Local Reports
Following Michael's suggestion, I went to the office of the Twin Cities Independent-Herald. I asked to see the files on the Draft Board Murders. They offered me a desk and handed over a thick folder of clippings, likely assuming I was part of what must have been a steady stream of out-of-town reporters who had asked the same question. I wasn't about to correct their impression. I looked around the office for a familiar face and didn't see any. It surprised me. I was still expecting old acquaintances at every turn.
I have xeroxed quite a number of those clippings, some that day and others on later visits. I had intended to include a selection of them here. My publisher has informed me that for copyright and other assorted reasons it won't be possible to do that. I've agreed instead at their insistence to summarize or excerpt those portions I feel to be most relevant. I've given in and I'm doing it their way. I like to think I'm a reasonable person, and I saw no reason for fighting them about this. I do want the reader to understand that if it were entirely up to me, in the interest of full unadulterated accuracy, there would now follow complete replicas of key newspaper clippings. While we're on the subject, I would explain like to acknowledge those reporters who did compile the stories here. Some of their names are listed in the front of this book along with all the others whose information and hard work I have taken advantage of. Also, if this chapter does appear to dwell upon a few of the more sensational aspects of the case, and upon events you may already have read or heard something about, I would still like to suggest that you not skip over it. This material is not here for sensation's sake. If nothing else, it is an important reminder of what is at stake in the material to follow.
There's no other place to begin besides going through the murders one by one. After covering the circumstances of each, we'll consider some of the odd conclusions one must draw from these facts, partly alluded to in the first interview with Michael Willetts, and we'll have to get to how Michael came to be arrested.
George Dryden, owner of a large tract of walnut groves near Live Oak, a few miles outside of Yuba City, had spent the morning of his death tending to business affairs in town. He had gone to the offices of a farm labor contractor, Manolo Fuentes, on E Street (see map), stopping afterwards at Ed's Cafe around the corner. It has been ascertained that neither place was part of any regular daily or weekly pattern that Dryden followed, so it would seem to have been difficult to prepare in advance for the attack which ensued.
At 11:05 A.M., as George Dryden walked out of the cafe and approached his car, he was incinerated by a blast from a flame-thrower who had stationed himself on the roof of Palmer's Hardware, near Dryden's parked car. The blast of napalm was sufficiently intense to kill Dryden on the spot. An eyewitness in the hardware store reported looking out the window in response to the glare of the flame-up, and said that she saw a silhouette of a man showing through the flame, a silhouette that crumbled before her eyes in less than five seconds, at which time the store windows shattered from the heat. A display of small kitchen appliances were fully denuded of their plastic exteriors, leaving small puddles of avocado and harvest gold beneath all the glass. No one heard a scream. It was believed Dryden was killed too quickly to utter a sound.
The attack was so swift and thorough, there was little comprehension at the scene of what had happened. The origin of the fire was not clear, with a good deal of initial disagreement as to its source. A couple of customers inside the store were convinced it came out of the ground, like an exploding gas pipe. Another reported (accurately, it turned out) that the flames appeared to come out of the sky. Mr. Palmer himself, standing near the cash register in front and closer to the victim than anybody (except, perhaps, for the killer), was convinced that Dryden had exploded from within in flames. The nature of his death was not cleared up until all the murders were investigated, at which time traces of napalm were found among the ashes, and the trajectory of the flames was traced back to their source on the roof. No one reported seeing suspicious or unknown persons in the vicinity of the crime, and there were no reports of speeding vehicles leaving the scene.
Willis Neville was at work. He owned Neville Caterpillar and Tractor Company on Clark Street, the largest dealer in farm equipment in Yuba City. While supervising the unloading of a new shipment of tractor engines at 11:15 A.M., he was shot repeatedly from a low-flying single engine aircraft. Two of Neville's employees, standing near him while this happened, used terms like "bombing run" and "strafing mission" in describing the attack. The small plane made two passes over the murder spot, firing about 100 rounds in rapid bursts. It is believed that Neville was killed on the first pass, though both employees, who dove immediately for cover under nearby equipment, describe seeing him hit a number of times on the second pass when his body was already stretched out on the ground. Thirty bullets were found in his body, which was almost cut in half longitudinally by the attack. There is a photograph of this which I hope you've never seen and will never have to.
