Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (50 page)

Sometimes a pervading fog envelops Mount Rainier and hikers can see no more than three feet in any direction. When the storms and fog come, the safest place is inside the rustic lodges, next to roaring fireplaces.

There are other elements to fear on a mountain as high as Mount Rainier. There, creatures often hide along the trails: bears, cougars, wolves, and, most dangerous of all, human predators.

*   *   *

On June 3, 1978, the bleakness and danger of winter storms when the sun sets at 3
P.M.
were far away. It was a brilliant late spring day when two young women set out for a hike along the Rampart Ridge Trail. Filtered sunlight etched dappled shadows on the vegetation along the pathway. Their own voices were the only sounds.

The women had no thought of danger. They were familiar with the trail, experienced hikers who had all the gear they needed for any eventuality—or so they thought. They planned to climb the path through the woods until they came to the high meadows rampant with spring flowers. They would share a picnic lunch there, and then return to their car near the lodge long before dark. The longest day of the year was just a little over two weeks away and in the Northwest at that time of year it doesn’t get dark until almost 10
P.M.

They were all alone. Yet, on a day like this was, they could expect to meet other hikers who had set out from Longmire Lodge and exchange greetings with them—the easy camaraderie of hikers.

Kit Spencer* was twenty-eight and worked as an economist in Seattle; her companion, Rose Fairless,* also twenty-eight, was a law student from Tacoma. They were highly competent, intelligent women. Neither would have walked along certain streets in Tacoma or Seattle at night—but this was Mount Rainier National Park and it was broad daylight.

They laughed and talked as they headed up the trail from Longmire Lodge to Paradise Lodge farther up the mountain, their voices cutting through the serene silence around them.

Kit and Rose heard footsteps thudding up the trail behind them and wondered momentarily at the energy of the person approaching. The recommended technique for trail hiking is based on steady walking. But the person behind them seemed to be in a tearing hurry.

Suddenly Rose let out a surprised yelp. A hand had reached out from nowhere and grabbed her arm. As both women turned to look behind them, they gasped to see a tall, apparition-like figure dressed in military camouflage clothing. They couldn’t see his face because it was covered with a green ski mask, leaving only his eyes and mouth visible.

Oddly, the man wore socks over his shoes. Each of them wondered briefly if this was some kind of bad joke.

Then they saw the gun. It appeared to be a small-caliber weapon, but he was waving it at them menacingly.

“I’m going to rob you!” the man rasped. He forced them to walk in front of him into a secluded clearing about four hundred feet off the trail.

“How much money do you have?” the masked stranger asked.

“None. I don’t have any,” Kit answered.

“Wait. Here—I’ve got about thirty dollars,” Rose said quietly. “Take it.”

The man pocketed the cash, but he didn’t leave, and he quickly blocked their way so they couldn’t return to the trail.

Finally, Kit asked him the question that was burning in both women’s minds. “Do you want money. Or sex?”

“Both,” the hooded figure answered.

“Why? Why are you doing this?” she countered.

“For kicks,” he said. “I want to find out what it’s like.”

Fighting panic, the women begged the man not to rape them. They urged him to take the money and let them go.

“We promise you,” Rose said. “We won’t report this to anyone. It would be too embarrassing for us.”

He wasn’t dissuaded. The robbery had been only the first part of his plan to achieve “kicks.”

“Why do you have the gun, anyway?” Kit asked him.

“For safety. It’s my insurance policy. But don’t worry—I won’t use it if you both do what I want.”

They realized that they were absolutely helpless. The only sound in the woods now was the calling of birds, the scurrying of little animals, and the buzz of mosquitoes in the dank underbrush that never quite caught the sun as it sliced through the giant firs.

Kit and Rose stared at each other, trying to send small signals by tilting their heads and altering their expressions slightly. They knew each other well. They were both in good shape. Maybe together they could overcome him enough so they would have a chance to run.

But he was a very large man, with very strong hands. And he had a loaded gun.

At this point, it had come down to a matter of their living or dying. He could kill them easily, and no one would hear the gun’s roar. The frightened women knew that their bodies might well lie undiscovered for days, months—perhaps forever.

