Smooth Talker: Trail of Death, page 7
Boitano told the reporter that almost every day when he drove down mainstream he still asked himself, “Why couldn’t we solve that murder? … It’s tough to see somebody that I considered a friend brutally murdered, especially when it happened within feet of my office.”
Bailey, who had since retired from police work, told Whiting it was his most frustrating case in 25 years in law enforcement. “Every time I go by the bar and see the lock on the door I think about it,” he said.
Jarecki, a Captain with the police department, again raised a ‘what-if’ that had plagued the investigation from the beginning: the missed police drive-by. “If the door without the lock had been seen, the body would have been found that night,” he noted. “Who knows what could have happened?”
Boitano told Whiting that he had two different theories about the murderer and why he hadn’t been caught. The first was that the killer himself had died shortly afterwards.
“But it couldn’t have been an auto accident; we’d have the car,” he said then surmised, “The car might be in the bottom of the Sacramento River with the killer’s body and the credit card.” The problem with that theory, he added however, was that after 1974 a series of droughts should have exposed the car, or brought up the body, if it was in the Sacramento River.
His second theory was that the killer had local ties but had driven to Sacramento and bought gas to throw investigators off his trail. “Make it seem like an isolated drifter incident,” he said. “The killer is alive and out there, and there’s got to be some tie to Napa through the State Hospital.”
Bailey shared Boitano’s suspicions. “It always kind of ate at me,” said Bailey, who left the Napa force a year after the murder and later served 10 years as Tiburon Police Chief. “The guy could have bought gas with cash. There was enough money in her purse.”
Bailey speculated that after leaving a paper trail at the gas station and heading south, as if to drive to Los Angeles, the murderer doubled back to the Napa area and was still living there. The car, he said, had probably been dismantled.
However, Jarecki stuck with the random crime scenario. “Every indication is that it was a transient situation,” he told Whiting. He admitted there were holes with his theory.
“How did the person who took the keys know which car was hers?” If the killer was a stranger, why did Anita allow him to stay when she ushered the other three men out of the bar?
The two detectives and prosecutor soon learned something new. While working on his story, Whiting talked to Anita’s daughter, Debbie Hawkins, who’d been living in fear that her mother’s killer was still in the Napa area. She told him that the sometimes boyfriend who worked for the carnival was also the welder/mechanic, which was news to the other men.
Apparently, up until that point, Bailey and Jarecki had believed that they were two different men.
“It was never relayed to us that the carnival worker was also a welder,” Jarecki told Whiting, “or that the carnival worker had his tools in the back of her car.” Nor was it known that Andrews had a current relationship with the man. “If this had come out in the investigation, he would have been prime suspect No. 1. We’ve got to find out where this guy is now.”
Whiting noted that “responding to fresh clues unearthed in the preparation of this article, Napa police have assigned the case high priority and put an investigator on it for the first time in 10 years.”
Eventually, the detectives learned the identity of the carnival mechanic. Unfortunately, like so many others, he turned out to be another dead-end. It looked like the case might never be solved.
XIV
Early 1990
Kathy Young was horrified. She’d just called the Texas Department of Corrections to inquire about Melanson and learned that he had been released in 1988. His “life” sentence had lasted 13 years.
Young could only wonder how many women had suffered as a result. It wasn’t long before she found out. The Gunnison investigator contacted the legendary Texas Rangers in an attempt to locate Melanson’s sexual assault victims. She wanted to know if there was anything about his attacks on them that might help link him to a murder case in Gunnison.
Young was put in contact with Ranger Haskel Taylor, who had spent a good number of years following the trail of Melanson. He was the one who had pursued him on the rape charges and extradited him from Colorado. However, there wasn’t much he could tell her about Melanson’s early years. The suspect had graduated from high school, where his grades were satisfactory if not spectacular. Apparently, his parents were dead.
Taylor provided her with Melanson’s criminal record. He had never been able to find the earlier rape victims to interview them.
Melanson was a suspect in a number of killings, Taylor added. Besides the beating death of the young inmate in prison, there was a woman whose body had been found in a field after having been seen with Melanson. The police at the time hadn’t had enough evidence for charges to be filed.
“More recently, he’s the prime suspect in the disappearance of a Port Arthur woman,” Taylor said and told her the story of Pauline Klumpp.
Taylor said he’d questioned Melanson about Klumpp. Just as he had in the Wallace case, he claimed to have left the woman safe and sound.
Young was somewhat relieved when Taylor told her that Melanson was back in prison. In 1989, he’d been arrested for burglary in Kentucky. He fled but authorities caught up to him, living on a ranch in Montana owned by a woman. He had convinced the woman that he was the wealthy owner of a ranch in Texas.
When he was arrested, Melanson was driving a small tan car with Texas plates and carrying a .380 Beretta with the serial numbers filed down. Taken back to Kentucky, Melanson, now 53 years old, was convicted of burglary and being a felon in possession of a gun. He was sentenced again as a habitual felony offender.
