Nancy Brooks had known him since he was a disturbed teenager; she knew all his vulnerable places. Whatever her attachment to Rose Stahl was, it was intense. Nancy wanted Rose to be happy—and rich. The only way to facilitate that was for Art to be gone. Really, really gone. When all the circumstantial and physical evidence was evaluated, the only conclusion to be drawn was that Nancy Brooks, the sweet mother and wife, had manipulated eccentric Bennett LeClerk into within a fraction of an inch of outright murder. And she had done all of this as a favor to a friend.
The jury of eight men and four women, after deliberating for less than five hours, found Nancy Brooks guilty of attempted first-degree murder. The penalty for attempted murder was the same as it would have been if the murder plot had succeeded. Judge James Mifflin sentenced Nancy Brooks to up to life in prison.
At this writing, both Nancy Brooks and Bennett LeClerk have served their prison terms and been paroled. They have not come to the attention of Washington State authorities again. Like Nancy and Bennett, Rose Stahl has disappeared from the public eye. Art Stahl recovered completely from his gunshot wound and is alive and well two decades later.
In the end, the argument for the healing powers of reflexology may have been strengthened. Art Stahl received what should have been a fatal—or at least a paralyzing—wound. But immediately after he was shot in the chest, a classmate removed his shoes and massaged the “heart healing” area of his feet. Who is to say that, at least in Stahl’s case, it wasn’t reflexology that saved his life?
The Most
Dangerous Game
(from In the Name of Love)
When I was in high school, our English teacher assigned us a short story that has become a classic. “The Most Dangerous Game” was the story of a millionaire whose private island was his personal hunting preserve—only he hunted humans, not animals. It left a lasting impression on me and gave me a view of cruelty and manipulation I had never imagined. Many years later I came across a case that made me remember that troubling story. I have chosen the title of that short story for this Snohomish County, Washington, case. There are many dark similarities between the fictional story and the true case.
The victims in this case were very young and naive, full of the spirit of adventure and in search of a perfect world and perfect love. They were the age that I was in high school, and they had the same innocence. The peace and love and joy of Woodstock was only two years past, and many young people were still captivated by the concept the flower children had embraced: “All you need is love.”
The girls in this case had never encountered pure, distilled evil before, and they did not recognize it for what it was until it was too late.
This true case has always reminded me of a Stephen King book or a “Jason” or “Freddie” movie. It’s much like a ghost story as it plays out in the dark short days and endless nights of winter in the Northwest. Blizzards obliterate everything that once seemed familiar. Something scratches and bumps against a thin-walled cabin as two terrified young women huddle inside.
What was it knocking and scraping on their door? What followed them as they tried to escape, the presence they could feel but could not see, even when they whirled around to try to catch it unawares?
This case still gives me goose-bumps.
As terrifying as this encounter in a howling blizzard was, the ending was not as tragic as it seemed destined to be. For those who believe in miracles—or in angels—the astonishing denouement of “The Most Dangerous Game” will only strengthen that belief.
Washington is bisected by the Cascade Mountains. The state is rainy and mild on the Pacific coast and prone to hot dry summers and freezing winters on the eastern side. The mountains themselves often have snowy peaks year round. Skilled highway engineers have cut routes through the mountain passes, so that it is possible to cross the Cascades in all but the wildest of winter storms: White Pass, North Cascades Highway, Snoqualmie Pass, and Stevens Pass. The North Cascades Highway tends to close down for the winter first, and Snoqualmie Pass is the easiest route. Success for those who attempt to cross White Pass and Stevens Pass depends on the depth of the snowdrifts, the threat of avalanches, and the accuracy of weathermen.
None of these routes east from the Washington coast should be chosen by ill-prepared youngsters bent on running away—not in winter. Never in winter.
Maeve Flaherty* was sixteen years old in the winter of 1971. She lived in Seattle with her parents and brothers and sisters. Her father was a doctor, and the family lived in a more-than-comfortable home in one of Seattle’s nicest neighborhoods. Maeve was a pretty girl, short and a little plump. She had a pixyish sense of humor, and like many teens in the early seventies, she was caught up in a world where the young were protesting what they saw as the sins of adults. The Chicago Seven, the Beatles with their long hair and their message-filled music, and the National Guard shootings at Kent State were in the news. While their parents were listening to Dinah Shore and Lawrence Welk, teens were buying Janis Joplin, Three Dog Night, and Simon and Garfunkel—music that sounded like cacophony to the older generation. It has always been so, and it always will be, but the youth revolution of the sixties and seventies was stronger and more visible.
Maeve liked to think she was a rebel—but she wasn’t, really. She was a dreamer whose fantasies far outweighed her common sense. She was restless—eager to try her own wings. Whenever things didn’t go well in her life, Maeve ran. She had run away often enough so that her parents, at their wits’ end, considered putting her in a private girls’ boarding school. Although they would miss having her at home, they hoped that she would get strict supervision there.
