Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (38 page)

There were other bits of circumstantial evidence that marked Arne Kaarsten as a liar. Jody Kaarsten had told her neighbors that Arne said all the clocks in the house had stopped. Arne said that he had overslept because his alarm didn’t go off. Why, then, had detectives found the clock in the master bedroom working perfectly the next morning? Jody had allegedly come home and gone to sleep in the living room without even going into the master bedroom. Had Kaarsten himself stopped to reset the bedroom clock in the morning before running to the Pearces for help?

A neighbor living directly across the street testified that he had been up preparing for work at 6:45
A.M.
on that Wednesday in July. When he glanced through the front window of the Kaarsten house he saw a man wearing a bulky coat or robe in the Kaarsten living room. That was more than an hour before Arne Kaarsten, wearing his bulky bathrobe, ran for help to the Pearces’ home shortly before 8:00
A.M.
And even though detectives found that robe on the end of the bed in the master bedroom, Kaarsten insisted he had not worn it in months. Was it within the realm of credulity that an intruder—a man who had killed a woman and a baby—would still be lingering in the house long after daylight?

And who had prepared a bowl of cereal that morning and eaten half of it—only feet away from the body of Jody Kaarsten? Would a burglar-killer have been so brazen?

One of Arne Kaarsten’s acquaintances testified about a strange conversation. When Arne learned that scrapings had been taken from Jody’s nails, he had explained to his friend, “They’ll probably find some of my skin. Terry scratched me, roughhousing, and then Jody cleaned Terry’s nails with her own when she put her to bed.”

This statement was inconsistent with his earlier statements. He had told police that
he
had put Terry to bed.

There were other discrepancies. Taken singly, they didn’t mean that much. Considered all together, they suggested that Arne Kaarsten had concocted a plan that didn’t fit, and so he had made it fit by continually changing his explanations.

If Arne Kaarsten’s family had been sick enough for him to take a half-day off from work, why did he take them out to dinner, shopping, and visiting on that same day?

Even more difficult to understand was Jody’s change in attitude. According to Arne, Jody had been so terrified of the prowler that she had locked her doors in the middle of the day. Wasn’t it peculiar, then, that she had gone outdoors and through the dark yard to visit the Pearces? She had come home alone at midnight, too; she didn’t ask Ted Pearce to see her safely home. She hadn’t been at all afraid. And if Kaarsten had seen a prowler’s legs and attempted to chase him earlier that day, why had he gone peacefully to sleep while Jody was out there in the dark?

When the defense began its case, Kaarsten’s attorneys, Carl Richey and Larry Barokas, presented a number of character witnesses who attested to the harmony in the Kaarsten marriage at the time of the double murder. They also presented witnesses who said that Kaarsten was known to be a very sound sleeper. Again and again the defense attorneys stressed the fact that there was no physical evidence linking the twenty-three-year-old widower to the crime. Under the laws of the United States, Richey and Barokas were not saddled with the burden of proof. They did not have to prove that Arne Kaarsten was innocent; it was up to the prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt and moral certainty that he was guilty.

Richey and Barokas threw down their ace card when they called Jody’s alleged lover, Jack Kane, to the stand. He was an attractive man in a carny-cowboy kind of way whose testimony often made jurors and the gallery smile.

Kane was only too happy to go into detail about his affair with Jody Kaarsten. He was obviously a ladies’ man, and he admitted that he had been married several times. He also acknowledged that he had once been a patient in a mental facility. But he certainly did not appear at all deranged on the witness stand, and he told his story in a straightforward—albeit colorful—way.

Kane said he had first met Jody in April of 1965. “I fell somewhat in love with her that weekend,” he testified. “The next Friday she called and said she was flying to Eugene [Oregon]. I met her, and we spent the weekend in a motel room. I saw her again at the Kaarsten home in May of 1965. I was shaving in the bathroom when Kaarsten came in. We shook hands and started making small talk. Terry came in and ran to me and said, ‘Hi, Daddy!’”

