Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (2 page)

There was the child's carseat right behind the driver's seat.
 
It was

empty, but that didn't make Blighton feel much better, the baby could

be on the floor someplace.
 
Counting on the flares to warn other cars

to go around, he slid the side passenger door open and patted the floor

and seats with his hands.
 
Everything he touched was wet and he

realized why it had been so hard to see through the driver's-side

window.

Something dark splattered the glass.
 
On some level, he knew he was

running his hands through pooled blood, but finding the baby that might

be there was more important than anything else.
 
When he found nothing,

he ran to the hack of the van, opened the hatchback, and looked in.
 
No

baby.

Thank God.
 
No baby.

Instinctively, Blighton wiped his hands down his shirt and pants, wanting to get the wet, iodiney-smelling stuff off them.
 
He shuddered,

hut he didn't stop to consider how there could be blood if the van had

not been hit by another vehicle.
 
He ran back to the driver's door,

hopped into the van, expertly shifted into reverse, and backed the van

across the freeway and onto the shoulder of 79th where it met the

Sunset Highway.

Only when he had assured himself that the
Toyota
was no longer in

danger of being hit by oncoming traffic did Blighton turn to look

closely at the person lying across the seat.
 
He thought it was a

woman.

Her hair was short and dark, but he didn't know if she was young or

old.

She did not respond to his questions, but he still kept asking, "Are

you okay?
 
Are you hurt?"

Blighton ran around to the front passenger door and found it was

slightly ajar.
 
He opened it and picked up the woman's hand, feeling

for a pulse in her wrist.
 
There was no reassuring beat.
 
He could see

blood on her face, and one of her eyes protruded grotesquely, as big as

a hardboiled egg.
 
Even if he had known this woman, he would never have

recognized her.

His first thought was that he had to get help for her maybe she did

have a pulse but too faint for him to detect.
 
He ran back to the

driver's side and reached in, running his hands along the dash,

searching frantically again for the emergency flashers switch.
 
He

finally saw it overhead and switched them on.
 
They clicked in eerie

rhythm, hut that was the only sound he heard.
 
The woman wasn't

breathing.

Blighton stuck more flares in the gravel along the shoulder of the

freeway and traffic in both lanes slowed down as it passed, hundreds of

cars whose occupants had no idea how close they had comc to being in a

massive fatal pileup.
 
Blighton then looked around for a place where he

could call for help.
 
He saw lights along S.W. 79th, the street that

ran at a right angle onto the Sunset Highway.
 
No one responded to his

knock at the first house, even though he could hear voices inside.

He pounded on the door of the second house and a young woman opened

it.

'iTllerc's a had accident on the freeway," he gasped.
 
"Call an

ambulance.
 
I'm going back out there."

It was hard to judge the passage of time, but Blighton estimated that

about ten minutes had passed since he first saw the Toyota van angled

crazily across the freeway.
 
Cars were inching by in a single lane now,

and he caught glimpses of curious faces darting a look at what appeared

to be nothing more than a roadside breakdown.

who lay across the seat hadn't moved.

Sirens wailed somewhere in the distancc, and soon Blighton could see

the flashing red lights of an ambulance.

Thomas Stewart Dulfy, Jr.þTomþwas on duty at W lshington County Fire

District Number One, the West Slope station, that Sunday night.
 
The

station was just east of the I.G.A supermarket between Canyon Drive and

Canyon lane at S.W. 78th Street.
 
The alarm bells sounded at on the

Sunset HighGhay.
 
There were a lot of calls from the Sunset, and a

fair amount of them were fatals, so Tom Duffy and his partner, Mike

Morn, both paramedics, were familiar with the area.
 
Running for

their rig, a Chevrolet van, the two men leaped in and headed up Canyon

Lane.

turned left on West Slope Drive, and then went northhound on 79th

toward the Sunset T,lighway.

It was an older neighborhood with houses on big lots set far off the

street and well apart from each other.
 
Huge trees edged the narrow

roadsha!
 
and there were no street lights.
 
The medics' rig lights were

on, but they still had trouble seeing until t,hey spotted the flares at

tlIc southwest corner of the Sunset and 79th.
 