The habitual offender sentence was supposed to mean he would serve as much as twenty years in the Kentucky state penitentiary. However, Young was told by prison authorities there that Melanson would be up for parole in another five years or so with good behavior.
For the time being, Young knew where to find Melanson, but she didn’t yet have enough for Murder to take to District Attorney Stern. She was going to have to locate as many of the former witnesses as she could and try to reconstruct the case.[1]
[1] Steve Jackson, No Stone Unturned (WildBluePress, May 2015), Kindle Edition
XV
Late Spring 1991
It seemed like a recurring nightmare. Once again, Vince LeJeune found himself sitting in an interview room across from the dour faced Livingston Parish chief of detectives Kernie Foster. The big man had just told him that an anonymous caller claimed that LeJeune had confessed to the murder of his fiancée, Charlotte Sauerwin.
LeJeune sighed and shook his head. He was pretty sure he knew who the caller would have been. He’d just been through a bitter breakup with the mother of his infant daughter and she wasn’t too happy with him. She was back using hard drugs. She wanted more child support, but wasn’t willing to let him have visitation rights. This was just the sort of thing she’d do to get even.
However, it wasn’t the first time he’d been accused of killing Charlotte. In fact, only a couple of days after her body was found, he’d realized with shock and horror that he was the prime suspect. Up until that point, he’d been in such a daze the first time that he didn’t realize what the investigators were after when they, almost apologetically, said they needed to ask him a few questions. “You know, get as much information as we can,” he was told.
However, they kept asking him to come back down to the sheriff’s office and then kept asking the same questions, only using different words and phrases. Then if he got confused, or answered a little differently, they’d jump all over him. “That’s not what you said before,” they’d say as if he was changing his story. That’s when he realized they thought he did it.
At first they tried to make a big deal about him sideswiping Charlotte’s car, as if he’d run her off the road. They had to concede, however, that the damage showed he’d been driving in reverse.
Still, they continued to try to break him down, even showing him photographs of what happened to Charlotte. The killer had tied a rope around her neck and dragged her through the woods to a clear cut. There he’d raped and beat her so bad that he caved in the side of her face. He’d also strangled her and slit her throat.
When LeJeune saw the photographs his mind went red with thoughts of revenge. He couldn’t believe that the police could suspect that he was even capable of such brutality. He understood wanting to catch the killer; he wanted revenge not just justice.
It was apparent that the investigators didn’t have much else to go on. They’d had no luck tracking down the man from the Laundromat who his friend Ricky said he saw talking to Charlotte about clearing the property.
He’d been described by another witness, unknown to LeJeune, as in his 50s and claimed to be a Cajun from the Lafayette area, 75 miles to the east. However, the man and the small, tan- or light-colored car with out-of-state plates he was supposedly driving had disappeared.
The police even acted as if they thought the whole thing was made up by his friend Ricky to cover for him. Also, as though to say that the killer must have been local and knew the area was secluded, the police pointed out that after murdering Charlotte, the killer had taken the time to steal the stereo equipment out of the car. That, they said, meant he felt confident that he wasn’t going to be discovered.
LeJeune tried to stay calm in the face of the thinly veiled accusations from the police interrogators. He knew they wanted him to slip up, say something they could twist, but he wasn’t going to give it to them. Neither was he uncooperative. He never asked for a lawyer; never refused to come down to the station whenever they asked; never refused to answer their questions.
Still, no matter how many times he voluntarily answered their questions, they had not relented, especially Foster. There was no changing his mind. He was sure LeJeune was the killer and made it clear that he’d stay after him until he could prove it.
It was almost like a cruel game that nearly led to another homicide. This time, LeJeune would have been guilty.
At one point, the Livingston Parish SO investigators started playing LeJeune against his friends, especially Ricky. He and Ricky had grown up together hunting, fishing, and working on hot rod cars. Charlotte and Ricky’s wife were good friends.
During one of his many interviews, LeJeune was asked if any of his friends dipped snuff.
“Well, yeah, all of them,” he replied.
What about Ricky in particular? They asked the question as if it was significant, and proceeded to say that Ricky was being “evasive,” not answering questions, and had refused to take a polygraph test. They also noted that he was one of the last people to see her according to his account of the Laundromat scene.
The seed of distrust was planted. It grew in LeJeune’s mind until he believed his friend had murdered his fiancée. He put a handgun in his pants beneath his shirt and went to confront Ricky, pulling into his driveway hot and fast.
Ricky saw him coming and walked abruptly into the house. He came back out as his brother, Terry, roared up in his car and slid into the driveway. That struck LeJeune as suspicious. Foster had told him there could have been more than one killer, or that one guy did it and someone else was covering for him.
Everybody was tense, but nobody said anything. Then Ricky turned to go to his shack behind the house where he worked on car parts. LeJeune followed him.
Sure now that Ricky was the murderer, LeJeune intended to kill him. He slipped the gun out of his pants and aimed it at the back of his friend’s head. He couldn’t pull the trigger and put the gun away before Ricky turned back around.
