In his mind, there was no turning back. One of the women he’d assaulted in Monterey had identified him, gotten him into so much trouble that he was kicked out of the army. He didn’t want any more trouble, so he went to the kitchen and found a steak knife.
“I cut her throat,” he confessed to the detectives.
Then he carried out the rest of the obsession that had made him leave his bed and creep into the Stackhouse home. He ripped Mary Ellen’s slacks off and raped her.
“I was very careful not to get any blood on my clothes,” Gilbert added. “When I was done, I went to the bathroom on that floor and washed my hands. Then I went home and went back to bed.”
Although he didn’t mention exactly what his victim had done, the fact that Mary Ellen’s body had been found at the top of the stairs leading to her daughters’ bedrooms suggested that she had been fighting to save them, a mother lioness protecting her young, even as she died.
* * *
ON JUNE 7, 1963, Mary Ellen Stackhouse’s funeral was held in the Darling-Fischer Garden Chapel with two Baptist ministers from churches she had attended performing the services. None of her children were there when Mary Ellen was buried in the Golden Gate National Cemetery.
That same day, Gilbert Thompson, his parents, probation officials, a court clerk, and a sole reporter attended a hearing regarding what jurisdiction would handle the teenager’s trial. He was currently being held in Santa Clara County’s Juvenile Hall. A further hearing was set for June 17 to determine if Thompson would be turned over to juvenile authorities or if he would face murder charges in superior court.
With his long history of sexual assaults, the latter seemed the best option. Gilbert Thompson’s juvenile probation officer, P. R. Silva, described an early interview with him, a time when Silva had expected the teenager to show emotion or cry.
“Gilbert expressed regret over what he had done, particularly at leaving six children motherless, but he showed no physical signs of remorse.”
The defendant hadn’t cried or trembled. He neither blushed nor turned pale as he spoke of his vicious attack on Mary Ellen Stackhouse.
Gilbert first wanted to plead insanity, but then he decided to go for a trial.
Gilbert Thompson was charged as an adult in superior court, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to life in prison. Because of his age, he would spend two years in a boys’ reformatory before he was transferred to the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo.
He would be permitted to ask for a parole hearing every five years.
“This is one of my saddest days ever on the bench,” the judge said. Gilbert Thompson didn’t appear to share the judge’s feelings. Instead, he motioned to the bailiff and asked, “Can you let me know the winner of the World Series game?”
He was only seventeen, but his sexual deviancy was deeply entrenched.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
* * *
WHEN JIMMIE AND HIS six children arrived at Whidbey Island for his change of duty, he built a house for his family. Their Aunt Ellen opened her home to them until Jimmie had finished the new house. The navy gave him as much leave as it could, but eventually Jimmie had to go back to duty.
He hired a local woman, the divorced mother of two small daughters—Amy, who was four, and Sue, nine—to be a live-in housekeeper and take care of his children. Her name was Doris Alton née Anderson, and she was eight months older than Jimmie.
Physically, Doris was nothing like Mary Ellen. She was not a beauty as Jimmie’s first wife had been, but rather a petite, average-looking woman. She wore her blondish-brown hair cut short and rolled up just below her ears and eschewed makeup.
But Doris pleased Jimmie with her ability at organization and homemaking. That was the most important thing to him as he tried to re-create at least the semblance of a normal household where he and his six children could move past the tragedy they lived through at Moffett Field.
Doris had just been divorced from her daughters’ (Amy and Sue Alton) father, and she needed someone to help her raise them. Alton had signed away all of his legal rights to the girls.
Jimmie wasn’t an outwardly affectionate man; he showed his love for his family by trying to provide everything physical that they needed.
Beyond his expertise in the navy, he was a man who could do virtually anything: carpentry, make furniture, and he was “smart as a whip” according to his children. He was a plumber, mechanic, and he had a photographic memory. Even so, he never could spell or sing.
He had built the fine house on Edgecliff Drive in Langley: seven bedrooms and three bathrooms. All by himself, he sanded, stained, and hung twenty-four mahogany doors.