“Now take off your clothes—all of them,” their captor ordered.

Slowly, they complied. As their bare skin was exposed, they were suddenly assailed by mosquitoes, scores of them. The buzzing insects bit them, drawing blood out and dotting their flesh with stings.

As the gunman blindfolded the women—Kit with her own shirt, and Rose with his ski mask, which he turned around backward—they complained that they were being eaten alive by the mosquitoes.

He was well supplied for the wilderness, and in a bizarre act of concern, handed them a bottle of insect repellent and told them to rub it on their bodies. It was a considerate gesture, while he was clearly planning to hurt them more than the mosquitoes ever could.

Shivering with fear and the dank chill of the black-green forest, Kit and Rose dabbed at their bodies with the repellent.

“You can call me Joe,” the man said.

They doubted that that was his real name, but they played along; they did not want to irritate him in any way. Each had noticed that the man spoke with a New York or East Coast accent. Both Kit and Rose had lived in New York at one time and they recognized the dialect.

Now the man told them, in obscenely explicit terms, what he wanted: intercourse and fellatio. Naked, blindfolded, and remembering the gun in his hands and the six-inch knife they had spotted in a sheath at his waist, they complied.

But they were making mental notes to remember him by. If they got out of the forest alive, they would never forget him and they
would
report him to authorities as soon as they could.

As he forced each of them to kiss him, they moved their hands over his head. Unlike many young men of the seventies, he had extremely short hair—the kind of haircut required for military men. When his mouth crushed theirs in openmouthed kisses, both Kit and Rose felt the several jagged teeth in the front of his jaw.

For the moment, at least, the rapist had everything on his side, and he confidently ran his hands over their helpless bodies, fondling them. Each could hear the other shudder and gag as he forced his attentions on them.

The sexual attacks seemed to go on endlessly, but eventually he climaxed and moved away from them. They could hear his harsh breathing, and their own hearts thudding. Was he satiated? They prayed so.

He could kill them. He might kill them. Then he wouldn’t have to worry that they might be able to identify him. Aching, scratched, sickened, they feared what might come next. They could hear him putting his clothes back on, and they felt around in the brush for theirs and cautiously began to get dressed.

“Now,” he instructed them, “I’m leaving, but you’ll be watched. Wait twenty minutes before you try to leave—or I’ll have to—”

“We’ll wait,” they both assured him.

They could hear crashing in the brush and breaking twigs as the man dove deeper into the thickets of evergreens. Soon there was no sound but the forest noises. Rose and Kit ripped off their blindfolds. They looked around cautiously, daring to hope that he was really gone.

They couldn’t see him, but that didn’t mean much; there were so many places for him to hide, watching them. They held their breath, listening. But there was no sign of their attacker.

The two young women waited only ten minutes. He had appeared out of nowhere, and he might still be out there, waiting for them to make their way through the dense underbrush, perhaps planning to pick them off with his gun.

Still, they decided they had to risk it.

Once they were back on the trail, everything seemed normal, but of course it wasn’t. Kit and Rose were both in deep shock. They discussed in whispers about whether they should report the man who had just raped them. Their dilemma was to be expected. They felt violated, dirty, and wanted only to forget what had happened. They feared the man who had forced them into the woods and worried that he might somehow find them and take his revenge. Had he looked through their belongings while they were blindfolded? If he had, he probably knew where they lived.

The camouflaged man had seemed in such complete control, as if he knew the forested mountainside like the back of his hand. He could be waiting for them just around the next bend in the trail, watching to see what they were going to do. He might be taking pleasure in hunting them.

Someone was coming toward them, and they froze with fear. Vastly relieved, they saw a man and woman walking down the trail from Paradise Lodge. The couple could see at once that the young women were very frightened and seemed confused.

“Are you lost?” the man asked.

“Yes. Yes—we’re not sure where we are,” Kit stammered.

“Follow us—we’ll lead you to Longmire,” he answered.

Kit and Rose followed the couple, but now shock was really taking its toll, and they shivered, feeling almost numb, as they walked down the trail that had seemed so sunny and friendly such a short time before.

