On February 20, a federal grand jury in Honolulu returned an indictment against Buck Walker and Jennifer Jenkins for first-degree murder in the death of Muff Graham. (Walker and Jenkins were not charged with the murder of Mac Graham.) The grand jury charged “that sometime between, on, or about August 28, 1974, and on or about September 4, 1974, at Palmyra Island, in the District of Hawaii and within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, Buck Duane Walker, also known as Roy A. Allen, and Jennifer Lynn Jenkins, also known as Jennifer Allen, with malice aforethought did murder Mrs. Eleanor Graham during the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, a robbery, thereby committing the offense of murder in the first degree.”
Gruesome details began to be made public. “The aluminum box found next to the bones was too small to place a full corpse inside,” a federal prosecutor in Honolulu told the press. “The body must have been cut up to fit into the box. There’s a hole in the left temple of the skull and char marks on both the bones and the box. This body suffered intense heat.”
Virtually every article or news story about the murder spotlighted Buck and Jennifer’s suspicious conduct back in 1974—the theft of the Sea Wind, its repainting, Jennifer’s flight from authorities in the harbor, Buck’s escape, and so forth. Flat-out accusations in the news media were commonly reported: “Friends of the Grahams maintain that the two San Diegans were murdered by Walker and Jenkins.” Even when there was no direct accusation, it was clear who the murderers were believed to be: “The Grahams had described the couple as ragtag nuisances they wished to be rid of” “The Grahams radioed that they did not like the looks of Walker and Jenkins, the only other people on the atoll, whose yacht was in poor condition and without provisions” “The Grahams’ last transmission said Walker and Jenkins were out of food, cutting down coconut trees, and shooting fish with a handgun” “The Grahams told Curt Shoemaker that Walker and Jenkins were desperate and out of food” “The relationship wasn’t a friendly one,” etc. Even the headlines themselves went in the direction of presupposing guilt: “Walker and Jenkins Tied to Slaying of Pair on Cruise.”
On March 5, Jennifer Jenkins, now thirty-four, turned herself in to U.S. Marshals in Los Angeles. The next day, she was freed on $100,000 bond, and she promised to appear in a Hawaiian federal courtroom on April 2 to enter a plea to the charge that she had taken part in the murder of Muff Graham.
Unlike his former girlfriend, Buck Walker had no intention of surrendering to the authorities.
When Cal Shishido attempted to get a line on Walker’s whereabouts, he called the FBI office in Seattle. Last Shishido had heard, Walker was serving time at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary in Washington State.
The agent called back in twenty minutes. “Walker escaped.”
“Escaped? You’re kidding. When?”
“Year and a half ago.”
“Any leads?”
“Nope. No one knows where he is.”
U.S. MARSHAL’S OFFICE
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
WHEN DEPUTY U.S. Marshal Richard “Dick” Kringle, Jr., received word of the Hawaii murder indictments, he spun into action, teletyping information to headquarters in Washington, D.C., about Buck Walker and the discovery of human remains at a place called Palmyra Island.
Buck Duane Walker’s case had been among eighty fugitive cases the U.S. Marshals Service Seattle office had received from the FBI in October 1979, when that agency relinquished its responsibility to hunt for federal prison escapees. Kringle, forty-four years old, had a streak of bulldog determination in his personality that suited his job.
Walker had escaped on July 10, 1979, from the minimum-security camp adjacent to the federal penitentiary on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, just southwest of Tacoma. He had either swum the two miles to shore or—according to one colorful rumor Kringle never entirely discounted—had been picked up in the water by a single-engine seaplane. Kringle learned that the U.S. Parole Commission had planned to parole Walker after he had served seven years. He escaped after logging close to five years.
When Kringle first received the case in late 1979, he wondered why Walker had been so desperate to escape, considering that the most difficult part of his sentence was already behind him. But in view of the murder indictment, the escape made perfect sense. The deputy could imagine Walker sweating each moment out in prison, fearful that the bodies of his victims might be found any day.