When Jimmie poured cement for a window well, he let his children place their hands carefully in the wet cement, and then etched their initials beside the small handprints.
They are still there a half century later.
The Stackhouse children came to love Whidbey Island. Along with Sue and Amy, they rode their trikes and bikes all over the south end of the island, rushed down a well-worn trail to the beach every day where they scraped mussels off the pilings or caught minnows with fishing lines tied to their fingers—selling them to fishermen for bait. They swam like fishes themselves, bobbing in the waves. Langley was a small town then, where kids could count on free handouts from merchants: a cold hot dog from the Langley Meat Market or some treat from the grocer.
If there was anywhere the Stackhouse children could begin to feel safe and heal, Langley would have been the place.
Between Jimmie and Doris, they had eight children, all of them born between 1954 and 1961. Jimmie Stackhouse’s new semifamily seemed to be the answer to how he could take care of his motherless children.
Jimmie was often out at night, going to bars and dating women. Doris told Rhonda how they decided to get married, but only after Rhonda was a grown woman.
“I waited up for him one night,” Doris recalled. “When he finally got home, I told him, ‘There’s nothing out there that you can’t get right here.’ ”
Within a year of Mary Ellen’s murder, Jimmie married Doris. Their wedding picture is of the couple with all of their children clustered around them. It might have worked in a movie of that era starring Julie Andrews and Jimmy Stewart or Doris Day and Henry Fonda. All the elements for a fictional happy ending were there, but this was real life, and no matter how serene the Stackhouse family might have seemed to neighbors and Jimmie’s navy buddies, it wasn’t.
Like Mary Ellen before her, Doris kept a spotless house and was a great cook and seamstress. She was admired by those who lived in Langley for her self-sacrificing efforts to raise six motherless children along with her own two daughters. Still, the facade Doris Anderson Alton Stackhouse showed the world was only that—a facade.
No one can see through the outside walls of someone else’s house, and Jimmie’s children by Mary Ellen felt that they were always treated like second-class citizens to Doris’s daughters.
“Doris put on airs,” Rhonda recalls. “As if she was a loving, devoted mother—but she wasn’t. There were many times when we realized that we didn’t really matter to her.
“One time, we all missed the school bus. Our brothers and Lana, Brenda, and I started walking in the rain. Then we saw Doris’s car, with Sue and Amy in it, but Doris drove right by us.”
And soon, Doris was pregnant with Jimmie’s child. She would be the only baby they had together. Peggy Sue Stackhouse was born on September 2, 1965.
She was an adorable baby with burnished auburn hair, much doted on by her father and her half siblings.
“I finally got my redhead,” Jimmie crowed. He had always had flaming red hair, and he was covered with freckles from head-to-toe. But Peggy Sue was his first child to inherit those genes.
“Of course we loved her when she was little,” Rhonda recalls. “But she was spoiled—and headstrong as she grew up.”
With Peggy Sue’s birth, Jimmie’s older children moved anothe
r step down the ladder. “We were third best now.”
Doris continued to impress people in Langley with her devotion to all her children. For reasons Mary Ellen’s children never understood, she had their birth certificates changed, removing their natural mother’s name, and replacing it with her own.
She was, in her stepchildren’s opinion, “an angel on the street and a devil at home.” Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth as she presented herself to the Langley community as a long-suffering stepmother who was doing her best to raise six children who weren’t even hers. Some people saw her as heroic; others were suspicious of her saintly persona.
“She fulfilled our basic needs,” Rhonda remembers. “We got all our shots, and went to the dentist regularly—but she didn’t even try to meet our emotional needs.”
Doris was such an exceptional seamstress that she won a contest and received a top-of-the-line sewing machine, a model used by professionals. She was an artist when it came to sewing.
She insisted that Jimmie’s girls take sewing lessons—which they hated—but were later grateful for.
