Rage To Kill And Other True Cases
The Thanksgiving holiday, 1998, was no different from any other holiday, although Thursday, the day itself, was fairly quiet. Most residents of the western half of Washington State were grateful that the week’s tumultuous weather had tempered just a little, and that there was power to roast their turkeys, since a storm packing 70-mile-an-hour winds had swept in on Monday and knocked power out in 200,000 homes. Ten inches of snow fell in the Cascade Mountains and the first gully-washing rains of what would prove to be a winter of record rainfall had begun. Thanksgiving Day itself was mostly cloudy, a little rainy, but the gale-force winds had diminished to only breezes. Friday was the same. That was fortunate for anyone living along Puget Sound or Elliott Bay; high tides of over twelve feet were expected and 70-mile-an-hour winds would have taken out a lot of docks and bulkheads and carried away boats and buoys. That had happened often enough over the Thanksgiving holidays of the past.

There are no holidays in a homicide unit; there are only detectives who have the day off, detectives who are on call, and detectives who are on duty. When something catastrophic happens, the whole police force is, of course, available. Those in the first category in the Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Unit can breathe easy on a holiday, but the next two are either listening for their pagers to beep or working on open cases. Holidays tend to breed homicides; people who manage to avoid each other—and are wise to do so—the rest of the year are thrown together, with sometimes fatal results. They drink too much, get too little sleep, are worn out by travel, and generally tend to behave badly if they have a propensity for badness in the first place.

Detectives Steve O’Leary, John Nordlund, and Gene Ramirez were only on call on November 27, and thankful for that. They figured they were through the worst of the weekend by Friday. Steve O’Leary and his wife were having a delayed holiday dinner with her grandmother at a restaurant called Claire’s Pantry in the north end of Seattle that afternoon. Between his turkey and his pumpkin pie, O’Leary happened to glance up at the television set placed there in deference to football fanatics. “When I saw what I saw,” he recalled, “I wondered why they hadn’t called me. A moment later, my pager sounded. And that was the beginning of it.”

* * *

Traditionally, in every city in America, the day after Thanksgiving is the kick-off of the Christmas shopping season. Die-hard shoppers have barely digested their turkey dinners before they are up and headed to the malls and downtown. That was true in Seattle on November 27, too; most of the shoppers drove private cars, but hundreds of them took advantage of the Metro Transit park-and-ride lots located on the borders of the city. They rode the bus—no parking hassles that way.

Forty-four-year-old Mark McLaughlin was well into his twentieth year as a bus driver for the Metro King County bus system, and he was a familiar and cheerful presence on the Number 359 daytime route from Shoreline in the far north end of Seattle to the downtown area. Mark was a big man with broad shoulders, a deep chest and a comfortable belly. He was six feet, two inches tall, and weighed over 250 pounds, and his partially white beard made him look a little older than he really was. Many of his regular passengers felt that he was a good friend and they looked forward to his kidding, just as his fellow drivers and the mechanics at the bus barn did. He could wrestle the huge articulated buses with an ease a smaller man might envy. McLaughlin loved his job, and he was a complete professional in a career that required a driver to be not only skilled behind the wheel, but adept at dealing with the problems, complaints and eccentricities of the passengers who hopped on board and took a seat behind him.

Driving a transit bus has never been an easy job in Seattle. Three decades or more ago, the buses got their power from overhead electric wires. They were half trolley/half bus, and their connecting rods were forever detaching and swinging free. Drivers had to stop, get out, risk getting a shock as they struggled to get their rig back on track. Later, Metro went to regular buses, but when the transit company purchased sixty-feet-long, forty-thousand-pound, articulated buses, everyone eyed them with suspicion. These buses had an accordion-like midsection that connected one ordinary-size bus to another. Articulated buses could carry twice as many passengers, and slide around corners like a Slinky toy. At first the concept didn’t seem natural—or even safe. But some of the drivers, including Mark McLaughlin, were willing to give them a try. Before long, the behemoth buses were taken for granted.

* * *

Mark McLaughlin lived away from the city in Lynnwood, halfway between Seattle and Everett. He was divorced and had custody of his two sons, who were sixteen and thirteen. His seventy-eight-year-old mother, Rose, lived nearby, and he had brothers and a sister close by, too. After Mark graduated from Ingraham High School in 1972, he married his first wife, a local girl. He enlisted in the Army and trained to be a medic.

When his Army stint was over in 1979, he went to work for Metro. His first, young marriage ended and so did his second marriage, but he didn’t give up on the possibility of finding someone who would be right for him. He raised his boys, drove the big buses, and hoped for a happier future. He found it in what had become his world—on the bus. Sometime in 1990, Mark was driving through the suburb of Bothell when he met a young woman who was a regular passenger. She was pretty and petite with long blond hair and she always got on with two small children, a baby carrier and a jumble of bags that held diapers, bottles and other baby paraphernalia. Mark always got out of the driver’s seat and helped the young mother get settled. The sight of her struggling with her babies and their gear touched his big heart.

Her name was Elise Crawford. When the bus was nearly empty during off-peak hours, Elise and Mark talked. He learned that she was alone and he told her his second marriage had ended. After months, he asked her out and she said yes. Inevitably, perhaps, they fell in love. They became engaged and joined their families, moving into a modest three-bedroom house in Lynnwood. Mark welcomed Elise’s children; he was such a natural father that he had been awarded custody of his second wife’s son by her earlier marriage. Now, Mark and Elise had four children—his two, her two.

Mark and Elise had wedding plans for the spring of 1999. They were going to marry at his mother Rose’s home, and his sister Debra was helping Elise with the plans. It wouldn’t cost a ton of money, but they would have spring flowers, bridesmaids in pastel dresses, and a great buffet. Mark and Elise had each known lonely days, and this marriage was going to be forever.

When he wasn’t driving a bus, Mark McLaughlin was an avid fan of the Seattle Sonics and Seahawks. He loved the outdoor opportunities in the Northwest, and he was a hiker and an amateur photographer. Elise worked as a nurse at Virginia Mason Hospital, and she took a second job clerking at a J.C. Penney store on the weekends. Mark was driving extra shifts, and it seemed only fair that she help, too. With four kids and a wedding coming up, they needed extra money. Their big dream was to buy their own home together, someplace with bedrooms enough for everyone. There was no reason to think they wouldn’t be able to realize that dream.

Where they lived didn’t really matter to Elise. After being alone with her small children, often being afraid of sounds in the night, she felt so safe with Mark. He was a big bear of a man who looked after everybody. “He was a wonderful man,” Elise recalled of their happiest days. “We had just started to make it. I was never afraid of anything with him here.”

As a nurse, Elise worried sometimes about Mark’s weight and urged him to cut back on his appetite. But he seemed healthy, and he had boundless endurance.

Mark and Elise had a perfect day on Thanksgiving; they went to his mother’s house for a turkey dinner along with the rest of their relatives. One of Mark’s favorite cousins drove down from Vancouver, B.C., for the weekend. He and Mark planned to take the kids on a hike on Saturday, but first Mark had a shift to drive for Metro. He started at 11:30 on Friday morning, driving Number 359. He would be home in plenty of time to eat leftovers and watch a few of the games during the football marathon that weekend.

Mark worked out of Metro’s North Base located at Interstate 5 and 165th; he’d been there since it opened in 1990. It was close to his home, and daytime runs were usually pretty easy when it came to trouble from passengers, even though his route was one of three in the Metro system with the most incidents involving violence. You could never guarantee that there wouldn’t be a drunk or some druggies on the bus, but there were certainly fewer than during late night runs. Drivers all over the city had had their problems with “gang bangers” and other riders who seemed to have more potential for trouble than the average passenger. On some routes, it seemed that the transit drivers had to spend more energy maintaining order on the bus than they did driving. County-wide, Metro was averaging about ten incidents a day. Some were only minor altercations among or between passengers, some were over fare disputes, and, in rare instances, the drivers themselves were assaulted. But, considering that 217,000 people rode the bus every day, the average wasn’t bad.

A lot of the hassles were over fares, so Metro’s policies dictated that drivers were to request that a fare be paid, but to back off if a passenger was combative. Keeping the peace was the most important thing.

Mark McLaughlin’s easy manner and ready grin helped him defuse potential trouble most of the time. When he had to stand up and be heard, he was fully capable of doing that. But the day after Thanksgiving was a happy day. It was his last day of work before a week off.

Even the weather seemed to be a good omen. Suddenly, where there had been rain, wind, clouds, snow and sleet, the skies parted in the early afternoon and the sun burst forth. It was November, but it seemed almost like April. For an hour or two, it was shirt-sleeves weather, and neighborhoods along McLaughlin’s route were alive with people taking advantage of a beneficent warm wind, and nowhere more than in Fremont.

The Fremont neighborhood is located in the center of the north end of Seattle. It was once a staid middle-class enclave, but it reinvented itself and became innovative, funky, colorful and much to be desired by those with open minds. Brazenly calling itself the “Center of the Universe,” Fremont has shops with items found nowhere else. The statuary here ranges from someone’s inherited life-size rendition of Lenin to the Fremont Troll. The Troll is a creation of artist Steve Badanes, a hulking monster three times larger than any human, who holds a hapless life-size Volkswagen bug in one mighty claw. Hunkering down under the north end of the towering Aurora Bridge, The Fremont Troll, fearsome as he looks, is also considered lucky and tourists and locals alike often meet at the cement monster.

At three on Friday afternoon, several young people left their small apartments to hang out near the Troll under the bridge, which runs parallel and close to the soaring Aurora Bridge, both spans crossing the Lake Washington Ship Canal which cuts the landscape between Lake Washington, Salmon Bay, and Shilshole Bay. The young people below the overpasses could hear the rumble and thunkety-thunkety sound of tires overhead from the small and large bridges, but the noise was so familiar they unconsciously lifted the level of their voices, laughing and talking without really being aware of the traffic above.

* * *

Mark McLaughlin headed south toward the center of Seattle on Aurora Avenue North. Along the way, he would pick up some thirty-three passengers, as diverse in age and errand as any busload of people could be. The only thing that they had in common, really, was that they happened to be on the same bus at the same time. Some of them were going downtown to start their Christmas shopping, some were going to work, some to visit friends, and some were headed home. A few recovering addicts were headed for a rehab center. Although all schools and most offices in the Seattle area were closed that Friday after Thanksgiving, the bus would surely be at least half full by the time they reached the Aurora Bridge.

Jerome Barquet, forty-seven, got on the bus at Aurora Village sometime between two and three and chose a seat just in front of the bendable midsection on the right side. He peered out the window as they picked up other passengers and turned back onto the main thoroughfare, Aurora Avenue. Bill Brimeyer, twenty-three, sat about four seats in front of Barquet. Gary Warfield, also forty-seven, sat down close to Barquet in the fourth row of seats, and immediately began reading the textbook he carried. He was studying for a final exam, and needed to cram as much information as he could before his test.

Lacy Olsen was thirteen; she got on at Aurora Village with her friend, Brandy Boling, sixteen. They sat near the articulated divider in the middle of the double bus and began to talk and giggle as teenagers will. Brodie Kelly also boarded Number 359 at Aurora Village. He sat in the first section of the coach, but near the accordion divider. He had his earphones plugged in and was listening to his portable CD player.

Alberto Chavez and his cousin got on the bus at 145th and Aurora and took a seat close to the midsection of the double coach. Alberto looked out the window as they headed south. Barbara Thomas hopped on near the drivers’ license bureau at North 132nd.

Jennifer Lee was sixteen, and a high school junior. She worked in the afternoons at a retirement home in downtown Seattle. She enjoyed her job and she was a breath of fresh air for the seniors who lived in the complex. She bounced down the aisles, oblivious to the driver and the other passengers. Regina King, twenty-eight, caught the bus at North 130th. She worked at a theater and she had already done some heavy-duty shopping that day. Her arms were loaded with packages. She found an empty seat, arranged her shopping bags on her lap and fell asleep, lulled by the sunshine through the windows and the hum of the engine.

Shawn Miller and his sister, Leanna, took seats in rows two and three near the front door on the right side. They didn’t notice the man who sat in the first seat facing the driver until Leanna looked around, studying her fellow passengers. The man looked to her to be in his thirties, and he wore a dark jacket. It was his sunglasses that caught her attention. They had some kind of “shade” coming down on the side so that his eyes were completely hidden. She wondered if he was coming from an optometrist’s office and if the sun was bothering him. He sat silently, staring at the bus driver.

