Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist by Ann Rule Page B

$5,000—but ultimatelycouldn’t go through with the murder. When he backed out, Addicks and a man named Dennis Lee Cartwright—a hunting buddy and childhood friend of Addicks’s who was already on parole for assault and battery in Washington—committed the murder themselves. Addicks even bragged about it, Cross said.
    After Addicks and Dennis Lee Cartwright were arrested, Cartwright confessed to his part in the murder. His version of events matched Cross’s. Cartwright went to prison for murder, though he was paroled after serving thirteen years. Addicks was found guilty of arson, securities fraud, and murder and sentenced to life in prison. While there, he launched a multitude of lawsuits, from a $2 million suit against
Official Detective Stories
magazine for libel to a $5 million suit against the victim’s son Stan Turel—who Addicks claimed was secretly a police agent—for allegedly violating his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. (The costs of lawsuits launched by prisoners are underwritten by taxpayers.) Though the suits were largely unsuccessful, Addicks was paroled by the states of Oregon and Washington in 1989.
The Deadly Trio
    As I investigated more homicides, I learned that most people commit murder for one of three reasons: money, sex, or revenge. If you are astute and you know what to look for at a murder scene, you can often spot clues that reveal which motive inspired the crime—a broken window, a busted lock, or ransacked drawers suggest a break-in; semen on or around the victim indicates that intercourse has recently taken place; and so on. In other cases, delving into the victim’s background unearths the motive: Was she a woman with a broken romance and a violent-tempered ex-lover? Was he in a heated struggle with a business partner for control of a company they shared? Werethey double-crossing associates in a drug deal? In James Turel’s case, Addicks stood to lose a huge amount of money if Turel exposed his shady business dealings and ousted him from the firm.
    Sometimes you know instinctively that a killer’s actions arose from one of the three common motivations, but you can’t prove it. Such was the case in the death of little Larisa L. Wahnita, a six-year-old girl we found stabbed to death in her bedroom in 1977. Her mother’s boyfriend, Phyll Mendacino, admitted to killing her, but his story about how it happened would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so tragic. Mendacino claimed Larisa was jumping up and down on the bed and he warned her to stop. She didn’t. So he tried to stop her while holding his knife, and she jumped into it—more than eighty times.
    Child murders have always been the hardest for me to handle emotionally, so it was horrible seeing Larisa’s body covered in stab wounds, lying on the floor next to her bed. My gut told me Mendacino had made some kind of sexual advance on Larisa and then flown into a rage at her reaction. I had seen it often enough before to recognize the signs. But there was no way to prove it. Ultimately, he was convicted of murder, and bringing out lurid details about Whatever his motive may have been wouldn’t have changed anything in the sentence.
    Like every other homicide detective, I’ve made my share of misinterpretations and missed key evidence more than once. I had already been working homicide for eight years when the phone rang at four A.M. one chilly November morning in 1983. My family and I had tickets to the Oregon–Oregon State football game, but instead I got dragged out of bed to respond to a homicide in one of Portland’s wealthy, old-money neighborhoods. The scene was a bloodbath. Unbeknownst to his family, Robert Galloway, owner of the successful J&J Construction Company, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Rather than face the humiliation of losing it all, he decided to end it and take his entire family out with him—even the dog. As we soon learned, he told his two oldersons he was worried about burglars and needed