Because all three men on the ground were in plain view at the time the plane fired, it was understood right away that the pilot and/or gunner knew his target. Neither of the other two were injured, though one did scratch his palms thoroughly as they dove to safety. Due to the suddenness of the plane's appearance and the threat to all of them, the survivors were unable to provide any description of the plane or its occupants. It was estimated that the time from first shot to last was no more than a minute.
Smith, an insurance agent, was driving on Highway 99 just north of Yuba City. He had been on his way to Chico, about 50 miles away, to discuss a group policy with an administrator at Chico Community Hospital.
There were no witnesses to what occurred. Investigation indicates that the death was caused by a hand grenade thrown in the window of Smith's car from a passing vehicle. Due to the subsequent explosion of the car itself and the damage caused by the car's crashing into a heavy utility structure, it was not initially understood that a murder had taken place until the identity of the car's occupant was learned and his connection with the other deaths was established.
Identification at the scene had only been possible because of Smith's briefcase in the trunk. The front interior of the car was badly damaged, and no papers remained unincinerated in the glove compartment. The body was in no condition to allow for visual identification, and the blast more than took care of all personal effects. Death was set at between 11:25 and 11:45, the time the car was discovered. There's a picture around of this too, I'm sorry to say.
The death of Mitchell Ferguson occurred in a corner of Peach Bowl Stadium, the football field for Yuba City Union High School. Ferguson, a high school administrator and also an assistant superintendent for the full school district, left his office about 11:30 A.M., telling his secretary he was going to have a short visit with a former student. This ruse (or possible truth) was the only apparent instance of one of the victims being lured to his death site. It was assumed he knew his caller, for it did not seem likely he would consent to so odd a meeting place as a patch of grass in a remote part of the stadium had he not known who he was meeting. The spot was also a full two blocks from his office. (See map.)
When Ferguson had not returned in the early afternoon and news of the other deaths reached the school, the Superintendent, Arthur Deems, called for an immediate search of the grounds. Ferguson's body was found in a pit which had been dug in the grass. He lay face down, impaled by six of the dozen pointed wooden stakes positioned at the bottom. They were sharp enough to have made clean wounds straight through his body, including one that entered his face just to the left of the mouth and exited in back at the base of the neck. The tips of all the poles had been smeared with human excrement. If you wonder about pictures, don't ask.
Ferguson's body had to be lifted out with the stakes still piercing through him, so firmly had they attached themselves to their victim. The two firemen-paramedics given this unpleasant task both became physically sick on the scene. That didn't help the pictures either.
Investigators believe that Ferguson was the victim of a camouflaged booby trap. While it is possible he may have been pushed or thrown into the pit, given the appearance of camouflage over the opening, of some dead leaves and tree branches, it is assumed he unknowingly walked over the trap on his way to a bench at the edge of the field, the probable site of his expected meeting. As the path from the stadium gate to the bench passed right over the death location, it is felt that the killer could easily assume his victim's route of movement, and as the field is not used until the afternoon for team practices, he could be sure that no unintended victim would happen by. As a consequence, this death required only the phone call to be set in motion. Unlike the other killings, no one had to be present at the moment of the crime, although it was considered possible that the killer could have been present, perhaps to make sure the trap was effective and/or to stand across the abyss and witness the death as it took place.