The couple from the lodge were puzzled by the two women’s demeanor but assumed that they were only frightened because they’d been lost on the mountain. Neither Kit nor Rose had mentioned the violent stranger to their rescuers.

At Longmire Lodge, they decided they had to do something;
they
were alive, but the next females who were alone on the wooded trail might not survive. Rose placed a call to Rape Relief in Seattle and then to one of her law school professors.

“They both said we should report him,” Rose said. “I know we should.”

The two women approached chief park ranger Robert Dunnagan and Ranger William Larson and told them about the masked man in the woods who had held them captive, raped them, and forced them to perform oral sodomy.

“What did he look like?” Dunnagan asked. “Tell me as much as you remember and I’ll notify all of our rangers and also the law enforcement departments that are nearby.”

“I wish we could describe his face,” Kit said. “But we didn’t really see him. He was wearing an army camouflage outfit—maybe coveralls. He had a very short crew cut—and his front teeth were kind of snaggled—broken.”

“Oh,” Rose added, “we couldn’t look up at him, but I looked down. He wore socks over his shoes.”

“That’s probably because he didn’t want to leave tracks—patterns from his shoes,” Dunnagan said. “He must have known what he was doing.”

Finding the suspect was not going to be easy. Fort Lewis, the second-largest military compound in the United States, was located nearby and soldiers camping or training in the vast mountain park area were not unusual. Any suspect who wanted to hide would have a relatively easy time, especially a suspect who knew the trails as well as the rapist seemed to.

A few hours later, Rangers Dunnagan and Larson were scouting the parking lot in a widening area around Longmire Lodge when they spotted a tall man with a crew cut. He was wearing an army camouflage jacket.

“You! Stop!” Dunnagan shouted, and shone a flashlight into the man’s face. He noted that the man was “wound up like a spring.” He stopped walking away, but he refused to come any closer to the rangers.

“What are you doing around here?” Dunnagan asked.

“I’m camping up near Paradise,” the man said, shrugging his shoulders. “I guess I’m lost.”

Dunnagan and Larson gave him directions to the Paradise area, but they watched him closely. Suddenly he bolted and took off running into the now-dark woods in an entirely different direction. They searched for him in vain.

By the morning of June 4, Mount Rainier National Park was alive with park rangers and FBI agents—because the park was on federal land. Pierce County sheriff’s deputies had also been directed to the mountain to assist in the search. Tracking dogs padded along trails and then crashed into the undergrowth.

The consensus was that the rapist was still within the park’s boundaries; police vehicles had sealed off the usual exits overnight, and the widespread search began again by 4 
A.M.
in the first pale light of dawn.

The lawmen staked out a number of cars that bore Fort Lewis parking stickers, but none of the individuals who approached the vehicles matched the description that Kit and Rose had given.

FBI agent Richard Rudy stopped a soldier in the parking lot at Longmire Lodge and asked him his reasons for being there. The man, who gave his name as Alan Showalter,* resembled the suspect they sought. He appeared to be about the same height as the man the victims had described and he had a very short crew cut.

Showalter explained that he was a member of the army’s elite Ranger unit. Agent Rudy knew that the army Rangers were trained in wilderness survival and, if need be, to kill quietly and swiftly.

“What are you doing here?” Rudy asked.

“I left my buddy up here yesterday,” Showalter explained. “He was going to camp out and I’m on my way to pick him up at Narada Falls.”

Alan Showalter held out his identification, and the searchers relaxed a little. Showalter said his friend and former roommate was also an army Ranger. He had come to pick up Mark Leslie Rivenburgh, twenty-six.

“He’s from New York State,” Showalter said.

“We’ll walk you up there,” Rudy said easily, signaling to Park Ranger John Wilcox to accompany them. “We’d like to talk to him. He may have seen the guy we’re looking for.”

The trio set out along a forested trail. If Rivenburgh had been in the park all night, he might be a good witness—or a likely suspect in the double rape. Special Agent Rudy speculated privately that a Ranger, with the specialized training he had received, would be a formidable quarry if he was the man they sought. With his knowledge of forest lore, a Ranger could easily hide himself from the massive search.