Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (55 page)

The investigators were fielding plenty of useless leads from people who wanted to help, but they hadn’t heard from anyone who might have called to her shortly before she disappeared.

Close records are kept on all armed services personnel; any man with a known history of preying on children for sexual gratification wouldn’t have been able to enlist. And if child molestation occurred while they were in uniform, they would have been discharged without delay.

There was always the chance, of course, that some serviceman had sexual aberrations that none of his superiors knew about, even some dark past where he’d never been discovered.

No screening process is perfect, and the blandest smiles and most clever lies of a sociopath can form perfect masks to hide what lies within a sick mind.

There was also the chance that Wendy Ann’s murderer was not service-connected at all. It wasn’t wartime; civilians could come and go on the base as long as they had a reason to be there and proper identification.

But Wendy didn’t know anyone off the base. Her world was inside McChord Air Force Base.

Pierce County and Tacoma police checked through their files for known sex offenders. They didn’t find any with a history or MO that would link them to Wendy’s killing. Pierce County detectives had arrested a pet store employee several years earlier for the murder of a young blond girl—but that man was still safely inside prison walls. To be absolutely sure, they checked and found he had not been released to any outside halfway houses or to Western State Hospital’s sexual psychopaths’ program, which was notorious at the time for allowing dangerous offenders out on unsupervised leaves.

Though they scoured the woods next to the tracks, investigators found no more physical evidence. Only the sheet and bedspread, and they were common brands that were sold in thousands of department stores around the country. Short of polling every one of the nine hundred homes on the base, the detectives couldn’t find out where they had come from. Without probable cause, there was no way they could search every home on the base for bedding that might match. And who was to say they had come from inside the base in the first place? A stranger might have had them in his car.

Since Wendy’s disappearance, her family had been flooded with calls offering help. Neighbors brought in casseroles, cakes, and pies and offered to care for Wendy’s brother. Larry Mayo, who had been one of the last people to see Wendy on Saturday before she went berry picking, tried especially to help. He offered to do anything he could, but Wendy’s family assured him there was nothing left to do.

Although Larry seemed earnest in his wanting to be there for them, they finally began to lose patience with him. He was always underfoot.

“He was kind of a nuisance,” another neighbor said. “He seemed to be getting in the way more than helping.”

Larry Mayo’s connection to the case seemed odd; he would have been more help if he’d gone out with the searchers instead of camping on Wendy’s family’s doorstep. Maybe he felt somehow responsible because he’d been so close and hadn’t seen Wendy’s abduction in time to help her.

A few days after Wendy vanished, Larry had had a run-in with a Pierce County deputy sheriff over his driving. The deputy stopped Larry on a routine traffic check after he noticed he was driving erratically. Larry had identified himself and explained he was visiting the area from the Southwest. But he seemed very nervous, and the deputy found a whiskey bottle, two-thirds empty, and a .38-caliber handgun in the vehicle. Larry had a permit for the weapon, and said he didn’t know that it was illegal to carry an opened liquor bottle. He got off with a warning.

The deputy asked him where he was staying, and Larry gave his brother’s address on Juniper Street at McChord Air Force Base.

The address sounded familiar to the deputy, and when he checked it and found it was right next door to Wendy Smith’s home, he turned the information over to army OSI agents.

The special investigators looked more closely at Larry. The tall, suntanned young man said he hadn’t seen Wendy after she came home on Saturday night, and he absolutely denied having anything to do with her disappearance.

Her stepfather had told the probers that Larry Mayo was a bit of an odd duck, who had behaved somewhat strangely and made a nuisance of himself during the days after Wendy vanished. Still, he couldn’t imagine that Larry would have harmed Wendy.

“We always talked,” he said. “Larry and I always got along good together.”

And then, Wendy’s aunt remembered that she had seen Larry shortly after Wendy disappeared.

“He was putting something in the back of his brother’s car,” she said, with a dawning look of horror passing across her face. “At the time, it looked like laundry.”

It hadn’t seemed important. Not then.

