Broken Doll. Burl Barer
And without getting myself in trouble, we robbed a rental place out in Marysville, and we took a cherry picker and a bunch of tools and other shit.
“We done lots of crime,” he said, “lots of bad stuff, lots of drugs, lots of drinking, yes. We partied together many of years—many a times. As for Richard being a big drinker, he’s a real hard-core alcoholic. He also does cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana, LSD, and basically about everything.
“I seen him the night after the abduction of Roxanne Doll,” he recalled. “Yes, I seen him at the Sports Center, downtown Everett. I know it was Saturday night, April first, because my lady has the receipt that we got money. I loaned him money that night and I have a receipt that says the second, that was seven minutes after midnight, so it would be Sunday, so I know it was Saturday night that I saw him.”
Despite his acknowledged intoxication, Jaaskela’s recollection was remarkably clear. “The Sports Center was closing, so it must have been at least ten or ten-thirty, thereabouts. I know the time because the bartender took a half hour to get me a beer. I was sitting there and I asked Kevin for another beer, but he wouldn’t serve me because I was already drunk. I ordered a beer and it took about a half hour before he would give it to me.”
The loquacious inebriant downed his beer and was preparing to stumble toward the door when his old pal Richard “Animal” Clark came in. “He had his aunt Vicki with him,” recalled Jaaskela. “They were told that they couldn’t order a drink ’cause the place was closing.
“The three of us proceeded to go down to the Aaron’s Restaurant and Lounge so we could have some drinks down there. It was me, Richard, and Vicki, and we probably got there between ten-thirty and quarter to eleven. We stayed long enough for two drinks,” explained Jaaskela. Realizing not everyone conceptualizes time in relation to alcohol consumption, he added, “About half an hour is approximately enough for two drinks.
“Actually, to be precise,” he clarified, “I had one drink, Richard had a beer and a straight shot of tequila, and Vicki had a beer, two rum and Cokes, I think. I’m pretty sure. I had a rum and Coke myself.”
Richard Clark and Mike Jaaskela left Aaron’s together. “We were walking by the First Interstate Bank and I asked Richard, ‘Should you be leaving your aunt alone?’ I asked if she had any money, and he said she did. I asked him if she had a hundred, you know, he said no. I said, ‘Well, she have two hundred?’ He said no. I said, ‘Well, does she have three hundred?’ And he said yeah, she has about three hundred dollars, and I said, ‘Well, you’re leaving her with some guy down at the bar that you know that could peel her for all her money’. I said she’s about three-sheets-to-the-wind drunk, she’s literally plastered. And I said, ‘Well, why don’t we go back and peel her for her three hundred dollars? Let’s scam her or steal her three hundred dollars.’”
Richard’s response, Jaaskela reported, was uncharacteristically conservative. “He seemed really distant or something. He didn’t want to do it. That struck me strange because other times he would have took it. Boom! He would jump at the chance to rip somebody off for three hundred dollars, you know.”
Perhaps the prospect of peeling his beloved Aunt Vicki violated Clark’s moral code. “Oh no, that wasn’t it,” said Jaaskela. “He don’t have one of those. Anyway, I kept on trying to get him to come back and try to go get Aunt Vicki. Why leave her there with three hundred dollars? I stopped him about three times to make sure that he didn’t want to go back.”
The main reason for Richard Clark’s reluctance, Jaaskela believed, was Clark’s increased paranoia of the Everett police. “He said he was just afraid the police might get him or pull him over. He was really paranoid at this point about the police pulling him over. He’s never been paranoid before about being pulled over, you know, because he don’t have a driver’s license, he don’t have no insurance. He had nothin’ to worry about anyway, but he just didn’t want to see the police. He didn’t want to see the police, period, at all.
“Now, by this time, he was really buzzed. He was pretty well drunk. He was legally drunk,” asserted Jaaskela. “From that point, we kept on walking down to his aunt Carol’s house and we got in his van and he chopped up some crystal meth and shared it with me.
“I don’t remember what he used to chop it up. It was pretty dark. I do remember that little dog whining and whimpering soon as I got in the van. I do remember the dog just whining and wouldn’t shut up the whole time and everything, and Richard picked it up. Like the dog was really freaked out or something. I mean, I don’t know what was wrong with it, it just kept on whining and whining the whole twenty minutes I was in the van. That dog was freaked out about something. I don’t know. The dog just kept on whining and whining. It was happy to see Richard, but when Richard picked it up, the little black puppy was still whining.”
Clark and Jaaskela each snorted a line of meth. “Yes, we did. We both did a line, but maybe close to a half gram of crystal meth. I did a line and he did a way much bigger line. He said that when we were previously at the Sports Center that he had been up the night before doing crystal meth then too. You know, he had not just been up that day; you know, he was up since at least six Friday morning.”
The average person, according to Jaaskela, will stay awake for twenty-four to thirty hours after snorting a line of meth. “You just don’t go to sleep.” Finished snorting meth, Clark and Jaaskela then went to the Buzz Inn Tavern in search of Jasskela’s friend Mike. “I had a pitcher of beer, and then me and Richard went over to my house to get some money. My ol’ lady only had twenty dollars on her, and Richard wanted to borrow a twenty, but I needed some money too. So my girlfriend, Angela Caudle, took Richard, her, and the van up to the bank.”
When Angela Caudle mentioned a ride to the Safeway store, Clark thought she said “south Everett”—the area in which the Doll-Iffrig residence was located. “He said no, and seemed really wigged out about it,” recalled Jaaskela. “There was no way that he could go to south Everett. He didn’t indicate why or, or any reason, you know, why he couldn’t go to south Everett. He was trippin’ out or he seemed weird about it, apparently, whatever you want to call it. He made that point clear, you know. He was not giving a ride to south Everett.”
At approximately ten minutes before midnight, Richard Clark drove the five to seven minutes required to get back to the First Interstate Bank. “And five minutes to get back,” Jaaskela said. “The bank receipt said, like, seven minutes after twelve on Sunday morning.”
Twenty bucks was lent to Richard Clark, he returned Angela home, and Jaaskela and he drove back to the Buzz Inn. The object of the exercise was for the three men to go in together on some cocaine.
“My friend Mike was playing a game of pool, and we sat there twenty minutes, and Richard seemed all nervous. He wanted Mike to hurry up because he wanted to go eat, and he wanted to hurry up and go, and we just wanted Mike to hurry up, hurry, hurry, hurry, period. You know, just kept on saying, ‘Hurry ’em up, hurry ’em up, hurry ’em up. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ I don’t know why he was in such a hurry,” said Jaaskela. “It seemed really strange that he was in a hurry. Hurry to go somewhere. But he was going nowhere. He was waitin’ for his cocaine.”
The three men—Clark, Jaaskela, and Mike—all went in on a half gram of cocaine that they purchased from a friend at the Buzz Inn. The three men went out to Clark’s van. Mike got in front with Richard, and Jaaskela climbed into the back of the van.
“It was then, when I got in the back of the van, that I got hit by the smell—it almost turned my stomach. It wasn’t the smell of dog poop, or dog pee, or dirty socks,” he said. “It was kind of like urine, except a hell of a lot stronger and real sick-sort-of smelling. I couldn’t tell what it was, but it was bad—really bad. It smelled like fuckin’ death back there.”
Wincing from the noxious odor, Jaaskela tried to make himself comfortable. “I sat down on some kind of plastic material back there. It was a tarp or a tent, I guess.” Even though the van was dark, the lights from the Buzz Inn parking lot provided sufficient illumination for Jaaskela to see what he described as a blue