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Chapter 5

Vicki Smith’s recollections of April 1 are both somewhat accurate and moderately befogged. It is true that she and Richard stayed at Aunt Carol’s until late in the evening, but prior to attending Aaron’s, the slightly sloshed Smith/Clark duo’s destination was the Sports Center. It was there that Clark and his aunt Vicki encountered Richard’s longtime associate and occasional criminal cohort, Michael Jaaskela.

“Richard Clark and I are old pals,” Jaaskela said. Years of friendly association with Richard Clark provided Jaaskela with a plethora of pleasant memories. “We’ve done crime together; we’ve drank together; we’ve done drugs together. 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 or gray plastic tarp.

The three men went to Mike’s house, and down to the basement to do the rest of the cocaine and meth. “We all shared,” remarked Jaaskela proudly. “We didn’t say much of anything, just sat there and talked about Mike’s mom and dad coming downstairs and busting us up and calling Hawaii Five-O on us—the cops. So we took out of there and went upstairs, we got in Richard’s van and went back to the Buzz Inn.”

Jaaskela and Mike exited the van. “By the time we turned around, Richard was gone,” said an irked Jaaskela. “He hadn’t said anything to me or Mike about going anywhere, but he sure was in a hurry.” Clark ditched his friends outside the Buzz Inn between 1:30 and 1:45 A.M., leaving them to walk home.

Such behavior was uncharacteristic for Clark, according to Jaaskela. “But the whole night he wasn’t like himself at all. He was way different—distant, quiet—not at all like he usually is. As a rule, he’s real jabber-jaws. You can’t get Richard to shut up. Ya know, yak yak yak. All the time, flappin’ his jaws.”

Saturday night, April 1, Richard Mathew Clark was markedly different. “Dead quiet. Like he wasn’t there. Weird.” Looking back on his former friend’s demeanor, Jaaskela was most troubled by Clark’s complete silence on the topic of Roxanne Doll.

“He said nothing about the missing child, Roxanne Doll,” recalled Jaaskela. “He said nothing of having been camping with Roxanne’s father, or that he even knew the girl and the family. He never said nothing about the little girl being missing or anything. He didn’t tell me that he had gone camping the previous night with a friend named Tim, or nothing.”

Clark’s silence, especially regarding the missing Roxanne Doll, preyed heavily on Jaaskela’s mind. “Everybody knew that little girl was missing—it was on the news and everybody was talking about it. And Richard, who knew the girl and the family and all that, didn’t say a single word about it all the time we were together.

“Why wouldn’t he say something to me about some little girl being missing, unless he had something to hide from me?” asked Jaaskela. “You would think he would say something about it right away to his friends. Hell, maybe I might have seen her, or maybe somebody else seen her.

“He never indicated that he went camping up with the little girl’s father, Tim,” said an exasperated Jaaskela. “We were together four hours and he never said a word to me about nothin’. In fact, he seemed real quiet and, you know, seemed distant that night. Didn’t seem the same Richard. It seemed like he was out in left field waiting for a ball that wasn’t coming. Seemed like he felt a little guilty. He was just like he was there, but he wasn’t.”

Following his drug and drink interaction on April 1 with the uncharacteristically distant Richard Clark, Jaaskela discovered an unwelcome memento of their time together—peculiar reddish brown stains all over the back of his pants.

“I noticed that on the back of my ass there was a big mud stain. There were mud stains from about the middle of my back leg right up to the back of my pocket. There was nowhere I was that I could get mud all over my ass like that,” he insisted. “I wasn’t sittin’ nowhere in mud, all time sittin’ in booths, chairs or, you know, I wasn’t sittin’ outside in the mud. I put them pants on clean that day, that morning. I think the stain came from Richard Clark’s van. Ya know, when I sat in the back on top of the tarp or the tent, or whatever it was that smelled bad, on that Saturday night, April first.”

April 2, 1995

Detectives and other police personnel returned to the Iffrig residence at 9:00 A.M. to resume investigation. A half hour later, Detective Herndon’s pager went off. It was Richard Clark.

“Clark had been instructed by his aunt and his father to call me as soon as possible,” Herndon said. “Clark told me that he was at his aunt’s house and would wait there for me.

“The first thing I noticed when I met him,” said Herndon, “was that Clark had my name and pager number written on his hand. I asked him why he didn’t come to the residence like he was asked to, and he told me that he did not stop because he was low on gas and could not make it out to the house. Then I asked him why he didn’t page me. Clark responded he did not want to hassle with the police. I asked him if I could search his van, and he said it was okay with him, so I took a good look. I didn’t see anything obvious that would belong to Roxanne.”

