First of all, I’d like to thank the Minnesota Community Corrections Association for a great conference. I presented in a room meant to hold 40 at the St. Cloud Convention Center, and we squeezed 60 in. Professionals stayed for my presentation, even though it meant some had to sit on the floor. I am so thankful to be received so well. Winter in Minnesota can be beautiful. I took these pictures on 2/22/2018. Randall Woodfield’s life is best characterized by self-centeredness and a lack of accountability. The I-5 killer has recently been suspected of the homicide of University of Minnesota student Mary Schlais on February 15, 1974. Mary was hitchhiking on Highway 94 to an arts convention in Chicago. Her body was discovered in Springbrook township in Wisconsin. Investigators have determined Woodfield was traveling from Portland to Green Bay at the time of Mary’s murder. He fits the same description that a witness gave of the man who dumped the body. Mary also fits his prototype of Woodfield’s victims — all of his victims were young and petite, white women. In high school, Randall Woodfield was caught standing on a bridge and exposing himself to females. His parents sent him to a therapist, who, by all accounts, were not overly concerned by a teenager exploring his sexuality. Newport High’s coaches knew about the situation but, wanting to protect their star, chalked it up to an adolescent’s lapse in impulse control. Police say that when Woodfield turned 18, his juvenile record was expunged. At college in Portland State University in Oregon, he was described “as a little strange.” As a player, the biggest concern was his unwillingness to go over the middle to catch passes. He didn’t like getting hit. I would like to point out that even though charges weren’t coming forth, I don’t believe his sex crimes stopped. A former PSU teammate stated, “You just had a bad feeling about the guy, like there was something underneath his mask.” Says Carey, Woodfield’s quarterback, “I was surprised when some of this stuff started coming down, but on reflection, I thought, that does sort of add up.” Randall was drafted by the Packers, but cut. Their explanation was they were going to focus on the run game. The Wisconsin police suggested he was cut after numerous reports of indecent exposure began to emerge. (Randall was never formally charged.) Woodfield remained in Wisconsin, settling an hour and a half west in Oshkosh, where he played for the semipro Manitowoc Chiefs and moonlighted as a press-brake operator. (Ironically, Manitowoc is the setting for the acclaimed 2015 Netflix documentary Making a Murderer.) While he would have preferred to spend his Sundays at Lambeau, Woodfield felt that playing on Saturdays nearby for the Chiefs, the Packers execs might notice him and reconsider their decision. Teammates from that stop recall Woodfield as a “smooth operator,” a “ladies man” and a bit strange. Fred Auclair, a teammate and roommate, recalls Woodfield bringing home a trinket he had acquired at a local Christian bookstore. “How much was that?” Auclair inquired. “Well,” said Woodfield, “it wasn’t really for sale, so I stole it.” Woodfield, adds Auclair, “was on the phone all the time, telling tall tales. He had a woman in every port, it seemed.” After the season, though, Woodfield was dropped by the Chiefs. No reason was given publicly. There were murmurs, however, of off-field concerns. Woodfield was involved in at least 10 cases of indecent exposure across the state (but never charged). So despite Woodfield’s history, at this point he has no sex crimes on his record, which means no accountability and no treatment efforts. By multiple accounts, Randall Woodfield was devastated by being cut by the Packers. Woodfield seemed to know there would be no more invitations from other teams. With his ambitions of being a pro football player ended, he drove back to the West Coast. In early 1975, Portland police were vexed by a series of attacks on women, carried out by a man—invariably described as athletically built and handsome—armed with a knife. After demanding oral sex he would take a woman’s purse or wallet and run off. On March 5, detectives set up a sting operation. An undercover female officer walked leisurely through a park, and a man wielding a paring knife darted out from behind some bushes demanding money. Officers converged and arrested Randall Woodfield. Charged with robbery, Woodfield gave an extensive interview to police. He admitted to some impulse-control issues and some “sexual problems.” And he confessed to one vice: He’d taken steroids to augment his physique. Maybe, he speculated, that changed his sex drive. “There was a conventional wisdom back in the day that someone who was an exposer or a Peeping Tom wouldn’t elevate to more serious crimes,” says Paul Weatheroy, a longtime Portland cold case detective. “We’ve learned that nothing’s further from the truth.” Woodfield cruised around Portland in a gold 1974 “Champagne Edition” Volkswagen Beetle and took unmistakable pride in his physique. He was especially fond of sending naked photos of himself to women. In late ’79, Woodfield was photographed in a state of undress, his abundant muscles abundantly oiled. He mailed the image to Playgirl