When the Ghost Screams

  Also by Leslie Rule

  Coast to Coast Ghosts: True Stories of Hauntings Across America

  Ghosts Among Us: True Stories of Spirit Encounters

  When the Ghost Screams copyright © 2006 by Leslie Rule. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information, write Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, an Andrews McMeel Universal company, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, MO 64106.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rule, Leslie, 1958-

  When the ghost screams: true stories of victims who haunt / Leslie Rule.

  p. cm.

  E-ISBN: 978-1-4494-0280-8

  1. Ghosts—United States. I. Title.

  BF1472.U6R86 2006

  133.0973—dc22

  2006047297

  www.andrewsmcmeel.com

  Cover design by Van Crosby.

  Photography by Leslie Rule

  Book design by Holly Camerlinck

  Attention: Schools and Businesses

  Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write to: Special Sales Department, Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, MO 64106.

  specialsales@amuniversal.com

  For DaMeisha Bartunek

  Contents

  Foreword by Ann Rule

  Introduction

  one

  The Ice Files

  two

  Within the Shadows

  three

  The Third Eye

  four

  Witch Hunt

  five

  The Enemy Within

  six

  Victims of War

  seven

  Afraid of the Light

  eight

  Stranger Than Fiction

  nine

  Accidents Happen

  ten

  Overnight with Ghosts

  Foreword

  by Ann Rule

  Although my daughter Leslie is the ghost researcher in our family, the genres in which we write often overlap. She has helped people grieving over family members lost to murder, and I sometimes run into emissaries from that “other world,” or talk to homicide detectives who use more than solid physical evidence to catch a killer.

  As I write this, Leslie and I both had book deadlines that caught up with us on the same weekend. Mother and daughter, we are alike in our work habits in many ways. Although she writes at night and in the wee hours of the morning and I write during the daytime, we both tend to work slowly until we get close to the end of a book, and then we rev up our engines and sometimes it does seem as if an offscreen voice is dictating to us. But I don’t think that’s a ghost; at the most, it’s our writing muse.

  Even so, I often find connections or synchronicities. As it happens, the book I finished earlier today was about a sea captain who vanished inexplicably from his home on a foggy island in the San Juans off the coast of Washington State. Whether he was murdered or simply walked away from a life and a wife he could no longer bear is the mystery in my book. But there is little doubt that, ultimately, he did not survive. In the course of his sixty years at sea all over the world, he was a ship’s pilot as well as a captain. These highly skilled men (and, today, women) guide mammoth ships safely into port through the narrowest of waterways. And he was the oldest pilot of them all: seventy-nine. Although his physical body was never found, his spirit survived. And on the very day that the person convicted of killing him died, another younger pilot stood exactly where the old pilot had once guided a ship. Indeed, it was the very same ship, with a different name.

  “I felt his hand on my shoulder,” the young pilot said, “as surely as if he really stood there. He’s long dead wherever he is, but his spirit was on that ship.”

  But back to homicide detectives. In my early years as the Northwest reporter for True Detective and five other fact detective magazines, I realized I needed to go back to college and get a second major, this time in Crime Scene Investigation. I was also lucky enough to be invited to attend the King County, Washington, sheriff’s two-week homicide investigation course that every rookie deputy had to attend.

  One of the rules of thumb is that at least two detectives are required to work a murder scene; one picks up evidence and seals and labels it in plastic baggies, and the other makes notes. When they measure distances so that they can re-create the scene absolutely by triangulation to fixed points, there has to be an investigator on each end of the tape. Or one detective takes photographs or videotapes the scene, while the other keeps track of who arrives and who leaves.

  I think most of us in the “rookie” class were surprised, then, when the detective sergeant who was our instructor told us, “I work homicide scenes alone. At least I start out that way. I want to listen to the victim . . .”

  In the class, we darted our eyes at each other, wondering if he was kidding. But he was serious as he clicked the slide projector to bring up the image of a beautiful corpse, saying, “I talked to her for awhile, getting a fix on who was the last person she saw, trying to understand what had happened to her and why. However the other guys work murders, this is the way I begin. And it works for me.”

  As it turned out, the woman’s husband had killed her in a jealous rage, and then arranged her body tenderly so that she would “look nice,” as he said later.

  I don’t know if she really “talked” to the detective who taught our class, but he solved the case and he said that he had the sense of who her killer was from the very beginning.

  There are many people who believe that inanimate objects can somehow retain dark and wicked acts that occurred around or because of them. Maybe I believe this too. I am not sure. When I attended the trial of Diane Downs in Eugene, Oregon, in 1984, for the book that became Small Sacrifices, one piece of physical evidence played a powerful if silent part in the prosecution’s case. Diane, who was in love with a married man who didn’t want children, stood accused of shooting her three children during a drive in the lonely countryside one May night. She apparently believed that if she didn’t have a family, her lover would leave his wife and come to her.