She also taught them how to maintain a perfect house. Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda were required to clean house on Tuesdays after school and all day Saturday. Doris wanted to be sure that all Jimmie’s girls learned how to bake, although they barely knew the rudiments of cooking, and she didn’t care if they couldn’t cook plain food.
Jimmie’s three oldest daughters had to clean house so thoroughly that even a hard-boiled army sergeant would approve. They had to scrub the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush until they were clean enough to suit their stepmother.
If Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda sometimes “forgot” to come home and clean on Tuesdays after school, there was hell to pay, just as there was when Doris disapproved of their decorum.
“One time,” Rhonda remembers, “I fought back and sassed my half sister, Sue. Doris beat me with the vacuum cleaner cord. She also used a paddle with holes in it when she spanked us. I always wet my pants even before she started to hit me because I was so scared!”
Although they weren’t exactly “Cinderellas,” the older girls did not have a truly happy childhood. Her sisters remembered Mary Ellen, but Brenda still completely blocked the memory of the night in June when their mother was murdered. Mute for a long time, Brenda had finally begun to speak after many months on Whidbey Island.
But she didn’t talk about her dead mother. And none of the children really knew what had happened to Mary Ellen. They recalled the blood and being wakened early by Tom and Mike, being lifted over a woman who didn’t look like their mother, and the older ones recalled men with cameras and strobe lights.
As they grew older, they knew that Mary Ellen had been murdered, but they didn’t dare ask about it for fear it would upset Jimmie.
Christmas was a time when Jimmie’s children felt more left out than ever. “Sue, Amy, and Peggy Sue got tons of presents, and our stepmother never seemed to notice how unequal it all was—or maybe she did,” Rhonda says. “I don’t know what she was thinking.”
Jimmie and Mary Ellen’s six children got “one big gift” for all of them, a present from one of Jimmie’s aunts.
Even then, Doris would give the present to Sue to “monitor” to be sure her stepchildren weren’t too hard on whatever it was.
Jimmie’s children got along fairly well with Doris’s two daughters; Sue, sometimes called “Sweet Sue” with affection, was a nice girl. So was Amy, although she was shy and tended to fade into the background.
For a blended family, they may have fared better than many such relationships. Of them all, Peggy Sue was the one who was most indulged—the baby of the family.
Peggy was a chubby child, and Doris watched her closely, fearful that her beautiful baby girl might truly become fat. Peggy was allergic to eggs and chocolate, and she had to be on a special diet. Instead of milk, she drank Strawberry Quik. Peggy had sugar-free candy because she was allergic to chocolate. This wasn’t really Peggy Sue’s fault; she couldn’t help having allergies—but Doris coddled her excessively.
“If I hurt myself,” Rhonda said, “I didn’t go to anyone for help—I just found a Band-Aid. It was the same for all of us. We knew she wasn’t our real mother.”
But Doris watched over Peggy Sue all the time.
“Once, Rob was spinning Peggy on his feet,” Rhonda remembered. “They were laughing and having fun until she got launched into the air and broke her arm. My stepmother was livid.”
Doris bragged about Sue and Amy when they earned good grades, but whenever Jimmie’s kids got a D or an F, she told him, “That’s your child—not mine.”
Jimmie noticed that her own children got preferential treatment, and although he was seldom angry, he complained to Doris: “You draw a line down this family!”
Doris was a good manager of her household money and in handing out chores. Jimmie appreciated the comfortable home she kept. She liked the new house that Jimmie had built, but she had her eye on another house next to the one her new husband had provided. It was also on Edgecliff Drive. It was smaller, just an old—but quaint— farmhouse, and it wasn’t big enough to hold their large family. Doris wanted Jimmie to buy it for her and their children. But it was something that Jimmie simply would not give her.
A long time in the future, Doris would have that farmhouse, although she wouldn’t live in it with Jimmie Stackhouse.
Even though Tom, Mike, Lana, Brenda, Rhonda, and Robby were fond of Sue, Amy, and Peggy Sue, Jimmie’s first children were all afraid of losing each other. They had already lost so much, as amorphous as their memories were, and dreaded some unknown danger that might attack one of them.