Now FBI special agent John R. Kellison questioned Larry Mayo. The sheet-metal worker continued to deny any connection with Wendy’s abduction, rape, and murder.

But then, suddenly, his shoulders slumped, and he looked at Kellison and said, “I wish I could borrow a gun. I’d shoot myself. I didn’t mean to do it. Oh, God damn!”

Mayo finally admitted that he had seen Wendy on Saturday evening. He said that she had tagged along after him to his brother’s house. She watched him clean a fish tank.

“I had been drinking beer all day,” Mayo said. “I lit a cigarette and looked at Wendy, and then a funny feeling came over me.”

He told Kellison that he had put down his cigarette and walked into the living room, where he obtained a piece of nylon drapery cord. When he returned to the kitchen, Wendy had her back to him, watching the fish. “I remember walking up behind her with the cord in my hand.

“I had a thousand things going on in my head,” he said.

Mayo grudgingly admitted that he had made up his mind to rape Wendy minutes before he crept up behind her as she watched the fish.

From that point on, he claimed that his mind was very fuzzy. He said he had blank spaces, until he recalled falling down in the hall as he was carrying Wendy to the bedroom. Once in the bedroom, he had raped her.

“I don’t know where I killed her. [It might have been] in the kitchen—or the hall—or in the bedroom. I can remember hearing a ‘choking sound’ in the bedroom.”

Later, he had wrapped Wendy Ann up in the sheets and spread and carried her to his brother’s car. He drove to the spot in the woods near the railroad tracks.

There he had “abandoned her.”

Mayo said he’d returned to Juniper Street and became involved in the search, and in trying to help Wendy’s family.

Larry Mayo was an enigma, a pleasant-seeming man who was popular with his new neighbors. He had a good, steady job with the sheet-metal firm in Seattle. He told detectives that he had come from Texas to try to change his life. He had been a heavy drinker since he was twelve years old.

“I went from there to drugs,” he said. “I had trouble with the law in Texas, and I convinced my brother to let me come up to Washington for a new start.”

At first, he thought he was going to do that. He had found his job, started going to church regularly, and did chores around his brother’s home.

But he’d begun to drink again.

On Saturday, July 10, while Wendy and her family were out berry picking, Mayo said, he consumed eighteen beers in six hours.

The boyishly handsome suspect said he was used to having sex regularly when he lived in Texas, but he had no intimate girlfriends in Washington.

The outcome of his heavy drinking and having the little girl alone in his house had led to a brutal, tragic murder—even as Wendy’s family watched and waited for her next door.

*   *   *

On July 16, Larry Allen Mayo was charged with first-degree murder with “premeditation and malice aforethought” and kidnapping and held on two hundred thousand dollars’ bail in the federal section of the Pierce County Jail.

When Mayo went on trial in U.S. district judge Walter T. McGovern’s federal courtroom in October, his defense didn’t attempt to deny that he had killed Wendy Ann. The courtroom battle would be a battle of the psychiatrists.

Mayo’s court-appointed defense attorney, Kenneth Kanev, told the jury he would prove that Mayo was mentally irresponsible when he killed Wendy to keep her from screaming.

Assistant U.S. attorney Robert Westinghouse, for the prosecution, maintained that Mayo was quite sane at the time of the murder.

Westinghouse called his witnesses: Wendy’s stepfather, her aunt, and FBI agent John Kellison. Her family described how frantic they were when Wendy vanished so quickly, and their hopeless search for her. Wendy’s stepfather cried as he told of how helpful Larry Mayo he had been while they were building the picnic table, and of how his family had trusted Larry. They had never suspected him of being a threat. Wendy had trusted him, too. It would have been natural for her to feel she could follow him safely into his brother’s home.

FBI agent Kellison told jurors about Larry Mayo’s confession, and it was entered into evidence.

Counselor Kanev said he would produce expert witnesses to testify that Mayo put the cord around Wendy’s neck only to keep her from screaming, and that he had been “unable to realize that his act would result in her death.”