  Diane testified that a “bushy-haired stranger” had flagged her down, demanded her keys, and then shot her small children, killing one and critically injuring the other two. She had escaped with a gunshot wound to her lower arm.

  Lane County detectives searched her town house and found a bronze unicorn statuette in a prominent place on her television set. A plate on the front was engraved with a date, the names, “Christie,” “Cheryl,” and “Danny,” and the words “I love you, Mom.” The date was five days earlier than the night of the shooting.

  The investigators learned that Diane had taken her children to the Pacific Ocean and the Willamette River on the engraved date. She had driven around aimlessly, returning home close to midnight when her children were crying with exhaustion. The sheriff’s men deduced that she had meant to kill them then but she had lost her nerve.

  The prosecutor suggested that the unicorn was “fungible,” a legal term that means one thing can be exchanged for another of like value. To Diane Downs, it seemed meant to take the place of three dead children. She would have their names and her memories, but not the burden or the responsibility of being a single mother, frustrated because she could not be with her lover.

  Diane Downs’s jury was convinced that that was the truth of the tragedy. The unicorn had meant death and murder.

  Detective Doug Welch took custody of the unicorn after Diane was convicted a
nd sent to prison. Small Sacrifices was published, and Welch thought that the bronze statuette would be an ideal birthday present for me, a souvenir of my first best-selling true crime book. He may not know until he reads this that I was horrified as I opened the heavy box he mailed to me. I was afraid of what I would find inside. And it was, indeed, the dreaded unicorn. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful so I thanked him, ignoring my premonitions.

  For me, the next three days were one mishap after another. First, I slipped on spilled water in the supermarket and hurt my back. While I was still limping, a drunk driver ran into the back of my car and did a lot of damage.

  I had nightmares every night about murder, and I almost never have bad dreams about what I write. I’ve always believed that it’s cathartic to write about the things that frighten me or make me sad. I get rid of the thoughts, and what might have become nightmares just flow out of the tips of my fingers into my computer and into a book. I don’t have to let them take up space in my subconscious mind.

  But with the unicorn sitting on my desk, I felt as though I had lost all protection from bad luck and evil itself. When my computer swallowed half a book and I barely got it back and my dog got sick, I made up my mind. I wrapped Diane Downs’s unicorn up carefully and returned it to Doug Welch by Federal Express.

  He has had it many years now, solved many more murders, and retired from his career as a police officer without incident. And I’m grateful for that because he’s a very nice man. If Diane had the power to put a hex on anyone, I’m sure she would have picked Doug because he was the one who brought in the most compelling evidence against her.

  Maybe it was me and my spooky feeling about having the unicorn in my house; maybe I drew the bad luck to myself. But there are simply objects that I don’t want around me. I “accidentally” erased the tape recording where Ted Bundy confesses to murder. I didn’t do it deliberately, but I pushed the “record” button instead of “forward,” and taped over his voice. Why did I do that when it would have been a compelling addition to my lectures? And why have I never tried to get another copy of that tape? I think I know.

  After Ted was executed and I was adding an update chapter to the Stranger Beside Me, I found that I could not work with his picture on the shelf behind me. I put it away. Although I still have a few dozen letters he wrote to me from prison, I don’t keep them where I live.

  My own most memorable experience with another time and another place—or maybe I should say it’s the same place—happened about a dozen years ago. I can’t really explain it, although I have tried. I was driving on the Alaskan Way Viaduct, a double-decker road that divides downtown Seattle and the waterfront district. As always, I shifted my gaze momentarily from the road ahead to Eliott Bay and then to the skyscrapers that now proliferate in the downtown area. The Smith Tower, once the tallest building west of the Mississippi River, has been eclipsed by shining blue and black aquamarine glass-fronted buildings, its peaked top diminished and humbled as the old building seems shrunken among newer architectural upstarts.

  As I looked at the downtown skyline on the day I recall, it suddenly became fiat and one dimensional. It was no longer dominated by many different colors but had become sepia toned like a very old newspaper, faded by long time passing. In fact, it seemed to me that I had flashed back to the way the earlier city had looked.

  Aloud, I said, “Oh, Leander, who would ever have thought it!”

  And then I said, aloud again, to myself, “Well, Ann, where on earth did that come from?”

  For a matter of seconds, I found myself a century back in time. I was a woman named Beulah Carmody and a man whose first name was Leander was my husband. (I had never heard of the name before.) We owned a small, dark store that sold groceries and other items. It was right on the mudflats, and it smelled of smoke from a combination cookstove/heating stove. An oilskin drape separated our living quarters from the store. I was aware that I was not a pretty woman but short and round with dark hair pulled into a bun. And I had a baby in a cradle close by the stove.

  Leander, on the other hand, was a handsome man with light brown hair and a luxuriant mustache, thin and too tall. He wore a light-colored shirt with his sleeves rolled up and suspenders. I sensed that we were happily married. I absorbed all of that information in an extremely short time.