Randall White's death left him the least mutilated of all his former colleagues. He was killed by a single bullet hitting him so precisely between the eyes that his wire-frame glasses were severed in two without breaking either lens. The shot was fired just moments after noon, as White, on his way to lunch, walked out the double glass doors at the front of Twin Cities Savings And Loan, the bank he managed. The sound of the rifle and the sight of the body falling caused an immediate panic. The bank, located on Yuba City's busiest street (see map), adjacent to Sears and Roebuck, is generally crowded at lunch time. There were at least four people within a few feet of White when he was shot. Two reported that they thought the sound of the rifle came from above them and across the street, information difficult to verify because there was disagreement among the witnesses as to whether White was looking up at the moment he was killed or looking straight ahead, so the angle of entry of the bullet was in dispute. One witness, Laura Talbot, an employee of the bank, stated her belief that White looked up suddenly a few moments before the shot, as if he noticed his assailant, but it was generally felt that she may have been caught up in the terror of the event and not able to piece together events in quite proper order. It is a frequent occurrence for witnesses to quickly moving events to recount them slightly out of order, an impression of simultaneity a natural result of tension and excitement. This was the police explanation for Miss Talbot seeing White's head jerk up, that it was caused by the bullet and didn't precede his being hit.
Because the bank where White was killed is only a short distance from the scene of George Dryden's death-by-napalm almost an hour earlier (see the map again), police were on the scene less than two minutes after the shot was fired. They quickly sealed off the block and began an immediate search of the area. The buildings across the street, all housing small businesses and shops, reported no unusual visitors, and a check of the building rooftops revealed nothing.
Later that evening, on the roof of the bank itself, an M1 military rifle was discovered by a night security guard. How the rifle wound up on the same side of the street as the killing, behind the front entrance where White was shot head-on, has not been answered yet. No search had been made of any roof on that side of the street, except by helicopter surveillance, as no weapon was expected over there. A ballistics test did verify the gun as the murder weapon. The police were reported as uncertain why the gun had been abandoned at all, and how the rifleman was able to leave it there and depart the scene.
All that was certain was that Randall White wound up on the sidewalk of Clark Street with a red hole where the bridge of his nose used to be.
The most glaring similarity between all five of the murders is, of course, the resemblance to deaths in combat. Beyond the armaments of killing required - flamethrowers, planes, hand grenades, military rifles and the rest - the precision of the plan suggests nothing less daring than a surprise attack by guerilla forces. I say "forces" rather than a single individual because I have not been able to imagine any way one person could have managed the sheer complexity of the plan, especially since so elaborate an arsenal was involved. The police do believe that the logistics are at least possible for a "single individual", as they put it, to have been at all five locations, but even Walter Cronkite, as you may recall, raised those famous eyebrows in skepticism when he read the one killer theory on the air. Still, the police were only being thorough and rational, since figuring one guy did it was no less nutty than any alternate theories, as I said earlier myself.
There has been little explanation as to the killers' (or killer's) ability to know where each of his victims would be within that hour. Only Randall White, the bank manager, could be described as doing something at the moment of his death which was part of a predictable routine - he did go to lunch about the same time every day, usually leaving through that door. The others, while mostly involved in routine business, were not in locations that could be counted on with absolute certainty, though the locations in each case were precisely appropriate to the manner of death. Were Willis Neville, for instance, not outside on his own lot watching equipment being unloaded, the airplane would have had little to shoot at. In like manner, each of the other deaths depended upon either knowing the victim would be there (so the killer could be waiting with the proper equipment) or being able to predict his behavior sufficiently to suit the nature of the killing. The five murders, after all, went off without any apparent complications. Every intended victim was dispatched without anyone being apprehended at the scene or sighted running away afterwards. Witnesses had no physical descriptions of any possible perpetrator, and few tangible leads resulted from their reports.
If events like these were to happen in a large city, each single act would certainly be sufficiently unusual to attract a good deal of immediate attention from bystanders and police. That it actually occurred in a town of 18,000, with one main street and not a lot of places for killers to hide or lose themselves in crowds, is close to impossible. Believe me, you have to be here to realize how totally extraordinary a feat this is. As Yuba City is small enough to drive across in under ten minutes, and any sort of curious activity sticks out the way you'd expect it would in a town that size, the mechanical aspects of the enterprise are especially difficult to accept. How was it possible for someone in broad daylight to carry flamethrowing equipment up to a roof, deploy it, and carry it away after the deed is done? Where could the airplane have come from? I will be reporting on various theories about these aspects of the case, but the reader should have some appreciation for how truly unusual these circumstances are.
