Im Never Gonna Commit Suicide Again I Almost Killed Myself Vine

The I-5 Killer

With the 428th option in the 1974 NFL typhoon, the Green Bay Packers selected. . . ane of the most trigger-happy killers in U.S. history. No ane is saying football led Randall Woodfield down his dark path—merely did information technology perhaps deter him from it, at least for a while?

BY L. JON WERTHEIM

Even equally crime scenes go, this i was sensationally gruesome. Shari Hull, age xx, lay splayed naked on the flooring, blood pooling virtually her matted hair, brain affair seeping from her skull and spackling the rug. She was surrounded by her discarded clothes. Gradually her moans and her deep, labored animate diminished until her body was drained of life.

Some time around nine o'clock on the evening of Jan. 18, 1981, Hull had been nearing the end of her Lord's day-night shift, cleaning the TransAmerica role building in the central Oregon town of Keizer. She was preparing to get out when she was grabbed by a man who'd somehow managed to enter the building. He was strikingly handsome, maybe half-dozen feet tall, blessed with a torrent of thick, curly brownish hair and optics to match. He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Corralling Hull with ane hand and property a gun in the other, he walked her downwards a hall. Shortly he saw another cleaner, 20-year-old Lisa Garcia.

The assaulter took both women into a dorsum room and ordered them to the floor. After sexually assaulting them, he shot them each in the dorsum of the caput. This, it would subsequently be revealed, was generally in keeping with his M.O.: some sexual act followed past a .32 bullet to the rear of the skull. Only while Hull died of her gunshot wounds, Garcia survived by feigning her death, lying motionless on the floor with slugs lodged in the back of her skull. Equally soon as her attacker left, she called the police. En route, one officer noticed a thickly congenital man fitting the assailant's description standing at an intersection—but this was more than than a mile from the attack; information technology would have taken a hell of an athlete to make information technology that far so quickly on human foot. So the policeman drove on.

Composite witness sketches, circa 1980 (Robert Beck)

For weeks afterward Garcia worked with detectives to crack the case. Lilliputian did she know, this attack was one of many allegedly carried out by the same human; she was helping track one of the most notorious serial murderers in U.S. history. Nicknamed the I-5 Killer, he had threaded a trail of almost unspeakable brutality up and down the upper left corner of America, killing in California, Oregon and possibly Washington. His orgy of violence started in the mid-1970s; by the time he'd gotten to Hull and Garcia, he'd already clustered a sizable necrology. Many more than murders would follow.

Based on DNA evidence and advancing criminal offense lab techniques, the I-5 Killer'south torso count has climbed through the years. Cold case detectives take conservatively put that number at a dozen, though a few journalists and armchair detectives believe he's responsible for every bit many every bit 44 deaths. And that doesn't include a string of more than 100 other crimes, mostly robberies and rapes, that bear his hallmarks.

The I-5 Killer's victims were mostly from the same subset: petite, Caucasian women in their teens or 20s. Sometimes they had declined his sexual advances and the killings seemed to be acts of retribution. Other times he didn't know his victims at all. Just he had his way with them and so snuffed out their lives because he could.

And and then there's this small particular, which Garcia shared with detectives and which surfaced again and again across the I-5 Killer'due south crimes: He wore what appeared to be a strip of athletic tape over the bridge of his nose, in the manner of a football player at the time. Which stood to reason. Because not long before turning into one of America'south most depraved and remorseless serial killers, Randall Woodfield had been drafted past the Green Bay Packers.

The new coach had to have been torn. He wanted to pump up the Portland State plan he had merely taken over, and placing a guy in the NFL would go a long manner toward that. Merely he also knew that if he oversold a actor, he'd lose credibility. So on that fall day in 1973, equally Ron Stratten sat in the bleachers of Multnomah Stadium—at present Providence Park, home to MLS'due south Timbers—he chose his words carefully.

