Tags:
True Crime,
Murder,
Serial Killers,
forest,
oregon,
portland,
eugene,
blood lust,
serial murder,
gary c king,
dayton rogers
territory: "Tough luck, not much that we
can do." After all, many cops subscribe to the notion that most
homicide victims die by their environment, their lifestyles, and
there's no question that prostitutes make themselves easy victims
of opportunity. Right or wrong, statistics tend to validate such
beliefs, making it understandable why policemen are sometimes
reluctant to give such murders their undivided attention.
But Turner couldn't brush this case off that
easily. His main concern was for people, regardless of their class
in life, which was why he became a cop in the first place. Jenny
Smith had been a living human being, some mother's child and a
mother to two small children herself. To have been killed with such
unleashed savagery troubled Turner immensely. She shouldn't have
had to die at age twenty-five, at least not that way. He wanted to
make sure that he built as strong a case as possible against the
man he believed killed her.
There was another reason. Call it instinct, a
cop's intuition, or whatever, something kept telling Turner that
Jenny's killer had obtained great pleasure in his acts of violence,
that he had committed such acts before. The injuries her killer had
inflicted on her had been painful, excruciating, and unbearable,
and seemed intended as an act of torture. Few killers, regardless
of how violent they are, kill their victims so slowly and with such
precision.
And then there was that damned blue pickup
that kept cropping up. Why did he keep thinking about it, unable to
get it out of his mind? Was there another case besides Heather
Brown's involving a blue pickup? He seemed to think so, since its
description kept floating around in the farther reaches of his
mind. Could there be others, victims like Jenny, that he knew
nothing about? And if so, were their cases buried somewhere within
some police agency's filing cabinets, their bodies unidentified as
Jenny's had been?
Jenny's murder could have been written up so
neat and simple, and Turner could have forgotten it and gone on to
the next case that came his way. But something kept telling him
that he wasn't finished with this case, that he really wasn't
seeing the big picture of it yet. And he also kept telling himself
that nobody deserved to die at the hands of a brutal murderer.
Nobody deserves that.
Chapter 5
It was 1:30 P.M. the next day, August 8, when
detectives John Turner and James Strovink responded to the home of
Barbara Smith, located in the 500 block of North Jarrett Street in
Portland near "Crack Alley," in the middle of Portland's chapter of
the Bloods' and Crips' gangland war zone. Neither detective had had
much sleep, and they weren't particularly happy about being there.
It was a neighborhood where it was not uncommon for the residents
to dodge stray bullets from drive-by shootings and other instances
of gang warfare that claim innocent people, including young
children playing inside their homes, as victims of a growing and
senseless violence. Turner and Strovink preferred the more
civilized qualities of their own turf in the normally peaceful
confines of Clackamas County, but they resigned themselves to the
fact they had a job to do, and that job was to determine the truth
behind the killing of Jenny Smith no matter where in Portland's
seamier netherworld the case took them. After inviting them inside
her home, Barbara Smith tearfully described herself as the mother
of Jenny Smith's ex-husband and grandmother of Jenny's
children.
Smith, between sobs, told Turner and Strovink
that she last saw Jenny at approximately 9:45 P.M. Thursday, August
sixth, near Holiday Park Hospital. Jenny had asked her to drive her
to that location because Jenny had left her car, a Honda Civic,
there earlier when she couldn't get it started after apparently
flooding the engine. Upon arrival, however, Jenny's car had started
immediately. Prior to their leaving, the last thing Jenny said to
Mrs. Smith was, "When the food stamps come, keep them for
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