It doesn’t take a trained psychiatrist to spot the reasons behind their anxiety. As the years passed, none of the children born to Mary Ellen Stackhouse ever found out exactly what had happened to her. She was there one night when they went to bed, and she was lost to them in the morning. Some of her six children remembered seeing her bloodied form on the floor, while others blocked that image or were too young to understand. A dark horror sometimes consumed them—especially Brenda. She still cried out in her sleep in terror.
She always would.
Wakened, she could not remember what her nightmare was about.
One morning when Brenda was ten, Rhonda nine, and Robby was six or seven, they waited for the school bus in the pouring rain. Suddenly, Robby broke away from his sisters and ran to get at the front of the line of students waiting to board. But he slipped on the loose gravel and puddles, and fell. The bus driver didn’t see him, and drove the massive bus right over him.
The other youngsters shouted to her to “Get off of him!” totally confusing her so that she put the bus in reverse and backed over him.
“We thought he was dead,” Rhonda says. “We had seen him pulling with his arms to try to get out from under the bus, and at first he was screaming. We got pushed onto the bus and Doris told us we had to go to school. No one would tell us how he was. The school called an immediate special assembly on bus safety, and we thought that meant for sure that Robby was dead.
“Finally, they got around to telling Brenda and me that Robby was alive, but he was in the hospital. He was hurt quite badly; his ankle was crushed and his shoulder was dislocated. He came home in a wheelchair with his injuries in casts. It took him several weeks to recover.”
And, once again, the truth had been withheld from the Stackhouse children, which made them feel that they were standing on unstable ground.
Peggy Sue had a more solid childhood; she lived with her natural mother and father, all of her half siblings loved her, and she got virtually anything she asked for.
She had no awful memories to repress. Like Sue and Amy, Peggy Sue slept in the room next to Doris. If she had a bad dream, she could run to her mother and be comforted in seconds. Doris would always favor her youngest daughter.
Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda slept far away in another part of the house. When they had bad dre
ams or believed that someone—or something—was trying to get into their rooms, Doris pooh-poohed their anxiety, saying “Don’t be silly.”
Doris gave Rhonda a two-by-four and told her to shove it up under the doorknob. “And nothing can get you.”
That didn’t help. Many nights, they lay awake, frightened of what might be hiding in the dark.
Doris and Jimmie’s marriage lost much of its luster as the years passed. The older children were in middle school and then high school. They were, of course, several grades ahead of Peggy Sue.
All of Jimmie’s children were natural athletes, and even the girls excelled at basketball and baseball. Tom played football and basketball with his teammate Jim Huden. At that time, Jim was sixteen and Peggy Sue was only seven and their paths didn’t cross.
Peggy Sue would be a basketball star when she reached high school, not just because she was six feet tall but because she was strong and graceful. She was the only girl in an Everett basketball league, and they were glad to have her.
“Peggy Sue was good!” Rhonda said.
Besides sports, Lana, Brenda, and Rhonda also developed an interest in the opposite sex. They were all pretty and popular, as were Doris’s girls, Sue and Amy. It was probably ordained that little Peggy Sue would grow up fast and be eager to date.
Sometimes her rebelliousness was funny and sometimes it was troubling.
In her teens, Peggy Sue entered a Jell-O wrestling contest where she and her opponents wore bathing suits and jumped into a huge vat of orange Jell-O!
“We went to see that and it was hilarious,” Rhonda recalls.
When she was fourteen or fifteen, Peggy often hitchhiked out of town—whether it was to go to a party or to run away, and she hitched a ride with the Wonder Bread man! She got home safely, and the Stackhouse girls—Peggy included—laughed about it for years.
Rhonda remembers that Peggy once asked her to lie and give her an alibi. She had a date with a much older boy. She needed a reason to stay out late, and wanted Rhonda to say she was staying overnight with her. But Rhonda shook her head. She was not going to lie for her baby sister.