Kringle learned that before his escape at McNeil, Walker had obsessively stuck to a strenuous physical fitness regime, making his muscular build even more solid. Kringle also learned that Walker was very intelligent, with an IQ range of 130 to 140. A rabid reader as well, Walker had become something of a jailhouse lawyer, helping other convicts with their court motions and appeals in exchange for the most valuable prison currency: cartons of cigarettes. He also was a prolific correspondent, sometimes sending out a half-dozen letters a day. Reading copies of the surprisingly articulate and reasonably grammatical missives—routinely kept on file—Kringle noticed that Walker’s tone never varied. The entire system was against him; he had been framed. From McNeil Island guards, Kringle learned that Walker had delved into the occult. “He thought himself capable of leaving his body,” reported one guard.
According to Walker’s file, he had been married twice,* and had fathered a daughter, Noel, born in 1967. Walker had married Noel’s mother, Patricia McKay, in 1966, and they had divorced in 1972. McKay, who had been awarded custody of Noel, still lived in fear of her former husband. “I don’t want him to know where I’m living,” she told the feds. “You have to understand something about Buck. He’s a classic psychopath. And he’s never been questioned for even a fraction of the armed robberies he’s committed.”
Kringle noticed a pattern in Walker’s buddies at McNeil Island and in the list of convicts he had written to in other institutions. They were the true incorrigibles—bank robbers, drug smugglers, extortionists, kidnappers, murderers. Kringle knew how this amoral brotherhood worked. When any member could call another as a witness in a trial, he did so, with the idea that it was easier for his friends to escape while traveling to and from court than while stuck behind prison walls. When someone like Walker hit the streets again, he was often set up in criminal enterprises by friends who had been out longer. Kringle knew that with such connections, Walker did not plan to go straight. That was fine with Kringle. Fugitives who stayed out of trouble were the most difficult to locate.
Kringle also knew about Jennifer Jenkins. Her name was included on the McNeil Island list of Walker’s correspondents. About eighteen months before his escape, Buck had written to her at a Santa Barbara address. There was no record of a reply.
January 18, 1978
Aloha Kekepania,
Hau’oli Makahiki Hou. I wish you new beginnings. How the fuck are you, baby? I’m writing because I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately and feeling the bitter wrench in my heart. I’m enclosing a present, which is about all I can come up with hereabout. They’re a bunch of mad scribblings, which, in my egotistical state, I lump under the heading of quote poetry unquote.
We haven’t communicated much over the last couple of years and you’ve become something of a stranger to me. Most of my thoughts about you nowadays are warm, some are bitter with disappointment, and there are times when I just can’t help myself. I turn myself on remembering some vivid and vital things, beautiful things, that happened between us. Sometimes I can almost remember what you taste like.
The other evening I walked out on the back ramp to get a breath of fresh air, and stood there looking at the mountains, the waters of the Sound, across to other islands that abound in this area, and the setting sun was magnificent shining through a golden-reddish haze of the clouds. It’s a terrible agony to experience anything beautiful in prison, because beauty here is always so tentative and there never seems to be any consummation. Some of the ugliest thoughts in the world must be thought by people in prisons, but I th
ink some of the most beautiful thoughts come into our visions simply because we have such a need for them.
Ah well, Jen, my love (I hope you don’t mind my calling you that for old time’s sake) it’s not such an enchanting world after all, is it? Too much manure for barefooted souls like us. If I had any juice with whatever gods there may be, I’d put in my strongest bid that they look after you and bless you with all you deserve, which would consist of an awful lot of love and consideration.
No more. I have to get back to work. Just wanted to say hello. Like hell! What I really want would take about a million words to express, and I’m not really feeling that creative. Take care and be good to yourself.
Aloha, baby.
Attached to the letter was Jennifer’s “present,” twenty-four pages of poems. Most were love lyrics, more than a few spiced with erotic images. Lines from one effort—entitled “Shall I Begin?”—caught Kringle’s eye, and the deputy marshal smiled. Walker had written:
No dungeon shall long contain me,
nor chains bind.