Maeve was adamant that she would not go away to school. She would rather run away than wear a uniform and observe a curfew and go to a stuffy school. She began to formulate a plan. She didn’t tell her parents, of course; she needed time to prepare. By February 20, 1971, she was ready to leave. Maeve “triple-dressed”—and then some. She piled on layer after layer of clothes and jeans. That way, she wouldn’t have to carry a suitcase, which would certainly have sounded automatic alarm bells.
Maeve wouldn’t be running away alone. She had a friend whose views were much like her own. Kari Ivarsen* was eighteen—two years older than Maeve—and had lived away from her family for months. They both felt they were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. They saw their parents as having morals and rules right out of the Stone Age. They both believed that the world was a good place, that you could trust strangers because all people were good if they were shown love, because love transcended all danger. If they could have, Maeve and Kari would have journeyed to Woodstock in 1969 and participated in that giant muddy love fest where everyone got along wonderfully despite the dire predictions of adults.
Where Maeve was a cute and cuddly girl, Kari was absolutely beautiful. She was slender and graceful with the perfectly symmetrical facial features that made men swivel their heads to look at her. Having already proved she could get by very well without parental supervision, Kari assured Maeve that they would be perfectly fine once they hit the road. They would have fun and interesting adventures, and when they were ready, they would come back home.
The two girls arranged to meet away from Maeve’s home. They knew if they were to evade Maeve’s parents and the authorities, they had to avoid all their usual hangouts and get out of Seattle as soon as possible. They had saved some money, but not enough to rent a room or an apartment. If they ran out of money for food, they could work as waitresses or dishwashers. Figuring out how to survive would be part of the adventure of their new life.
Someone had told them that there were scores of summer cabins around the Cascade foothills and the isolated lakes in Snohomish County just north of the King County line. Reportedly those cabins sat there empty during the off-season; their owners rarely, if ever, used them in the winter time.
Kari brought it up first: why couldn’t they “borrow” a cabin for a while? She envisioned
a cozy hideaway with a roaring fire where no one would find them or bother them. They wouldn’t really be hurting anything; maybe later they could repay the owners for whatever canned goods or supplies they used. It wouldn’t be stealing—not really—since they intended to replace everything.
Neither girl knew anything at all about mountain survival. They figured they would learn as they went along.
One thing about Washington State that its residents appreciate is that they can leave Seattle and be in the mountains in an hour—or on a Pacific Ocean beach in an hour and a half. One can actually stand in the middle of Seattle and see the snowcapped mountains in the distance; tricks of depth perception make them seem close enough to reach out and touch.
Maeve Flaherty and Kari Ivarsen decided to head for those deceptively safe-looking mountains. They had enough money to take a bus twenty-six miles north to Everett, the Snohomish County seat. They knew how to make their way to Stevens Pass from Everett, hitchhiking through the little towns of Monroe, Sultan, and Startup, where Highway 2 began to climb toward the summit of the towering mountain range. They passed through Gold Bar and Index, and then stood beside the highway. They needed to find shelter before dark. Kari and Maeve had no real plans at all after that; that was half the fun—waiting to see what would happen.
The dream sounded good, and they fueled each other’s enthusiasm.
Almost three weeks earlier and some eighty or ninety miles south of the hideaway Maeve and Kari sought, a young man had also made plans to run away. But he didn’t run away from his parents and the boredom of school. He was escaping from the U.S. Army. He used the name Al, although that wasn’t his real name. The less people knew about him, the better he liked it. Al was twenty-one. He had been confident that joining the army would be the answer to all of his problems, but he found the rigors of basic training at Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma, more than he’d bargained for. He didn’t like getting up before dawn, he didn’t like hikes in the rain, and he didn’t like being told what to do every waking moment. Most of all, he didn’t like the idea of being shipped to a war in Vietnam.
Another soldier, who was from Washington State, had told Al about the cluster of empty cabins near Index in Snohomish County. He said that lots of the places up there were too deep in the woods to appeal to their city-dwelling owners in the winter. He directed Al toward Stevens Pass in the snowy foothills of the Cascades. From what Al could gather, a lot of people showed up there in the wintertime for reasons of their own.
The deserted cabins would be only the first phase of Al’s plan. He had studied maps to find a place where he could cross the Canadian border without a lot of questions from the border patrols. Once free of the United States, he hoped to get on a plane or a boat to Sweden. Reportedly, many American draft dodgers and servicemen like him, who were absent without leave, had taken refuge in Sweden. He had picked up on rumors that an active underground, run by conscientious objectors, would shelter runaways from military service.
Al figured he’d blend in—protective coloration, as it were—in Sweden. He was blond with a crisp wave of hair that fell over his forehead, and he had dark eyes under heavy brows. He was a handsome young man, six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and trim but muscular. He was also outgoing and convincing. People liked him and were drawn to him—especially women, whether they were little old ladies or young girls. All he had to do was grin. If there was rage just beneath his attractive facade—and there was—he hid it completely.
Al hitched a ride north to Seattle and beyond. He visited with some relatives near Everett and then rode with a truck driver through Sultan, Gold Bar, and Startup. He was looking for a place called Mineral City.
The truck driver shook his head. “Never heard of it,” he said, “and I’ve been driving Stevens Pass for years.”
