A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

the most mundane pursuits. Along with a million other people, I watched it unfold on my television screen. But don’t jump to conclusions; this is not a review of the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, although the motivation behind the two incidents are, perhaps, almost identical. Rage and resentment hidden beneath a bland façade can explode in ways we might never imagine, and sometimes that kind of hatred can smolder for a very long time, even for decades.
    On the day after Thanksgiving, 1998, I was cleaning my kitchen, which, for me, was playing hookey from writing. Like many moms with big families, I had spent all the day before cooking and this seemed a good time to try to create some kind of order in my kitchen drawers and cabinets. This was
my
idea of a holiday, polishing silver, lining cupboards and washing dishes while I watched daytime television.
    But I was snapped out of my reverie when I heard the announcer cut into
Oprah
with a news bulletin; his voice
had a nonprofessional edge to it that gave away what was clearly his own shock. I looked up at my little kitchen TV set to see an image there that made no sense at all. I recognized a familiar bridge, but everything else was a jumble of crushed metal, emergency vehicles, victims with bloody clothing, and sobbing bystanders. For the next three hours, I watched, transfixed with horror.
    We all tend to think that really bad things are not going to happen in the town where we live—that we are somehow protected by the law of averages, fate, and even angels. The classic quote from bystanders who cluster around a murder or a multiple fatality accident is
always,
“Things like that don’t happen in our town.” Television reporters seem to love that quote, no matter how predictable it has become. But sometimes, terrible things
do
happen right down the street from where we live. The tragedy that occurred in Seattle on the day after Thanksgiving, 1998, was like that, and the reasons behind it made for an unfathomable puzzle at first.
    I set out to try to find some answers. What I eventually discovered was shocking. More than any case I’ve written about to date, this one demonstrates that there are people who live and breathe and move among us who live in a completely alien world. In Seattle, on the day after a holiday that traditionally signifies warmth and love, one of those people brought untold pain to perfect strangers. I had to know who he was, what he looked like, and, most important, what drove him to do what he did. You couldn’t really tell who he was from the statements of almost forty eyewitnesses; he might have been a dozen different men.
    And
no one
knew who really lived behind his handsome, pleasant facade.

T he Thanksgiving holiday, 1998, was no different from any other holiday, although Thursday, the day itself, was fairly quiet. Most residents of the western half of Washington State were grateful that the week’s tumultuous weather had tempered just a little, and that there was power to roast their turkeys, since a storm packing 70-mile-an-hour winds had swept in on Monday and knocked power out in 200,000 homes. Ten inches of snow fell in the Cascade Mountains and the first gully-washing rains of what would prove to be a winter of record rainfall had begun. Thanksgiving Day itself was mostly cloudy, a little rainy, but the gale-force winds had diminished to only breezes. Friday was the same. That was fortunate for anyone living along Puget Sound or Elliott Bay; high tides of over twelve feet were expected and 70-mile-an-hour winds would have taken out a lot of docks and bulkheads and carried away boats and buoys. That had happened often enough over the Thanksgiving holidays of the past.
    There are no holidays in a homicide unit; there are only detectives who have the day off, detectives who are on call, and detectives who are on duty. When something catastrophic happens, the whole police force is, of course, available. Those in the first category in the Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Unit can breathe easy on a holiday, but the next two are either listening for their pagers to beep or working on open cases. Holidays tend to breed homicides; people who manage to avoid each other—and are wise to do so—the rest of the year are thrown together, with sometimes fatal results. They drink too much, get too little sleep, are worn out by travel, and generally tend to behave badly if they have a propensity for badness