An NFL scout had come up to see Randall Woodfield, the Vikings' leading receiver. He had been impressed with Woodfield'due south hands and athleticism. But when he asked Stratten for further cess, the coach wavered. "Randy runs decent routes," Stratten said with enthusiasm, "and he'southward proficient to the outside." He spoke positively nigh the speed that enabled Woodfield to run high hurdles for the school'southward track team. But he also mentioned Woodfield's glaring deficiency: He didn't like getting hitting. Not by the safe. Not by the linebacker. Not by anyone.

The I-5 Killer, recalled past his one-time teammates and coaches

"He was the nicest, most gentlemanly kid I always knew. Years later on, a reporter from a San Francisco newspaper called me and asked, 'Practise you know a Randall Woodfield? Did y'all know he's the I-5 killer?' I said, 'That tin't be.Probably the wrong Randall Woodfield.'"

—Gary Hamblet

PSU receivers coach from 1972 to '73

When Stratten was named Portland Country's head coach, a yr before, it had marked a rarity. Though scarcely best-selling at the time, he was just the 2d African-American in the modern era to agree that position at a predominantly white school. Stratten was merely 29, less than a decade removed from playing at Oregon. And as a quondam linebacker, he was quick to discover receivers who resisted cutting across the middle of the field. "It's a point of graphic symbol," Stratten told the scout. "Woodfield doesn't accept that."

To Stratten, this softness, this dislike of confrontation, was in keeping with Woodfield'southward genial personality. Information technology wasn't just that Woodfield was, in the platitude, coachable. Perchance more than whatsoever other actor on the team, he seemed to seek out the staff for companionship and counsel. "He was e'er bopping by our offices before heading to grade," recalls Stratten. "It was similar he but wanted to hang out with us."

Teammates' and coaches' memories of Woodfield vary wildly. Some think him every bit unassuming and serenity, if a bit odd. "He really didn't fit in," says Anthony Stoudamire, who was a freshman quarterback at PSU in 1973. "He'd brand out-of-the-blue, off-the-wall statements." Stoudamire's brother, Charles (both are uncles of 1995–96 NBA Rookie of the Year Damon Stoudamire), was a halfback on that team; he recalls Woodfield for his vanity. "[Randall] was always preparation himself. That even carried over to the way he played. He seemed like he was more interested in looking cute out at that place than getting the job done." Truthful as that may have been, the pride Woodfield took in his appearance was justified. He was half-dozen feet, with negligible body fat, well-defined muscles and a sly smile framed by what today might be chosen a pornstache. To trade in understatement, he did not struggle to find female companionship. "He was a suave, sophisticated fella," says Jon Carey, a PSU quarterback in '72. "Confident in himself, but not to the signal of being cocky."

Woodfield may have been all-time known at PSU, though, for his devotion to the Campus Crusade for Christ and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. A former teammate who spoke on the condition of anonymity recalls, "It seemed existent important to him that he come up across as someone who would practise the right thing—nearly like it was keeping him together."

Armed with the resource—and facing the public relations pressures—of a modern-24-hour interval NFL squad, the Packers would have conducted a detailed background check on Woodfield. And the proverbial ruddy flags would accept flapped wildly. Raised generally in the picturesque Oregon mid-coast town of Otter Rock, Woodfield grew up in a fiercely middle-class home. His male parent had a steady managerial job at the phone visitor Pacific Northwest Bell; his mother was a homemaker. Woodfield had two older sisters, who would babysit him. The family unit was well-known and well-regarded in the community. Outwardly, Woodfield appeared to exist the portrait of normal. Only in loftier school he was caught standing on a bridge and exposing himself to females. His parents sent him to a therapist, who, past all accounts, was non overly concerned by a teenager'southward exploring his sexuality. According to law officials, Newport Loftier's coaches knew most the state of affairs but, wanting to protect their star, chalked it upwards to an adolescent'southward lapse in impulse control. Police force say that when Woodfield turned 18, his juvenile record was expunged.)

