A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases by Ann Rule Read Free Book Online Page A

Fred Jordan, supervising the Two-George Patrol Sector, was armed with a description of the man who had shot Mark McLaughlin when he drove to Harborview. Most of the eyewitnesses said he had worn dark clothing, and all of them said he was Caucasian, tall, and had dark hair. As Jordan entered the Emergency Room at Harborview, he was met by Security Officer Karen Jacobsen. She handed him a plastic bag holding a handgun. It was a small caliber, shiny, steel-colored Derringer five shot. There were also some unfired bullets in the bag.
    Karen Jacobsen told Fred Jordan that the gun had been found hanging out of the right front pocket of one of the patients who had arrived from the bus crash scene, a man who looked to be about forty.
    She escorted Jordan into an ER treatment room where she pointed out a tall, dark-haired man who lay naked on a gurney. He had a tube in his mouth, but all efforts to resuscitate him had ceased. He was dead. “That’s the man who had the Derringer,” she said.
    The man’s clothing had been cut from his body so that he could be treated. Jordan took possession of the remnants of his clothing, and bagged them for evidence in brown paper sacks, carefully initialing the bags, and adding the date and time before he secured their tops. These would be turned over to the homicide detectives who would be investigating the bus crash. The dead man had a yellow band around his wrist with the temporary I.D. given him : the words “Whiskey Doe.”
    Who
was
Whiskey Doe?

    What had happened had happened. Even as the dead and wounded were carried off to hospitals and the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, the time had come to find out
why
such a catastrophe had taken place, and
who
was responsible. It was ten minutes to four in the afternoon when Seattle homicide detectives received the first word that a Metro bus had crashed near 36th North and Aurora. The word coming back from passengers who had been able to blurt out statements to police and paramedics was that their bus driver had been shot.
    And now he was dead.
    Assistant Chief Ed Joiner walked into the Homicide Unit and asked the detectives there to respond at once to the scene. Sergeant Ed Striedinger and Detectives Steve Kilburg and Rob Blanco left the downtown offices and headed north. The homicide detectives, whose job it was to investigate all suspicious deaths, raced to the crash site just beneath the north end of the Aurora Bridge.
    The Aurora Bridge was a familiar place for them; it was the traditional site of suicides in Seattle, and had been for decades. The bridge was so high in midspan that death for jumpers, who were sick and tired of the world, was almost assured. A few people had survived a midspan plunge, but not many. Even more suicides had been accomplished by leaping off the ends of the bridge where the depressed jumpers had landed on boats and buildings. And, more optimistically, over the years police officers had arrived in time to save scores of would-be jumpers by talking them out of ending their lives.
    The first phalanx of homicide detectives arrived at the bridge at two minutes after four. And there they saw a scene of such chaos that even they could barely believe what had happened. They watched as the last of the injured were carried off from the scene. Later that night, the bus would be lifted so searchers could check beneath it. If anyone had been walking outside the apartment house at the moment of impact, they might well have been crushed. The cluster of neighbors who had stood around the Fremont Troll talking and smoking were still pinching themselves with gratitude that they were alive.
    As bad as the crash already was, the detectives knew it might get worse as reports came in from the hospitals where the injured were being examined.
    But, as bad as it was or might become, it could have been a great deal worse. If Mark McLaughlin had been shot and then lost control of the bus only four or five seconds later, the double