“And what happened then?”

Jack Kane testified that Arne Kaarsten had stopped being civil at that point. “Kaarsten said, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Then he left and said, ‘Okay. You guys go back to your funny little games. Someday, I’ll fix both of you.’”

Larry Barokas focused on Kane’s history of mental illness: “Didn’t you tell your psychiatrist that you planned to blow up your in-laws with a detonator?”

“I may have,” the witness admitted casually, explaining that he was angry with them at the time, but he insisted that he wouldn’t really have harmed them.

“What was the reason you went to the hospital in the first place?” Barokas pressed. “Wasn’t it for rape?”

Kane wriggled uncomfortably in his chair. “Well…I was only sixteen, and this older woman invited me over. When I walked in…well, she came out in hardly any clothes and I was scared…so I…Well, I just hit her.”

It was clear that Barokas was attempting to set Jack Kane up as a viable suspect in the murders. But Kane insisted that he was not angry when Jody left him to go back to Kaarsten. He testified that she was pregnant and needed a husband to take care of her and that he was in no position to marry her. They had parted reluctantly but by mutual agreement.

“Where were
you
on July 6?” Barokas asked suddenly.

“I was working in the woods in Casper, Wyoming,” Kane answered. He admitted that he had been on a drinking binge during that whole week. Jack Kane, as charming a rogue as he appeared to be, was clearly not blessed with good judgment. He confided to an utterly fascinated jury that his memory had failed him during that time. One of the main reasons he had been unable to marry Jody Kaarsten was that—in the summer of 1966—he was already married to one of his many wives. But on July 16 he had completely forgotten he was currently married, and he had wed a beautiful teenage girl. So he had become a bigamist.

He continued his testimony, which sounded like nothing so much as a cross-country movie comedy script. He and his new, if bigamous, bride were headed for their honeymoon in South Dakota’s Badlands National Park when they had a mishap.

“A buffalo attacked my sports car,” Kane testified.

“I beg your pardon,” Barokas said.

“He came at us and crushed both doors, and we couldn’t drive it, and we couldn’t get out of it, either. We had to wait until the state police found us.”

After a long uneasy time trapped in the battered little car, Kane said he and his teenage bride were rescued by a highway patrolman. The incident got much tongue-in-cheek coverage in local papers and hit the AP wires. It was a natural for human interest: “Buffalo Attacks Sports Car of Honeymooning Couple.”

Unfortunately for Jack Kane, the parents of his latest
legal
wife read the news stories with interest. They learned that their son-in-law had remarried without benefit of divorce and then had been roughed up by a buffalo. They didn’t find it as funny as the reading public. When they told their daughter, she brought charges against Jack Kane and had him arrested for bigamy.

The double murder trial, which was now edging dangerously close to Christmas, continued through Saturday, December 18. On the advice of counsel, defendants in murder cases rarely take the witness stand. But Arne Kaarsten insisted on testifying. His demeanor continued to be that of a supremely confident man. He might well have been the toastmaster at a banquet for close friends. He smiled and spoke easily to the jury, turning often to include them in his answers to questions. After the lunch break, however, Kaarsten seemed a changed man. Either he’d had time to think about the enormity of the charges against him or his legal counsel had suggested that he should act a little more somber, considering the occasion. Now his face sagged, and he spoke in a low, almost humble tone.

“What happened to that smile?” Deputy Prosecutor Lee Yates asked with a bite in his voice.

“I guess I’m just surprised at being called to the witness stand today,” Kaarsten responded weakly.

When he was shown a picture of his wife, Kaarsten broke into sobs. That seemed peculiar, since it certainly wasn’t the first time he had seen the photograph. Kaarsten had gazed at pictures of the bodies of Jody and Peri Lynn on the corkboard in front of the courtroom through most of the trial and had never shown a trace of emotion. Now it was as if he were seeing for the very first time this picture of his wife lying dead in a tangle of blankets.