That shook Al a little. According to rumor, Mineral City was a ghost town, a regular Shangri-la, with everything a man needed to live. Miners had abandoned the settlement decades before, but the buildings were still there. Al hadn’t located it, but he figured it was too small to show up on the map he’d bought at the service station. In truth, there was no such place.
There was an area called Garland Mineral Springs, or Garland Hot Springs. It had once been a mecca for those who believed that the minerals in the spring water would cure all manner of physical ills. The springs were fourteen miles east of Index on the Index-Galena Road. The road wound north from Index and then east along the north fork of the Snohomish River and past the Troublesome Creek Campground and the San Juan Campground to Garland Mineral Springs before it meandered tortuously south back to Jack Pass and Highway 2. The road was used mainly by loggers. Garland Mineral Springs, a scene of former grandeur, was now in disarray. Lodges and buildings designed to attract health pilgrims had long since fallen into skeletal ruins.
In summer, the area Al sought was verdant and inviting to experienced hikers who were trail-wise and willing to venture so far from civilized roads. In February, however, it was buried in snowdrifts, and icy tentacles clung to the 100-foot fir limbs and the few buildings that still had roofs. The foothills were over 5,000 feet high here: Troublesome Mountain, Bear Mountain, Frog Mountain. This was no place for amateurs.
It was sometime around February 2 when the tall young man known as Al lowered himself from the cab of the logging truck and headed into the tiny town of Index. Beyond his clean-cut handsomeness, he was not particularly unusual-looking, but there are so few strangers in Index in midwinter that almost any newcomer is noted and remembered. In the summer, things are a bit different; vacationers come and go for a week’s hiatus from the city noise in the jerry-built cabins that dot the hills around the village. Strangers are commonplace in Index in August; they stand out in February.
Al had stopped for a beer in an Index tavern and made small talk with the bartender as he drank. The bartender noted that the stranger carried a duffel bag and wore jeans that had been slit up the outside leg seams and then laced together with rawhide. The young man, who said his name was Al, obviously wasn’t a complete novice about winter survival; he wore an orange-and-green field jacket, gloves, a scarf, a sweater, and heavy-duty brown boots.
He said he was from California and he carried a map, which he said would lead him to Mineral City. The bartender had never heard of such a place, but he nodded noncommittally. Fantasies are not unheard of in taverns and he had heard a lot of stories in his job. If the stranger thought he was going to find some magic place up in the woods, let him dream.
Some distance out of Index, two young men occupied one of the rustic cabins that were sprinkled through the woods. They had come by it honestly; they paid rent on it every month. The men, known as Handy* and Digger,* were conscientious objectors. By inclination and principle, they were opposed to violence in any form. Because of their pacifist beliefs, they were involved in the underground passage system that smuggled draft evaders into Canada. Although many would find fault with their activities, few would argue that their participation in the underground was for any personal gain. Handy and Digger took risks to help other young men who felt the way they did about war. In return, they received nothing more than the knowledge that they were following their consciences.
The man named Al wandered up the Index-Galena Road to Handy and Digger’s cabin a few days later. They gave him a place to sleep, fed him, and listened as he explained that he could not bear to hurt or kill anyone.
“I can’t go to Vietnam,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t shoot someone. I have to get to Canada.”
“We’ll help you,” Digger said. “We’ll get you there.” He and Handy explained that a lot would depend on the weather. Until they could assure him of safe passage into Canada, they would see that he had enough to eat and a place to stay.
The temperature dropped and the drifts grew deeper, and Al became something of a familiar sight around Index.
A few weeks later, Maeve Flaherty and Kari Ivarsen hitchhiked into Index. They were carrying supp
lies that they naively believed would see them through the mountain winter: several changes of clothing, a hammer, some nails, matches, and their eye makeup.
The two girls started walking up the Index-Galena Road away from civilization, looking for a cabin where they could settle in for the next few months. But night fell and caught them far from shelter. They managed to find a lean-to where they huddled together for the night, curling up spoon fashion to share their body heat. But it wasn’t enough as the night deepened and the temperature plunged lower and lower. In desperation, the girls managed to set fire to the shelter, and the hard wood burned long enough and hot enough to keep them from freezing. They were grateful to see a pale sun come up, saving them from what had seemed like an endless night.
With the resiliency of youth, Kari and Maeve pushed farther into the woods. Eventually they came to Handy and Digger’s cabin. They could see that someone probably lived there, although no one was home at the moment. They found a vacant cabin nearby, and Kari and Maeve used their hammer to break into it.
They were like little girls playing house. They swept the floor, started a fire in the fireplace, and prepared to settle in. Later that day, they met Handy and Digger, their “old ladies,” and Al, their houseguest. Al smiled widely and held out his hand. Maeve and Kari liked him. He made them laugh and they thought he was awfully good-looking. After walking away from Fort Lewis, Al had grown a mustache and a Vandyke beard, which gave him a rather exotic appearance. His dark eyes were compelling as he stared at Kari and Maeve; he seemed fascinated by their story of running away to find a mountain hideaway.