"He was a petty foreign—possibly stranger than nosotros thought. Y'all simply had a bad feeling about the guy, like at that place was something underneath his mask."

—PSU teammate who asked not to be named

Later, at Treasure Valley (Ore.) Community College, where Woodfield played football for one season before transferring, he was arrested for allegedly ransacking an ex-girlfriend's home. (With little evidence, he was institute not guilty in a jury trial.) At PSU, Woodfield was arrested multiple times for indecent exposure. (He was bedevilled twice.) Stratten, who didn't recruit Woodfield, says he didn't learn of those arrests until years subsequently. "If I had known," he says, "I would accept said something [to interested NFL teams] for certain."

As it was, having done lilliputian in the mode of intel, Dark-green Bay remained interested in Woodfield. In the offset round of the 1974 NFL draft the Packers selected Richmond running dorsum Barty Smith, who would go on to first 42 games in 7 seasons. The side by side twenty-four hours they used their 15th-round option on Dave Wannstedt, a natural-born leader who never played a down simply who went on to become an NFL head omnibus. Two rounds after, with the 428th selection, Green Bay took Woodfield.

Packers media guide (Taylor Ballantyne)

These may not accept been the dynastic Packers who won the starting time ii Super Bowls, in the 1960s, but this was still a celebrated franchise. Woodfield was offered a one-twelvemonth contract to serve as a "skilled football player" for $xvi,000. The deal came laden with bonuses: an extra $2,000 if he caught 25 passes that autumn, $3,000 if he caught xxx. "Hither's what you need to keep in mind" about those figures, says Bob Harlan, who as assistant GM handled the squad'due south contracts that yr (and whose son Kevin, now a prominent broadcaster, was a Packers ball boy back then): "When Bart Starr made $100,000, people thought he was overpaid."

Woodfield'due south contract also stipulated that he proceed himself in peak condition, avoid consorting with gamblers and wear a coat and necktie in public places. He signed near immediately. The coin enabled him to quit his job at a Portland-area Burger Chef. But beyond that, this was all validation. He was on the verge of playing in the NFL. "Everyone fabricated such a large thing when he was drafted," 1 of Woodfield's roommates told The Oregonian. "He put a lot of force per unit area on himself to make it big."

That April, Woodfield attended a minicamp in Scottsdale, Ariz., an innovation of Green Bay charabanc Dan Devine. As special teams motorbus Hank Kuhlmann explained beforehand in a letter to players, the minicamp would be "a get-acquainted catamenia then that in July we can all get-go working toward our common goal, 'The Championship.' " Afterward, Woodfield returned to Portland galvanized, impressed with the speed of the other players merely confident he would make the team.

Per the Packers' request, he spent the next months staying in shape and working on his pass catching. In June the team sent him a beginning-class plane ticket, along with instructions for an airport limo pickup that would take him to the team'due south training camp in De Pere, Wis. Woodfield declined, opting instead to drive out from Oregon. When he arrived, his bio in the Packers' media guide listed him at half-dozen feet, 170 pounds and assessed him as follows:

In July, Woodfield was among the rookies who competed confronting the Bears in a scrimmage at Lambeau Field. Writing in the Light-green Bay Press-Gazette, Cliff Christl, at present the Packers' team historian, sought out Woodfield for a quote. "I'm pretty excited," the immature wideout said. "I'grand only really thankful for the opportunity." Woodfield survived early on cuts and reported to friends in Portland that he was acquitting himself well, that he felt as if he belonged.

The Packers thought otherwise. They released Woodfield on Aug. 19, 1974, before their flavor began. Woodfield would later on debate—not unreasonably—that his prospects were hindered considering Green Bay was stressing a run game that season. Police would debate that the team had other reasons. (Packers officials declined to annotate for this story.)

