1 Roadblock

A month after I found out that two innocent people had been sentenced to prison for my murder, my girlfriend Peggy and I headed east with a truckload of lumber for Illinois. As we pushed through an Iowa storm, the heavy wet snow built up on top of our trailer. At the Rock Island check station, the scale master red-lighted me and made me pull around to the parking area. She said we needed to pay eighty-four dollars for overweight and knock off the snow. Otherwise, we couldn’t leave.

I said, “I’m not gonna pay. It’s your Iowa snow!” In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, Goddamn it, whenever I get in trouble, it’s always a woman.

She told me to wait right there while she stepped inside the shack to check something. She ran my name in her N.C.I.C. computer and came up with a warrant from Shasta County, California. She placed me under arrest on a charge of sexual assault.

Peggy yelled that it was a mistake. I gave her a look that told her to shut up. She was pissed, mostly because she knew she would have to deliver the load by herself and con somebody into doing the untarping.

The scale lady let me clean off the snow so Peggy could drive away. We sat together in the cab for a few minutes and I told her that I might be going down for a long time. I was feeling paranoid and I made the mistake of telling her that while she’d been driving with that other guy in Tennessee, I’d killed a girl in Portland, and they might hold me for that, too. I didn’t tell her who I killed. I explained that I did the killing to get in practice for the ex-husband she’d asked me to execute.

At first she acted like she didn’t believe my story, but when the truth finally sank in, she flipped, called me every name in the book and then started bawling like a baby. I didn’t know what to say to calm her down. Before they drove me away in a sheriff’s car, I gave Peg all my money. She was still sniffling when she hauled ass with our load of lumber.

 

At two in the morning I was locked into the county jail. Eight hours later I was arraigned on a charge of first-degree sexual assault and informed I would be extradited to California.

I told the judge that I wouldn’t fight the warrant. I said, “I’m innocent, Your Honor, and I want to go back and prove it. But I want you to drop your eighty-four-dollar ticket. It’s wrong!” I was sensitive about bum raps, I’d taken too many as a kid. The judge voided the ticket.

 

I was put in a holding cell with sixteen other guys. It was my first real experience with jailbirds. I got up to change the TV channel, and a big black dude said, “You can’t do that. You gotta arm-wrestle me for it.”

I pinned him quick. He says, “I wasn’t ready.”

“Are you ready now?”

I took him down again. He says, “I slipped.”

I said, “You slipped, huh? Let’s do it one more time.” I flung him across the table. I stood up and said, “It’s my TV, asshole.” I ruled the roost.

After a few days in the tank one of the Rock Island detectives told me that California’s felony warrant was too weak and that they’d reduced the charge to a misdemeanor. The cost of extradition wasn’t worth it to them. He said that the next time I was in California, I should report to the courthouse in Yreka and clean things up. No big deal. I knew that Shasta County’s hottest blow job would never testify about the night she spent with me and her baby—not for a chickenshit misdemeanor.

Rock Island kicked me loose and I walked to the I-80 truck stop to call my trucking office in Spokane. They sent me two hundred dollars for a Greyhound ticket. On the bus ride I told myself, Dead people tell no lies, and the next time a woman resists like Jean, she will fucking well die. I am not taking any more of this bullshit!

 

The long bus ride gave me time to think, and I went over things in my mind. Maybe it was just dumb luck, but I killed the girl in Portland and two innocent people took the fall. I assaulted a woman in California, and the cops turned me loose. I’m arrested in Rock Island, and I wiggle out of that one, too.

I realized that I was making fools out of everybody, but it was still a little annoying that nobody knew it. I had mixed feelings of frustration and power, cockiness. I’d finally reached my father’s level—smarter than anybody else. I could get away with murder.

 

I couldn’t resist rolling the dice again. As I sat on the throne at a Greyhound rest stop in Livingston, Montana, I pulled out my pen. Who reads that graffiti shit anyway? I wrote, “I killed Tanya Bennet January 21, 1990 in Portland Oregon. I beat her to death, raped her and loved it. Yes I’m sick, but I enjoy myself too. People took the blame and I’m free.”

That summed up my attitude—arrogance, pride, superiority. Why not taunt the cops a little? I was in such a good mood that I signed my graffiti with one of those silly little Happy Faces. I was so happy to be free again.

 

I was disappointed that nothing came of my message—not a word in the papers or TV or on radio. I waited two months till I was driving through Umatilla, Oregon, and wrote another restroom note: “Killed Tanya Bennett in Portland. Two people got the blame so I can kill again. (Cut buttons off jeans—proof).” Let’s see them ignore this one.

But they did. When would those stupid cops catch on that they had the wrong people?