Herndon said years later, “I admit that I had tunnel vision in that search. I wasn’t looking for trace evidence. I was looking for something more substantial—shoes, clothes, toys—something that belonged to Roxanne. And I didn’t find anything of that nature. I saw two black puppies. There was a small portion of feces on a mattress that was located in the back of the van. The van was also loaded with sleeping bags and camping equipment, which apparently belonged to both Clark and Iffrig.”

In recounting his activities the night of March 31 and on April 1, Richard Clark said that the only time he left the Casey residence during the “party” was when Pat Casey and he went out to Casey’s garage and looked at an airplane that Casey had disassembled.

“Me, Tim, Shawn, and Pat partied until approximately seven-thirty in the morning,” Clark said. “But Shawn’s kid woke up and it was time for us to leave. Tim and I walked back to Tim’s house and I sat on the couch while he said good-bye to his wife and collected his camping gear. Gail Doll’s eight-year-old son, Nicholas, came out of his room and sat on the couch with me,” said Clark. “The door to the girls’ room was shut and Nick was the only kid I seen. Tim and I left and drove to the north Everett area looking for Neila D’alexander, Tim’s mom, who was going to go camping with the rest of us.”

“Richard Clark told us,” recalled Herndon, “that he and Tim Iffrig had planned a camping trip the following morning and that he was to pick up his brother Jimmy Miller, who was now out on the reservation; Jimmy’s girlfriend, Lisa, and Vicki Smith, who was Richard’s aunt. They were also supposed to pick up Tim Iffrig’s mother, Neila. According to Richard, they could not find Neila D’alexander, so they drove to the Indian reservation, where they picked up Vicki Smith, Jimmy Miller, and Lisa Rader, who is Jimmy’s girlfriend. After waiting around at Vicki Smith’s for several hours, all drove to the Everett area in Richard’s van, where they picked up Vicki Smith’s check at Carol Clark’s house on Lombard. They then drove to U.S. Bank on Hewitt and cashed the check. After stopping at Rocky’s Gas and Grocery for beer and gas, Richard drove to the campsite.”

Herndon admitted years later, “I was suspicious of Richard Clark. Everyone was a suspect, and we hadn’t eliminated others, of course. But I had strong suspicions of Clark, and not just because he didn’t show up at the Doll residence like he was supposed to, or just because he didn’t page me. When I ran a check on him, I found out about the incident with Feather Rahier back in 1988. Now that fact wasn’t evidence against him in any way. It also wasn’t any indication that he was involved in the disappearance of Roxanne Doll. It just gave me what you might call stimulus for reasonable suspicion.”

Herndon asked Clark if he would be willing to take a polygraph test concerning the disappearance of Roxanne Doll. “Yeah,” said Clark, “but I promised to help my friend Andy do some landscaping in the Marysville area later this afternoon, but I can do it tomorrow.”

“I asked him how I could contact him if the polygraph examiner was available later in the afternoon, and he didn’t hesitate to tell me that I could contact his aunt Vicki or his father in Marysville, who lives nearby. They could get him a message about the polygraph test.”

A quick conversation with the polygraph test administrator revealed that April 3 actually would be more convenient, since the examiner was going to speak to the parents first. At 11:00 A.M., the detectives returned to the Doll-Iffrig residence, and Kiser took extensive photos, including the interior and exterior of the home. Herndon also took VHS video recordings of the residence and surrounding area.

“If you look at the videotape,” said Herndon, “you’ll see one part where the camera comes around into the girls’ room and Roxanne’s sister is holding a doll that’s almost the same size that she is, and it has lifelike hair. It would be very easy to mistake that doll’s head in the bed for another child—specifically Roxanne.”

Looking over the photographs of the home’s interior, Herndon noticed a smoke detector in the hallway just outside Roxanne and Kristena’s bedroom. “I went back to the house specifically to see if that smoke detector was operational,” said Herndon.

If the smoke detector was in working order, it should have awakened Tim Iffrig and his children when the house filled with smoke from his burned steak. “The family never mentioned a smoke detector going off,” Herndon said. “Well, if someone is sleeping on the couch and steak is burned on the stove, you think a smoke detector would go off and wake that person up.”

