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I-5

On a chilly Sunday evening in mid-January, two young women rolled up to the TransAmerica Title Building on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon, just off Interstate 5, to clean the office. It was their usual Sunday job, though today they had gotten a bit of a late start, having to shower and stop for gas, so they didn't arrive to the business complex until after nine p.m. The office had wide, welcoming windows on every wall and, with the bright florescent lights flipped on, the effect was to create a fishbowl-like scene, the women bustling around in their duties like two busy, little fish. They'd left the door unlocked and entertained themselves by chatting to each other, the two of them best friends. They were Shari Hull, twenty-years-old and the daughter of the owner of the housekeeping company with which they were both employed, and Beth Wilmot, also twenty and a fairly recent transplant to Salem from Spokane, Washington. She'd come for work, and along with steady pay, she'd found a true friend. 

Everything was going well. It was a small office and kept very clean during the week, so the two women had barely anything to do. They cleaned the floors and dusted; wiped the doors and took out the garbage. Shari took it out alone, feeling comfortable enough in the empty office park to do so. They were almost done and ready to climb back into Shari's Bronco, they'd left it running to keep it warm, and head home. But, someone must have seen Shari when she took the garbage out on her own. They must have seen that the door was left open. They must have watched the two women, alone in the fishbowl-like office, sweep and scrub, talk and laugh. And they must have known that they could do anything, anything they wanted, and no one would ever know.

He came in through the door, bolstering a gun, his face hidden by the hood of his jacket, a band aid stretched over the bridge of his nose. 

He corralled the two women into the small lunchroom of the office, the only room without a view into the parking lot or nearby River Road, and demanded they strip naked and get down onto the floor. He told them, then, to preform oral sex, unzipping his pants and exposing his erect penis. Terrified, shaking, and crying, Shari Hull and Beth Wilmot complied. He told Shari to masturbate and attempted to vaginally rape Beth, but was unable to, so he commanded again that both girls fellate him until he reached climax at which point he demanded they swallow his ejaculate. 

When he was satisfied sexually, he told them to lie face down and asked them if they had any rope. They didn't have any or know where any was, so he stood over them, quietly, and listened to them beg. Shari was hysterical, pleading for her life, swearing never to tell what they had done. Her cries were useless, but she had to fight for her life. Beth spoke more rationally, asking him to leave them unharmed. He had already decided what he was going to do.

A shot rang out, a bullet slamming into Shari's head. Another echoed in the tiny room, knocking hard into Beth's skull. Three more shots followed, one more for Beth, leaving her ears ringing, and two for Shari, who lay moaning on the floor.

He walked out, sprinting into the night, leaving two young women to bleed out on the floor, thinking he'd won. He'd left no witnesses.

Minutes passed and Beth finally found herself able to rise up and walk to the bathroom. Her head was pounding, her heart still racing. The right side of her face was becoming a blackened, bloody mess, the swelling spanning across her cheek and jaw, over her eye, deep into her hairline. She stumbled away from the mirror and found a phone where she dialed 911.

Detective Dave Kominek of the Marion County Sheriff's Office caught the case and got to work immediately. The killer had been wearing gloves, he hadn't taken off a single item of clothing, he'd kept his hair covered by the hood of his jacket. They found little evidence, save for the .32 caliber bullets that barreled through Shari's head, and a lone curly, black pubic hair. He'd run the hair against everyone that was at the crime scene, which included the two victims, as well as deputies, paramedics, and fire fighters responding to the call. It was a match for no one. 

Shari Hull was found barely breathing, three gunshot wounds to her head, fired at such a close range as to blacken her hair with singed gunpowder residue. She was rushed to the hospital, but died very shortly thereafter. 

Beth Wilmot was found fully conscious, two gunshot wounds to her head, fired execution style at point-blank range. But, Beth Wilmot was going to survive.

Rushed to the hospital, the ED physicians and nurses found something incredibly surprising. A .32 caliber bullet sitting in a nest of matted, bloody hair. They took an X-Ray and found that another bullet had been fired into Beth's head and had skirted along her skull under her skin to rest a few inches in front of her right ear. The same bullets that had ripped through Shari's brain hadn't even penetrated Beth's skull. Everyone was amazed. Beth's survival was truly miraculous. Physicians deduced that Beth must have had very dense bone, enough to stop a bullet fired at extremely close range. Not only could Beth survive two bullets to the head, but she could testify against Shari's killer and find some justice for herself and her best friend.

At the time of Shari's murder, no one had any idea of what they were actually walking into. With a fairly detailed description and a composite made from Beth's memory, Detective Kominek sent out a teletype to seven western states, including within it the strange modus operandi of his killer. 

The next day, the case broke into one hundred little pieces, each one spanning across the vast expanse of the Interstate 5 corridor, from a small Seattle suburb into the depths of the California Redwood Forest. Somebody was robbing, raping, and ruining lives, and he'd been doing it undetected for months.