Rather than return to Oregon, 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 printing-brake operator. (We pause to point out the irony: Manitowoc, the 24th-largest city in Wisconsin, would exist the setting for the acclaimed 2015 Netflix documentary Making a Murderer.) While he would accept preferred to spend his Sundays at Lambeau, Woodfield reckoned that, playing on Saturdays nearby for the Chiefs, maybe Packers execs would find him and reconsider their decision.

Teammates from that stop retrieve Woodfield as a "smooth operator," a "ladies man" and a bit strange. Fred Auclair, a teammate and roommate, recalls Woodfield bringing domicile a trinket he had acquired at a local Christian bookstore. "How much was that?" Auclair inquired. "Well," said Woodfield, "it wasn't actually for sale, so I stole it." Woodfield, adds Auclair, "was on the phone all the fourth dimension, telling tall tales. He had a woman in every port, it seemed."

As Woodfield had at Portland State, he ran precise routes and distinguished himself with speed in Manitowoc. In the 1974 Central States Football game League championship game he caught a pair of passes for 42 yards, though the Madison Mustangs crush the Chiefs 14–0. The Packers, meanwhile, went 6–8 and, as a team, averaged merely 13 completions per game.

"Information technology shocked me when he [went to jail]. If in that location were 100 guys on the team, he'd be the 99th guy I'd suspect to do something like that."

—Tim Temple

PSU secondary coach in 1973

After the season, though, Woodfield was dropped past the Chiefs. No reason was given publicly. At that place were murmurs, even so, that the team had off-field concerns. (The Chiefs, forth with their league, disbanded in 1976.) While there are no public arrest records for Woodfield in Wisconsin, a detective would later larn that Woodfield was involved in at least 10 cases of indecent exposure across the state. Equally one Wisconsin law enforcement officer recalls, years later, Woodfield "couldn't go along the matter in his pants."

By multiple accounts, Woodfield was devastated by being cut. "Deeply hurt," was the phrase The Oregonian would afterwards use. And, curiously, Woodfield acted as if he knew at that place would be no more invitations from other teams. With his ambitions of being a pro football game player killed off, he drove back to the West Coast. And and so the binge started.

It took some time before Randall Woodfield graduated to murder, simply the buildup was steady. Back in Portland, he drifted to the margins. He was three semesters short of completing his physical pedagogy caste at Portland State, merely he rejected suggestions that he return to school; instead he cycled from job to job, residence to residence, romance to romance. He was 24 and moving backward in life.

Woodfield would evidence up at Portland Country on occasion to work out with his old squad. By so, Stratten had been replaced by Mouse Davis, who would later motorcoach equally an assistant in the NFL and go known every bit the godfather of the run-and-shoot offense. "[Woodfield] seemed like a nice kid; he was a good athlete," Davis recalls today. "But one of the other players said, 'Coach, don't get too close with that guy. He'south strange.' That was the end of my human relationship with him."

Randall Woodfield (No. five) (Robert Brook)

In early 1975, Portland police were vexed by a series of attacks on women, carried out by a human—invariably described as athletically built and handsome—armed with a knife. After demanding oral sexual practice he would take a adult female's purse or wallet and run off. On March 5, detectives set a sting functioning. An surreptitious female officer walked leisurely through a park, and a man wielding a paring pocketknife darted out from behind some bushes enervating coin. Officers converged and arrested the assailant, who identified himself as one Randall Woodfield.

Charged with robbery, Woodfield gave an extensive interview to law. He claimed he didn't drink or fume and that he was committed to the Christian faith. 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. Perchance, he speculated, that charged his sexual activity bulldoze.

"There was a conventional wisdom dorsum in the day that someone who was an exposer or a Peeping Tom wouldn't elevate to more serious crimes," says Lieut. Paul Weatheroy, a longtime Portland common cold instance detective who retired from that task last year. "We've learned that zero's further from the truth."

Former PSU teammates threw Woodfield a party to celebrate his release from prison house, but some thought it strange when the guest of honour arrived 21⁄2 hours late to his own event. Woodfield also got out only in time to nourish his 10‑year loftier school reunion in Newport. At that place, he wore his muscles almost as a fashion argument and told stories virtually his time in the Packers' organization.