Standing on a chair, Herndon took the cover off the smoke detector. “There was no battery in it, and it was obvious the battery had been out for some time. The whole inside of the smoke detector had sooted over, or had that nicotine brown residual-type coating on it. And I asked Neila D’alexander about it; she really couldn’t provide me with any information with regards to when it was last in operation. But Nicholas said that his father had taken the battery out of it over a year prior, after it had gone off from steam coming out of the bathroom. When that sort of thing happens, it’s not uncommon for folks to forget to put the smoke detector back in working order.”

Gail Doll and Tim Iffrig were escorted to the Everett Police Department at 1:00 P.M. for polygraph tests. Detective Barry Fagan of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office interviewed Tim Iffrig; Special Agent Ray Lauer of the FBI interviewed Gail.

While Tim and Gail took polygraph tests, specialist Kelly Bradley interviewed their five-year-old daughter, Kristena. “Kristena was accompanied to the police station by her grandmother Neila,” Bradley noted, “and her brother, Nicholas. They were not present, however, during the interview.”

Bradley asked, “Can you tell me your full name?” The child answered, “Kristena.”

“Do you know your last name?”

“No,” she replied, but she was aware that she was five and lived in a blue house with her mom, dad, grandmother, and brother. She also knew that Roxanne was gone.

“Is there anything that happens in your house that you wish you could stop?” Bradley asked.

“I don’t know what it is,” said Kristena, playing with Bradley’s marking pens, “but this color smells good.”

“What’s the best thing about your daddy?”

“He plays Barbies with me. We play house. He’s the dad and I’m the mommy.”

“What happens when you play house with your dad?”

“We take care of the kids. Feed them and dress them.”

“What is the one thing you don’t want your dad to do?”

“Get mad,” said Kristena. Asked what happened when Tim Iffrig got mad, his daughter answered, “You go to your room and wait awhile.”

Bradley also questioned Nicholas Doll. Neither child gave any indication of unpleasant or inappropriate behavior in the home.

“Kristena’s parents were polygraphed that day, as were Kim Hammond and William D’alexander,” said Herndon. “I was very eager to hear the results.”

Gail’s polygraph test lasted much longer than Kim’s. “It seemed to me,” said Gail, “that Kim’s took fifteen minutes and mine took three hours. That might be an exaggeration, but if so, it’s not much of one. The guy interviewing me seemed obsessed with the erroneous concept that I kidnapped my own daughter and had her stashed somewhere. They even speculated that I had her hidden her with relatives in Nebraska.” Recalling, the event in 2003, Gail Doll shook her head in disbelief. “I leave the house at nine-fifteen and return at midnight, and I’m supposed to have spirited her out of state? The guy kept insinuating that I was lying about Roxanne’s disappearance. Maybe that is the technique they use or something, but I found it insulting and offensive.”

The polygraphists reported to Herndon that Gail and Tim were both truthful, as were Kim Hammond and William D’alexander. Four individuals were thus eliminated as suspects.

“I contacted Pat Casey and Shawn Angilley, the next-door neighbors, at about six P.M.,” recalled Herndon. “They were very cooperative and terribly concerned.”

“Tim and his friend Richard returned to our house between twelve-twenty and one A.M.,” Angilley told police. “We sat and talked for about forty-five minutes to an hour about Pat’s plane. Then Pat and Richard went to the garage to see it. They were out there for about a half hour while Tim and I sat inside and talked. When Pat and Richard came back in, we all sat around talking until around six-thirty in the morning. We were kind of loud, and we woke up my son. Once he was up,” she said, “we asked them to go.

“When they left, Pat locked the door behind them. We then went into our room to watch TV. Pat fell asleep and I was watching TV until about eight-thirty when Gail called to see if Roxy was here playing with my son, Chris.”

Twenty minutes later, Gail was knocking on Angilley’s door. “Again she was asking about Roxy. I called her back in a half hour to make sure she found Roxanne, but she hadn’t.”

“Casey and Angilley suggested I talk to a thirteen-year-old boy down the street,” reported Herndon. The youngster was known as “Bad Boy Roy” and was not welcome at the Casey residence.

Detectives Herndon and Kiser met with the boy briefly and quickly determined that he was not involved in the incident. Returning to the Iffrig residence, evidence was gathered from the victim’s bedroom. Detective Kiser was able to lift three latent prints from the exterior of the victim’s window located on the North side of the residence.

“Gail Doll took me into Roxanne’s bedroom,” recalled Kiser “and I observed some things in the bedroom. She pointed out a nightgown that Roxanne had been wearing and some other items.”