Francisco Carrasco, thirty-one, had been visiting with friends in the north end of the city, and he paid his fare at 80th and Aurora. “I sat on the second seat behind the back stairs in the ‘trailer’ part of the bus on the driver’s side.”

Jeremy Hauglee was nineteen, and he headed as he usually did toward the rear of the bus, sat down and immediately put on his earphones. Soon he was lost in his own world.

Judy Laubach, forty, worked in the financial division at the downtown flagship Nordstrom’s store. She had a flexible work schedule that allowed her to go in as early as nine A.M. or as late as noon, depending on her workload. It was very rare for her to head downtown so late, but on this afternoon she had debated going in at all. Finally, knowing she had some work to catch up on, she left home shortly before three, catching Number 359 near the Presbyterian church at Green Lake. She sat on the right side just behind the handicapped section—in the first seats that faced forward. Deep in thought, Judy was only peripherally aware of the man who got on the bus a few stops before the Aurora Bridge.

Herman Liebelt, sixty-nine, caught the bus, as always, near Green Lake. He had finished his weekly three-mile walk around the scenic city lake, had gone to visit an old friend, and was headed to the Urban Bakery for a cup of coffee before heading home to a senior citizens housing building downtown. Liebelt was alone in the world except for some stepchildren in California, but he wasn’t a lonely man at all; he believed in getting out of his apartment and talking to people. When the weather was good, he loved to sit on a bench at Green Lake and discuss life and the world with strangers who paused to chat. He never lacked for someone to talk to; people seemed to be naturally drawn to him.

P. K. Koo was seventy-six, and spoke virtually no English. He took his seat three back from the front on the opposite side from Mark McLaughlin. He watched what was going on around him, and saw a number of people get on at various bus stops. Idly, he noted the tall white man who got on three or four stops before the big bridge.

Aurora Avenue North used to be one of the major thoroughfares in Seattle, but with the advent of the Interstate 5 freeway, it is now only a surprisingly narrow street lined mostly with businesses that saw their good years in the fifties and sixties. Passing decades-old landmarks like the trumpeting elephant sign and the Twin Tee Pees, the number 359 runs through neighborhoods, past motels and restaurants, the Washelli cemetery, the sweeping park with a walking track that surrounds Green Lake, and past the zoo at Woodland Park before it heads into downtown.

At Woodland Park, Mark McLaughlin detoured off Aurora to pause at bus stops along Stone Way North. And then at North 38th, he wrenched the wheel hard and headed up onto the southbound ramp that led back onto Aurora over the long bridge that crosses the Lake Washington Ship Canal. At its highest point, the Aurora Bridge arches 175 feet above the water.

It was a few minutes after three P.M.

Shortly after the long bus lumbered up the ramp, something happened, something that seemed almost surreal to those passengers who were alert to what was going on around them. They watched it happen almost without comprehension, the way the eye fixes on a magnified blow-up of some everyday item which, enlarged, looks foreign. It takes a few moments to recognize what one is actually seeing. The passengers could not compute what they were seeing.

There wasn’t even time for panic or for anyone to stop what they watched. And, like many eyewitnesses, later they could not agree on the precise details of what they saw. The only thing they would be in consensus about was that a man got up, and walked silently up to the bus driver. Before they could wonder why he was getting up, since there was no stop on the bridge, many passengers heard a series of loud noises—“pops,” “bangs,” “firecrackers.”

Some who were familiar with guns knew they were hearing gunfire; some were puzzled. And, then, within a matter of seconds, the 20-ton bus began to veer left.

Later, some of the thirty-three passengers on that bus would try to make some sense out of what had happened to them.

“Moments after I got on,” Judy Laubach recalled, “I remember a gentleman getting up and walking past me. He had on a blue, horizontally striped shirt, and he walked up past the people sitting in the front of the bus. I didn’t see the gun, but I heard two gunshots—BOOM! BOOM!—and I said to myself, ‘He just shot the bus driver!’ The bus went across the center lanes. I recall a couple of bumps and the bus came to a stop. I remember praying. I heard some gurgling—something—I don’t know if it was me or a body next to me or what. Then I remember sirens and a rescuer coming to help. I remember looking up at a rescuer and some glass was falling in my face, and I remember him telling me to look down so the glass wouldn’t get in my eyes. The next thing I remember I was in an ambulance, and the bumpy ride to the hospital.”

Judy Laubach wasn’t sure if she’d stayed inside the bus before it came to a stop, or if she’d been thrown out.

P. K. Koo tried to find the words to describe what had happened. Koo, whose English was so spotty that he needed an interpreter, said he had had a clear view of the gunman. “He said nothing at all. The man didn’t do anything,” Koo recalled as he tried to explain that there had been no fight, no argument, no incident on the bus. “He just got up and went to the driver. I heard two shots. He was about forty, tall, slim—a good-looking man. He had a jacket on and some sunglasses.”

Henry Luna had been reading the manual that had come with his cellular phone. He heard the “pop-pops,” followed by a second burst of sound. “People started yelling ‘Gun! Gun!’ I got down on my knees. I didn’t even know the bus had been in a wreck until some people pulled me out . . .”

Francisco Carrasco didn’t see the shooting. “I was talking with someone when I heard what sounded like a backfire,” he said. “I remember the bus hitting something and I was thrown into the rear stairwell. I covered my head with my arms and grabbed hold of a bar, but when I looked, the whole right side of the bus was gone. If I would have been thrown another foot or two, I would have been gone, too. Diesel fuel was spilling all over me, soaking my clothes and head. I thought it was going to explode so I walked off the bus where the doors in the right side were missing. I remember the ground I got out on was asphalt. I walked across the street, dragging my left leg. There were people who tried to help.”

When Regina King woke up, it was to screams and the sense that the bus had crashed against something. She heard no gunshots and no disturbances.

Thirteen-year-old Lacy Olsen saw it happen. She heard the “pops,” and saw two bright flashes spit from the gun in the man’s hand, and then scarlet blood that erupted, staining Mark McLaughlin’s uniform shirt. Try as she might, she could not remember the man who’d held the gun in his hand. But she knew she had seen the gun, and the muzzle flash. “It happened really quick. I thought the man with the gun was sitting down.”

Lacy couldn’t remember anyone shouting or any angry words. But after the gunshots, the bus took off like a roller coaster. First there was a big bump as it hit something on the bridge, and then there was an awful sense of free-fall as the bus left the bridge. Lacy didn’t know what was down below and she wasn’t even sure that they weren’t still bouncing in the air over the bridge itself.

* * *

Bill Brimeyer had seen what happened. “I saw a white male wearing a black leather jacket, a fedora and dark sunglasses standing on the right side of the bus driver. I didn’t hear any argument or conversation. I just observed him shoot the bus driver—maybe two or three times. The bus swerved left. The last thing I remember is the bus falling. After the fall, I climbed out of the window and yelled for people to call nine-one-one.”

And the bus had fallen, although some of the shocked passengers thought it had only struck something. The sixty-foot long, double-coached, twenty-ton bus had been a juggernaut without its driver at the wheel; it had careened into the concrete and steel bridge and crumbled it as it plowed through, and then, with its load of passengers, Number 359 had plunged over fifty feet.

Leanna Miller had noticed the man with the sunglasses stand up and move toward the driver just as they started over the Aurora Bridge. “I heard two or three gunshots—it was a ‘popping’ sound, and the man looked like he was trying to take control of the steering wheel. The driver was fighting with the man, and the bus swerved from the far right lane through the railing on the other side, and we went over. I ended up on the floor and everyone was on top of me, and the bus was all torn up. I tried to help people out of the bus.”

Jerome Barquet lived to tell about what he had seen, too. “At about the Aurora Bridge, I observed an unknown male dressed in dark clothing approach the driver as if he was going to ask him a question. I saw him shoot the driver in the back three times. I didn’t see the gun or the shooter’s face. The bus driver slumped over the steering wheel, and the suspect tried to grab the steering wheel. The bus veered left across the northbound lanes of Aurora Avenue North and ran off the east side of the bridge.”

Jeremy Hauglee heard a loud popping sound even while wearing earphones. “I thought it was a rock and then this other guy stood up to see what it was. Then I got down real fast because it was like gunshots. I had thoughts of dying, and then the next thing you know, the bus goes over the side. I remember being at the bottom of the bridge, hoping my body would move and be able to run. I’d heard the gunshots and I thought the dude still had the gun.”

Barbara Thomas heard “three pops like firecrackers. I looked up and saw a big guy, six-two and about two hundred forty pounds, wide shoulders. He was wearing a loose shirt with a blue and gray checked pattern. After three pops, the bus started to turn to the left and hit the railing. . . . It all happened in about thirty seconds.”

So many of the passengers remembered that everything had been normal, quiet, like every other day—until they saw the dark-haired man get up from his seat and walk over to Mark McLaughlin.

Brodie Kelly “saw a white man go forward and stand next to the driver. He was middle-aged with dark hair. He shot the driver two times. I saw the powder fly out from the gun. The bus then went off the side of the bridge. I heard people yelling to get off the bus. I crawled off the bus through an exit window. I left my Jansport pack on the bus—with about twenty CDs in it, a small purple notebook and a book, Kiss of the Spiderwoman.”

Jennifer Lee, sixteen, heard two gunshots. She rode the bus down, fully conscious the whole time. She saw people hurt and bleeding all around her after the crash and followed the instructions of a man who helped her through an emergency exit on the right side.

Gary Warfield’s attention was snapped away from his textbook when he heard two pops. He looked up and didn’t see anyone near the driver, but realized to his horror that the bus was out of control and they were going through the guardrail. “I thought we were goners,” he would remember. “I never lost consciousness—I landed flat on my back under a seat.” He tried to move and managed to crawl to a seat and sit there until a firefighter found him.

All around him, people screamed and moaned. A few were staggering blindly toward where the right side of the bus had once been, but where now there was only a wall of daylight.

* * *

Below the north ramp to the Aurora Bridge, people ran from their apartments at the sound that seemed like a hundred garbage cans smashed together. Several of the residents who had been loitering next to the giant Troll beneath the bridge realized that they had escaped being crushed by just a few feet. Where there had been lawn and flower gardens, now there was, incredibly, a bus. They huddled next to the Troll as debris rained down from above.

Sasha Babic, who was once a diplomat in Yugoslavia, was sitting at his kitchen table when his wife called that she had seen a bus falling from the sky. He looked out the window and saw that it was true. A bus, all crumpled metal and gaping holes, rested on the front lawn of his building, its two sections angled like a boomerang. It was as if the hand of God Himself had set the bus down. Another six inches forward and the front of it would have sliced through the apartment house. Another foot or two backward and it would have crushed the people under the bridge.

It had come through the evergreen trees, wheels down.

Babic ran to put on some shoes and called to his wife that he was going to try to help.

It was so quiet. Eerily quiet, except for some groans of metal settling. Dust rose from the wreckage; the scene looked like something out of a war at the world’s end.

Kurt and Cat Malvana didn’t hear the crash. Both are profoundly deaf, but Kurt was looking out the window and had seen something that didn’t equate with what he knew to be true of the world; he saw the rear section of a bus dropping from somewhere up above. And then he was shocked to see a human being flying out a window of that bus.

Through it all, concrete, glass, metal, and fir branches fell like a waterfall over the houses and the apartment complex where eighteen people lived. A tenant in a second-floor apartment had been getting ready to take a shower when he heard a tremendous crash. He ran into his living room to see that his front door was gone, ripped away with half of his porch. His goldfish still swam calmly in an aquarium only inches away from the gaping hole. Only a few minutes earlier, another tenant had walked out the door where the front of the bus now sat.

Bob Heller, whose apartment house was two buildings down from the crash site, was talking on the phone when he heard the sound of “a whole bunch of dumpsters crashing.

“I went outside to see what happened,” he said. “When I came down the alley, and around the corner, I saw the bus. I saw people crawling out of the side windows of the bus—it had just come to rest there. I turned around to someone behind me and yelled, ‘Call nine-one-one!’

“I went to the front of the bus because I could see people’s bodies still inside. The folding doors of the bus were so close to the apartment building and adjacent to a tree.”

Looking for some way to help, Heller scanned the accident site and saw a man who looked to be in his late thirties lying on his back. He wore a tan jacket, and Heller saw that he had blood on his forehead and was unconscious—if not dead. But he checked his pulse; there was a faint beat. Heller moved on to help people who were still trapped inside the bus. He found a torn section of the accordion joining panel, and saw that many victims were still trapped under the floor panels which had been thrown around like giant plates. He helped the people pinned under them, and talked with others who were wandering around the wrecked bus, dazed. “I checked them for injuries, asked them their names, and then suggested that they just sit down until the paramedics could come and help them.”

