Body Count. Burl Barer
They saw a foot with a shoe on it sticking out from under the brush. “I am the one who discovered Pat and Susan on July 14, 1975,” said Dan Oliver years later. “I saw their dead bodies on the west side of Mill Creek beneath a sleeping bag and a tire.”
Exactly twenty-four hours after Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage pulled out of the driveway, Frank Munns and Dan Oliver walked into the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Office. Notified of the shocking discovery, Sheriff Art Klundt and Chief Criminal Deputy “Scotty” Ray immediately drove to the scene.
Beneath the implement tire, sleeping bag, and debris were the bodies exactly as Dan Oliver and Frank Munns reported: Savage, placed on top of Oliver, was naked from the waist down, and her green halter top was pulled up exposing her breasts. Oliver, clothed in his matching lightweight blue shirt and shorts, had a bullet wound directly through the heart; Savage’s wound was directly behind her left ear.
An autopsy conducted on both victims by Dr. Abbas Sameh revealed that Oliver was actually shot three times—the first bullet went through his left forearm; the second passed through the right shoulder. This indicated that the killer was a marksman aiming for the heart and that Oliver put up his arms in a defensive reflex. The first two shots were only slightly off target; the third shot went directly through young Oliver’s heart.
Dr. Sameh reported that Susan Savage also was shot more than once. Prior to the fatal shot behind her left ear, there was one to her left shoulder. “Doctor Sameh found no evidence of sexual assault,” commented Sheriff Mike Humphries years later, “but there was a substance noticed on Ms. Savage that was never identified for the simple reason that her body was completely cleansed by the funeral home before the autopsy. Today, of course, we would recover every hair, fiber, or whatever and identify it. But this is the twenty-first century, and the murder was in the mid-1970s.”
The sheriff’s office requested, and received, assistance from the Spokane police in processing potential evidence retrieved from the debris piled upon the bodies. There were a small number of latent fingerprints, but they were insufficient for purposes of comparison to prints on file. “About as good as we can do,” reported the lab technicians, “is to either say they were or were not left by any particular person in the event you locate a suspect.”
Ray sent all the physical evidence, including bullets recovered from the bodies, to the FBI lab in Washington, DC. There was one thing, said Ray, which could crack the case. The FBI reported that the bullets came from a .357-caliber handgun. If there was a viable suspect who owned a .357, a ballistics test could determine with a high degree of probability whether or not the suspect’s gun was the murder weapon.
Desperate for additional clues, Ray invoked help from the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, the local newspaper where Oliver’s aunt Nadine Gerkey was a respected reporter. Radio stations KTEL and KUJ joined in the media effort encouraging any and all individuals with information, ideas, or evidence to immediately contact Scotty Ray at the sheriff’s office.
“Public response to our efforts to track down the killer has been very good,” noted Ray, who acknowledged that the sheriff’s office received an “enormous” number of calls from individuals offering information. Several people reported hearing gunshots at Mill Creek that Sunday afternoon, but the area was also a popular spot for target practice. Hearing gunfire wasn’t unusual.
Diane Lackey, a teenager picnicking at Mill Creek with her boyfriend the same day as Oliver and Savage, was among those who contacted Investigator Ray. She had heard more than gunfire, and had seen more than the area’s rural serenity. Lackey had heard a woman scream, and shortly thereafter, she had come upon a man crouching in the bushes.
To elicit more details, she agreed to being interviewed under the influence of sodium amytol by psychiatrist Frederick Montgomery. The interview’s results were then shared with Walla Walla deputy prosecuting attorney Jerry Votendahl.
“Diane was, I think, extremely cooperative,” reported Dr. Montgomery. “Following an altercation with her boyfriend, she walked to a small ravine and, while standing there, she noticed a young man between the ages of nineteen to twenty-four crouching in the brush with no shirt on. When they noticed each other, he stood up and they stared at each other for some time. She describes him as being weird-looking, with brown medium-length hair. He was of medium height, of a slender build, and wore jeans. They looked at each other for a period of time; then both became frightened and they both took off and ran. The boy running away from her, and the girl running back toward where her boyfriend was.
“Diane seems to recognize this individual,” noted Montgomery, “and she states that she has seen him before some place in Walla Walla, but could not recollect when. I think she would recognize him again if she saw him.”
Lackey added one more important piece of information—the man may have been driving a red compact car, similar to a Mustang. She noticed the car parked alongside the road when she arrived at Mill Creek. Several other people, including residents of the area, also mentioned a small red car parked near Oliver’s vehicle.
The unidentified red compact car was among over two dozen vehicles that were either parked or cruising in the Mill Creek area at the time of the homicides. “The sheriff’s office is doing what we can,” said Ray, “to get these cars identified that people have seen up there. Deputies have interviewed about one hundred persons in the case, including individuals acquainted with the victims, and others who were in the area at the time of the shooting.”
The entire town was emotionally invested in capturing the couple’s killer. A citizens’ group raised a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the guilty party. Walla Walla attorney Madison Jones, cochairman with fellow attorney Al Golden of the nine-member Concerned Citizens Reward Committee, was optimistic.
“The bigger the reward, the more likely someone is going to come forward with information,” Jones said. “People in this town are upset about this thing. Susan Savage baby-sat for everybody in this town, including me.” The day she died, Susan Savage had been wearing a cloisonné bracelet received as a thank-you gift from the parents of three neighborhood children for whom she baby-sat.
“Pat Oliver was from a well-known family in this town,” stated Madison Jones. “I think that with a reward, we can continue to maintain the public interest. With a tragedy like this, it shouldn’t go unnoticed after a few days. Look at the Lindbergh kidnapping. They didn’t solve that for two or three years. They didn’t find Patty Hearst for nineteen months.”
Within two weeks of the murders, the sheriff’s office confirmed that two officers working full-time devoted one thousand man-hours to the investigation. Hundreds of persons were contacted, and forty-three individuals provided taped interviews. Transcriptions ran to over two hundred pages, and the case files reached a thickness of more than two feet. Supplemental reports totaled over 150, and seventy-five items were collected as evidence. Despite the impressive numbers, authorities were no closer to catching the killer than they were on the day Savage’s and Oliver’s bodies were uncovered.
“Walla Walla was then and is now a very small community with very limited resources,” commented Christopher Oliver, Patrick’s younger brother, in retrospect. “The investigation started with several suspects. All these leads were a dead end. No real suspects, no true motives.”
“Murders have three essential elements,” explained Detective Skeeters. “They are as follows: motive, means, and opportunity. The ‘means’ in this crime was a handgun, the ’opportunity’ was the seclusion of the couple’s picnic site, but the motive was something that couldn’t be ascertained.”
“We are not prepared to offer any motive that we can back up,” acknowledged Ray to the press at the month’s end. Sheriff Klundt and he held strongly divergent opinions regarding motive: Klundt seriously considered the possibility that “it was just some kook who killed them for no reason.” Ray disagreed, insisting that the killings were too deliberate to be the sudden act of some “kook.”
“My hunch is that somebody followed them out there with the intention of killing them,” said Ray. He also firmly suspected that the motive was jealousy. “It’s