“I was one of the responding officers that met detectives at the residence,” recalled Sgt. Boyd Bryant. “Gail Doll told us that Roxanne regularly wet her bed in the middle of the night. I reached down and felt her mattress. It was dry to the touch. From that, we reasoned that unless she remained dry that night, she had been missing for several hours.”

“A couple of hours later,” added Kiser, “we began searching around the outside. I believe it was Detective Herndon that decided that maybe we should try to collect some fingerprints, if there were any available, and then we went to the back side of the house, which would be the north side.”

It was already dark outside when Herndon and the other detectives made the fingerprint discovery. “Herndon had his flashlight with him—he carried the flashlight, and together we went to the back of the house, on the north side.”

A large friendly dog, tethered with a rope, wagged its tail at the officers while they examined the rear of the house. “The dog’s presence explained all the muddy smudges on the wall below the kid’s bedroom window,” said Kiser. “There are four windows on that side of the house. Two of them slide open. The far left window was Roxanne Doll’s bedroom window, and we carefully examined it for fingerprints.”

Kiser noticed a clear print on the outside of the bedroom window. “Once I noticed it, I took out the fingerprint powder and a brush—it’s a very fine brush. And you sprinkle powder, it’s a black powder on the area you want to lift the print from, and that’s what I did in this case.

“Sometimes when I dust a print,” explained Kiser, “I can actually make two lifts from the same print because there is enough powder on there, and that’s what I did—I made one lift; then I decided that I would try it again to see if maybe the next time it will be more clear. I was able to make the same lift twice of that one individual fingerprint.”

Detective Kiser’s fingerprint proficiency ended with efficient recovery. “I don’t have any expertise in reading prints,” admitted Kiser. “I submit the fingerprints to someone else. In the Roxanne Doll investigation, as with all others, we submitted the fingerprints to someone especially trained in that science.” The “someone else” was James Luthy.

Hired by the Washington State Patrol in May 1988, he classified, compared, and searched fingerprints via the automated fingerprint identification system. “That’s a computerized system that allows for rapid searching of fingerprints,” he explained. “Also, at that time, I began assisting latent-print examiners with processing evidence in crime scenes for latent prints.”

In March 1993, Luthy was assigned to the missing and unidentified persons unit, where he assisted coroners and medical examiners in identifying the deceased. One year later, he was assigned to the Latent Print Unit. Latent means hidden.

“A latent fingerprint generally means a fingerprint left on an object when that object is touched,” explained Luthy. “It generally requires processing with powders or with chemicals or with alternative light sources before it can be seen. That doesn’t have to be done all the time, but that’s typically what needs to be done, and that’s why they call it latent.

“There are a variety of methods used in retrieving and comparing fingerprints,” said Luthy. “One way is to just photograph it, and then you have a permanent record of it. You can also process it with powders, lightly dusting it with powder and then lifting it, or putting a piece of tape over it, lifting the tape and placing that tape on a white card that would provide for you a permanent record of that impression. You may also develop it with chemicals so it can be enhanced, so you can photograph it and record it that way.”

Fingerprints are compared and identified, Luthy explained, “because the friction ridge skin that we have on the palms of our hands and also on the bottom of our feet is unique to each individual. The ridges that are formed there have unique characteristics—ridges that stop, or perhaps they will fork or divide into two. We call it bifurcation when they divide like that.

“We compare the ridge endings and the bifurcations of one print to the ridge endings and bifurcations of another. That’s basically what we do; we compare fingerprints looking for ones that match.”

Luthy received the fingerprint lifted from Roxanne Doll’s bedroom window. The results of his comparisons wouldn’t be known immediately, if at all. “If the person who made that print doesn’t have his or her fingerprints on file,” he said, “you’re not going to find a match.”

“The best we could hope,” said Herndon, “is that whoever left that print on the bedroom window was the perpetrator, and that the perpetrator either had a print on file, or we would find the person responsible and get a print from them at that time.”

Herndon and Kiser packed up all items of evidence, provided or recovered. Included were one roll of 35mm film containing photos of the exterior and interior of the house, two fingerprint cards of the latent prints lifted from the exterior bedroom window by Detective Kiser, one pink Barbie-type nightgown—the last-known item worn by Roxanne Doll found atop the victim’s dresser—and one second-grade class photograph of Roxanne and her classmates, plus one note to “Michael” from Roxanne. It simply said, “I need some fun.”

When the police drove away, the distraught parents sat outside on the front porch. “It’s Richard,” said Gail. “I just know it.”