Shall I begin
by walking on water
or moving mountains?
Although a former sweetheart or accomplice could often be of assistance in locating a fugitive, it appeared to Kringle that Jennifer could not offer such help, having apparently ended all contact with Walker a long time before his escape. But, Kringle decided, locating the new woman in Walker’s life could be the key to apprehending him.
Ruth Claire Thomas, thirty-nine, a short, bespectacled housewife, lived a humdrum existence with her stockbroker husband and two children in a tree-lined Olympia, Washington, housing tract. That is, until she joined the Aloha Club and went on one of its visits to McNeil Island to cheer up inmates from Hawaii. During regularly scheduled social hours in the prison’s recreation hall, Ruth joined other club members in handing out fresh leis to the convicts as taped Hawaiian music played in the background. On her first visit, Ruth met Buck Walker. Soon she was returning just to see him. The day after he escaped, Mrs. Thomas left her family and vanished, but not before cleaning out the family savings account to the last penny.
JULY 31, 1981
A DUSTY PICKUP pulled off Interstate 8 in Yuma, Arizona, stopping at a gas station. Two men climbed out of the truck. They were wearing blue jeans and cowboy-style shirts with snaps and pointed pockets. Dressed pretty much like the locals, Deputy U.S. Marshals Dick Kringle and Don Baker hardly resembled law enforcement officers hot on the trail of a dangerous wanted fugitive.
Kringle had left Seattle a week before, first checking out a Lake Tahoe address that Ruth Thomas had recently used to acquire a new California driver’s license. After he warned the residents of the penalties for aiding and abetting a fugitive, they confirmed that Buck Walker and Ruth Thomas had stayed there off and on that past summer and gave Kringle a Las Vegas address for Walker, which turned out to be a private postal drop. A few days later, Walker called the Las Vegas mailing center to request that his mail be forwarded to an address in Yuma, another private postal drop, located in an adult bookstore. Within the hour, Kringle was on his way to Arizona, where he rendezvoused with Baker.
At the local sheriff’s office in Yuma, the duded-up lawmen discovered a federal narcotics task force working out of the office and Kringle showed the undercover officers Walker’s mug shot.
“That’s Sean O’Dougal,” said Art Cash of the Drug Enforcement Agency. “We’ve seen him around but not for a few days. He’s tight with a guy named Terry Conner. Conner owns a house in one of Yuma’s nicer neighborhoods and drives a big Lincoln Continental. He likes people to think he sells enough greasy burgers at his hamburger stand to finance his life-style.”
“This hamburger stand in town?”
“No, it’s a truck-stop town called Wellton. About thirty miles east of here.”
“Where does Walker hang out?” Kringle asked.
“We know where he hangs his hat when he’s in town. I’ll show you.”
“By the way, what have you got on Conner?”
“Smuggling. Dealing. He’s bringing in large quantities of Thai heroin. Your guy O’Dougal—or Walker—makes drug runs for him south of the border.”
Kringle smiled narrowly. “That sounds like Bucky.”
YUMA
AUGUST 4, 1981
BUCK WALKER still hadn’t shown up.
Kringle decided against staking out the house on Elmwood Avenue where, according to the task force, Walker lived with a woman about forty named Luanne. “Walker is so con-wise, he might see our stakeout before we see him,” he told Baker. “I want him to think it’s safe to come home.”
But Kringle and his partner did drive by the place several times every day. They were looking for a cocoa-brown 1976 Oldsmobile sedan bearing Arizona license ALF752, reputedly Buck’s latest set of wheels.
As they drove for the nth time past the address at about nine in the morning on their fifth day in town, they saw a woman in a faded purple bathrobe taking the garbage out to the curb. She was in curlers, and she looked like bloody hell, but Kringle instantly recognized her.
“Ruth Thomas,” he told Baker.
Now known as Luanne Simmons, Thomas, oldest of the molls among the Conner-Walker gang, had been dubbed the Den Mother by the task force. Pathetically enough, her main man, Walker, was known to be traveling with the youngest woman in the group—the fetching nineteen-year-old daughter of a McNeil Island ex-con. Willingly or not, Ruth Thomas apparently condoned the relationship, for everyone seemed to be one big happily villainous family.