In a heartheat, the

quiet dark street ended in a usually roaring freeway.
 
That night, they

saw cars hacked up to the west for miles.

It had taken tllelll two minutes and twenty seconds to reach the

site.

Tom Duffy Was a former army combat medic who senred in Vietnam.
 
He had

worked for thirteen years as a paramedic with the Washington County

Fire district and Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue.
 
Altogether, he

had over twenty-eight years in the medical field.
 
Ven tall and lean,

he rarely smiled.
 
he had seen people die in all manner of ways.
 
He

had seen scores of fatal accidents, and they always bothered him.
 
He

had long since learned to shut his mind to the terrible things he saw

during those moments when he fought to save lives, but he never really

forgot and he would have almost crystalline recall of that Sunday

night.

Duffy and Morn saw a blue Toyota van parked facing north along 79th.

A man ran up to them, shouting, "A lady's in the van.
 
She's hurt

really bad!"

"How long has it been since the accident?"
 
Duffy asked.

"I don't know for sure.
 
It took me a while to find a phone.
 
I think

about fifteen minutes," the man answered.

"We saw the van," Duffy would remember, "and we assessed the situation

quickly.
 
We saw no hazards around itþno power lines down or gas

leaking.

There was very little damage to the van itself."

As for the man who had run up to him, Randy Blighton, Duffy didn't know

who he was and he had no idea what had happened.
 
Blighton's clothes

were streaked with dark stains that could have been blood.
 
The van

didn't look wrecked.
 
For all Duffy knew, he and Morn might be walking

into trouble.

The three men went over to the van and Blighton opened the nassenger

door so the paramedics could see the woman inside.
 
"She's in here," he

said.
 
"The van was crosswise over there in the fast lane."

Duffy attempted to find some sign of life in the woman who lay sprawled

across the front seat in the shadows of the van.
 
He put a hand on her

shoulder and asked, "Are you all right?"

There was no response.

He exerted more pressure and gave the woman a "trapezius squeeze" on

her shoulder muscle.
 
Someone even semiconscious would have reacted to

that force.

There was no response.

Duffy held sensitive fingers to the carotid arteny along the side of

her neck and felt nothing.
 
"There was no response at all," he would

remember.
 
I could palpate no pulse.
 
No respiration."

Turning to Mike Morn and three firefighters who had arrived at the

scene in a firetruck, he said, "We need to get her out of this van

fast."

They maneuvered her limp body out of the front seat with extreme

caution, careful not to aggravate any cenvical-spinal injuries she

might have sustained in the accident.
 
They circled her neck with a

bracing collar so that her spinal processes would not be jostled as

they took her out of the van.
 
If by some miracle she was alive, they

didn't want her to be paralyzed.
 
They placed her on the road beside

the van and began attempts to resuscitate her, even though they were

quite sure it was an exercise in futility.

The gravelly shoulder alongside the Sunset Highway now bristled with

people who wanted to help when there was no longer any way to helpþa

Buck Ambulance and its crew, Mike Morn and Tom Duffy, the firefighters

and EMTs, and a half dozen state police.
 
In the yellow rays of

headlights and flashlights, they could all see that the victim who lay

on the ground had suffered massive trauma.
 
The top of her head was, in

the blunt words of an obsenver, i'like mincemeat."
 
One of the

paramedics thought he saw brain matter leaking.
 
There was so much

blood þso terribly much blood.
 
It was as thick as curdled sour milk,

already beginning to coagulate.
 
Duffy knew that meant that more than

five or ten minutes had passed since the woman had last bled freely.

Depending on her own particular clotting factor profile, it might have

been up to half an hour.

There was no hope of saving her.
 
The dead do not bleed.

"The patient fit into the category of a patient who could not possibly

be resuscitated," he would say later.
 
"Not at all.
 
She was in

cardiopulmonary arrest."
 
That meant her heart no longer beat, her

lungs no longer drew breath.
 
Even without the tremendous loss of

blood, the assault to the brain itself would have been fatal.
 
An

injured brain responds by swelling, and as it does so, it bulges into

centers that control heart rhythm and breathing, effectively shutting