* * *

It was close to 3:30 P.M. when David Leighton, a young Coastguardsman, was in his red pickup truck, driving his uncle, Jim Dietz, east along North 36th Street just where it ran beneath the Aurora Bridge. They came up a little incline and ran into what seemed to be fog. People were walking back and forth in the cloudy air. Leighton slowed down because of the congestion. And then they saw the still-quivering hulk of the battered bus in the yard of an apartment house. What they thought was fog was really concrete dust from the ravaged bridge rail. David said to his uncle, “My God, that just happened. We have to help.”

He pulled over and the two men leapt out. People had begun to pour out of their houses all up and down the block, the horrified looks on their faces mirroring Leighton’s and Dietz’s. There were no emergency vehicles, no police cars, not even the sound of a siren at this point. David called out, “I know CPR. How may I help?”

There was no response at all. It seemed that everyone still on board the savaged bus was dead. David Leighton moved quickly, checking people who lay on the ground outside the bus before he moved through the gaping hole where the right side of the coach had been. He was checking for pulses and for signs of breathing.

“The first person I came to was lying outside the bus and had severely broken legs,” he said. “He was unconscious, but someone was tending to him. I asked if he was breathing and he said, “Yes.”

Sasha Babic was there, too, trying to help. The front door of the bus was open, and two men lay tangled at the bottom of a pile of bodies on the bus steps. One appeared to be in his sixties and the other in his thirties. The younger man looked dead, but he made a choking sound as hands reached to free him. The older man’s head was jammed between the bus door and the frame. Babic and other bystanders used all their strength to free him.

A woman was caught inside the door too, and she was conscious. From deep inside, they heard a man’s voice soothing her, “It’s O.K., sweetheart. Everything will be O.K.”

One of the teenagers from the bus wandered over to a curb and sat down, his CD playing as if the world hadn’t just crashed around him.

In the distance, the forlorn keening of sirens began to sound. The first call to 911 had been clocked at 3:13 P.M. The first rescue units would arrive three minutes later.

For the moment, neighbors and passersby did what they could. Everyone on the bus wasn’t dead, although many of them were terribly injured. They had all plummeted five stories from the bridge overhead, without seat belts, bouncing around like BBs in a tin can, and yet almost miraculously, many of them were alive.

David Leighton and several of the people who had rushed to help smelled the pungent odor of diesel fuel. It had poured out of the bus’s tanks and saturated the ground and bushes, as well as many of the passengers. A spark or a lit cigarette could send the whole thing up in flames, and Leighton suggested that those not actively involved in the rescue effort move away from the bus.

He moved to the front of the bus and saw the man trapped on the bottom step; he was barely breathing and he was coughing up blood. The young Coastguardsman turned his head so he wouldn’t choke. “Then I and another man slowly picked up the three individuals on top of him—trying to keep their necks as straight as possible—and we put them on the ground. Then someone yelled there were more people inside the bus. I crawled through the front window. I came across an older gentleman who was in shock, and looking for his shoe. I told him to stay seated. I noticed another man, a thin, younger man lying on the floor of the bus with severely broken legs. He was barely breathing. Another volunteer said he would stay beside him until help arrived.”

Leighton climbed out of the bus and met the first police officer on the scene. He pointed out the three people whom he felt were the most seriously injured. Even a policeman, trained for disaster, was shocked by the horror he found; the bus was awash in blood, and so was the ground outside.

Seattle Patrol Officer David Henry had been in Patrol Unit 205, with a trainee aboard: Student Officer George Aben. He’d heard a radio broadcast that a Metro bus had driven off the Aurora Bridge. Disbelieving, he wheeled his patrol car around and headed there, arriving three minutes later. He grabbed his microphone and told Radio that there were “mass casualties,” with a large amount of diesel fuel on the ground. Using the public address system in his car, he cleared unnecessary civilian bystanders from the scene.

Throughout the neighborhood where the bus had fallen, people were in shock. Those passengers who were somewhat mobile were trying to help others who whimpered in pain or who didn’t move at all. The bus seats were tumbled and bent, and the floor seemed to be gone. There was no way of knowing how many passengers might have fallen out of the bus as it came off the bridge, and no way of knowing how many might now be trapped beneath it.

Patrol Officer Sjon Stevens wasn’t far behind the first patrol officers on the scene. Domestic Violence Detectives Monty Moss and Mike Magan happened to be driving nearby when a call for help came over the police radio. Not one of them could have possibly envisioned how serious the emergency was. Their first thoughts had been, “A driver’s been shot, he lost control of the bus, and it hit the curb, or a tree, or another car. . . .”

But none of them expected to find that an entire articulated bus, half-full of passengers, had gone over the bridge and dropped straight down. And no one knew yet that the bus had actually clipped the three-story apartment house on the way down.

Someone yelled that there were people on the roof who were injured. There weren’t people on the roof. There was only one, Mark McLaughlin. He had crashed through the windshield of his bus as it went over through the cement bridge rail, and he had landed on the apartment house roof. While Leighton ran to a nearby house to try to find a ladder, Officer Henry somehow managed to shinny up a drainpipe to the roof. He clambered his way to the driver of the bus and saw that he was terribly wounded with what looked like gunshot wounds to the upper right arm, chest, and abdomen.

Suddenly, there were other policemen on the roof, too, and they helped David Henry pull the driver up and rolled him onto his right side so he wouldn’t drown in his own blood. The gunshot wounds were, at this point, unexplainable. Henry had responded to a bus accident, and now he found the man in the Metro uniform near death—and not just from the accident. As they worked frantically over the big man, they saw that his eyes had become fixed and dilated. Henry could no longer get a pulse, and he began CPR while another officer began forcing air into the bus driver’s lungs with an ambu-bag.

Helicopters from Seattle’s television stations had already begun to circle the crash site, sending images of the disaster into homes across Washington State. The newscasters’ voices were low and worried. This was no ordinary news story.

A helicopter moved in—too close. For ten seconds, the image of Mark McLaughlin appeared, showing emergency workers hunched over him as they desperately administered CPR to try to bring him back. The newsman back at the studio said urgently, “No, no—pull back. PULL BACK!” and the picture on the screen changed to a wider shot of the crippled bus.

People watching at home knew they had intruded far too much into someone else’s life. Perhaps in someone else’s death. It was too early for any next of kin to be notified, and there was always the chance that someone who loved the injured man on the roof might be watching.

David Henry yelled down for a fire department ladder truck to move in and bring a backboard up. If the driver was going to have any chance at all to live, Henry knew they had to get him to the hospital immediately. Carefully, they strapped the man whose name they didn’t even know yet to the backboard and lowered him off the roof.

But it was too late. Despite all their efforts, Mark McLaughlin would be the first person in the bus crash to be declared dead.

* * *

Seattle is known for its outstanding fire department, both for its pioneer Medic One program with highly trained paramedics and for its arson unit, Marshal Five. Now its paramedics were called upon to use their skill in “triage”; this wasn’t a test situation where “victims” are made up to look injured with fake blood, cuts and bruises. It was a real disaster that not one of them could have ever imagined. Triage is a French word that means to winnow out or to sort. It is an essential response to catastrophes where many, many people are badly injured. Most lay persons became familiar with the concept of triage after the horrific bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Rescue workers, physicians and paramedics are trained to quickly evaluate the conditions of those injured, to separate the living from the dead, the critically injured from those who can wait a bit for treatment. There were some beneath the Aurora bridge whom no amount of first aid would help, some who looked terrible, but who were only bruised and battered, and far too many who needed treatment immediately.

Seattle firefighter/paramedic Andre McGann faced an awesome task; his instinct and experience made him want to start helping the first person he saw, but his job that day was to separate the living from the dead, and the critical from the other injured.

Wearing a bright orange vest that read “TRIAGE,” McGann carried rolls of the thin colored ribbons like surveyors use, and a roll of adhesive tape as he went to work, marking human beings.

Was the patient breathing and did he have a steady, moderate pulse? Was his blood pressure within normal limits? Was he able to talk intelligibly?

McGann moved rapidly among the crash victims. Those in the worst shape got a red ribbon around the upper arm; they were to be transported by ambulance to a hospital ER at once. The walking wounded got green tags, and those who were in serious condition—but who could speak—got yellow ribbons. The dead got black ribbons. Later wrist bands would be put on with words that started with letters of the alphabet, followed by “Doe”: “Apple Doe,” “Blackberry Doe,” “Cadillac Doe . . .”

Carol Ostrom, a Seattle Times reporter, would ask Andre McGann later to relive those first minutes after he arrived at the unbelievable scene. The most difficult task was examining those injured who were not visibly breathing. McGann recalled grimly, “You give them one shot—tip their heads back.”

If he could detect one murmur of breath, he quickly slipped on a red ribbon. If they didn’t breathe at all, he tagged them black, and resolutely moved on to someone who might have a chance to live.

McGann, himself the survivor of a pedestrian-car accident when he was seven, had lived though twenty-seven fractures and critical internal injuries. Being a paramedic was his destiny. He was doing the job he’d wanted to do for most of his life. He had only about five seconds with each patient, and he wanted to save as many victims of the bus crash as he possibly could. Like all Seattle Fire Department paramedics, he was conditioned to treat one or two patients at a time. He had almost three dozen in front of him. The name of the game was percentages, not individuals. It was agonizing for him to have to walk away from any patients that he might have saved had there been more time and more help.

At Seattle’s prime emergency care hospital, Harborview Medical Center, the man who was Medic One and who had supervised the training of class after class of paramedics, kept in touch by radio. Dr. Mike Copass called the shots. It was he who would decide which patients would go to particular hospitals; no one could do a better job than Copass at assessing the capability of a hospital to treat so many injured. He talked to a medical command officer at the scene, and calmly gave hospital destinations. The worst trauma cases were loaded into ambulances headed for Harborview where they would be treated by crews who were adept at dealing with knifings, gunshot wounds, and accident victims. That was what they specialized in.

Gradually, the rescue scene took on a kind of organized turmoil. MaGann’s tapes and ribbons marked those who needed help at once, and there were sixty-five rescuers, ten off-duty firefighters, five paramedic units, and twenty-seven aid vehicles on hand.

It was impossible at this point to account for everyone who had been on the bus; they couldn’t even know how many people had been on the bus.

Lacy Olsen had wandered across the street. The thirteen-year-old girl remembered that the boards of the bus floor had “come up, and I was under them. People were yelling and screaming and crying, and I guess I kind of pushed [the boards] out of my way. I looked around and saw that the bus was basically split in half and I jumped out a window. I couldn’t find Brandy. My eyes were blurry and I felt shaky, and I went across the street. There was a lady on the ground, and I was talking to her. Another lady came over—she lived around there—and she asked me if I was O.K. I said ‘I think so,’ but my ear was bleeding and my back was sore. It was hard for me to walk. I asked ‘My friend? My friend?’ and they said she was across the street. She was all cut up, and I just couldn’t stand to see that.”

Sixteen-year-old Brandy Boling had suffered severe abdominal wounds, a lacerated liver and kidney, but she was conscious and lucid. When Byron Juliano, who was employed by the U.S. West phone company, came upon the scene, he asked her what he could do to help. She replied, “Call my father,” and she gave Juliano her dad’s cell phone number.

Robert Boling answered his phone to hear a man’s voice attempting to be reassuring, “Your daughter was in a bus that just went off the Aurora Bridge,” Juliano said, “but she’s O.K. She was on the bus, but she’s O.K.”

“She’s where?” Boling gasped. “She’s what?”

Both Brandy and Lacy would survive. They were taken to different hospitals and were both admitted in critical condition. Lacy had a severe back injury.

* * *

Judy Laubach, who wished she had never decided to go to work that day, was admitted in very serious condition with a flailed chest, a fractured scapula, a ruptured left lung, and a broken back. Like everyone else on the bus who had survived, she was covered with cuts and scrapes. Still, she felt lucky.

Francisco Carrasco had crawled out an emergency exit with his cousin Jose Navarrette, nineteen. They had wandered to another bus stop, waited, and then gotten on the Number 6 bus headed downtown. The two cousins went to a relative’s house, unaware that they were in deep shock. Only then were they taken to the hospital, where they were both admitted.

Leanna Miller, who had tried to help others get out of the bus, was injured herself and was soon loaded into an ambulance. Her brother Shawn remembered, “I held on tight and I wasn’t thrown from my seat—but Leanna couldn’t hold on and she was thrown out of hers.”