Mayo listened impassively as Dr. Adolph Whiting, a psychiatrist, described the personality of a child killer. Whiting said that Mayo was mentally ill and not responsible for what he did at the time of the murder. He confirmed that Larry Mayo had strangled Wendy because he was afraid she would scream to summon help, but also because he feared her screams “would arouse his sympathy for her.”

That made little sense and jurors as well as court watchers shook their heads, confused.

Dr. Whiting described Larry Mayo as having an immature personality, of being irresponsible and incapable of holding a job for long.

“He had engaged in a lot of antisocial acts in his past. He was lonely and under a lot of stress because he was trying to remake himself into another person.”

Dr. Whiting called Mayo’s mental illness “disassociation” and said that he did not have the capacity to willfully take a life. A hypnotic interview, he said, confirmed that Mayo had “disassociated his ability to care what he did, and the ability to realize that tightening the cord around the girl’s neck would kill her. He only meant to stop her screams.”

Whiting attributed this to Mayo’s “primitive thinking” and said he had “immature and childlike mental mechanisms in dealing with basic problems.”

A second psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Stolzheise, testified for the defense. He said that he had attempted to hypnotize Larry Mayo in an effort to let him recall why he had killed Wendy.

“I couldn’t get a meaningful answer as to why he made his initial move to put down his cigarette and pick up the cord,” the psychiatrist concluded.

Prosecutor Westinghouse subjected Dr. Stolzheise to a grueling cross-examination. The doctor finally allowed that hypnotism is not a universally accepted tool in psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. However, the psychiatrist said, he was confident that Mayo told the truth during the critical portions of the hypnotic interview.

A psychiatrist called by the state testified that Mayo was neither disassociated nor mentally deranged at the time of the murder.

“Mayo had to elect to walk into the living room to pick up the cord, walk back to the kitchen where the girl was, place it around her neck, and strangle her,” Westinghouse told the jury. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is premeditation. That is murder in cold blood.”

Defense attorney Kanev told the jurors that if they should find Mayo sane, they should find him guilty of manslaughter because he killed Wendy “without malice aforethought.”

The plea of temporary insanity, diminished responsibility, is a common theme in murder defenses. The number of confessed murderers who later say they committed murder in a “dream” state is legend. Under the M’Naghten Rule, a killer has to be so deranged that he does not realize he is committing a crime, cannot tell right from wrong,
at the exact moment
of his murders.

And who can really know what the state of someone else’s mind is at any precise time?

Credulity is stretched a great deal when a murderer almost immediately regains his sanity and cleverly covers his crime. Larry Mayo had enough stability to carry Wendy from his home, wrapped in sheets to make her look like a bundle of laundry. He had enough sanity to hide her body in a deserted area, enough to go to her home and offer to help in the search, enough to hang around her home and play the part of the sympathetic friend. If he was insane, he had it under perfect control.

Wendy never got a chance to tell what happened that night. Those who knew her feel it is doubtful that she would have willingly followed Larry Mayo into his brother’s house. It is far more likely that he used some kind of ruse or trick to make her run after him. Once he had her captive inside, she would have been helpless as she struggled to leave and go back to her family.

Only Larry Mayo knows what really happened, and his version seems fashioned to make him look as a “victim” of his own disturbed mind.

On October 8, 1976, the federal jury rejected Larry Mayo’s plea of insanity and found him guilty of murder in the first degree. They acquitted him of kidnapping, the charge that stemmed from his carrying the child into a bedroom to sexually assault her after he choked her with the drapery cord.

First-degree murder carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Had he been acquitted on grounds of insanity, he would have walked out of the courtroom a free man.

Life in prison rarely means true life in prison, and that was even more true in the seventies. Even so—thirty-six years after Wendy Smith died—Larry Mayo is in prison in a state far from where he killed Wendy. Unfortunately his prison counselor has failed to respond to my requests for information about his status or parole date. He may still be serving his life sentence for Wendy’s murder, or he may have re-offended and been sent behind the walls for another crime.

The departments of prisons and parole in many states are quite willing to notify interested parties when felons come up for parole. Anyone reading this who would like to be notified on the status of someone who still frightens them should contact their state’s prison and parole department.