It was late afternoon on December 21, 1971, when the jurors retired to begin deliberation. It would not be a quick verdict. The rule of thumb that attorneys and court watchers live by is that a quick verdict is a guilty verdict; the longer a jury stays out, the more likely it is that there will be an acquittal. When the jurors were still weighing the testimony and evidence more than forty hours later, the defense camp felt optimistic. In the end, it took Arne Kaarsten’s jury almost forty-eight hours to reach a verdict. It was two days before Christmas when Kaarsten walked into the courtroom to hear the jury’s decision. He walked arm in arm with one of Jody Kaarsten’s closest relatives; her family was supporting his innocence. If Jody’s own family believed in him, how could a jury find otherwise?

Arne Kaarsten was shocked and turned stark white when the jury foreman read the verdicts. In the death of Jody Kaarsten: “Guilty of murder in the first degree.”

In the death of Peri Lynn Kaarsten: “Guilty of murder in the first degree.”

The jury did, however, recommend against the death penalty. Arne Kaarsten was sentenced instead to two concurrent life sentences; with good behavior, he could be out of jail in thirteen years and four months.

The Kaarsten saga was far from over. Arne Kaarsten’s legal team appealed the guilty verdicts on the basis of prejudicial testimony by a witness. The witness in question was the owner of a Kent ambulance service, also an EMT, who was the man who had tried in vain to bring Jody Kaarsten back to life. He had testified that, in his opinion, Kaarsten had not seemed as concerned or as grief-stricken as other husbands he had observed when he worked over their stricken mates. He said that Kaarsten grew concerned only when it looked as if Jody was breathing—when her chest began to rise and fall as a result of air being forced into her lungs by the resuscitator. At that point—and that point only—did the ambulance owner detect panic in Kaarsten.

The prosecution had inferred that Arne Kaarsten was afraid his wife was still alive and might tell who had choked her.

The defense attorneys claimed that the ambulance driver was not an expert in human behavior and that his testimony should have been deemed prejudicial and should have been stopped, or else the jury should have been advised to disregard it. Although the EMT had seen scores of worried relatives in accident and sudden death situations and had become a kind of intuitive judge of human nature in such cases, he was not—in the accepted legal sense—an expert witness.

On March 5, 1973, the Washington State Court of Appeals reversed Arne Kaarsten’s convictions and ordered a new trial. Kaarsten had been released from the Monroe, Washington, Reformatory on a $35,000 appeal bond on July 31, 1972, pending a State Supreme Court hearing on the issue of whether or not he should be allowed bond. The state subsequently ruled that Kaarsten could not be freed because of the capital nature of the crime, but, ironically, that decision did not take effect until his convictions had been reversed.

Arne Kaarsten remained free for sixteen months.

In December 1973, almost exactly two years after his first trial, Arne Kaarsten once again went on trial for the murder of his wife and baby. Once more, a Christmas tree dominated the lobby of the courthouse. The courtroom was different, and the judge and jury were different, but one got a feeling of déjà vu. It seemed that all of this had happened before. As indeed it had.

Kaarsten himself, still a popular race-car driver, appeared scarcely changed. His hair was a bit grayer, but his full face was unlined. Interestingly, the strain of the marathon legal ordeal showed strongly on relatives and friends of Jody and Peri Lynn, both now dead for seven years. Little Peri Lynn would have been in the fourth grade by now. Terry was in the sixth.

Some of the witnesses had died, although the ones whose testimony was vital to a conviction had been located and brought to the trial.

Carl Richey once again represented Kaarsten, and Lee Yates would again prosecute for the state. The mere passage of time had made the Kaarsten case less news-worthy. This time there were no headlines on the front page—only short articles in the back sections of local papers. Kaarsten spoke expansively to an attractive television newswoman and was filmed smiling broadly as he strode into the courtroom. One reporter studied the jury and remarked, “It’s possible that Kaarsten may seem innocent now just because so much time has gone by since they died. That alone might be enough to sway a jury.”