Laethan Wene, twenty-four, who had been on the way to a writers’ conference, had escaped with minor injuries. So had Jerome Barquet, whose hand and arm were painfully, but not critically, injured.

Craig Ayers, thirty-seven, had severe abdominal wounds, Henry Luna had a fractured right leg and head cuts, Regina King had right leg and rib injuries, William Holt, forty-two, had a fractured femur and chest injuries. Catherine Tortes, thirty-nine, had a fractured spine, a broken leg and pelvic fractures. Amy Carter, eighteen, had a fractured femur and a broken pelvis.

Their cries for help had mingled together, as had the blood that flowed from their wounds. Fourteen of the most seriously injured passengers were taken to Harborview Medical Center, including Jian Suie, forty-two, with left shoulder and back injuries, and Charles Moreno, thirty-two, with crushing injuries to his arm and leg. Herman Liebelt, who at sixty-nine had still loved to walk three miles around Green Lake and discuss philosophy, was grievously injured with back, head, and pelvic injuries.

It didn’t seem to matter where they had been sitting; their lives became dependent on chance the moment the bus they rode soared off the bridge. Those with young bones had done a little better than older riders, but all of them had come very close to death.

One of the first detectives arrived at fifteen minutes after three. Someone grabbed his arm and said, “My sister saw it! Some guy shot the driver. He was a white guy, wearing a brown jacket!” And then more voices called to him to go to the front of the bus. It was Sasha Babic, David Leighton, Jim Dietz, and off-duty firefighter Dave Birmingham, who were struggling to help the people caught on the coach’s steps by the folding bus door that wouldn’t open. The old man with the white beard had his head caught in the door and he was unconscious. The young woman trapped there was conscious but said she could feel nothing below her waist. The men exerted all their strength and the door finally gave.

The rescuers asked the detective to check on a white male who was lying with the lower half of his body underneath the bus. This was the man who had been on the bottom of the pile-up near the folding front door.

The man, who wore a brown vest, was unconscious. The officer saw that he had an injury to his right temple area, although there was so much blood that it was difficult for him to see how bad it was. The man was quickly loaded into an ambulance and carried away. At Harborview Medical Center, the man was found to be in far too critical condition for anyone to ask his name. ER physicians working over him realized that, along with his other critical injuries he, too, had been shot. In the head.

Once the scene was being taken care of by professionals, David Leighton, the young Coastguardsman, and his Uncle Jim weren’t sure what to do. Leighton asked a police officer if he wanted a statement, but it was instantly clear there wasn’t time for that—yet. Nephew and uncle, they were covered with wet blood, and they had begun to tremble ever so slightly from the shock of it all. They walked back to Leighton’s red pickup and drove slowly away from the bus crash. Like so many others, they knew they probably wouldn’t sleep that night.

The Puget Sound Blood Center sent out a call for donors to help the thirty-three injured people who had gone down with the bus. “[The shortage] could be pretty serious by Saturday morning,” Candy Tretter, the manager of the Center said. “Types O and A, both positive and negative, are needed the most—as well as Type B positive.”

A thousand people showed up to donate blood.

* * *

There was so much to be done. The Seattle AIS (Accident Investigation Section) was already on the scene, and their preliminary analysis matched the statements gasped out by victims who could talk, and those of witnesses who lived beneath the bridge. They could see that the huge bus had been headed south as it came up the ramp onto the bridge and that it had suddenly swerved over the center line while it was still over dry land. It had clipped a small van. Incredibly, that van driver had survived without serious injury. Seconds later, the front of the bus had taken out the cement and iron bridge rails and, like an action scene from a Dirty Harry movie, it had catapulted off the bridge, taking part of the apartment house roof and porch with it.

The AIS detectives were amazed that the bus had landed on its ruined tires after dropping over 50 feet. It could have been upside down or twisted like a snake, and that would have been worse. They began their Total Station recreation of the accident. To do this, they would take all the measurements of the bus crash both on and below the bridge to a fraction of an inch. Like surveyors, they used tripods, optics—tools that must be perfectly still as they measured. With a reflector, they “shot” the scene with a beam that gave them accurate measurements. It would take them hours and hours, but they were patient and methodical. They would be able to recreate this scene at any time in the future.

Where there had been frenzy, there was now a degree of organization as the AIS investigators took control of the accident scene.

* * *

Sergeant Fred Jordan, supervising the Two-George Patrol Sector, was armed with a description of the man who had shot Mark McLaughlin when he drove to Harborview. Most of the eyewitnesses said he had worn dark clothing, and all of them said he was Caucasian, tall, and had dark hair. As Jordan entered the Emergency Room at Harborview, he was met by Security Officer Karen Jacobsen. She handed him a plastic bag holding a handgun. It was a small caliber, shiny, steel-colored Derringer five shot. There were also some unfired bullets in the bag.

Karen Jacobsen told Fred Jordan that the gun had been found hanging out of the right front pocket of one of the patients who had arrived from the bus crash scene, a man who looked to be about forty.

She escorted Jordan into an ER treatment room where she pointed out a tall, dark-haired man who lay naked on a gurney. He had a tube in his mouth, but all efforts to resuscitate him had ceased. He was dead. “That’s the man who had the Derringer,” she said.

The man’s clothing had been cut from his body so that he could be treated. Jordan took possession of the remnants of his clothing, and bagged them for evidence in brown paper sacks, carefully initialing the bags, and adding the date and time before he secured their tops. These would be turned over to the homicide detectives who would be investigating the bus crash. The dead man had a yellow band around his wrist with the temporary I.D. given him : the words “Whiskey Doe.”

Who was Whiskey Doe?

* * *

What had happened had happened. Even as the dead and wounded were carried off to hospitals and the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, the time had come to find out why such a catastrophe had taken place, and who was responsible. It was ten minutes to four in the afternoon when Seattle homicide detectives received the first word that a Metro bus had crashed near 36th North and Aurora. The word coming back from passengers who had been able to blurt out statements to police and paramedics was that their bus driver had been shot.

And now he was dead.

Assistant Chief Ed Joiner walked into the Homicide Unit and asked the detectives there to respond at once to the scene. Sergeant Ed Striedinger and Detectives Steve Kilburg and Rob Blanco left the downtown offices and headed north. The homicide detectives, whose job it was to investigate all suspicious deaths, raced to the crash site just beneath the north end of the Aurora Bridge.

The Aurora Bridge was a familiar place for them; it was the traditional site of suicides in Seattle, and had been for decades. The bridge was so high in midspan that death for jumpers, who were sick and tired of the world, was almost assured. A few people had survived a midspan plunge, but not many. Even more suicides had been accomplished by leaping off the ends of the bridge where the depressed jumpers had landed on boats and buildings. And, more optimistically, over the years police officers had arrived in time to save scores of would-be jumpers by talking them out of ending their lives.

The first phalanx of homicide detectives arrived at the bridge at two minutes after four. And there they saw a scene of such chaos that even they could barely believe what had happened. They watched as the last of the injured were carried off from the scene. Later that night, the bus would be lifted so searchers could check beneath it. If anyone had been walking outside the apartment house at the moment of impact, they might well have been crushed. The cluster of neighbors who had stood around the Fremont Troll talking and smoking were still pinching themselves with gratitude that they were alive.

As bad as the crash already was, the detectives knew it might get worse as reports came in from the hospitals where the injured were being examined.

But, as bad as it was or might become, it could have been a great deal worse. If Mark McLaughlin had been shot and then lost control of the bus only four or five seconds later, the double coach would have gone off the bridge over water that was a hundred feet deep. Instead of the injured landing in the front yard of an apartment house, they would have ridden the bus down and down and down to the bottom of the ship canal. Those who were unconscious and even those who might have managed to clamber out of the bus would surely have drowned. And then there would have been no statements about what had happened. No witnesses. No evidence. No survivors.

It was a terrible thought. Thirty-three people fighting for air under a hundred feet of murky water. The investigators wondered if that was what the shooter had planned all along, and if he had somehow misjudged the bus’s location on the bridge.

* * *

Detectives Steve O’Leary, John Nordlund, and Gene Ramirez were paged to respond to the Homicide offices that Friday afternoon. Although many Seattle police officers and detectives would work to find out the reasons behind the shooting, the bulk of the investigation would be done by these three men. They were sent directly to Harborview Hospital, so they could begin to sort out the mystery of the crash of metro Number 359.

Among the three of them, they had almost fifty years of experience in solving homicides; still, they had never had a case quite like the one they faced now.

Each of them had come to Homicide through a circuitous route. Steve O’Leary had wanted to be a chef. Seattle’s grand old Olympic Hotel had the best chef’s training program in the area and he had applied there. “They said they didn’t have any openings, and asked me if I wanted to be a bellman. I said, ‘What’s that?’?” But O’Leary needed a job because he was going to college, so he soon found out that bellmen carried thousands of pounds of luggage.

The Olympic’s bellmen shared an office with the hotel’s security officers, all of them off-duty cops. “I got to know a lot of these policemen,” O’Leary remembered. “I started scuba diving with them, and one of my cop friends said, ‘Why don’t you go down and take the test?’?”

It sounded interesting to O’Leary. He passed with a high score, and was hired by the Seattle Police Department December 1, 1979. He never became a chef, but being a cop suited him. He walked a beat on the waterfront and in Chinatown for five years, worked with the Swat Team and Special Patrol, and then was assigned as a detective to the Sex Crimes Unit.

One of the things that tugged at O’Leary’s heart the most was seeing children so afraid of testifying against their abusers. He devised a way to give them a little bit of power. “I loaned them my badge while they were on the stand,” he said. “I pinned it underneath their clothes and no one could see it. But those kids knew it was there, and it seemed to give them some comfort.”

O’Leary came into Homicide in October 1989. It was an assignment that few detectives ever want to leave, and he was no different.

Gene Ramirez started out in Patrol, but he broke department policy that says every rookie must work five years in Patrol before he can become a detective. Detective Sergeant Don Cameron had a major case where he needed someone who was fluent in Spanish to serve as an interpreter. After three years on Patrol, Gene Ramirez was assigned temporarily to Homicide. Not only was he a remarkably good interpreter, he proved to be a natural homicide detective. “I’m still here,” Ramirez says, smiling. “I’ve been here for sixteen years.” The other detectives call him “Eugenio.”

John Nordlund served in the Navy until 1966, and then became a clerk in the FBI in Seattle. Asked what he did there, he immediately says, “I can’t tell you,” but then he smiles. Like all FBI employees, he had signed a document swearing him to secrecy about the inner workings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Nordlund wanted to work in law enforcement in a more active way, and the Seattle Police Department was hiring. Another FBI clerk had signed on and encouraged Nordlund to give it a try. Initially, it was a way to stay in Seattle. “I was raised in Ballard [the city’s Scandinavian enclave],” he said, “and I’d already been around the world with the Navy; I wanted to stay home.”

Although they’d worked hundreds of homicide cases, each of the three detectives had cases they would never forget. Steve O’Leary solved the gruesome axe murder of a widow, using, among other clues, a single fingerprint and a stolen banana to establish commonalities between that murder and another attempted axe murder. John Nordlund worked the Wah Mee Massacre, where thirteen people were gunned down in an after-hours gambling spot in Seattle’s Chinatown. The investigators who did the crime scene quite literally waded up to their pant cuffs in the blood that flowed from the victims. Nordlund and Don Cameron found the two gunmen who had been quite willing to sacrifice more than a dozen lives in exchange for gambling money.

Gene Ramirez remembered a 1996 case where a young man was killed under the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Ramirez had a perfect case, a perfect witness—until they got into court and he learned his witness had been in jail at the time he said he’d seen a murder. Disappointed for a while, Ramirez found a better witness. His deceptively gentle questioning elicited the real eyewitness, a girlfriend who had seen it all.

The trio of homicide detectives were as different in personality as it was possible to be; O’Leary was garrulous and enthusiastic, Nordlund, deadpan and cynical—at least on the surface—and Ramirez, soft-spoken and thoughtful. Each one of them was a meticulous investigator who knew people, psychology and how to work a crime scene. Together, they were a dynamite team.

Now, they were starting at the bottom step of a case that was basically “Murder and Attempted Murder of Thirty-Four Victims.” They would try to determine if the killer was still alive. They wondered if it was possible that the shooter was one of the people who had been admitted to six different hospitals: Harborview, University of Washington Medical Center, Swedish Medical Center (First Hill), Swedish Medical Center (Ballard), Providence Medical Center, Northwest Hospital and Virginia Mason Medical Center. If the killer had been so angry at someone or some thing that he had been willing to sacrifice a whole busload of strangers, there was no guarantee that he would stop there.