Another facet of the killings difficult to ignore is the unusually gruesome means of death. Apart from the military inspiration in the manner of death, the results were bloody beyond belief. You've seen how difficult it's been for me to describe the photographs, but it is hard to ignore the results of death in each case - bodies torn apart beyond recognition, one turned to a fine powder - every case a mutilation or total destruction of the most unstomacheable sort. The final death by a single rifle shot looks like an exclamation point at the end of an obscene sentence. I certainly have never heard of murders quite so ugly, simply on a physical level, and while I grant my experience in this area is as limited as the next person's, I can't even imagine worse Other crimes may have exceeded these in magnitude, but none in the apparent force of violence.
The local newspaper reports also speculate on other possible motives for the killings, as if the five's serving together on the Draft Board and the nature of their deaths are almost too staggeringly obvious to hold up under close scrutiny. I found this an intriguing angle, since I mentioned earlier wondering roughly the same thing. The subject hadn't come up in stories I had read before I came back. Finally, I think there's nothing behind this talk except the usual small-town rumor mongering. While all of them could conceivably have been linked in other activities, the coincidence would have been just too large. Also, because it is so small a town, those connections would surely surface under the most casual of investigations, and this has been anything but a casual investigation. I do have to say, though, that the paper's willingness to discuss this point in print surprised me, daring to suggest that there could have been motives for killing all five. The paper was unusually free of the "mad killer" and "senseless death" references which were liberally sprinkled through most other accounts. While nearly every local person interviewed in their pages sounded wild with rage, the paper's own reporting was unusually restrained.
The sources for much of the information in the newspaper stories was openly acknowledged to be law enforcement officials, especially the FBI. Their massive and near-immediate presence is often remarked upon in the articles. By 3:00 on the day of the killings, sixty-five agents had come from Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They apparently took rapid control of the release of official information, citing the need to pursue aggressively any guilty parties. They set up headquarters in the Sutter County Sheriff's office, as there was no longer an FBI field office in Yuba City, having closed about a year after the bombing. In fact, the only federal office in either of the Twin Cities is a District Branch Agency Office of the Department of Agriculture in Marysville, not counting the nearby presence of Beale Air Force Base. The Selective Service headquarters in Yuba City had been closed in 1973 shortly after the draft was ended, its records transferred to Sacramento.
The FBI also installed a laboratory team in what facilities existed at the Chemistry Department at Yuba College, bringing with them a good deal of their own equipment. The paper reported on the FBI saying they expected to require rapid lab analyses and didn't want to wait for tests to be done in San Francisco. Liaison was established with Military Police at Beale, in order to investigate whether any military equipment used in the killings had come from there. Announcements of these activities were made to the press. The FBI appeared anxious to demonstrate that they were in complete control and were treating the matter with utmost seriousness. In charge of the FBI investigation was Agent Edward O. Donlon, chief of the San Francisco office, known in the media previously for having been second-in-command of the Patty Hearst kidnapping investigation.
Besides the FBI and Air Force Military Police, local police and sheriff's department officers were fully involved. Everyone was out those first days checking leads or interviewing possible suspects, and it was reported that police vehicles and unmarked cars with federal license plates were a dominating presence all over town, a presence that townspeople were grateful for. Frequent comments in quoted interviews expressed admiration for how thorough and industrious the agents and police were being, and they agreed this was playing a major role in calming any sense of panic Yuba City was experiencing in the wake of the killings. Editorials two days running spoke glowingly of the apparent thoroughness of the investigation and echoed the FBI's expressed hope of a rapid conclusion to the search for the guilty parties.
There was divided opinion as to whether those responsible for the deaths were local or from "outside". The FBI spokesman, when asked, replied that all possibilities were being considered. The Mayor was quoted as being certain that no one from here could have conceived so horrible a crime. A local businessman speculated in a published letter that nobody from elsewhere would have sought Yuba City out to do this, or would have the knowledge to pull it off. Another letter-writer wondered why Yuba City had been cursed for the second time with a mass murder, as well as the tragedy of the bus deaths. It seemed time, he said, for these things to happen somewhere else.
