Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers Read Online Free PDF Page A

it was 1975 and DNA matches were unheard of—still something out of science fiction.
     
    But just when the case appeared to have reached a brick wall, information came from an unexpected source. On October 7, Detective Jerry Monroe took a phone call from Constable Keith Johnson of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Johnson said his department had a man in custody who had been talking about murdering two girls near Wenatchee.
    “You have anything like that down there?”
    “Yeah,” Monroe said. “We sure do. What’s he saying?”
    “The guy first said his name was Maneto Minelli*—but he’s actually Jack Stolle. We have him on forgery and possession of stolen property charges. He says he and a friend from Albany, Oregon, killed two girls by cutting their throats….”
    Monroe signaled to Bill Patterson to pick up a phone.
    “We’ve got him up here,” Johnson said, “because he tried to open up a bank account with checks stolen from a man in Vancouver, Washington. Then he started talking about killing some girls near Chelan. He gave us four different names and he claims to be the son of some family living in Chelan.”
    “Don’t let him loose,” Patterson said. “We’re going to have men on the road up there in about five minutes.”
    “Don’t worry. We’ll keep him right here for you.”
    Detectives Tillman Wells and Jerry Monroe drove to Calgary the next day, and they were led to an interview room where Jack Lee Stolle, 34, waited. Stolle had a long “rap sheet” for arrests in Washington, Oregon, and California, but he didn’t look like a hardened criminal. He was a slight blond man with rather feminine features and a “cookie duster” moustache.
    Stolle’s recollection of meeting Beverly Johnson and Patty Weidner warred with what the Chelan investigators already knew.
    “Me and this guy I know—Rudy Snell*—met these gals near Portland and we drove them west to Hood River, Oregon. The four of us spent the night together, but when Rudy and me woke up, they were gone and so was fifteen hundred dollars in cash that belonged to us.”
    It was possible, Wells and Monroe knew, that there was some truth in Stolle’s story. The victims had been in The Dalles, which was 15 miles east of Hood River. But that was where they got a ride with the Vancouver man who drove them all the way to Blewett Pass. Wells and Monroe didn’t say anything, but let Stolle keep talking.
    “We decided to go and look for them and get our money back. We crossed the Columbia at Biggs Junction and drove into Washington. And we saw them again at a rest stop, where they were trying to hitch a ride. It was somewhere between Yakima and Ellensburg. We picked them up again.”
    “What day was this?” Wells asked.
    “Lemme see. That was the twenty-eighth. We all smoked pot, drank beer and wine. We were in Wenatchee and then we went to this tavern in Entiat.”
    Stolle had wound his story around so that he was only about 30 miles from the homicide scene, even though the first part of his statement seemed to be a patent lie. The victims had found a ride in The Dalles, but not with him—or Snell.
    “What were their names—these girls you met?”
    “Maude and Frannie.”
    The wrong names. Wells and Monroe exchanged glances, but they didn’t comment. The girls from Lincoln City might have deliberately given strangers made-up names. “So, what did you do when the tavern closed?”
    “It was Rudy who thought of it. He whispered to me that we should ‘off’ the girls because they stole all that money from us. Me, I thought he was only kidding.”
    Jack Stolle said they had driven north on 97 and found a spot near Chelan where they decided to camp out. They had all spread out their sleeping bags as Rudy got angrier and angrier about being ripped off. “He was really mad at Maude and Frannie,” Stolle remembered.
    “Me, I was so stoned on weed and booze that he was already slashing them before I knew what happened. One girl was dead