There was a real sense of urgency about finding out the reasons behind what had just happened. Had the shooter been after Mark McLaughlin personally, or had he only been a target for what he represented?

* * *

While Gene Ramirez went to the scene of the crash, John Nordlund and Steve O’Leary joined Sergeant Fred Jordan at Harborview where he was standing by the body of the victim known only as Whiskey Doe. They studied the corpse. The man looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, he was quite handsome and well-groomed and was over six feet tall. Now that the ER staff had wiped the blood away, they recognized a contact bullet wound to the right side of his head.

Jordan showed them the bag containing Whiskey Doe’s clothes; he had worn a brown insulated vest, a long-sleeved purple shirt, blue jeans, a blue-black rubberized waist strap—the kind that people who wanted to lose weight wore—a black tank-top with a Nike logo on it, thong-style briefs with blue and black horizontal stripes, and a blue tie with circular red designs, which was attached to a red and white elastic strap with duct tape. There was an additional red and white strap. Except for the last two items, the clothing was fairly expensive and hardly unusual. The weight-loss strap was strange; the dead man was not at all overweight.

He had had $12.75 in bills and change, a Swiss army knife, a key chain with three keys attached, and a Metro bus transfer. He had carried a gun, yes, but the derringer’s cylinder was still loaded with five bullets. He hadn’t fired it.

Jane Jorgensen, an investigator for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, would take custody of Whiskey Doe’s body. She would roll his fingerprints so they could be run through AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) to see if there would be a match. Almost anyone in America who has applied for a job, joined the service, or been arrested has fingerprints on file somewhere.

While the detectives were at the Medical Examiner’s office, the body of the bus driver was brought in. They learned the identity of the first victim in the puzzling shooting: Mark Francis McLaughlin, who was born on June 13, 1954. His address was listed as a single family dwelling in Lynnwood. They listened to a cursory report on his injuries: “two gunshot wounds to the right side.” It would take a complete autopsy to know the extent of the damage caused by those shots.

O’Leary, Nordlund and Ramirez headed out to some of the other hospitals where victims were being treated. They would begin with interviews with those passengers who were able to talk: Jeremy Hauglee, Lacy Olsen, and P. K. Koo all gave O’Leary halting versions of the nightmare they had survived only hours before.

At 7:30 that first night, ID Tech Joyce Monroe entered Whiskey Doe’s thumbprints into the AFIS computers. It wasn’t long before an answer came back: the man was identified as Steven Gary Coole, but, oddly, several birthdates came back: 5/14/57, 5/14/59, 5/15/57 and 5/15/59. Steven Coole had been arrested for shoplifting at the Green Lake Albertson’s Grocery store. Along with that, he had been charged with public park code violations, false reporting, and “obstructing.” He had been in jail in July 1994 for those offenses. There was another shoplifting arrest listed in 1991. There was no information on what he had been accused of shoplifting, and there were no current warrants out for Coole.

It was a start. They had gone from being completely in the dark about Coole’s identity to the knowledge that he was probably from the Green Lake–North End area, and that he’d been arrested for some minor crimes. They still didn’t know if Coole was a victim or a shooter. Most of the witnesses had recalled hearing two spates of shots. Either the shooter had shot both McLaughlin and the man known as Steve Coole, or Coole himself had been the shooter. If the latter was true, he might have been fatally injured as McLaughlin fought with him over control of the bus.

Efforts would be made now to contact all Seattle hospitals to see if there was a medical history on file anywhere for a Steven Coole, and that could lead to information on his next of kin. In the meantime, Coole wasn’t the only passenger whose name would be run through the computers for prior criminal history. But nothing much beyond traffic tickets and some minor drug violations popped up. Somebody on that bus had carried a dark secret inside his head, and the three investigators still had no idea who it was.

Steve O’Leary headed out to talk with more of the injured at one hospital, while John Nordlund went to see others on the list. It was not an easy job. Many of the passengers spoke no English, a few were developmentally disabled, one or two had been drinking just before they got on the bus, and all were in shock and in pain; very few were in a state to provide clear and coherent statements.

At the very least, the two detectives figured they could eliminate possible suspects as they questioned one after another of the people who had been on the bus. They weren’t naive enough after years in Homicide to believe they could spot a killer just by talking to him, but they relied on a certain sixth sense, too.

AFIS was demonstrating once again what a remarkable investigative tool it was. Before the whorls, loops and ridges of fingerprints could be matched by a computer, using fingerprints as a means of identifying someone was catch as catch can. The FBI kept single prints on record only for the most wanted criminals in America, and all ten prints were necessary to identify an ordinary criminal. But the AFIS system has virtually changed the forensic identification world. One lone fingerprint can elicit remarkable information. Now, an investigator for the Medical Examiner’s office called Steve O’Leary at 9:30 that first night to say that AFIS had spit out another hit on the prints taken from the unknown man with the bullet hole in his head. But the new information only made the case more bizarre.

On November 16, less than two weeks earlier, a King County ID officer had run prints of a John Doe for the Lynnwood Police Department. “They came back to a Steve Gary Coole.”

O’Leary was elated, but not for long. Lynnwood police had arrested Steve Coole, but they didn’t really know who he was. He was only a most peculiar man who had been hanging around a local park. On November 9, 1998, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, a father had been waiting for his nine-year-old daughter to take a shower after a swim in the pool at the Recreation Pavilion in Montlake Terrace, Washington. Because it was a public facility, he stood guard outside the curtain where she showered. He was glad he had when he was startled to see a tall man walk up and boldly peer over his shoulder into the shower stall.

“Back off,” the father had said forcefully. “My daughter’s taking a shower in there.”

The man, who was described as tall and slender with a mop of brown hair streaked with gray, did move away—but only for a moment. He kept coming back, and walking much too close to the shower area several times, initially ignoring the father’s warnings. “On the third warning, he finally left,” the father told the Lynnwood police. “But I remembered him and what he looked like.”

One of the lifeguards had noticed the man too, and she wondered why he was hanging around the pool.

A week after the incident, the girl and her father were again at the Montlake Terrace pool when he saw the man who had acted so strangely before. He decided that he wasn’t going to wait for trouble; he dialed 911. The officer who responded to the call spotted the suspect in the Jacuzzi, and waited for him to move into the locker room. There, he attempted to talk with him. He took the most basic initial approach, asking the tall man who he was and when his birthday was. But the stranger insisted he didn’t have any identification on him. Finally, he agreed to give the officer his name.

“Stewart Coltrane*,” he said, adding that his birthdate was May 15, 1957.

“Why were you hanging around the girls’ showers last week?” the policemen asked. “You were making people nervous.”

Coltrane was adamant that he had done nothing wrong. “I just wanted to use the shower,” he said. “She was taking too long, and I was getting impatient. I just wanted to see if she was done yet.”

But he had been so persistent that he had alarmed the little girl’s father, and he didn’t seem to understand that, at best, he had used bad judgment. He insisted that he’d been within his rights. The officer told Coltrane it would be best if he left the Rec Pavilion. He headed off down the street, while the investigating officer checked computer bases for Coltrane’s name. He learned there was no Stewart Coltrane who’d been born on 5/15/57, and he quickly steered his patrol car in the direction the suspect had walked.

“I got nothing on that name and birthday you gave me,” the officer said when he caught up with the tall man, and Coltrane quickly gave him three more birthdays: May 14, 1957, May 15, 1959, and May 14, 1959. He didn’t seem to be developmentally disabled, but he didn’t even know his own birthdate! None of the dates he gave drew any hits on the computers as matching up with the name Stewart Coltrane. The suspect had then explained that he was from New Jersey. Maybe that was why the Northwest computers had no record of him. The policeman nodded and ran the name and the four birthdates through New Jersey computers. They drew no hits either.

Coltrane refused to show any documentation that would prove his identity, nor would he give the names of anyone who might identify him. If he hadn’t been hanging around kids in the shower, the officer would have let it go. But there was something a little ominous about the man. He wouldn’t give his home address or phone number. He demanded to talk to an attorney, deliberately escalating the conversation into an incident. At length, when he still would not give any accurate information about himself, he was booked into the Lynnwood jail for “obstructing.”

“Stewart Coltrane” was given a “cash only” bail of $1,000. He wasn’t in jail long. Someone in New Jersey contacted a bail bondsman in Seattle who provided the $1,000 bail. Stewart Coltrane, the alias for Steve Coole, walked out of the Lynnwood Jail a free and unidentified man.

O’Leary and Nordlund found the latest information confusing. If the dead man from the bus crash was both the shooter and the suspected child molester in Lynnwood, it made no sense. The M.O.s were completely different, and they both knew that the profiles for sex offenders and mass killers weren’t the same.

Even so, the Seattle homicide detectives were getting closer to finding out who the dead man really was. They ran the name Stewart Coltrane and found an address on 15th N.E. Gene Ramirez, O’Leary and Nordlund headed out there at 10:30 Friday night. They found the Ponderay Apartments easily enough, a four-story, square building in the University District.

It wasn’t difficult locating Coltrane’s unit; he was listed as the manager of the apartment house there. That was a bit of a surprise. They knocked, not really expecting anyone to answer; they figured Coltrane was lying on a slab at the M.E.’s office.

But someone answered the door, a large man with glasses. His hair wasn’t shot with gray and he was neither tall nor slender. “I’m Stewart Coltrane,” he acknowledged. “How can I help you?”

Coltrane gave his birthdate, and it wasn’t even close to the ones given by the man at the public pool in Lynnwood. He looked as puzzled as the investigators until John Nordlund mentioned the name “Coole.” Coltrane nodded. He knew a man named Cool. “Silas Cool,” he said. “You must mean Silas Cool. He’s one of the tenants here. I hardly know him, but let me take a look at his records.”

Coltrane checked the rent ledger. “Cool moved into Apartment 209 on June 18, 1985. He pays rent of $475 a month.”

“What’s he like?” O’Leary asked.

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“He’s lived here for more than thirteen years, and you don’t know what he’s like?”

“I never see him. He keeps to himself. I see him maybe two, three times a year, tops.”

Ironically, the real Stewart Coltrane’s career dealt with people who were mentally and emotionally disturbed and he considered himself fairly good at recognizing people who were on the edge. He had never seen anything that unusual about Silas Cool, save for the fact that he was a loner. Coltrane said Cool paid his rent on time, minded his own business, and always kept his windows covered. As far as he knew, nobody in the apartment house knew Cool any better than he did.

It was with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension that Coltrane and the three homicide detectives headed up the stairs to the south side of the building. They noted two small windows in the back of the unit as they stood outside the door to Apartment 209. They knocked, but no one answered. They hadn’t really expected that anyone would. Then Coltrane slipped the master key into the lock and turned the knob.

Ramirez, Nordlund, and O’Leary entered a dark apartment that smelled of dead air, dust, dirty clothes, and a strange sweet-sour mediciney odor. Even when they switched on a light, it was still dim; the bulbs were only forty watt. But they could see that this was a very small one bedroom unit. A short entry hallway led to the living room. There was a combination dining-room/kitchen area adjoining that, and a door led back to a bedroom and bathroom. The place was unkempt and dreary, and it had only a few cheap pieces of furniture. It looked lonely, and had a flat, lifeless quality about it.

Nordlund, Ramirez and O’Leary were looking for answers to what seemed an unsolvable mystery. If Silas Cool was the second fatality of the bus crash, they would never be able to ask him what had happened. All they could do was hope that there were some clues in his drab apartment.

They didn’t have to move far inside before they spotted something that gave them goosebumps. There on the cluttered divider between the entry hall and the dining area were stacks of Metro Transit schedules, far too many for an average bus rider to have kept. They towered more than a foot high, and had begun to tumble down onto the dining room floor. They were for many different bus routes, all over the City of Seattle, and for other cities, too. Here, too, were notes Cool had written to himself, reminders that if he missed a Number 6 bus, he could catch a Number 40 within minutes. It looked as if Silas Cool’s life had revolved around buses.

A man’s wallet lay on the divider, too, with a driver’s license inside made out to Silas Garfield Cool, born on May 14, 1955. That was a familiar date; the suspect at the pool had apparently given his correct birthdate—but with the wrong year, and his apartment manager’s name instead of his own. However, this driver’s license had expired in 1987, eleven years earlier.

The whole apartment had that lifeless feeling, like a place out of a William Faulkner story. The picture on the license was of a very handsome young man, a man probably in his late twenties. He looked like a younger version of the man in the ER, but it was hard to be sure.