Nationally known reporters, as many of us saw, came to cover the killings the first day, and the Independent-Herald treated them as being newsworthy themselves. There's an unintentionally funny story in the March 2nd edition about a failed attempt by the paper to secure an interview with Geraldo Rivera, and also a mention the next day of Roger Mudd telling the owner of Hal's Grubstake, a barbecue restaurant on Sutter Highway, how much he enjoyed his chicken and rib dinner. Between the police and reporters, a lot of people in town were being spoken to.
This summary of the newspaper stories is drifting a little too much from the subject of the murders themselves, which is what I was trying to cover most thoroughly in this section. Filling in "local color" is not what I'm after for now, so I shall try to avoid that temptation as much as I can. There was enough of that at the time. It's not off the subject, I don't feel, to mention the efforts that started immediately after the deaths to set up rewards for information leading to arrests. The Chamber of Commerce, the local post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the newspaper itself, and several national groups including the American Legion, all put up money that totalled $65,000 by the time everyone was heard from. A special phone number was set up for receiving reports, and anonymity to informers was assured. I found that rather amusing, as I could think of no way someone in town could receive that much money and expect it to be a secret. To do that, you'd never be able to cash the check or spend much of it in one place. About all you could do is move out. I think the reward money was just another way of establishing that this was serious business indeed for Yuba City, and every base was going to be covered.
I've already reported on the way in which the search for the killer led the FBI to Michael Willetts. What the Independent-Herald stories added to what I had known earlier was the reported nature of the physical evidence against him. Except for the question of his alibi and whether it held up, the primary evidence against him consisted of several items found at his home when agents conducted a search they proudly proclaimed was "exhaustive". The incriminating items were listed as follows:
l. Two pieces of oak lumber, 1/2" in diameter, each 3 feet 2 inches in length, found wrapped in a piece of canvas on the garage floor.
2. A hunting knife.
3. A file containing correspondence between Willetts and the Selective Service office in Yuba City. The file was found opened on a desk in the bedroom.
4. Sixteen books found on bookshelves which relate to the Vietnam War, the Army, or American history during the Sixties and Seventies.
5. A poster from the movie "The Green Berets".
The FBI's interest in the last three items is pretty apparent; the first two require explanation. It was believed that the pieces of wood were similar in length and material to the poles used in the booby trap for Mitchell Ferguson, and the hunting knife could have been used to whittle the poles to their deadly points. The two together, if it were true that the wood were the same, would suggest that Michael Willetts could have prepared the death weapons for one of the murders. At the time of his arrest, that was the extent of the evidence against him. He was charged solely with the Ferguson murder, and now, a month later, that is still the only official charge against him. I assume that the FBI announced the evidence found linking Willetts to the crime because they wanted to show that they indeed had made substantial progress, but it's hard to tell why so far there have been no further charges and no more information supplied as to possible additional evidence. Whether they have more and aren't telling, or announced what they had in order to make it look like there was more to the case than that, I really can't say for sure. They have also not indicated in any of their further press conferences whether they suspect Willetts acted alone or with others. This holding pattern for nearly a month, following the considerable hoopla surrounding the announcement of Willetts' arrest, has been interpreted as fairly unusual, but as Agent-in-charge Donlon said at the press conference last week, this case is so unusual in itself, an ordinary investigative process could not be anticipated.
Despite all the new information that the Independent-Herald stories provided, the biggest questions are still there, as difficult to answer as before. I still couldn't say whether Michael Willetts was involved, though I certainly admit to feeling he was. How these terrible murders were set up and so skillfully committed becomes even more mysterious the more one learns of the particulars. Who they happened is surely a major question - it still doesn't seem sufficient to me to say that somebody (or several people) wanted revenge against this particular Draft Board. There must be more to it. The largest question for me, I'd have to admit, is why Michael Willetts has involved me with this mess, what it is I'm doing here. For now, I have to say I'm not complaining one bit about being brought back here. To say the least, this is a damned curious case. I only hope I can find some things out, though what it is I'm looking for isn't near as clear as it ought to be.