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

already, and he made me help him kill Frannie.”
    It was a weird confession, but Stolle had just enough of the details and times right to be believable. Still, Wells and Monroe wondered if there really was a Rudy Snell, or if Stolle was making him up to take the blame off himself.
    Patty and Beverly had been in Wenatchee on September 25, so why would they have retraced their steps 300 miles back to Hood River, Oregon? They’d almost reached Chelan on Friday, but Stolle was telling the detectives that he had met them way back in Oregon on the 27th. It just didn’t make sense.
    They were sure, however, that he had been at the crime scene in the tumbledown shack. He knew too much not to have been there. His work boots closely matched a blurred print they had found in the sand outside the shack and cast into a moulage, but the edges weren’t sharp enough to make it a positive match.
    The investigators suspected that Stolle was probably “confabulating”—taking things that were true and mixing them up with some other time in his life or in his imagination. At any rate, they needed to get him back into the U.S. and to Chelan County to figure out what part he really had played in the death of the two young women. Ex-tradition proceedings began.
    Bill Patterson’s team of detectives found that Jack Stolle was, indeed, familiar with the area where the girls had been found. He had worked for a family named Minelli who owned a farm near Chelan. They had a son named Maneto, but he was accounted for. Stolle had simply taken his name as an alias.
    The Minellis said that Stolle and his uncle had come to work for them four years earlier. He had been a good worker, and they hired him again the next summer. “He worked until late August,” Nick Minelli said, “and he said he had to go into town to see to some legal papers. And he was gone for a whole month! The next time we heard from him, he was calling from Idaho. He needed eighteen dollars for bus fare to get back to Chelan. We sent it to him.”
    “Where did he say he’d been?” Tillman Wells asked.
    “He didn’t talk much about that. Later, we found out he’d spent twenty-eight days in jail in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He never did say what for.”
    The Minellis were a very forgiving family and they hired Stolle again. He’d then worked until November 1972.
    “So the next time we heard from him was in February 1973, and he was calling from Boise, Idaho. He said he’d been sentenced to twenty years in prison for forgery. He wrote to us from prison because he wanted to apologize to us for stealing one of our radios.”
    “You ever hear from him again?”
    “Three years later—in July, this year. He wanted to come back and work for us, but we’d had enough. We turned him down—and that’s the last we heard from him.”
    So Stolle had known the area between Wenatchee and Chelan very well, and he’d been there as recently as late July. One sad discovery indicated that he may have been very close around the time Beverly Johnson and Patty Weidner were murdered. Silas, the missing red setter mix, was finally found dead. Maybe Stolle had taken the dog with him when he left the dead girls, or maybe the frightened animal had followed the only human alive out from the desolate hills. Railroad workers found the remains of the dog on the railroad tracks near Stayman Flats, very close to the Minelli farm. Although, weeks later, there was little left of the dog’s body, the detectives were able to identify it by its hair and scraps of the red bandanna, which had the same print as the one Charlie wore.
    Detective Chief Bill Patterson called the Hood River, Oregon, Police Department to see if there might really be a man named Rudy Snell. To Patterson’s surprise, Snell turned out to be an actual person. A Hood River investigator located him and reported back that Snell knew Jack Stolle and had worked in the orchards in Hood River— not in Chelan—with Jack Stolle.
    When