And the Sea Will Tell (23 page)

L
ATE
J
ANUARY
1981
FBI
HEADQUARTERS
, H
ONOLULU

C
AL
S
HISHIDO WAS WORKING
at his desk in the field office’s “bull pen,” the grungy squad room where agents worked at long tables, filling out reports, talking on the phones, and expelling enough cigarette smoke to produce the smoglike “vog” that lingers on the Hawaiian air after a volcanic eruption.

Shishido had been assigned to Honolulu for ten years now, longer than anyone else in the office. It was rather unusual for an agent to spend so long in one locale, but he had consistently spurned all offers of transfer—even ones promising promotion—because he loved Hawaii. His sons were going to his old high school, his elderly parents had retired nearby, and most of his other relatives and many of his closest friends still lived in the islands. And then there were the golf courses, some of the most neatly manicured and beautifully situated in the world. When Cal Shishido teed off at the majestic, coast-hugging thirteenth hole at Oahu’s Klipper Marine Golf Course, with the surf crashing next to him and the fertile emerald hills of the Waiahole Forest Reserve in the background, he couldn’t imagine moving to Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Washington, D.C. He was home.

It was an uncommonly slow afternoon at the office, and the bull pen was quiet. When all the agents were present, it was difficult to hear oneself think over the volume of chatter, let alone overhear a phone conversation. But now Shishido could clearly hear, from twenty feet away, the new guy manning the complaint desk, set up to handle calls from local authorities and the public.

“They found bones?” the agent was saying.

At that moment, Shishido’s extension rang. A federal prosecutor was returning his call about a recent bank robbery case. When he hung up a minute or so later, Shishido noticed that the complaint-desk agent was still on the same call.

“Cannibals, maybe?” the young man chuckled.

Shishido made a note in the bank robbery file and put it back in a file cabinet.

“Give me the name of the place again. You’d better spell it,” Shishido heard the agent say.

Cal looked at his watch. Maybe he’d head home early today. He had worked overtime on the weekend.

“P…A…L…M…Y…”

Shishido popped out of his chair and hurried to the complaint desk.

“Yeah, Y as in Yankee…R…A.”

“Let me have that!” Cal unceremoniously grabbed the phone.

The new guy had only recently graduated from the academy in Quantico. He’d been in Hawaii barely six months. Christ, he’d been a college kid going to frat parties when the Grahams disappeared. He just wouldn’t know.

“This is Special Agent Shishido.”

The Coast Guard officer on the line reread the radio message that had been patched through from the yacht
Moya
. The officer, also new to the islands, knew nothing about the Palmyra case.

Shishido scribbled a few notes.

When he hung up, he pulled the Walker/Jenkins file.

One of the first people Shishido called next was Bill Eggers. Both men had always feared that the bodies of Malcolm and Eleanor Graham, even a trace of them, would never be found. When they had learned that Muff Graham wore prescription glasses, there was a fleeting hope that the partially burned lens Eggers had recovered from the old fire pit in the November 1974 search might be hers. But Muff’s eye doctor had reported that it didn’t match her prescription.

Eggers was elated at the reported discovery of bones and wished his old friend good luck on the next trip to Palmyra. Eggers would not be going along this time. He had left the U.S. Attorney’s Office a year earlier and was now in private practice in Honolulu.

“My God, I can’t believe it,” he exclaimed. “The bones have
got
to be the Grahams’.”

Shishido agreed. “I’d give my left nut to see the looks on the faces of Walker and Jenkins when they hear. They thought they had gotten away with murder.”

N
EWS OF
the grisly discovery on Palmyra reverberated throughout the Hawaiian Islands. “Human Bones Found on Palmyra,” “Murder on Palmyra,” “Witness Describes Finding Bones on Palmyra,” headlines across the islands screamed out.

On February 4, an FBI team headed by Cal Shishido left Hawaii for Palmyra. They were gone for six days. On the night they returned, television crews waited at the airport to film Shishido and another FBI agent as they stepped from the plane carrying the corroded metal box Sharon Jordan found on the beach. Up close, the rattling of bones could be heard inside the container.

That night’s ten-o’clock news on KGMB-TV led with this story:

Referring to the fact that the next tide might have returned the bones to the lagoon, where they could have sunk to the lagoon bottom or been washed out to sea through the channel, the report noted that the bones “may have been visible and reachable for only a few hours, and then would have been gone, probably forever. If connected to the Grahams, a few moments of luck may help clear up a seven-year-old mystery.”

The speculation ended on February 17 when William C. Ervin, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Honolulu office, announced that the remains found on Palmyra had been positively identified as those of Eleanor “Muff” Graham. A forensic odontologist had been able to make the identification by comparing dental charts and X-rays obtained from Muff’s dentist in San Diego to the teeth and fillings in the skull.

On February 20, a federal grand jury in Honolulu returned an indictment against Buck Walker and Jennifer Jenkins for first-degree murder in the death of Muff Graham. (Walker and Jenkins were not charged with the murder of Mac Graham.) The grand jury charged “that sometime between, on, or about August 28, 1974, and on or about September 4, 1974, at Palmyra Island, in the District of Hawaii and within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, Buck Duane Walker, also known as Roy A. Allen, and Jennifer Lynn Jenkins, also known as Jennifer Allen, with malice aforethought did murder Mrs. Eleanor Graham during the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, a robbery, thereby committing the offense of murder in the first degree.”