"I got to know him; he was a friend. . . . I was surprised when some of this stuff started coming downwardly, but on reflection, I thought:That does sort of add up."

—Jon Carey

PSU quarterback in 1972

Out of prison, he cutting a contradictory effigy. For all his failures—let go from bartending gigs, jettisoned by girlfriends—they inappreciably seemed to come at the expense of self-confidence. He cruised around Portland in a gilded 1974 "Champagne Edition" Volkswagen Beetle and took unmistakable pride in his physique. He was peculiarly addicted of sending naked photos of himself to women. In belatedly '79, Woodfield was photographed in a land of undress, his arable muscles abundantly oiled. He mailed the image to Playgirl for consideration. The following May, he received a letter back: "Congratulations! You take been selected for possible publication in Playgirl's Guy Next Door characteristic." Woodfield waited for his photograph shoot, and that's when police believe he began to murder.

On Oct. 11, 1980, Cherie Ayers, an bonny 29-yr-old, was found raped, stabbed and bludgeoned to decease in her Portland flat. Co-ordinate to the coroner, she died from blunt-forcefulness trauma and pocketknife wounds to her neck. Former classmates at Newport Loftier, Ayers and Woodfield had reconnected at the reunion and had then seen each other socially.

Letters from Randall Woodfield to Cherie Ayers (Robert Beck)

Immediately Woodfield was pegged equally a suspect, based mostly on his recent release from prison. When homicide detectives questioned Woodfield, they found his answers "evasive" and "deceptive." Merely he declined to take a polygraph. A blood test did not link Woodfield to the crime, nor did his semen friction match that found in the victim's trunk. In a time predating reliable Deoxyribonucleic acid testing, there was no other concrete bear witness.

Apparently emboldened, the one-man crime wave picked upwardly momentum. Seven weeks afterwards, Darcey Fix, 22, and Doug Altig, 24, were shot to expiry, execution-style and with a .32 revolver, in Fix's Portland home. Once 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, just police had nothing concrete linking him to the murders.

On Dec. 9, 1980, a man wearing a fake beard held up a gas station in Vancouver, Wash., only across the Columbia River from Portland. Four nights subsequently, in Eugene, Ore., a man wearing a fake bristles and a Ring-Aid (or what looked similar athletic tape) on his nose raided an ice cream parlor. The adjacent nighttime, a drive-in restaurant in nearby Albany, Ore., was robbed by a bearded homo. A calendar week later on that, in Seattle, a gunman matching the same description pinned downwards a 25-year-old waitress within a restroom and forced her to masturbate him. Hull and Garcia were sexually assaulted and shot in primal Oregon iv weeks later on.

Give-and-take began spreading that there was an "I-5 Bandit" marauding upward and down the northern one-half of Interstate 5, a ribbon running parallel to the Pacific for the 1,400 miles betwixt the Mexican and Canadian borders. All of the crimes occurred within two miles of an interstate exit.

The spree accelerated, each law-breaking more than twisted and horrific than the last. On Feb. iii, 1981, Donna Eckard, 37, and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Jannell Jarvis, were found expressionless in their home in Mount Gate, Calif., only off I-5. Each had been shot multiple times in the caput. Lab tests would after reveal that the daughter had been sodomized. Earlier that same twenty-four hour period, an 18-year-old waitress was kidnapped and raped later on a holdup 15 miles to the south, in Redding. The next day, a similar law-breaking was reported 100 miles upwards I-5 in Yreka, Calif.

Past then, word of the I-five Bandit had amplified to the bespeak that women were being warned to exercise caution. On Valentine's Day 1981, Candee Wilson implored her 18-year-old girl, Julie Reitz, to "be careful—there'south a unsafe person out there." Later that night, Julie was shot and killed at their home in Beaverton, Ore., non far from where the Nike campus now sits. She had known Woodfield previously. In his chore as a bouncer he had overlooked her faux ID and let her into a bar.