for consideration. The following May, he received a letter back: “Congratulations! You have been selected for possible publication in Playgirl’s Guy Next Door feature.” On Oct. 11, 1980, Cherie Ayers, an attractive 29-year-old, was found raped, stabbed and bludgeoned to death in her Portland apartment. According to the coroner, she died from blunt-force trauma and knife wounds to her neck. Ayers and Woodfield were former classmates at Newport High, who had reconnected at their 10 year reunion. This is his earliest–verified murder. He had known Cherie Ayers since childhood. When homicide detectives questioned Woodfield, they found his answers “evasive” and “deceptive,” But he declined to take a polygraph. In a time predating reliable DNA testing, there was no other physical evidence. Seven weeks later, Darcey Fix, 22, and Doug Altig, 24, were shot to death, execution-style and with a .32 revolver, in Fix’s Portland home. Again Woodfield had a connection to the murdered woman: One of his closest friends—a teammate from PSU’s track team—had dated Fix. Again Woodfield was questioned, but police had nothing concrete linking him to the murders. (New DNA testing has implicated Woodfield in the murders.) Between 1980 and 1981, Woodfield committed multiple murders in cities along the I-5 corridor in Washington, Oregon, and California. On Dec. 9, 1980, a man wearing a fake beard held up a gas station in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland. Four nights later, in Eugene, Oregon, a man wearing a fake beard and what looked like athletic tape on his nose raided an ice cream parlor. The next night, a drive-in restaurant in nearby Albany, Oregon, was robbed by a bearded man. A week after that, in Seattle, a gunman matching the same description pinned down a 25-year-old waitress inside a restroom and sexually assaulted her. Four weeks later, Shari Hull, age 20, and Lisa Garcia, age 20, were sexually assaulted and shot in central Oregon. Word began spreading that an “I-5 Bandit” was marauding up and down the northern half of Interstate 5, a ribbon running parallel to the Pacific for the 1400 miles between the Mexican and Canadian borders. All of the crimes occurred within two miles of an interstate exit. On Feb. 3, 1981, Donna Eckard, 37, and her 14-year-old daughter, Jannell Jarvis, were found dead in their home in Mountain Gate, Calif., just off I-5. Each had been shot multiple times in the head. Lab tests would later reveal that the girl had been sodomized. Earlier that same day, an 18-year-old waitress was kidnapped and raped after a holdup 15 miles to the south, in Redding. The next day, a similar crime was reported 100 miles up I-5 in Yreka, Calif. By then, word of the I-5 Bandit had amplified to the point that women were being warned to exercise caution. On Valentine’s Day 1981, Candee Wilson implored her 18-year-old daughter, Julie Reitz, to “be careful—there’s a dangerous person out there.” Later that night, Julie was shot and killed at their home in Beaverton, Oregon. She had known Woodfield previously. In his job as a bouncer he had overlooked her fake ID and let her into a bar. (New DNA evidence implicates Randall Woodfield.) From one act to the next, the descriptions were remarkably similar: An athletic man, armed with a silver .32 revolver and wearing tape over his nose, abducted a woman, committed a sexual act and then shot her execution-style. The I-5 killer’s downfall came swiftly and without much drama. A persistent detective, Dave Kominek, led the investigation. He worked in the sheriff’s office of Marion County, Ore., where Hull had been murdered, and he had his suspect pegged early on. Kominek knew Woodfield was acquainted with multiple victims. Woodfield knew his way around the I-5 corridor, and he matched the physical description provided by multiple witnesses. What’s more, Marion County detectives put together a pay-phone call log that showed Woodfield using calling cards within a few miles of the murders. Woodfield was arrested in March 1981. After Lisa Garcia picked Woodfield’s photo out of a lineup, police interrogated him on March 5, 1981. They searched his residence—a room he had been renting from an unsuspecting family in Springfield, Oregon, and found telling evidence: the same brand of tape that had been used to bind victims and a .32 bullet in Woodfield’s racquetball bag. Four days later, police charged him with Hull’s murder, Garcia’s attempted murder and two counts of sodomy. Woodfield, employing a public defender, entered a plea of not guilty. By March 16, indictments were rolling in from various jurisdictions in Washington and Oregon, including multiple counts of murder, rape, sodomy, attempted kidnapping, armed robbery and possession of firearms by an ex-convict. When Woodfield’s trial for the incident with Hull and Garcia began in the summer of 1981, it marked the first murder trial for an earnest, fledgling Marion County prosecutor named Chris Van Dyke (whose famous father, Dick, had recently finished up a run on The Carol Burnett Show). At the time, the prosecutor characterized Woodfield as “an arrogant, cold, unemotional individual . . . probably the coldest, most detached defendant I’ve ever seen.” By his own reckoning, Van Dyke had “armloads of evidence, overwhelming evidence.” Bizarrely, Woodfield admitted in court to having owned a .32 pistol but said that when he’d learned that as a parolee it was a violation to own a firearm, he threw the gun into a river. Lisa Garcia, meanwhile, was the key witness, recalling the horrific night at the office building five months earlier. She maintained that the man she faced in the courtroom was the same man who, she alleged, shot her and killed her coworker. It took the jury 31⁄2 hours to reach its verdict. On June 26, 1981, Randall Woodfield was convicted on all counts. With no death penalty option in Oregon, Woodfield, then 30, was sentenced to a prison term of life, plus 90 years. That December, 35 more years were added to his sentence when a jury in Benton County, Oregon, convicted him of sodomy and weapons charges tied to another attack in a restaurant bathroom. District attorneys up and down the I-5 corridor had a decision to make. Even if they could secure a conviction, what would be the point? Woodfield was already almost certain to die in prison. Additional trials would drain their offices of time and resources and would put the victims’ families through an excruciating ordeal. Even in California—where Woodfield was accused of killing a mother and her daughter, and where the death penalty would have been an option—the local prosecutor eventually decided against pursuing Woodfield. Still, the list of his victims has grown. In 2012, detectives in the Portland Police Bureau’s cold case unit, benefiting from new magnetic bead technology at the Oregon state police crime lab, announced they had matched Woodfield’s DNA to evidence from five victims: Fix, Jarvis, Eckard, Altig, and Reitz. In July 2005, on account of similar DNA matches, the former Portland lieutenant, Paul Weatheroy, and cold case supervisor, interrogated Woodfield about his connection to the unsolved crimes. “I remember that his hair was perfect, feathered and combed; he had a perfectly even tan, nails manicured,” says Weatheroy. “He was very charismatic, which makes sense because he would lure victims and get them to let their guard down.” Woodfield, though, confessed to nothing. Ultimately, as in other jurisdictions, authorities in Portland’s Multnomah County decided not to prosecute the murders of Altig, Ayers and Fix. They did, however, hold a press conference to make clear: In the unlikely event that Woodfield was ever granted a parole hearing, they would pursue these additional indictments. Jim Lawrence, another detective in Portland’s cold case unit was struck most by Woodfield’s lack of accountability or remorse—even in the face of indisputable evidence. “If Woodfield were, somehow, to be paroled tomorrow? “He would re-offend, there’s no doubt about it,” says Lawrence. “Even to this day, he is still a stone-cold killer.” Randall Woodfield was 30 years old when he was arrested-- a terrible person, who should have been in the system far sooner. He is now 67. Thirty-eight years after his conviction, he sits in Oregon State Penitentiary, nestled among Douglas firs and the Cascades, located in Salem, barely a mile from I-5. What disturbs me the most is that people spoke up for him to get him in the NFL, and there is no evidence he was ever a decent person. He had sex offenses as a juvenile and an adult, that he never received charges for. He raped and killed frequently as an adult, finally being incarcerated at age 30. The following is a list of Woodfield's confirmed victims: Woodfield is also estimated to have committed at least 60 unsolved rapes. 1980
1981
Quotes: A person who has never gone to school steals from a freight car; but with a university education, you can steal the whole railroad. Theodore Roosevelt When I dance, people think I’m looking for my keys. Ray Romano People who dance are considered crazy be people who can’t hear. George Carlin All my life I thought air was free, until I bought a bag of chips. Thanks for listening, Frank Rod Stewart and The Faces played the best blues music I still have ever heard back in the 1970’s. My brothers know the argument, as I made them listen to it (at least the rock tunes) when they were growing up. Here is Rod singing a song he wrote back in that era, “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” with Aimee Belle. Like most Stewart concerts, the audience takes over the chorus for part of the song. Aimee sings it better, but I thank Stewart for bringing it to us.
2 Comments
Karla Hill-Kaiser
2/27/2018 08:21:08 am
I was not surprised to hear you are a published author! I look forward to reading your book and I enjoy following your feeds! Congratulations!
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2/27/2018 09:26:19 am
Karla,
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AuthorFrank F. Weber is a forensic psychologist specializing in homicide and sexual and physical assault cases. He uses his unique understanding of how predator’s think, knowledge of victim trauma, actual court cases, and passion for writing true crime thrillers. His Award Winning books include "Murder Book" (2017) "The I-94 Murders" (2018) "Last Call" (2019) and "Lying Close" (September 2020). Archives
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