Gruesome details began to be made public. “The aluminum box found next to the bones was too small to place a full corpse inside,” a federal prosecutor in Honolulu told the press. “The body must have been cut up to fit into the box. There’s a hole in the left temple of the skull and char marks on both the bones and the box. This body suffered intense heat.”

Virtually every article or news story about the murder spotlighted Buck and Jennifer’s suspicious conduct back in 1974—the theft of the
Sea Wind
, its repainting, Jennifer’s flight from authorities in the harbor, Buck’s escape, and so forth. Flat-out accusations in the news media were commonly reported: “Friends of the Grahams maintain that the two San Diegans were murdered by Walker and Jenkins.” Even when there was no direct accusation, it was clear who the murderers were believed to be: “The Grahams had described the couple as ragtag nuisances they wished to be rid of” “The Grahams radioed that they did not like the looks of Walker and Jenkins,
the only other people on the atoll
, whose yacht was in poor condition and without provisions” “The Grahams’ last transmission said Walker and Jenkins were out of food, cutting down coconut trees, and shooting fish with a handgun” “The Grahams told Curt Shoemaker that Walker and Jenkins were desperate and out of food” “The relationship wasn’t a friendly one,” etc. Even the headlines themselves went in the direction of presupposing guilt: “Walker and Jenkins Tied to Slaying of Pair on Cruise.”

On March 5, Jennifer Jenkins, now thirty-four, turned herself in to U.S. Marshals in Los Angeles. The next day, she was freed on $100,000 bond, and she promised to appear in a Hawaiian federal courtroom on April 2 to enter a plea to the charge that she had taken part in the murder of Muff Graham.

Unlike his former girlfriend, Buck Walker had no intention of surrendering to the authorities.

When Cal Shishido attempted to get a line on Walker’s whereabouts, he called the FBI office in Seattle. Last Shishido had heard, Walker was serving time at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington State.

The agent called back in twenty minutes. “Walker escaped.”

“
Escaped?
You’re kidding. When?”

“Year and a half ago.”

“Any leads?”

“Nope. No one knows where he is.”

U.S. M
ARSHAL’S
O
FFICE
S
EATTLE
, W
ASHINGTON

W
HEN
D
EPUTY
U.S. Marshal Richard “Dick” Kringle, Jr., received word of the Hawaii murder indictments, he spun into action, teletyping information to headquarters in Washington, D.C., about Buck Walker and the discovery of human remains at a place called Palmyra Island.

Buck Duane Walker’s case had been among eighty fugitive cases the U.S. Marshals Service Seattle office had received from the FBI in October 1979, when that agency relinquished its responsibility to hunt for federal prison escapees. Kringle, forty-four years old, had a streak of bulldog determination in his personality that suited his job.

Walker had escaped on July 10, 1979, from the minimum-security camp adjacent to the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, just southwest of Tacoma. He had either swum the two miles to shore or—according to one colorful rumor Kringle never entirely discounted—had been picked up in the water by a single-engine seaplane. Kringle learned that the U.S. Parole Commission had planned to parole Walker after he had served seven years. He escaped after logging close to five years.

When Kringle first received the case in late 1979, he wondered why Walker had been so desperate to escape, considering that the most difficult part of his sentence was already behind him. But in view of the murder indictment, the escape made perfect sense. The deputy could imagine Walker sweating each moment out in prison, fearful that the bodies of his victims might be found any day.

Kringle learned that before his escape at McNeil, Walker had obsessively stuck to a strenuous physical fitness regime, making his muscular build even more solid. Kringle also learned that Walker was very intelligent, with an IQ range of 130 to 140. A rabid reader as well, Walker had become something of a jailhouse lawyer, helping other convicts with their court motions and appeals in exchange for the most valuable prison currency: cartons of cigarettes. He also was a prolific correspondent, sometimes sending out a half-dozen letters a day. Reading copies of the surprisingly articulate and reasonably grammatical missives—routinely kept on file—Kringle noticed that Walker’s tone never varied. The entire system was against him; he had been framed. From McNeil Island guards, Kringle learned that Walker had delved into the occult. “He thought himself capable of leaving his body,” reported one guard.

According to Walker’s file, he had been married twice,
^*
and had fathered a daughter, Noel, born in 1967. Walker had married Noel’s mother, Patricia McKay, in 1966, and they had divorced in 1972. McKay, who had been awarded custody of Noel, still lived in fear of her former husband. “I don’t want him to know where I’m living,” she told the feds. “You have to understand something about Buck. He’s a classic psychopath. And he’s never been questioned for even a fraction of the armed robberies he’s committed.”

Kringle noticed a pattern in Walker’s buddies at McNeil Island and in the list of convicts he had written to in other institutions. They were the true incorrigibles—bank robbers, drug smugglers, extortionists, kidnappers, murderers. Kringle knew how this amoral brotherhood worked. When any member could call another as a witness in a trial, he did so, with the idea that it was easier for his friends to escape while traveling to and from court than while stuck behind prison walls. When someone like Walker hit the streets again, he was often set up in criminal enterprises by friends who had been out longer. Kringle knew that with such connections, Walker did not plan to go straight. That was fine with Kringle. Fugitives who stayed out of trouble were the most difficult to locate.

Kringle also knew about Jennifer Jenkins. Her name was included on the McNeil Island list of Walker’s correspondents. About eighteen months before his escape, Buck had written to her at a Santa Barbara address. There was no record of a reply.