From one act to the adjacent, the descriptions were remarkably similar: An athletic human being, armed with a silver .32 revolver and wearing tape or a Band‑Aid over his nose, abducted a woman, committed a sexual human action and and then shot her execution-manner. Detectives targeted Woodfield every bit their suspect, convinced that the receiver who turned prissy running across the middle of the field had go an astonishingly brazen murderer.

Pick a country and yous probable can find a citizen who has killed ritualistically and repeatedly. Consider the phrase run amok, which derives from a Malay word translated loosely as "to assault with homicidal mania." Believing that amok was acquired by an evil spirit, Indonesian civilisation tolerated these tearing outbursts and dealt with the aftereffects with no ill will toward the aggressor. The underlying premise: The chapters to kill indiscriminately dwells in all of u.s.; near people just suppress the urge or avert the spirit.

Still, the series killer occupies a singular role in the bandage of Americana. Hither he—and the vast majority have been male—has been hyperbolized and fetishized, even romanticized. Serial killers are responsible for only a minor fraction of the murders committed in the U.S., only they are some of the most notorious figures in our history and culture. Says Sarah Weinman, who runs the newsletter The Crime Lady, "[Serial killing] is twisted fantasy that has roots in the broad-open up American mural, where it is all besides easy to hunt and kill without detection and with dispensation."

Information technology was in the 1970s that agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas of the FBI's behavioral scientific discipline unit coined and defined the term serial killer, distinguishing one from a mass murderer (who may kill many at once) or a spree killer (who lacks a so-chosen "cooling off" period between murders). Indeed, the '70s marked the crimson-stained elevation of serial killing in the U.Southward. In that era there were a number of factors working in the assailant'south favor, from lax gun laws to the popularity of psychedelic drugs to the sprawling interstate highway system to cheap gas. And from the dearth of surveillance applied science to the spotty coordination amongst law precincts, information technology may never have been easier to avert getting caught.

"He was a pretty tranquillity guy—not very talkative; kept to himself. I've got a squad photo and he's sitting right behind me. I would acceptnever idea he was capable of beingness [a killer]."

—Rick Risch

Manitowoc Chiefs defensive dorsum in 1974

Woodfield wasn't the only sociopath terrorizing the West Coast around that time. Ted Bundy's killing orgy in the Northwest is believed to accept begun in 1974, his first eight known victims slain in either Oregon or Washington. And roughly concurrent with the I-5 Killer, Gary Ridgway had begun committing ritualized murder in Seattle, more often than not targeting young women. It would have xx years before he was defenseless, only immediately he was known as the Green River Killer, a nod to the waterway where his first five known victims were found.

What accounts for our captivation—warped as it might be—with serial killers? Evolutionary biologists have pointed out that equally a species, we are hardwired to run abroad from predators in a way that we don't reflexively run away from, say, sunbathing or eating bacon or other potential causes of expiry. So the serial killer triggers fear and a visceral reaction rooted in the most bones homo nature.

Others cite the stirring exploration of the darkest corners of humanity. Serial killers may commit acts of unadulterated evil, but they are besides figures that generate at least a teensy measure of titillation, sometimes even affection. (Encounter: Lecter, Hannibal.) "In a perverse way, you lot sometimes end up rooting for these guys," says Skip Hollandsworth, a truthful crime author whose latest book, The Midnight Assassin, focuses on a serial of unsolved murders in 1880s Austin.

More than True Crime from SI

Hollandsworth fifty-fifty sees overlapping elements with football. "The reason nosotros love to lookout wide receivers is because they are and so elusive. They run a specially designed road, hoping to wriggle costless and catch a pass despite a defense stacked against them. Information technology's the same reason we are fascinated with series killers. They come up up with a specially designed killing route, carry out the kill and then make their escape, eluding the cops and criminal offence-scene technicians—only to do it all again after taking a breather."