They walked through the apartment, aware of their own footsteps, half-holding their breaths against the stale odor. There was a jumble of papers on the dining room table. Among them, O’Leary found a card from an attorney in North Plainfield, New Jersey. On the back, someone had jotted down a man’s name and a Bainbridge Island, Washington, address.

The living room was sparsely furnished, although it was cluttered with papers, clothes, bags and boxes. There was a single, uncomfortable-looking chair with an ottoman in the living room, and two black-and-white television sets. There was a bookcase, but there were no books or magazines, no newspapers—nothing to keep the man who lived in the apartment up with current events. On one of the bookcase shelves, Gene Ramirez located a gun holder for an AMT .38 caliber pistol, a holster for a derringer, and a cigar box that held nine live rounds for a .38 caliber weapon.

The detectives photographed the room and the items of interest with a digital camera, and moved on to the bedroom.

There was no bed; rather, they found a blow-up mattress of the sort that campers sometimes carry on hiking trips. It was leaning against the south wall of the bedroom. A jerry-rigged screen made of a blanket hanging on a wire covered the north bedroom wall. When they moved the air bed and pulled the blanket aside, they saw that the walls were covered with photographs of naked or half-naked women. They looked up at the ceiling and found that it, too, was covered with nude photographs. When the doors were closed, there were more naked women on the other two walls; most of the shots appeared to have been torn from Penthouse, Playboy, or similar men’s magazines; they weren’t overtly salacious, but more the kind of thing that a teenage boy might collect.

“When he went to bed,” Nordlund said, “He had his own gallery of women to stare at anywhere he looked.”

“Yeah,” O’Leary said. “He could choose his date for the night.”

In the corner of the bedroom, they found both Beta and VHS video recorders and a stack of pornographic video tapes. It looked as if Cool had been rerecording the Beta tapes onto the VHS machine. The man, who had apparently communicated with no one in the real world, had led a rich fantasy life behind the door to his apartment.

Thong underwear, like that the dead man tagged “Whiskey Doe” had worn, but in garish patterns of animal prints and exotic colors, was scattered in the bedroom. “I wonder if he posed in that mirror?” O’Leary mused.

All of Cool’s windows were covered, some with aluminum foil and some with dark green plastic garbage bags so that no natural light could get in and, perhaps most particularly, to prevent anyone from looking into his world.

The mediciney smell was explained when the investigators checked the bathroom. They had seen a number of containers of drugstore items in the living room, but nothing like the proliferation of bottles, jars, boxes and vials of nonprescription vitamins, pain-killers, herbal remedies, sports rubs, patent medicines, skin tonic, mens’ cologne, hair dressing, and lotions that littered the counters and the sink and were jammed into the bathroom cabinets. The sink was too full to use, and to accommodate the overflow of products, Cool had fashioned a box that fit in the shower and he’d piled more of the stuff in there. The containers in the medicine cabinet had been there so long that their bottoms had rusted to the shelves. Most of the tops were also rusted or dried shut. This looked more like the bathroom of a very old man than it did that of an athletic-looking man in his early forties.

They found two pellet guns, and several knives—both hunting knives and switchblades. The man who had lived here seemed prepared to protect his bleak lodgings.

The kitchen was pretty much what they expected; dirty dishes and accumulated boxes covered the counter tops and filled the sink. The refrigerator’s contents looked as if no one had really made a home here. The crowded shelves had the remainders of take-out dinners from a supermarket deli—fast food, half-eaten and moldering. There were many tiny bottles of alcoholic beverages, the kind that airlines serve. The oven and stove were filthy, covered with baked-on grease.

Only the refrigerator gave a clue about the man who had lived here. He had left notes to himself, anchored with magnets, some of which must have made sense only to him.

Who was Silas Cool? Or, rather, who had he been? Where had he worked, and with whom had he spent his time? Did anyone else know about this musty, pornography-filled apartment where he had apparently lived for almost fourteen years?

Silas Cool was dead, quite probably by his own hand. Seeing the .38 caliber bullets and the gun box, the three detectives suspected that he had also killed Mark McLaughlin, and attempted to take a bus load of thirty-three strangers down into the depths of the Lake Washington Ship Canal with him.

* * *

It was very late. After a last check with the hospitals to query the condition of the survivors, John Nordlund, Steve O’Leary and Gene Ramirez signed out of Homicide for the night. Tomorrow, they would hope to find someone who had actually interacted with Silas Cool—someone who might explain what forces had driven him. The man had lived in Seattle for at least thirteen years. Somebody had to know him.

“It was strange,” Steve O’Leary would recall. “Usually, we get lots of calls after something like this from people who have something to share with us. Not one person from his neighborhood ever called us about Silas Cool—not one clerk at the supermarket to say she had rung up his groceries, nobody who knew him from the Laundromat, no one who talked with him on the corner. No neighbors. No one who should have been at least tangentially close to him. It was almost as if he had existed in a vacuum. An invisible man.”

* * *

By Saturday morning, the reality of the bus tragedy had begun to sink in. Miraculously, there had been no more deaths although many of the survivors were still in critical condition. When the bus was lifted by cranes, the worst fears of the rescue teams didn’t come true; there was no one underneath. Those who had literally walked away from the bus to nowhere caught themselves wondering if it had all been a nightmare. But the headlines on the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blazed that it really had happened. Color photographs of the destroyed sections of the articulated bus took up half a page. It rested there so close to the apartment house, so close to the giant Troll who lived under the Aurora Bridge, the wreckage like two sides of a giant triangle, its accordioned midsection stretched and torn.

Still, it had landed on the ground amidst the last browning leaves of autumn and not in the deep water beneath the bridge. The ruined hulk would be lifted onto a truck and taken to the bus garage where it would be treated as a crime scene by Seattle detectives.

* * *

The postmortem examination on the body of Silas Cool was performed by King County Assistant Medical Examiner Dan Straathof shortly after 7 A.M. on Saturday. The body still wore the yellow identification band around the right wrist reading “Whiskey Doe.” It was simply an accident that he had happened to get the “Whiskey” label from the paramedics. There were so many “Does” at the accident scene that they all had to get names that went with letters of the alphabet. There was no odor of alcohol about his body. The triage team who had moved swiftly through the accident scene locating victims and evaluating their condition and had placed a strip of white adhesive tape on his right chest that read “13.” As it turned out, he had, indeed, been unlucky 13.

Silas Cool weighed 198 pounds and measured just under six feet—although earlier descriptions had listed him as several inches taller. His hair was brown with thick swatches of gray, he was clean-shaven with clipped sideburns, and his teeth were in good repair. His body was clean and well-kept. He looked for all the world like a normal man in his early forties, who was in good shape and good health, but who had been in a very bad accident.

Silas Cool had suffered numerous wounds, commensurate with that accident; the question was whether they had occurred before or after his fatal gunshot wound. His spinal column was fractured at the C-6 level due to a blunt force injury. Had he lived, he might well have been paralyzed to some extent. Other passengers had suffered similar injuries; it was what happened to a body if it fell from a great height.

Cool had bitten through his tongue, and his lungs and liver had hemorrhages from impact wounds. There were multiple abrasions and contusions. He had probably been brain-dead, but technically alive, as the bus fell to earth.

But Dr. Straathof determined that Silas Cool had not perished because he was in a bus that tore through a guardrail and plunged several stories to the ground. The fatal wound was the gunshot wound. That point of entry was just above his right ear. The skin around the wound had the familiar “stellate” tears that come with a contact gunshot as the skin itself is drawn momentarily into the gun barrel by the gases there, torn, and released. The bullet’s path was one of massive destruction through the brain itself, exiting near the top of the head. Any signs of life thereafter would have been mostly reflexive as the body struggled to live. That would explain the agonal gasps noted by the rescuers who struggled to free him from the bottom of a pile of people who had been thrown onto the bus steps.

If there is a classic gunshot suicide pattern, Silas Cool’s wound fit the criteria. It would probably be impossible to know just when Cool shot himself. But it would have to have been just after he shot Mark McLaughlin. He could not have done it after the bus crashed to the ground; he had been beneath a pile of passengers, his arms pinned.

In an attempt to answer at least some questions, a blood screen was done for alcohol, opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, PCP, marijuana, methadone, propoxaphene, benzodiazapene and barbiturates—in short, all the possible drug groups that might have an effect on the central nervous system. Every single test came back negative. The only thing that Silas Cool’s blood tested positive for was caffeine. Cool might have collected tiny airplane bottles of liquor, but he had not drunk from them the day of the accident. There would be no easy explanations for the tragedy on the bus.

This man had been in the peak of physical condition when he died. He had no ailments. Despite the fast-food diet in his refrigerator, he still had only very minor streaks of atheroma (fatty deposits) on his coronary arteries. All things being equal, he probably would have lived to be a hundred.

The postmortem examination of bus driver Mark McLaughlin’s body yielded some sadly ironic truths. He had been struck twice by .38 bullets. The wound that looked the most dangerous from the outside wasn’t; that bullet had entered his right abdomen and passed through soft tissue behind his vital organs, ending benignly in his thigh. It was the bullet fired into his upper right arm that had killed him. And that was because it went completely through McLaughlin’s arm, exited, and reentered his right chest. That wound track was through the seventh intercostal space, through his liver, through the transverse colon, and then, tragically, it had pierced the aorta—the major artery of the body. Seconds later, already hemorrhaging fatally, he had been catapulted through the bus windshield to the roof of the apartment house.

Mark McLaughlin had had no chance at all to live. Like the man who shot him, the bus driver was in good shape when he was shot, his arteries clear and healthy, his heart valves unmarked by anything more than minor fatty deposits. He had been somewhat overweight, but he was in excellent condition. He, too, would probably have lived to a ripe old age if he hadn’t been the victim of Silas Cool’s inscrutable rage.

* * *

At noon on Saturday, Gene Ramirez started searching over the Internet for any relatives Silas Cool might have had. He checked Plainfield, New Jersey. That was where the lawyer’s card was from, and Cool had told the Lynnwood officer that he was from New Jersey. Ramirez found a listing for a couple named Cool living in Plainfield, and copied down the phone number of Daniel and Ena Cool. It was possible they were Silas Cool’s parents, or perhaps his aunt and uncle. He gave the number to Kathy Taylor in the M.E.’s office for possible notification of next-of-kin. Twenty minutes later, she called Ramirez back. The Cools in Plainfield were, indeed, the parents of Silas Garfield Cool. She had told them that their son was dead, and it had, of course, been devastating for them. They were expecting a call from the homicide detectives who might explain to them what had happened to their son.

Steve O’Leary placed a call to Daniel Cool. This was one of the most difficult parts of being a homicide detective, but he had to find out as much as he could about Silas Cool. The elderly man was both upset and baffled when O’Leary told Daniel Cool that the detectives believed that his son had caused the bus crash. Cool said he had never known Silas to own any firearms. It was absolutely incomprehensible to him that Silas could have deliberately hurt anyone. That just wasn’t like his boy.

“Where does Silas work?” O’Leary asked.

“He can’t—couldn’t—work,” Cool replied. “He has had a serious back problem for many years.”

Silas had played golf in high school, his father said, but somehow he had injured his back and it had plagued him ever since. But no, he hadn’t seen a doctor about it in many years as far as the elder Cool knew.

As tactfully as he could, O’Leary asked if Silas had been under psychiatric care. His father said he never had, as far as he knew. “We knew he was a loner,” Cool said, but they had never thought Silas had any real problems.

His father said that Silas had worked until about 1987 or 1988 for King County in Seattle in the King County Building and Land Use Department. He had an associate degree in civil engineering from Middlesex County College in New Jersey.

But then Silas’s back had just become too painful for him to work full-time. He had wanted to move back to New Jersey, but his dad said he had talked him out of that. It was arranged for his parents to send him $650 a month until he found something that he could work at. O’Leary learned that Daniel Cool’s sister, who was in her nineties, had also helped Silas out for two decades—ultimately sending him over $30,000 in Certificates of Deposit. Somehow, the years had stretched, and ten years later his parents were still sending Silas monthly checks.

Steve O’Leary let the old man go to try and deal with the loss of his only child. They would have more talks as the detective tried to form a more complete picture of what Silas Garfield Cool had been like.