Randall Brent Woodfield was born on December 26, 1950 to two very pleased parents. They had wanted a son and, after two beautiful girls, they were granted their wish. He was perfect and he was going to be the perfect son. Dad had high hopes he would be an athlete. Mom believed he would do great things in the world.

Randall grew up in a charming, rainy beach town on the coast of Oregon. Otter Rock was the ideal place to raise a family. It was small and friendly; neighborly folks looking out for one another. The Woodfields were very well-liked and popular about town. Everyone said they were such a nice family. They had such a nice boy.

But, Randall, or Randy as his mother called him, was a troubled child. Yet, no one seemed to notice. He was very jealous of the freedom his older sisters experienced. He did not believe it was due to their age. That soon, when he was older, he too would also experience this liberation. He believed it was due to their sex. That, because they were female, they were privileged. He resented that he was not granted such freedom as his sister even though he was a boy and thus was owed attention and affection. 

He had a strange relationship with his mother. He worshipped the ground she walked on, but as she was the main disciplinarian, resented her greatly. He felt like he could never and would never live up to her unbelievably high standards, standards he set for himself in his own head. His mother was always very proud of him, but he never felt that pride, and felt every time he messed up or did wrong that she was severely disappointed in him. He invested his self-worth in the approval of his mother and then convinced himself he would never gain that approval. Throughout his life, his actions and motivations would all lead back to the approval of women and especially that of his beloved mother.

When Randall entered his very early teens, he started to feel intense sexual desires. As a child born in the early '50's, there was no talk of sex or sexuality in the home, at least not until high school. He watched as his sisters were granted even more privileges, like learning to drive and staying out later at night, and began to resent girls even more. He couldn't act on, or even understand, his sexual urges and girls were really starting to piss him off. So, Randall began a life-long career of flashing.

He would expose his erect penis to women and girls all over town. Sometimes flashing one woman and sprinting with his quick, athletic legs to another part of the city to flash another woman or a group of girls. He reveled in their looks of horror and disgust. It made his heart race, his blood rush--he was aroused. 

By this time in his life, it was apparent to everyone in town that Randall Woodfield was a star athlete. He excelled at every sport he was asked to play--baseball, basketball, track and field, though his passion was found in football--and a buzz was building that maybe he would be the one to put the little ocean-side town on the map. So when Randall was caught exposing himself to local women and girls, there was no punishment, there was no counseling, there was no reform school. His parents either ignored it or repressed it, neither ever speaking of it. The town swept it away and kept watching Randall play. He was good. So good, in fact, that he was chosen in 1974 to play for the Green Bay Packers.

Randall never really had a steady girlfriend. He would date a girl for a few weeks, maybe a few months, and then it was over. Randall would rage about how he was wronged, how women were untrustworthy, that they were purposefully deceptive. He would move on to another girl, rushing in, pledging his love, and his heart would break again. 

He never quite got over any of his girlfriends, or even the girls that outright rejected him. After his college girlfriend broke it off, he broke into her dorm room thinking maybe stealing back what he had given her would make him feel better. Instead, he got in trouble. And, yet, Randy kept writing her, sending her pictures of himself naked or nearly so, relentlessly for a decade. It was a pattern he would repeat with hundreds of women over the coming years.

Randall was cut from the 1974 Packers team. He stuck around in Wisconsin to play for a minor league team, but eventually returned home to Oregon ashamed. There was no exact reason given why he was cut. If you ask Randy, he would tell you he just didn't have the skills. For a man that was obsessed with becoming a professional running back, whose life was centered for a decade on that dream, admitting that you just didn't cut it and leaving it behind was strange. When asked about it later by Oregon detectives, Wisconsin police officers confirmed that Randall had been flashing again. So much so that his sexual exploits led to his dismissal from the NFL team. 

Returning home with his tail-tucked, Randall didn't know what to do. He didn't see the point in returning to college, he was only there to play football and become a star. He moved back to Portland, where he had attended Portland State, and took a job with an electronics company. In 1975

In college, Randall had become extremely religious. His family and friends would call him obsessed. He seemed to be the type of personality that, when he found something to focus his energy on, like religion or football, he became completely immersed in it, absolutely obsessed to the point of madness. His father worried and it drove a wedge between them, but Randall did not falter in his devotion. It was almost as if he were drowning himself in Christianity to stifle the demons within. In prison, Randall again turned to religion. 

Randall's time in prison did not start out well. He had a problem with female guards. He had a problem with the female nurse that ran his therapy group. He had a problem with female authority. 

He pledged to his therapist over and over that his issue was sex related and in order to fix it, he would abstain from sex once he got out of prison. He wanted to meet one woman, he said, that would fulfill all his needs and raise a family; have a quiet life. He was argumentative and got written up several times. A few years in, he realized this strategy wasn't working for him. He needed to focus on what he wanted, and what he wanted was out of prison. So, he began to tell counselors and guards what they wanted to hear, he became a model prisoner. Believing he was rehabilitated, he was released on parole in 1979. 

Just one year later, Randall would graduate from exposure and sexual assault to premeditated murder.