And while we phone call serial killers monsters, often they are all likewise homo. There's something unsettling but also a little tantalizing in the capacity of everyday people—siblings, classmates, coworkers, teammates—to carry out such chilling acts. "He seemed similar such a normal guy" is the inevitable refrain from the shocked neighbor. This was a central theme for Ann Rule, a prominent true crime writer who in her best-selling book The Stranger Abreast Me portrays Ted Bundy every bit a handsome, well-spoken, good-looking law student . . . who happened to kill at to the lowest degree thirty women. Rule has conceded, "I can remember thinking that if I were younger and single, or if my daughters were older, [Bundy] would be almost the perfect man."

From her home base in the series killer hotbed of Seattle, Rule grew interested in the I-v case and published a book in 1984 almost Woodfield titled The I-5 Killer. A meticulously reported account—and an invaluable resources in this story—Rule's volume relied on public documents equally well every bit interviews with detectives, family members and the socio-path himself. She was clearly captivated by Woodfield's conventional upbringing, jock full-blooded and good looks. Fifty-fifty the breathless jacket synopsis asks how "a suspect who seemed [so] handsome and appealing [could] have committed such ugly crimes."

The I-5 Killer'due south downfall came swiftly and without much drama. A persistent detective, Dave Kominek, led the investigation. He worked in the sheriff's function of Marion County, Ore., where Hull had been murdered, and he had his doubtable pegged early on. Woodfield had already served a prison sentence for preying on women. He was acquainted with multiple victims. He certainly 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 inside a few miles of diverse murders. The irony was rich: The son of a Pacific Northwest Bong employee would be done in partly past phone records.

After Lisa Garcia picked Woodfield'due south 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, Ore.—and found telling show: the same brand of record that had been used to bind victims . . . a .32 bullet in Woodfield's racquetball bag. . . .

Spent ammo found in Woodfield's bag (Robert Beck)

4 days afterward, constabulary charged him with Hull's murder, Garcia's attempted murder and ii counts of sodomy. Woodfield, employing a public defender, entered a plea of not guilty. By March sixteen, 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. The obligatory Oregonian headline: friends 'utterly shocked' by arrest of woodfield. But that wasn't really the case. Equally 1 onetime PSU teammate puts it, "You just had a bad feeling well-nigh the guy, similar there was something underneath his mask." Says Carey, Woodfield'due south quarterback, "I was surprised when some of this stuff started coming downwardly, but on reflection, I thought, That does sort of add together upward."

When Woodfield's trial for the incident with Hull and Garcia began in the summer of 1981, information technology marked the first murder trial for an hostage, fledgling Marion Canton prosecutor named Chris Van Dyke (whose famous father, Dick, had recently finished upwards a run on The Carol Burnett Show). At the time, the prosecutor characterized the accused as "an arrogant, common cold, unemotional private . . . probably the coldest, almost detached accused I've ever seen." By his own reckoning, Van Dyke had "armloads of show, overwhelming prove." And Woodfield's defense was flimsy, predicated on mistaken identity. At i signal the accused'south lawyer went so far as to propose that Garcia's identification of Woodfield was influenced past a detective's hypnosis.

When Woodfield eventually took the stand, he spoke softly, with his artillery crossed, looking nothing like a star athlete or a handsome lothario. Here'south how Dominion put it: "Randy Woodfield had been touted in the media every bit a massively muscled professional athlete. The human being in person seemed strangely diminished, not a superman afterward all. . . . He looked, if anything, humbled—a predatory creature brought down and caged in mid-rampage." Bizarrely, he admitted in court to having endemic 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.

