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

coach would have gone off the bridge over water that was a hundred feet deep. Instead of the injured landing in the front yard of an apartment house, they would have ridden the bus down and down and down to the bottom of the ship canal. Those who were unconscious and even those who might have managed to clamber out of the bus would surely have drowned. And then there would have been no statements about what had happened. No witnesses. No evidence. No survivors.
    It was a terrible thought. Thirty-three people fighting for air under a hundred feet of murky water. The investigators wondered if that was what the shooter had planned all along, and if he had somehow misjudged the bus’s location on the bridge.

    Detectives Steve O’Leary, John Nordlund, and Gene Ramirez were paged to respond to the Homicide offices that Friday afternoon. Although many Seattle police officers and detectives would work to find out the reasons behind the shooting, the bulk of the investigation would be done by these three men. They were sent directly to Harborview Hospital, so they could begin to sort out the mystery of the crash of metro Number 359.
    Among the three of them, they had almost fifty years of experience in solving homicides; still, they had never had a case quite like the one they faced now.
    Each of them had come to Homicide through a circuitous route. Steve O’Leary had wanted to be a chef. Seattle’s grand old Olympic Hotel had the best chef’s training program in the area and he had applied there. “They said they didn’t have any openings, and asked me if I wanted to be a bellman. I said, ‘What’s that?’ ” But O’Leary needed a job because he was going to college, so he soon found out that bellmen carried thousands of pounds of luggage.
    The Olympic’s bellmen shared an office with the hotel’s security officers, all of them off-duty cops. “I got to know a lot of these policemen,” O’Leary remembered. “I started scuba diving with them, and one of my cop friends said, ‘Why don’t you go down and take the test?’ ”
    It sounded interesting to O’Leary. He passed with a high score, and was hired by the Seattle Police Department December 1, 1979. He never became a chef, but being a cop suited him. He walked a beat on the waterfront and in Chinatown for five years, worked with the Swat Team and Special Patrol, and then was assigned as a detective to the Sex Crimes Unit.
    One of the things that tugged at O’Leary’s heart the most was seeing children so afraid of testifying against their abusers. He devised a way to give them a little bit of power. “I loaned them my badge while they were on the stand,” he said. “I pinned it underneath their clothes and no one could see it. But those kids knew it was there, and it seemed to give them some comfort.”
    O’Leary came into Homicide in October 1989. It was an assignment that few detectives ever want to leave, and he was no different.
    Gene Ramirez started out in Patrol, but he broke department policy that says every rookie must work five years in Patrol before he can become a detective. Detective Sergeant Don Cameron had a major case where he needed someone who was fluent in Spanish to serve as an interpreter. After three years on Patrol, Gene Ramirez was assigned temporarily to Homicide. Not only was he a remarkably good interpreter, he proved to be a natural homicide detective. “I’m still here,” Ramirez says, smiling. “I’ve been here for sixteen years.” The other detectives call him “Eugenio.”
    John Nordlund served in the Navy until 1966, and then became a clerk in the FBI in Seattle. Asked what he did there, he immediately says, “I can’t tell you,” but then he smiles. Like all FBI employees, he had signed a document swearing him to secrecy about the inner workings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
    Nordlund wanted to work in law enforcement in a more active way, and the Seattle Police Department was hiring. Another FBI clerk