. Even though things weren’t perfect and Russ was drinking, she wanted so much to have children.

Donna’s family, well-known and respected in the valley, helped the young couple buy a home and some acreage on Galloway Road a few miles northwest of Yakima on the Naches River. Yakima is only about forty miles south of Ellensburg, so Donna still saw her family often. There was room for a stable; Donna couldn’t imagine living without a horse or two.

Russ’s job with the State of Washington meant he had to be on the road a good deal. That gave him the opportunity to imbibe away from his wife’s disappointed eyes. It also gave him the chance to date other women. He would one day refer rather obliquely to his wife’s “changing sexual needs” as the impetus that “drove” him into affairs with at least eight other women. It was an easy and ambiguous excuse for him, and Donna never had a chance to tell her side of the story.

Did Donna know that Russ was cheating on her? Probably. But she was loyal, and she was a very private person. Many women would have run crying to friends or, in Donna’s case, to family. But for years Donna Howard kept her problems to herself. Her pride wouldn’t let her admit how hellish her marriage had become.

Why any man would want to cheat on Donna Bennett Howard was a puzzle in itself. She was warm and friendly, and her family came first with her. Into her late thirties and early forties she remained a startlingly beautiful woman. She was as slender as she had been during her days as a rodeo queen, her face unlined, her eyes as lovely as ever, and her hair free of gray strands. Russ, on the other hand, had begun to show the effects of years of hard drinking. His face was seamed with deep wrinkles. But he had taken up weight-lifting, and that made him as strong as a man twice his size. He was still a barrel of laughs at a party or in a bar, however—and it was true that he had little difficulty attracting women.

The class of 1950 of Ellensburg High School stayed in close touch. Originally there had been 107 in that graduating class. Although their numbers dwindled, at least half of them showed up at the class reunions they held every five years.

“Donna only came once,” “Tex” Parsons says. “And she came alone. I think we all knew that she was afraid that Russ might get drunk and embarrass her. As much as she wanted to come to our reunions, she missed most of them.”

“Tex” and Gene Parsons, who had moved to the Seattle area after they got married, stopped by to visit the Howards once when they were in Yakima for a Toastmasters convention. Russ seemed the same as he always had—maybe a little bit cockier. Gene Parsons, who stands well over six feet, found Russ something of a swaggering show-off. “He had several guns, and he took me out on the porch to show me what a marksman he was,” Parsons recalls. “He would toss aspirin into the air—ordinary aspirin tablets—and then blast them to pieces before they fell. He was good, and he must have been practicing a lot. It never rains over in Yakima, and his yard was sprinkled with all those little white bits of aspirin. Must have been a thousand or more of them.”

Donna Howard apparently tried every means she could think of to save her marriage. She prevailed upon Russ to go to an alcoholic treatment center. He went, but he began to drink again after he was back home. Feeling that his friends exacerbated his drinking problem, Donna put her foot down and barred them from her home, and that irritated Russ. She herself joined Al-Anon (the group for families of problem drinkers), and she talked almost daily with members of the group, seeking some way to help Russ stay sober. When nothing seemed to work she went so far as to consult an attorney about a divorce. But she changed her mind. She worried that she couldn’t support her daughters alone, and she really wanted them to have a father as well as a mother.

If there was one thing that the Howards were both concerned with, it was their daughters. The little girls were eight and ten, and Russ and Donna loved them.

Even so, his children were not enough to keep Russ Howard home much. Donna never knew where he was for sure. Once she was injured in a car accident, and nobody could find Russ for hours to tell him she had been hurt.

When Russ was in town he was a frequent patron at the bar at the Yakima VFW Club. The bartender there had been the attraction for a year or more. She was a cute little blonde with a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose and just the beginning edges of hardness. Her name was Sunny Riley,* and she was about a dozen years younger than Donna.

Sunny and Russ Howard had been involved in a sizzling affair for a year. Sunny liked the same characteristics in Russ that had drawn Donna to him twenty years earlier: he was fun, he was exciting, and he made her laugh. She wanted to marry him. But of course, he was already married. Sunny turned the screws a little. She simply told him that if he didn’t get a divorce, he’d better not expect her to wait around; she was going to date other men.