Broken Doll. Burl Barer
met Richard Clark at a party,” recalled Roxanne’s father, Tim Iffrig. “It was just a casual acquaintance. Two years before he murdered my daughter, I attended a party hosted by Clark’s aunt, Vicki Smith.”
Anyone who met Tim Iffrig came away with the same impression—immediately likable. Good-natured, outgoing, and adept at overlooking the faults of others, Tim Iffrig was the guy you can’t help but like because, as one person said, “he is so darn affable.”
Gail Doll, with her cherubic face that manifested good upbringing and essential innocence, was never a “party person.” Unlike many of her generation, she never crossed the line of light social drinking, nor did she trespass beyond typical teenage experimentation with pot. “In fact, when they took me out for my twenty-first birthday, I didn’t order a drink because I was still nursing Roxanne,” she said.
“People thought Tim and I were a real mismatch,” said Gail. “When I told my best friend, Kim Hammond, that I was getting married, she asked me who in the world I was marrying. She just couldn’t picture Tim and I together.”
“I was so upset at first about Tim and she getting married,” confessed Hammond. “I actually called Ricki Lake and tried to get on TV. They were having a show, ‘Do you have a friend who you want to keep from making the biggest mistake of his or her life?’ Well, I called Ricki Lake three times trying to get on that show to keep Tim and Gail from getting married. But as I told Gail, if she does marry Tim, I’ll be supportive of her decision, and supportive of their marriage.”
“I had a problem with Tim’s drinking,” said Gail, “but he was never abusive nor mean. In fact, quite the opposite. He’s one of those guys who starts out in a good mood and just gets in a better mood. Drinking and such were just something he grew up with, whereas I didn’t. He has always been the most wonderful and attentive of fathers.”
“As for Richard Clark,” said Gail Doll, “the man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered our daughter, I never liked him from the minute we met. I told Tim that Richard made me uncomfortable. There was something icky about him, and I would never, ever leave him alone with my kids. Maybe it was mother’s intuition or something, but Tim couldn’t see it. To him, I guess, Richard was just a sometime drinking buddy. And because the house is just as much Tim’s as it is mine, I felt Tim was entitled to have his friends over.”
Richard Clark visited Tim and Gail on Friday night, March 31, 1995. The next morning, eight-year-old Nicholas Doll walked into his parents’ bedroom and spoke four words that precipitated an avalanche of terror, trauma, and sorrow. “I can’t find Roxanne,” he said, and the nightmare began.
Chapter 3
“Richard Clark took his sick and twisted need for control and gratification out on a bright and promising child,” said Roxanne’s mother several years later. “He didn’t need to take my child. He didn’t need to find power in killing her, but he did.”
In retrospect, there was as much precognitive irony as perverted tragedy in the death of Roxanne Doll. The month prior to her kidnapping, a policeman lectured her class at Fairmont Elementary School on the dangers of child abduction. “If someone tries to kidnap you,” said the police officer, “kick and yell.”
“When we were by the slide and the trees,” recalled playmate Melissa Greenman, “Roxanne said that she was afraid that if she were kidnapped, she would be sad. She would like to be home. She worried about being kidnapped in her sleep. I taught her how to kick and punch.”
The two weeks before her death, Roxy’s mood and demeanor took a downturn. “She was afraid of a man who was giving her gifts, a man who she was very uncomfortable with,” affirmed commentary entered in her school records. The man who gave her gifts, the man who groomed her for abduction, was Richard M. Clark.
He utilized the same methodology with Feather Rahier. A puppy enchants the child; gifts soften her up. In both episodes, neither technique overcame the child’s apprehension or revulsion. For whatever reason, Richard Clark named his new puppy “Misty”—the name of Feather Rahier’s sister, the one who summoned Angela Rono to pull her daughter from the dark garage.
“Roxanne was a very pretty girl and always friendly to everyone,” recalled Gail Doll. “She wasn’t afraid of new people or things. She loved to read and play with her sisters. The month just before her death, Roxy mastered riding her bike.”
In truth, Roxy was blossoming in physical grace and personal accomplishment. Her school records reveal a child of resolve, charm, and dedication. Faced with early challenges in certain skills, she not only overcame her initial difficulties, but also surpassed expectations.
“Roxy would go to the school’s library instead of playing on the playground most of the time,” said Gail. “She wouldn’t just read picture books, she would read books that had lots of words and very few pictures, and she read her older sisters’ books too.
“Roxy loved pets and animals in general. She would play with our cats and they would allow her to wrap them in baby-doll clothes, blankets, and put them to sleep in her doll buggy. They never clawed or fussed.
“After her death, her favorite cat left, I guess to go find her. I don’t know, but when she was gone, so was he. Roxy had always loved to play with her dolls. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said she wanted to be a mommy.”
Fascinated with infants, Roxanne delighted in the presence of younger children. “She loved it when her baby cousins came over,” her mother recalled. “She would carry them around and feed them their bottle, play with them. At school, family functions, or Scouts, she would locate the families that had babies just so she could play with them.”
Easygoing, charmingly feminine, and innately musical, Roxanne loved singing. “Roxy knew a lot of songs from Disney movies and church,” recalled Gail. “She would sing them in the car or to her baby dolls. She was a very easygoing child that knew what she wanted in life and would tell you—she wanted to be a mommy and have twelve children. She would get up every morning and do her hair in braids or ponytails and she wore dresses even in the winter months. It was a fight to get her to wear pants. She had very good manners and crossed her legs ‘like the movie stars did.’”
Gail tucked her daughters in bed that Friday night, and naturally anticipated seeing them in the morning. Roxanne went to sleep wearing a brand-new nightgown. When young Nicholas said he couldn’t find Roxanne, Gail was understandably concerned. The new nightgown was atop the bedroom dresser.
“Long before I called 911,” remembered Gail, “I searched everywhere for my daughter. I looked in Nick’s room. I looked everywhere. I called the neighbors and Roxanne’s friends. Then I went next door to Shawn Angilley’s and asked her if she had seen Roxanne. I called my sister Trish, called my friend Kim and told her that I couldn’t find Roxanne.” Gail also called her mother, Willa Doll, and her eldest daughter, Jennifer, in the nearby town of Arlington. “I even went back again to Shawn’s. Finally, at about ten-thirty in the morning, I called 911.”
The responding officer, Daniel Johnson, was no stranger to missing persons investigations. A police officer with the city of Everett, Johnson had close to sixteen years’ experience the day he responded to Gail Doll’s desperate call.
“Almost every missing persons call that I have been involved in,” recalled Johnson, “they have all been found in various places. They were either at the neighbors’ playing, or I found them sleeping under beds, in closets, in the car, or they went to the grocery store with Mom—and Dad didn’t know it. Or they were at the park and went walking on the beach and the parents didn’t see them go, but they were always found.”
When Johnson arrived, he found an understandably upset Gail Doll. “I immediately started asking questions, like where she might be, where is the dad—I was trying to see if she might have gone with somebody, got up early and went playing.
“The father, Tim Iffrig, had left early in the morning on a camping excursion,” recalled Johnson. “Also scheduled