The next phone call into Homicide was from the Medical Examiner’s Office. Herman Liebelt, sixty-nine, had died of his injuries. Like Silas Cool, Liebelt had found his way to Seattle from the East Coast. Beyond that, they were so different. Liebelt, the one-time saxophone-playing bandleader, sailor in the Korean War, purchasing agent, had begun life in Amsterdam, N.Y. His last years were spent reading everything from popular fiction to deep philosophical works. He had lived on the shoestring that many seniors do, but he’d been a happy man with friends and myriad interests. He had found joy in little things and in new friends, and now he was gone. His painful injuries were too severe for a man nearly seventy to survive.

In the early afternoon of Saturday, November 28, two men who worked at the Union Gospel Mission in Seattle arrived at the Homicide unit. Bill Wippel and Peter Davis said they had heard the name “Silas Cool” on the news. Finally, someone had recognized him and wanted to talk about how they had known him. They asked to see a picture of the man known as Silas Cool, and Nordlund and O’Leary showed them the booking photo taken in 1994 after a shoplifting arrest.

They recognized Cool. He was one of those who had come to the mission to eat a meal now and then. “He’s eaten with us several times,” Wippel said. “At least twice this past month. He never caused any trouble, was very neat and clean, and polite to our staff.”

Still, Wippel and Davis had known Silas Cool only on a very surface level. He must have been hungry; simple arithmetic would substantiate that. His folks sent Cool $650 a month; his rent was $475. That left him $175 a month for food, utilities, clothing, and transportation. They found no record of any Certificates of Deposits in Cool’s name. He had spent it all, maybe on his scores of medications. “Those Union Gospel meals must have helped him out,” O’Leary commented.

* * *

Records at the mission, which had helped thousands of homeless and down-on-their-luck people in Seattle for many years, showed that Silas Cool had filled out meal tickets on October 20 and November 20; he had attended chapel, but he had never spent a night in the mission.

“I remember him,” Wippel said, “because the guy stood out in the crowd. He was clean-cut, handsome. He didn’t look like a street person. He kept to himself, didn’t talk to anyone. I do know I looked him in the eye and made contact with him, and he smiled. He gave no indication that he was a violent person.”

The mission staff knew that the people who came to them for food and lodging often guarded their past from prying eyes, and they never pressed. Wippel and Davis knew nothing at all about Silas Cool’s world outside the food lines, but he had always seemed as though he could have made a success of life. He looked like success.

In reality, Silas Cool, either unwilling or unable to work, had lived his life close to the bone. On Monday, the homicide investigators checked with the State Department of Public Assistance to see if Cool had received benefits of any kind, and they found he didn’t get any Social Security payments for being disabled, or any state Labor and Industry benefits.

Steve O’Leary talked in more detail with Daniel Cool, Silas’s father and, with his permission, took a tape-recorded statement.

Silas Cool’s early life had been anything but average. Daniel Cool’s career as an accountant for a petroleum company had taken him all over the world. He had met and married Ena, four years younger than he and a native of South Africa. Silas was born in Palenbang, Sumatra, Indonesia, in 1954. They had moved to Pakistan when Silas was a very small boy. Finally, they had come back to the U.S., settling in North Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1960, when Silas was five years old. He was their only son, their only child. They were nearly old enough to be grandparents when he was born.

“What kind of child was Silas?” O’Leary asked.

“A very good child,” Daniel Cool said, “Well-mannered, quiet. The neighbors used to comment and say, ‘He’s such a good boy,’ but I guess all kids are good.”

Silas had graduated from North Plainfield High School in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1973. He had always earned respectable—if not spectacular—grades. If Silas had a passion, it was golf, although he had never played on a high school team. “He played at local clubs,” Daniel said.

In his yearbook, Silas gave his plans as “playing golf at the farm.” But his father was convinced that he had hurt his back severely during one of his mighty swings.

Girls? Daniel couldn’t recall that Silas dated girls in high school. “My wife and I thought that was because of his ‘scoliosis problem.’ It made him on the shy side. I wish we could have caught that earlier . . .”

The only job Silas had had in New Jersey hadn’t lasted long. He had worked as an usher in a theater. “He lost that one because they caught him leaning against the seats,” his father told O’Leary. “But that was because of his back problems hurting him.”

Silas moved to Seattle in 1979. “He just wanted to explore the West Coast and he ended up in Seattle. He had a little Mustang then, and he drove out there—straight from New Jersey to Seattle.”

Even though he had no friends in Seattle, Silas hadn’t had trouble getting a job, not with his civil engineer training. “He had lots of different jobs—all different jobs. But he lost most of them because of his back problems,” Daniel Cool recalled.

In about 1985, Silas had gone to work for the county. Cool didn’t know why that had ended, but it had. He thought that Silas’s back must have gotten really bad about the same time.

“He called us on March 25, 1989. He said he was going to move back home and we talked him out of that. His back was bad. He told me once in 1989 that his back was so bad he just wanted to swat people.” And still, his father didn’t want him to give up and move home, although his mother worried.

Cool recalled that Silas had made “a mistake” in applying for disability for his back, and never got any compensation from the government. So the family had started to support him. “I think we’ve probably given him at least $75,000 over the years,” his father said. “Silas was just doing everything he could for his back pain. He had magnetic belts he put on, and massagers, and he lay down a lot. He told me one doctor said he just had to live with it. He came back here and we took him up to a hospital, and they didn’t make us feel very confident. Since then, he just didn’t go to any doctors.”

Despite the chronic pain he seemed to be in, Silas didn’t take any prescription medication, relying, his father said, on vitamins and health food supplements.

It seemed impossible to O’Leary that a man could be as disengaged from the world as Silas Cool had been and not have someone notice. He pushed a little harder, “He never exhibited any behavior as a child that would concern you—or your wife? Never had any psychiatric care?”

Daniel Cool was adamant that Silas had never been under psychiatric care. Steve O’Leary got the impression that this would have been shameful for his family. No, his father insisted. Silas had been fine. Fine. “No—No counselors. No problems. I hear he was eating in soup kitchens out there?” his father said uncomfortably.

“Yes—to save money,” O’Leary said.

This was difficult for the old man; he had tried his best to see that his son had enough to get by on.

“Did Silas ever seem depressed or angry?” O’Leary asked.

“No. Oh, one time we went out to dinner—when he was here a month ago—and he seemed a little irritated about the service. I think that was at the International House of Pancakes.”

Silas had always come back once a year to see his parents on the East Coast. “We saw Silas last October,” his father said, “when he came to see us for twelve days. We find it really hard to believe that he shot a bus driver. This would have been totally out of his character. I bought him a BB gun once, way back when he was a sophomore in high school. I don’t know what ever happened to that, but he wasn’t interested in guns. Never.”

As O’Leary tried to find something that might account for the tragedy on the bus, he elicited only “normal” things in Silas Cool’s childhood. His father remembered that he had been a Boy Scout, and had gone to Bible school. He had never been in the service. He was never interested in guns at all.

“In the last several months,” O’Leary began, “can you think of anything different in his behavior?”

“He was slightly agitated—but more on his own, again, like he’d be lying on the bed with his back problem in the afternoon, and he’d take a little walk somewhere. He could only go so far, and then he’d have to lie down again. He had that ‘twitching’ in the neck. The back situation was what he mostly complained about.”

As far as Daniel Cool knew, his son had no friends in Seattle. He never talked about anyone. No dating, no interaction with anyone at all. This had not, apparently, seemed strange to the old man. This was how Silas had always been.

“Did he talk about the buses?”

“Never mentioned them—except to say they had good bus service in Seattle.”

“Any hobbies?”

“Oh, he used to have a bicycle. I don’t know if that’s still in the apartment. He used to do bike riding when he first went out there. He used to go to the library a lot. He swam for his back. He used to swim a lot. That’s how he got in trouble on the sixteenth.”

“Do you know why he gave the officer a false name?”

“He was just a little irritated with the arresting officer. And he didn’t have any ID. And then he slurred his name so it sounded like ‘Steve’ instead of ‘Silas.’?” Daniel Cool said he had arranged for the bail bondsmen to get his son out of jail after the misunderstanding at the pool.

“And, until last Friday,” O’Leary tried again, “he never exhibited any anger toward anyone, and he never expressed any interest in getting back at anyone?”

“Not at all,” the old man sighed, utterly defeated by the catastrophe and loss that had come to him in his mid-eighties. “Boy, that’s what surprises us. All of a sudden, flip your lid, and shoot a bus driver. . . . It’s astounding to my wife and me. We can’t figure that out. There’s [got to be] a motive behind that. You go on a bus with a couple of guns? My wife and I can’t understand that.”

* * *

Nor could anyone else.

Steve O’Leary thought that it must have taken an incredible amount of sheer will for Silas Cool to keep a “lid” on his rage when he visited his parents. Or it may have taken a tremendous amount of denial for them not to see that the perfect, well-behaved son was losing his mind. It was probably a little of both.

But maybe Silas’s asocial behavior wasn’t strange to his parents. They had no close friends in New Jersey, or anywhere. Daniel’s sister in Wisconsin was the closest person to him, outside of his wife, Ena. The Cools had never been mixers. They had one son. One cat. They had their own interests.

* * *

During the processing of the wrecked shell of Bus Number 359, a loose .38 pistol was found where it had apparently skidded along the floor. That gun was tested for fingerprints, and on November 30, a single print on the magazine proved to be that of Silas Cool. That was good physical evidence linking Cool to the gun, but now the gun had to be tied to Mark McLaughlin’s murder.

The .38 was test-fired in the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab and the bullets were compared to those taken from McLaughlin’s body. The lands and grooves that striated the metal were identical. A gun with Silas Cool’s print on it, and an AMT .38 caliber pistol that came from the box in his living room, had been used to shoot Mark McLaughlin. It was all there.

Gradually, the picture of the man who had sent a busload of human beings over the Aurora Bridge was becoming three-dimensional. A county worker who had been Silas Cool’s supervisor a decade earlier when he worked for the King County Building Department called the investigators. “He was a weird fellow,” the man recalled, adding that Silas had had few social graces and didn’t get along with his fellow workers. “He was a racist, too,” the man said. That was totally against policy in King County. The supervisor said that Cool had been allowed to resign from his job, but in reality his presence in the department was so controversial that he had been forced out.

Pictures of Silas Cool had been posted at bus stops and stations to see if anyone recognized him. It remained hard to determine if Cool had had a particular beef with Mark McLaughlin or if his vengeful act had been directed at the world in general. A female Metro driver called the investigators to say that Cool’s face was very familiar to her. He’d been on her bus a couple of times. “At the end of last winter, he got on my shuttle route near Green Lake,” she said. “He immediately started complaining about the temperature inside the bus. He wanted no heat on. He actually walked up and down the aisle opening windows. He was complaining about germs in the air . . .”

Cool’s behavior had been bizarre enough to frighten her, she said, and she was relieved when he got off after a few miles. “But I saw him again when I was driving downtown. He wanted to go to the University District and I told him I was the slowest bus to get there. That time, he was very well dressed.”

Another Metro driver remembered Silas Cool, who had gotten on his bus in the downtown area. “He was unruly and obnoxious,” the male driver said. “I’ve seen him on my bus three or four times this year.”

It appeared that Silas Cool’s obsession, passion, avocation, hobby—his whole life—had been spent riding the buses of Seattle. He had acted as if he owned them, and he was frequently abusive with the drivers.

Still another driver called John Nordlund. He knew Silas Cool, too. “He would just stare at me—a blank intimidating stare. And I would just stare back at him. He had a reduced fare permit, but I haven’t seen him since last summer.”

A second female driver notified the homicide detectives that she recognized Silas Cool. Her voice was a little shaky as she recalled how he had boarded her bus at the north end of Seattle only one week before the bus crash. “He got on my bus and immediately started harassing me. He made comments about my ‘beautiful face and eyes,’ and I had to forcefully tell him to be quiet and sit down.” She said she hadn’t reported him; he had seemed like just another person who was either drunk or mentally disturbed, and every bus driver in the city had to deal with those problems every day.

More and more calls came in from bus drivers. Silas Cool hadn’t been a big problem but he had been a problem all over the city. A woman driver recalled that he’d been on her bus, which had a route that went east and then south of downtown—the opposite direction from Cool’s apartment. “He got on the bus, sat in the middle, and he was checking out teenagers,” she said. “I noticed him especially because it was dark out and he was wearing sunglasses. He scared me—enough so that I called my coordinator and reported it.”

* * *

Nobody at North Plainfield High School had thought much about Silas Cool in the years since graduation. Apparently, he hadn’t drawn much attention when he was in school. He had been sent an invitation to his class’s twenty-fifth reunion, which was to be held on the weekend after Thanksgiving. Because Silas was one of the “lost” graduates, the invitation was sent to his parents. There was no response.