Ricky said he and his brother wanted to go for a ride and check out where they were planning to hunt during deer season. LeJeune thought it was an excuse to take him into the woods to kill him.
So when they got into Ricky’s four-wheel drive vehicle, LeJeune sat in the backseat. With his hand hovering near the gun, he thought about killing them both, but the trip ended without incident.
LeJeune realized later that he’d been acting on suspicions planted by the police and that Ricky and Terry had nothing to do with Charlotte’s murder, but their friendship was never the same.
In fact, the “cruel game” ended other friendships as well, as he and his friends were all encouraged to look at each other as possible murderers. Some even told him later that they’d been asked to wear a “wire,” to record conversations. They said they’d been told to get drunk with him and try to trick him into saying something incriminating.
As Foster continued to hound him, LeJeune told himself that the detective was just doing his job, and, of course, he was a suspect. Over time, he came to believe that the man had put on blinders, and he resented him for it.
The chief of detectives wasn’t the only one who thought LeJeune killed Charlotte Sauerwin. Except for his family and a handful of his closest friends, the whole town seemed to believe it. Her family certainly did. They refused to talk to him and whenever he accidentally ran into her sister, Charlene, the woman would start trembling and act like she was going to die of fright.
The cloud hung over him everywhere he went in town, and there was nothing he could do to change it. He’d see someone he knew in a store and they’d simply stare at him or turn and hurry off the other way. He heard the whispered conversations, “That’s the guy who killed his girlfriend.”
Oh, he could have left and made a life for himself somewhere else. He still traveled a lot for work in Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas. He always returned home. Walker was where his family lived, where he’d been born and raised … and fell in love. He wasn’t the type to cut and run, especially when he wasn’t guilty of anything.
Besides, running would just have confirmed what everybody thought. “This is my home,” he told his friends and family. “I’m staying.”
It wasn’t always easy or pretty. There were dark times when his friends had to “talk him off the fence.” He drank a lot and did a lot of drugs, especially with the girlfriend he’d just broken up with. They did them all—heroin, ecstasy, cocaine and pain pills—in a never-ending attempt to forget the past, the whispers, the accusations in people’s eyes.
Their lifestyle changed when his girlfriend got pregnant. They both agreed that for the sake of the baby, they’d stop doing drugs. A healthy baby girl was born three days before his own birthday on December 20, 1990.
However, his girlfriend went right back to doing hardcore drugs. But LeJeune had found something better, his daughter. He wanted to be around for her and not as some drug-addled lowlife.
The child’s mother wouldn’t stop using drugs, so he left her, though it hurt because the court awarded her custody and wouldn’t give him visitation rights. Bitter and vindictive, she wouldn’t let him see the child. She wanted more child support, which he was willing to give her in exchange for visitation.
Instead, he was sure, she’d called the sheriff’s office and said he confessed to killing Charlotte. Again he’d come down to the office, answered Foster’s questions, and gone home. He determined that he wasn’t going to let this thing beat him, not when he had a little girl to live for.
XVI
September 1991
“You ever hear of the ‘pig people’?”
Kathy Young frowned up at the tall man standing in the hallway of the Montrose County courthouse. She’d been working on the Wallace case whenever she could find time outside of her regular workload, and believed that she was getting close to making a case against Roy Melanson. The holdup was they still had not been able to locate Michele’s remains despite the searches and the passage of time. Although the district attorney had finally said he might be willing to prosecute a body-less homicide case, it would make a difficult case that much tougher.
She’d just mentioned that obstacle to criminalist Nelson Jennett, who she’d serendipitously met in the hallway. In 1979, Jennett was the Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent who had confirmed that a “mass of hair in the form of two braids approximately twelve inches long” found on Kebler Pass was human. Now he wants to know if I’ve heard about some pig people?
She’d just spent the past two years or so running down every lead and witness she could find. On March 22, 1990, she found Jack Hassig, who was living in Montrose. He repeated the story Melanson had told him in jail about burying Michele near a stream and pouring a sack of lime into the grave. “He said he cut out her jaws, top and bottom, with an axe or a hatchet so she couldn’t be identified.”
Others weren’t so easy to locate. Young spent months trying to find Chuck Matthews until someone recalled that he had a sister in the area. The sister told the detective that Chuck had moved to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, so she drove there and interviewed the old ranch hand.
He was hazy about some of the chronology and names of places he had gone with Melanson, but he was clear about most things, including the part about his drinking partner driving off with the girl to “find his truck.”
As a police officer, Young knew that she couldn’t rule out Matthews as a suspect even if everything else pointed to Melanson. It didn’t take long before she thought to herself, He wasn’t involved. ... He just isn’t the kind of guy who attacks women.
After all these years, Matthews was still angry at Melanson, recalling the confrontation at the sheriff’s office —and maybe feeling a little ashamed that he had just stood there, anxious to get into the bar, when “that son of a bitch” drove off with the girl. He said he would be happy to return to Gunnison to testify. “Just tell me when.”