After Randy got out of prison, his obsession with religion dwindled and he focused on something new. Sex. He wanted to have sex with every woman he could, completely contradicting his previous statements about finding the one woman to settle down with, he courted every woman he met. He would come on strong, hitting on one woman and immediately moving on to the one next to her if she declined his offer. He would suggest serious relationships within minutes of meeting someone, beg to accompany them home. If he did go home with them, he would ask for fellatio. That was his thing. Rarely did he ever have intercourse with his girlfriends. 

Randy liked them young. He was often seeing girls in their late teens, some as young as sixteen and seventeen. Women his age, he was nearing 30, saw through him immediately and found him shallow and dull, the maturity of a teenager. He fared better with younger girls, found he could control them easier, manipulate them to his desires. They thought he was cute and could talk with him on the same level. Young women fawned over Randall Woodfield. 

But, many of them realized their mistake, and would ask him--he who came on very strong--to back off. Randall would hide his building rage and resentment at women and move on to the next girl. But he would write down their names, their numbers, and throughout the years would call them, try to court them, send them pictures and flowers. He had a little black book full of over 500 women. He would string several along at a time for years on end, promising a serious future and proclaiming his love. 

One such woman was Shelley Janson, a college student in New Mexico, who met Randy when she was visiting home in Oregon over the 1980-81 holiday break. Within a month, Shelley and Randall were on a trip to San Francisco. Randall drove down to meet her and they spent three days at the end of January together. And the end of the trip, Randall proposed. By March, Shelley couldn't stand to be away from Randall another day and dropped out of college in New Mexico to return to Oregon and live with Randall in Eugene. When she arrived in early March, everything she'd dreamt of with Randall was suddenly, horrifically changed.



On February 4, 1981, Shasta County detectives received a teletype from an Oregon sheriff's office about a brutal assault and murder that had occurred days before. They picked up the phone and dialed up Detective Dave Kominek.

Less than twenty-four hours before, in the little town of Moutain Gate, California, Donna Lee Eckard, thirty-seven, and her fourteen-year-old daughter Janell Jarvis were at home alone. Donna Lee's husband was a firefighter and had just begun his twenty-four hour shift at the station close by. Her youngest daughter, twelve-year-old Kristin, had called, after staying late from school to watch a basketball game, to ask to stay over at a friend's for dinner. Donna Lee had been woken up from a nap by the call. She hadn't been feeling well after a minor surgical procedure earlier in the day and when she realized she needed breakfast things for the next morning, threw a coat over her nightgown and wrote a check for Janell to take in to the store down the street. They were going to drive together and Janell was going to go in. But someone had seen them, at home alone, Donna Lee in her nightgown, Janell just fourteen. Before they could leave for the store, someone stopped them.

A few minutes before nine p.m., Kristin returned home. She called out for her mom, but wasn't worried when she received no answer. She walked from room to room, looking for her family, and when she entered her parents' bedroom, she found them.

Donna Lee lay on the bed, her arms bound underneath her and her ankles wrapped with surgical tape. Her nightgown was pulled down to reveal her breasts, her coat stripped off and cast aside. A wide piece of tape covered her mouth and nose.

Janell lay beside her mother, prone and completely nude. To Kristin, she was obviously dead. Her head was covered in blood and bullet holes. Later, at autopsy, they would discover she had been shot a total of seven times with .32 caliber bullets, and had been anally raped after her death.

Kristin checked on her mother. She ripped the taped from her face and shook her, urging her to wake up, to respond. Fearing the worst, Kristin picked up the phone and dialed 911. Her firefighter step-father, Steve Eckard, raced with his superiors to his home. All he could do when he arrived was identify their bodies.

Detectives Gene Farley and Rick Burnett noted the execution style wounds on both women and were at a loss to how, in a quaint little mountain town just off Interstate 5, at the end of a quiet residential street, such carnage had found it's way into this home.




***
That was part one of my entry on the I-5 Killer. As I was writing it, I realize there was a lot of information, and I needed more room to tell the story. I have always wanted to learn more about this particular serial killer and find travel killers absolutely fascinating. The idea of a man like this roaming from place to place, killing and cutting people down across our vast country is absolutely terrying. Especially considering how hard it is to hunt a killer like this. Just getting everyone on the same page, all the jurisdictions and the various persons involved in a homicide investigation, is a daunting task. This was a story I didn't know very well, but I am glad I am getting the chance to tell it now. So, stay tuned for part two, because it will be interesting.

As always, if you want to support this blog and my other writing endevors, please click on the patreon link above. Also, if you are interested in writing a review for my novel The Skeleton Friend, please let me know. You'll receive a free eBook or Kindle edition of the book for your review. And, if you like the blog so far, you can subscribe to receive e-mail updates. Just click the SUBSCRIBE button at the top of the page and enter your e-mail address to follow the blog! Thanks so much everyone for your support. I hope this was educational. #themurderyouknow


Sources:

The I-5 Killer, by Ann Rule
Learning History
Wikipedia

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