“Still no brown Olds,” Kringle said as they swung around the block. “Still no Bucky.”
When his boss called a few days later, Kringle had to admit he couldn’t anticipate when Walker would return to Yuma. “It could be tomorrow or it could be next month.”
The next day, Kringle boarded a plane for Seattle, leaving Art Cash in charge.
AFTER MIDNIGHT,
AUGUST 12, 1981
A BROWN OLDS with Arizona plates rolled through the U.S. Customs checkpoint just south of Yuma. The tall, muscular male driver and a much younger female passenger were waved through after a glance in the trunk. The customs agent on duty failed to notice that this car was on the “Border Lookout” list.
At 2:00 A.M., a Yuma city policeman spotted the Olds in the parking lot of the Torch Light Motel on the outskirts of town. He radioed in an alert.
Art Cash and his men raced to the scene. All but Cash parked their cars down the street. He pulled his van into the lot next to the unoccupied Olds. He and the agent with him went into the back of the van to observe through the vehicle’s one-way windows.
Ten minutes later, Conner and Walker walked out of Room 16. Both looked around edgily. Walker got into the driver’s seat of the Olds and reached under the front seat for a paper bag. Conner opened the passenger’s door and slid inside. He looked inside the bag, then pulled out an envelope from his pants pocket and handed it over to Walker.
Within seconds armed narcotics agents were descending on the two men. Walker and Conner were yanked out of the car, spread-eagled over the hood, patted down for weapons, and handcuffed.
Cash leaned into the Olds and pulled out the bag and envelope. The envelope was full of cash—at least several thousand dollars. The bag held hundreds of bright-colored capsules. Cash popped one open and tasted the powder. Barbiturates. Fresh from Mexico, Cash guessed.
He looked the big man in the face. “Buck Duane Walker,” he said. “You’re under arrest. So are you, Conner.”
“There’s some mistake,” Walker said. “My name’s Frank Wolf.”
“Okay, Frank Wolf. You’re under arrest.”
Book Two
JUSTICE
NOTE: In Book Two, a number of in-depth legal discussions have been included in the hope that they will help explain the motivations behind the actions of the participants in this case, and how such actions are viewed in the context of existing law. I believe that these p
assages will enrich the reading of the book. However, because there are those who may be distracted by such legal asides, wherever possible I have put these legal observations—along with certain other material—in the appendix.
—VB
CHAPTER 21
LOS ANGELES
MARCH 8, 1982
“VINCE,” MY SECRETARY ANNOUNCED over the intercom, “Miss Jenkins is here to see you.”
I greeted my visitor in the reception room and was surprised to see her accompanied by a shaggy little dog with a graying snout.
“Mr. Bugliosi, I’d like you to meet Puffer,” Jennifer said, leaning down to scratch the mutt behind an ear. “She’s my baby.” This was not the usual gambit of a murder suspect.
I ushered both visitors into my law library, and shut the door. Surrounded by wall-to-wall shelves of legal tomes, Jennifer and I sat across from each other at the long mahogany table that dominated the room. Puffer, with a quick wag of her tail, slipped under the table and curled up happily at Jennifer’s feet.
“Puffer goes everywhere with me. She was at Palmyra.”
“Maybe I should interview Puffer, too.”
Jennifer laughed politely, crinkling the laugh lines at the corners of her large brown eyes. The alleged killer of the newspaper headlines had a disarming little girl quality about her.
I had first heard of Palmyra Island only a few weeks earlier. A friend had given me a copy of a three-part series, “Murder on Palmyra,” that had appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin the year before—an account of Mac and Muff’s disappearance and presumed murder, the grisly discovery of Muff’s skeletal remains and the first-degree murder charges against Buck Walker and Jennifer Jenkins. My friend knew Ted Jenkins—“he swears his sister is innocent”—and asked that I meet with Jennifer to consider representing her.