Читать книгу The Last Time We Saw Her - Robert Falcon Scott - Страница 9

Corvallis, Oregon, May 24, 2004

The man named Joel was in a bad mood on the morning of May 24, 2004. He’d spent a long night of drinking and snorting cocaine at a party in Portland, Oregon. Now overdue for a DUI court appearance more than 150 miles away on the Oregon coast in Newport, Lincoln County, he was tired and hungover. There were no direct freeways from Portland to Newport, and he knew he was going to be late for his “driving under the influence” charge.

Joel called the court and left a message on their answering machine about his late appearance. Then he decided to drive down Interstate 5 to Albany and cut across to the coast on Highway 20. This highway would take him through the college town of Corvallis, on the Willamette River.

Corvallis was a city of fifty-five thousand residents and nineteen thousand college students at Oregon State University (OSU) in 2004. Corvallis went by the title “The Pacific Northwest’s Most Beautiful College Town.” Noble Prize–winner Linus Pauling had been an OSU graduate, and inkjet printing and the computer mouse had been invented there. In fact, Corvallis had one of the highest per capita number of computer users in the nation. Up until the year 2004, Corvallis had one other statistic: It was the twentieth safest city of its size in the United States out of a list of 344. But all that was about to change.

As Joel drove through Corvallis around nine-twenty on Monday morning, May 24, he began to spot more and more young college girls walking toward campus. They were just the kind of girls he liked. And even better, as far as he was concerned, these girls were walking alone on the residential streets beneath the shady trees.

In some areas there were no other people around, or even passing traffic. All of this was just too tempting for Joel. He’d been in similar situations in the past when he’d spotted a young woman walking alone on a street. He’d taken advantage of the situation in the blink of an eye, forcing them into his vehicle and making them disrobe, before having sex with them. And besides, now he was driving a minivan with tinted windows. Even in the daytime no one could see into the back of the van. He could hustle a girl into the van’s interior, threaten her, and then drive to some remote location. Then he could do whatever he wanted with her.

Joel started cruising the streets of Corvallis, closer and closer to campus. On the southwest side of campus, he spotted a young woman walking into the parking lot of the Oak Park Apartments, about a block away from OSU’s Reser Stadium. There was no one else around that he could see. Here was his chance.

Diane Mason was twenty years old in May 2004, and a student at OSU. She lived not far off campus, and on that morning she began her usual walk to class by cutting through the Oak Park Apartments complex. As she did so, she noticed a green minivan enter the parking lot from a side street. As the van drove in, Diane exited the parking lot and crossed Western Boulevard, walked past the Reser Stadium parking lot, and headed for Thirtieth Street, on the edge of campus. There were a few cars going by on Western Boulevard, but no people or cars at all on Thirtieth Street.

Suddenly the green minivan she had seen at the Oak Park Apartments pulled up and actually blocked her path. Diane had to walk out into the street to move around it. The van’s engine was still running; and as she approached the driver’s side of the vehicle, the driver rolled the window down. As soon as Diane was adjacent to the window, the man inside spoke to her.

“I’m lost,” he said. “Can you help me?”

Diane asked where he was going and he mentioned the name of some fraternity she had never heard of. Diane told him, “It’s probably on Greek Row, near Twenty-fifth and Harrison.”

Diane noticed that the man was in his late thirties or early forties, had light-colored hair, a goatee, and light-colored eyes, which were probably blue. He was wearing a casual shirt and had two earrings in his left ear. One of them was a gold hoop-type earring.

Diane recalled later, “When I gave him directions, he seemed a little confused. He had an Idaho map in his hands, but he said he also had a Corvallis map in the back of the van. He wanted me to point out directions on that map. At that point he opened the driver’s-side door to get out and I had to back up about three feet into the street to let him out. I thought this was odd, since most people don’t get out of their vehicles to ask directions.

“I began to get a really uneasy feeling about all of this, since I was alone on the street. There was no traffic. There was no noise. And this person I didn’t know had just gotten out of his vehicle.”

When the man got out of the minivan, Diane judged his height to be between five-nine and five-eleven. He had a medium build and seemed average in most respects. He walked to the side of the van, opened a sliding door, and began rummaging around inside the van behind the driver’s seat. Diane could see that there were several boxes inside and items of clothing and blankets.