  And then I blinked. The sepia-toned flat view of Seattle vanished, and I was back in the twentieth century. My car hadn’t moved more than fifty feet and it was time to ease right onto the Seneca Street off-ramp.

  It never happened before and it’s never happened again. I wasn’t thinking about history when I seemed to have slipped through a curtain in time, and I don’t understand why I did. Maybe I saw ghosts of someone from the early days. Maybe I did have another life as a homely woman named Beulah Carmody a few lives ago.

  Leslie thinks I may have been tuning into the ghosts of old Seattle. A few years after my experience, she made an interesting discovery as she researched the ghosts who roam Pioneer Square. A man named Leander Terry was part of the Denny party who founded Seattle in 1851. The Terry family did have a store on the mudflats, but so far we have found no mention of Beulah Carmody.

  Was I married to Leander in another life? All I know is that when I arrived in Seattle after having been born in Michigan, and growing up in Pennsylvania and Oregon, I felt as if I had come home. I knew I belonged here, and even though I have to travel a lot in my career, I’m always so glad to come back to where I belong.

  I will continue to research the criminal mind and forensic science and strive to tell the victims’ stories, but I will always encourage my daughter in her studies of the things we cannot quite prove, or see, or document with complete accuracy.

  Introduction

  When the ghost screams, we seldom hear, for the sound is drummed out by the beating of our hearts. We are alive, you and I. Our world is filled with machines and schedules and people with pulses who speak loudly, even when they don’t have much to say.

  Yet the ghost calls out. Sometimes if we stop to listen, we hear its voice choked by the rustle of the leaves or harmonizing with the train whistle in the distance.

  Or sometimes it wakes us at night.

  It wakes us because it was once as we are—snuggled in our beds with the night shut safely outside. It had a body, too, and perhaps nice shiny shoes lined up in the closet or maybe just one tattered pair of sneakers tossed carelessly in the corner. It had an alarm clock and someplace to be. Eventually. For every living person has somewhere to go. School. Work. Or downstairs for a piece of toast with marmalade and butter.

  The ghost once did these things too. It likely had the same mundane attitude about life that most people do. Until life is taken away.

  Suddenly the once-living being exists in a place that we can only imagine. Depending on one’s religious view, the dead one might be suspended in time or shuttled off to a wondrous place. The theories, of course, are widely varied.

  I do not know or pretend to know what happens when we die. Still, I hear the ghost scream. I hear the screaming and am compelled to write the stories of those whose lives were snatched away. They are the murder victims, the ones who roam restlessly. They are the headliners of this book.

  A leading theory among my peers says that the souls of those who die violently are prone to remain earthbound. And indeed, my research indicates that the sites with the most paranormal activity are most often tied to deadly violence, especially unsolved homicides.

  If each page of this book is a stage, then the ghosts made from murder are the stars. Their haunts are often populated with those who died much gentler deaths, and they, too, will make appearances as the stories unfold.

  Frequently we find that haunted places are crowded with a number of ghosts from a variety of eras. Some speculate that an earthbound spirit “opens the door” for others to move through and join him. If this is the case, then I wonder if it is the ghost who is most rooted to this plane who opens the door for the o
thers. In any event, the murdered ghosts’ “friends” will be included here.

  They are clamoring for attention now. In hotels and cafés and hospitals and schools and within private residences, they are trying to make us notice. So listen carefully as you read their stories and perhaps you, too, will hear the ghost scream.

  one

  The Ice Files

  When it comes to haunting, there seems to be no statute of limitations. A crime may have occurred a hundred years ago in a particular place, but the environment seems to cling to the bad energy as if it were yesterday.

  Maybe a detective believed he was “hot on the heels” of a criminal a century ago, only to become discouraged as the trail went cold. With the case unsolved for decades, the detective and even the criminal eventually die, leaving only a cold file stashed in a forgotten filing cabinet.

  And, finally, all who remembered the crime are gone, and the case has turned to ice. These ice files might freeze right into obscurity if not for the phenomena connected with them.

  Hauntings prompt ghost detectives to crack through the veneer of the past, to dig up archives to help us understand. Again and again, we find that extremely haunted places tend to be the sites of past violence. And the most active sites are often the scenes of unsolved homicides. It is as if the dead victims are waiting for justice.

  It does not seem to matter how much time has passed. The murdered don’t seem to know or care that they’ve been relegated to the ice files.

  Here are a few stories of spirits who move in the cold realm of cases unsolved.

  Lady in Green

  It is March 1956 in Avard, Oklahoma. The high school gymnasium resonates with the sights, sounds, and scents typical of school gyms across America. Gangly teenage boys with crew cuts zip across the basketball court, their shouts punctuating the rhythmic bounce of the ball. The sharp scent of rubber and sweat permeate the air.