The welcoming cocktail party for The Class of 1973 was just warming up in New Jersey at six P.M. on Friday, November 27. In Seattle, it was, of course, three P.M., moments before the shots sounded on Bus Number 359.

By Saturday afternoon, the reunion in North Plainfield was buzzing with the news of one of their former classmates. They couldn’t help but speculate that Silas Cool might have made some kind of statement meant to shock them. If that was the reason behind the shooting, it had worked. His name was on everyone’s lips at the reunion. Silas Cool was not someone who stood out in anyone’s memory. He wasn’t memorable for anything but his name.

“Cool” was slang that seemed to get recycled every generation or so. But Silas Cool was not “cool” at all. He wasn’t anything but average. He didn’t drink or go to parties. He didn’t date. “He was a very quiet kid,” one male classmate said. “Not a troublemaker.”

It was faint praise. When members of the Class of 1973 were approached by the media to give quotes, few of them had anything to offer more than speculation about why somebody would shoot a bus driver; few even remembered who Silas was, or if they did, they could not recall a single anecdote involving him.

His English teacher in tenth grade saw the story on the television news and said, “I found it very hard to sleep last night. People are obviously very different the rest of their lives than they were in tenth grade, but he was a really nice kid and he fit in.” He said Silas had laughed at jokes, once someone made the effort to draw him in.

Silas’s biology teacher remembered a loner, but one who showed no sign of problems. “He was what I would call a straight-arrow kid, typical student, clean-cut—but you never know what’s going to happen in someone’s lifetime that would make them do something like he did in Seattle. I’m flabbergasted.” His journalism teacher said he had been “sweet and kind,” but that he had never stood out from the crowd.

It was the same at Middlesex College in Edison, New Jersey. Silas had attended classes there from September 1975 to June 1978. He had gotten an A in statics, the study of forces in structures, but that was one of his few outstanding grades. His professor couldn’t recall him. “No one remembers him specifically,” Frank Rubino said, “but when they check back in their record books, everybody finds him . . .”

* * *

No one knew Silas Cool when he was a teenager, and no one knew him when he was forty-three. He seemed to have spent his whole life on the edges of other people’s lives, a person of so little importance that few remembered him.

In his Seattle apartment, he was “S. Cool,” the man whom his neighbors didn’t know.

Seattle reporters flew to New Jersey to try to get an inside look at Silas Cool’s life there. Eric Sorensen of the Seattle Times managed to obtain an interview with Daniel and Ena Cool. He found them in their very small, one-floor home, decorated modestly with some of the things they had brought back from their travels. The pair of bronzed baby shoes were from Singapore and had a little plaque reading, “Silas Cool, May 14, 1955.”

Ena Cool, seventy-seven, spoke with a South-African accent, still, as she echoed the bewilderment of her husband. “I can’t believe Silas is dead,” she said. “I can’t believe he’d do something like that. He was here only a month ago, and he didn’t give any indications he would do such a thing. You always think—if you’re left alone, you’re going to have your son around. But it’s not happening that way.”

Ena Cool said that she had been forty-three when Silas was born, and Daniel was forty-seven. As older parents, they accepted his quietness happily. “He was quiet, unassuming, a mind-his-own-business type. He never bothered anybody,” Daniel said proudly.

Ena and Silas were always close. After he graduated from high school, she recalled that he had gone with her back to South Africa when her mother became ill. While he was there, he had trained as an architect for the engineering department of the City of Durban. She said he was very good at the kind of drawing architects and engineers use—all straight careful lines and angles.

After he drove his Mustang out to Seattle, his parents had never really been sure what Silas’s life was like—apart from his back problems. They lived their lives 3,000 miles apart except for his yearly October visits. Although they believed he had scoliosis, he had never been treated for it in the traditional way—by wearing a full body cast to straighten out the curvature of the spine.

They didn’t know about his jobs out west, except that he lost them often. Ena Cool remembered visiting her son in Seattle in 1991, but, oddly, she described an apartment at a different address than the one he had lived in since 1985. Either she was mistaken on the date, or her son had rented a clean, nicely decorated apartment on a temporary basis so that she would not be disappointed in him. She was positive the nice apartment was on Taylor Avenue N. Silas Cool could not have taken his mother into an apartment with photographs of naked women on the walls and stacks of pornographic videos. Where had he taken her during her visit seven years earlier?

His parents admitted that Silas had been easily angered during his last visit home. He had spent those twelve days in October with them, and he had been angry that they had to wait in line at the restaurant—the incident Daniel Cool related to Steve O’Leary. Silas had insisted that they leave the line and go to another restaurant, his parents said. Yes, he had been angry at the neighbor’s dog for barking, and he had yelled at it. But what was neurotic about that, they asked? Anyone would have.

Although Silas’s parents had sent him nearly $700 a month, plus gifts at Christmas and on his birthday, the airplane tickets to fly home in October, and his aunt had been very generous, he was frustrated because he didn’t have any income that he’d earned himself. He felt that he was a burden on his parents, which, of course, he was. His mother sometimes thought that there must be some job that he could do with his hands, a job that wouldn’t strain his back.

“He was just wasting his life, when you think about it,” she said sadly, “But what can you do?”

Ena showed Eric Sorensen the last postcards that Silas had sent them. He called them “E and D” and the cards read like a normal, cheery, communiqué. He spoke of a PGA golf tournament that was to be held in a Seattle suburb, and of his walk to Albertson’s grocery near Green Lake. He asked if their ancient cat was still growing fatter. He told them what he had eaten for supper, and about riding a bus. He sounded like the son they wanted so badly to believe in.

Toward the end of his life, his mother said she had urged Silas to move back home. His room was still there for him, a small room with barely space for a bed, a dresser, and a postage stamp of a desk. He had resisted that idea, because he needed to move around. “He said he could do more there [in Seattle],” Ena Cool said. “He could get around on buses and go where he wanted to go, whereas here [without a car], you’re pretty stuck.”

At length, Ena Cool said tentatively, “He seemed on the very withdrawn side [in October] if you know what I mean.”

“It was the back pain,” Daniel said quickly. “I think his nerves were in such a state . . .”

* * *

Indeed they were. Within six weeks, Silas’s “nerves” were at the point of exploding. Clearly, the problems that had undoubtedly haunted him for years had started to unravel and the tightly controlled world inside his apartment and inside his own head were threatening to burst forth. It was only a matter of when and on which bus.

Not surprisingly, the bulk of the information that was coming into the Homicide unit was in response to the pictures of Silas Cool that were posted at bus stops. A woman recognized Cool, and said she had spoken to him on the bus earlier in the fall. He’d been complaining that the bus drivers were rude, that people were generally rude. He had shown her a small gun that he carried, and commented that things were getting so bad he was going to buy another gun.

And, apparently, he had.

The last person to talk to Silas Garfield Cool before he erupted on Bus Number 359 may have been Dorna Stone, who served free Thanksgiving Day meals at the University Temple United Methodist Church. She remembered a neatly dressed man carrying a backpack. He was tall and handsome and scarcely looked like a “street person.” He came in and sat down at a table where she was talking with several other volunteers. As he enjoyed the holiday meal, he told them that he knew which churches served free meals.

He also told them about which dumpsters held the best food. It was an odd conversation to have with a man who looked like a middle-aged corporate executive who was dressed down on his day off in a plaid sports shirt and jeans. He struck Stone as a nice guy who didn’t seem to be stressed or unhappy. He spent about fifteen minutes in the church basement eating his meal, and then stopped on his way out to ask for more food, which he took with him.

She was quite sure that that pleasant, good-looking man had been Silas Cool.

* * *

John Nordlund, Steve O’Leary, and Gene Ramirez continued to question survivors as their condition improved enough to warrant it. They found nothing new; some had seen the man in dark clothing stride up to the bus driver and shoot him twice without exchanging so much as a word. Some had been sleeping, reading, or distracted, and realized they were in trouble only as the bus took flight.

Most of the survivors were doing well, but Charles Moreno, thirty-two, lost a leg and faced the loss of an arm. A private and shy man who was scrupulously honest even when he was having a rough time, he was a recovering alcoholic who was in his sixth year of sobriety when the accident occurred. A relative of Moreno’s recalled one of Moreno’s many good deeds. “One time, he found a blank money order, and we needed it, but he insisted on turning it into Safeway. It was for $160 and we fought over it, but he insisted . . .”

As the Christmas season, 1998, was in full bloom, the groundswells from the bus crash continued to blunt the lives of those who’d been on the bus, those in the apartment house it hit, and even those who had participated in the rescue attempt. Many of the victims would be in the hospital until months into the New Year, and Metro was making arrangements to assist them with funds and counseling. The apartment dwellers had to find new lodging while the damage, estimated at about $200,000, was repaired. Beyond the monetary loss and the physical pain, the psychological cost was immeasurable. There were those who grieved and those who woke in the night full of fear. That would never really go away.

And something else had risen its ugly head; one of the bus passengers had tested HIV positive. Now, the rescuers who had plunged into a literal sea of blood, some of them cutting themselves on the jagged edges of the torn bus, were warned that they should submit to tests that would show if they had contracted the deadly virus. And they couldn’t be sure for six months. It was a concept that most lay people who run to rescue their fellow human beings never think of; where there is blood now there is always danger.

* * *

On December 8, fellow bus drivers, passengers, dignitaries and the Seattle public said good-bye to Mark McLaughlin, who had tried desperately to save his passengers by keeping his bus on the bridge. A procession of eighty buses drove slowly down Fourth Avenue toward the Key Arena, where five thousand people waited for a memorial service honoring both Mark McLaughlin and Herman Liebelt. Two Seattle police motorcycle officers led the procession and a tow truck pulled an empty bus emblazoned with McLaughlin’s badge number: 2106. His photo and his uniform jacket hung behind the driver’s seat, and thirty-two purple ribbons marked the seats where the surviving passengers had sat eleven days earlier. There were two black ribbons: one for McLaughlin and one for Liebelt.

But there was no ribbon at all for Silas Cool.

The buses rolled silently for an hour, blocking intersections, and seizing the street for that time in honor of the bus driver and the old man. No one minded. What had happened to them was something all drivers and many riders had feared. “We knew it was only a matter of time,” one driver said. “You never know who’s sitting next to you . . .”

* * *

No one can really know what went on in Silas Garfield Cool’s head. He is not a villain in the traditional sense of the word because he was undoubtedly insane.

He was a quiet boy who never quite fit in—who became a quiet man who didn’t fit in at all. His “bad back” was probably only an excuse for his inability to deal with the world. He had run as far as he could from his boyhood home, seeking a geographic solution to the thoughts that plagued him. But when he got to Seattle in 1979, Silas Cool found that he’d brought all his demons with him. He could not bring himself to admit that it was his mind that was so fragile that he could not work, but he could blame it on his painful spine. He may even have “felt” pain, and picked the term scoliosis to describe his ailment. He spent a tremendous amount of money on cure-alls, magnets, belts, and massagers but none of those could fix his mind, and so he still felt pain.

Silas Cool was about twenty-four years old when he drove his Mustang to the Northwest. Already, according to his supervisors at work, he could not get along with his peers. Already, he was scornful of African-Americans and Asians, perhaps convinced in his own mind that they were a danger to him. The undiagnosed illness that eventually destroyed him had begun to grow like the faintest cuttings of ivy in his thought patterns. As the years passed, the “ivy” wound itself around and around his brain processes. Because he kept himself entirely alone, there was no chance for anyone to help him. He got no psychiatric treatment and no pharmacological treatment.

For Cool, who was entranced, beset, consumed, haunted, obsessed, and possessed by buses, it was only a matter of time before someone or some thing triggered his fear and rage. The fact that the catastrophic shooting on the bus was virtually simultaneous with the homecoming reunion for the Class of 1973 cannot be ignored. It is quite possible that Silas did resent being teased about his name, being called a “cool guy” a quarter of a century before. He may well have harbored a resentment that burgeoned along with his developing paranoia. He may have wanted to show those classmates who barely remembered him that he was the most famous of them all. Twenty-five years after the fact, his actions were not unlike those of the violent outsiders in the 1990s high school massacres.

It was only a matter of five seconds. If Bus Number 359 had fallen from the top of the Aurora Bridge, Silas Garfield Cool would have taken nearly three dozen people with him in a headline-grabbing suicide plunge. And he would have achieved a ghastly sort of celebrity. He may have planned for it to be that way. But bad timing and fate foiled those plans.