Diane said later, “He slid one box in the back, which I thought was odd, since there was nothing behind it and it wasn’t heavy.” She wondered if he didn’t want her to see what was inside the box.

The man said to her, “Let me look for another second.”

But by this point Diane was becoming very nervous. Things just didn’t seem right about this situation, and she was aware that no one else was around. Diane told the man, “I’ve got to get to class”; she started walking away.

Soon after she began walking toward campus, she heard the van begin to move. It turned around toward Western Boulevard once again. Diane walked on, and the van did not return.

Joel became even more irritated. This ruse had not worked, but he was persistent. Now that he was determined to have a young woman, he was in prime “trolling grounds,” near a university campus. He drove back on Western for a short ways, doubled back, and soon spotted another young woman walking alone in the Reser Stadium parking lot. This was a wide area of dirt and gravel, and there was no one else around.

Jade Bateman was a student at OSU and very athletic. In fact, she worked part-time at the athletic office on campus. As Jade walked along, she noticed a green minivan cruising through the Reser Stadium parking lot. The minivan cruised by her very slowly, and the man inside was staring at her. It made her very uncomfortable. Instead of walking away, Jade decided to confront the driver. She moved toward the van and said to the man, whose driver’s-side window was rolled down, “Can I help you?”

The man seemed to be in his thirties or early forties. He was wearing a baseball cap and had a goatee. He also wore dark sunglasses. The man said to Jade, “I’m looking for the athletic offices.”

Jade replied, “Are you looking for the football office or one of the other sports offices?”

He said he was looking for one of the sports offices, and Jade told him that he should drive up to Gill Coliseum and they could help him there. All during this conversation Jade was on a cell phone with her mother, who lived in Portland.

Jade said later, “I asked my mom to stay on the phone. I was very serious about this. It was more of a demand than a suggestion. I was nervous. I felt that I was in a situation that wasn’t good.”

Jade’s mother, Phyllis, recalled that phone call very well. She said, “I knew that Jade lived not far off campus. From my daughter’s apartment you could see the football stadium. That morning I was getting some things ready for the recycle center, and Jade’s friend was coming over with his pickup to get it. I was on my cell phone with Jade and she was giving someone directions to someplace. I told her, ‘Jade, I’m going to hang up and let you talk to that person.’ She told me, ‘Do not hang up the phone!’ She said it fairly strongly. She normally didn’t speak to me that way.”

Jade was indeed nervous. A green minivan with a stranger at the wheel—in a large parking lot, with no one else around—was very unsettling.

And then, as luck would have it, another individual drove out onto the parking lot. The individual was Bob Clifford, an athletic director at OSU. Clifford knew Jade by sight, and what he saw now in the Reser Stadium parking lot disturbed him enough to make him drive over and see what was going on.

Bob said later, “I noticed a girl I knew named Jade, standing by a green Dodge minivan out in the Reser Stadium parking lot. It just didn’t seem like a normal situation. I drove over and noticed that the van had Minnesota plates. I pulled up to the passenger side and tried to get the driver’s attention. But he kind of ignored me. He kept his hands attached to the steering wheel and would not acknowledge my presence. He was wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, and a light spring coat.

“So I pulled in front of him and put my car in park. I turned around and looked at Jade. Then he and I exchanged quick glimpses of each other. I looked at her again, and she started to walk away.”

Jade was glad that Bob Clifford had arrived on the scene. She wasn’t sure if the man in the van was up to something, but the whole situation just didn’t feel right to her. Jade started walking toward campus, and the man in the van just sat there.

Bob noted, “At that point everything seemed okay. I pulled away, and the van followed me. I took a right onto Twenty-sixth Street, and the van turned onto Western.”

By now, Joel was “really pissed.” Two situations that should have worked for him had now been foiled, but he wasn’t giving up. He remembered a pretty young woman in the parking lot of the Oak Park Apartments who was cleaning lampposts when he had first followed the other girl to Thirtieth Street. The young woman cleaning the lampposts was petite, blond, and pretty. With any luck she would still be out there all alone, cleaning light fixtures.