Randall Woodfield's mugshot from the Duniway Park sting in Portland, 1975 (Robert Beck)

Lisa Garcia, meanwhile, was the primal witness, recalling the horrific night at the office building 5 months earlier. She maintained that the man she faced in the court 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 selection in Oregon, Woodfield, and 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 Canton, Ore., convicted him of sodomy and weapons charges tied to some other set on in a eating house 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 signal? Woodfield was already almost sure to die in prison. Additional trials would drain their offices of time and resource and would put the victims' families through an excruciating ordeal. Fifty-fifty in California—where Woodfield was defendant of killing a mother and her girl, and where the expiry penalisation would take been an option—the local prosecutor somewhen decided against pursuing Woodfield.

Still, the list of his victims has grown. In 2012, detectives in the Portland Police force Bureau'due south common cold example 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 business relationship of similar DNA matches, Weatheroy, the former Portland lieutenant and cold case supervisor, interrogated Woodfield nearly his connection to the unsolved crimes. Out of the Oregon State Penitentiary for a mean solar day, sitting across from Weatheroy on the 13th floor of the justice building in downtown Portland, Woodfield was pleasant company. "I remember that his pilus was perfect, feathered and combed; he had a perfectly even tan, nails manicured," says Weatheroy. "He was very charismatic, which makes sense considering he would lure victims and get them to let their guard downward." Woodfield, though, confessed to zippo.

Deoxyribonucleic acid evidence which helped convict Randall Woodfield (Robert Beck)

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 briefing to make articulate: In the unlikely outcome that Woodfield was ever granted a parole hearing, they would pursue these additional indictments.

Jim Lawrence, another detective in Portland'due south cold case unit, is intimately familiar with the example of the I-5 Killer. A veteran detective who has interviewed the most hardened criminals, he is struck most by Woodfield's utter lack of accountability or remorse—fifty-fifty decades later, even in the face of indisputable evidence. "If you're talking about somebody moving toward some form of rehabilitation, they had to at some point acknowledge they are responsible for their own behaviors," says Lawrence. "That is not Randy Woodfield."

If Woodfield were, somehow, to be paroled tomorrow? "He would re-offend, there's no doubt about it," says Lawrence. "Even to this mean solar day, he is even so a stone-cold killer."

Psychologists will tell you it's a fool'southward errand, a gross oversimplification, that there's no sense looking for one trigger or unmarried effect that can explain what internal misfire, what faulty circuitry, could accept turned a man into a serial killer. And yet, there's a temptation, near irresistible, to plumb the psyche and fashion an answer to the elemental question nosotros all have of serial killers: Why?

Ann Rule, who passed away concluding year at 83, long ago concluded that Woodfield killed women equally a form of rebellion against his authoritarian female parent and ii older sisters. (While in prison, Woodfield sued Dominion, unsuccessfully, for $12 million on grounds of libel.) Lawrence, the Portland detective, offers a different theory: "There had to be something that happened to him sexually in his formative teenage years that caused him to look at sexual activity every bit ability fulfillment equally opposed to an expanse of procreation and of intimacy."

What virtually the sport Woodfield played so expertly? Football game did this has become the quick-and-piece of cake explanation for all sorts of antisocial acts, from slugging a fiancée in a casino elevator to running a dog-fighting band. A sensationally violent sport breeds sensationally violent beliefs. Special rules are conferred on star athletes, plumping senses of entitlement. The peculiar rhythms of the sport—1 intense solar day followed by half dozen days of recovery and training—are out of whack with the residual of society. Teams (and an image-obsessed league) have mastered the arts of willful blindness and harm command.

"He was kind of a skillful-looking guy, maybe kind of a ladies man, proficient physique and the whole thing. . . . I don't remember annihilation specific about him.What is he up to now?"

—Gary Scallon

Manitowoc Chiefs broad receiver in 1974

Asked about Woodfield in September, Pecker Tobin, a longtime NFL exec who was Green Bay'southward director of pro scouting in 1974, claimed not to recall Woodfield as a actor, much less know that a erstwhile draft pick of his was a bedevilled killer. Yet Portland detectives maintain that the Packers quietly cut Woodfield in part because of off-field concerns. "I know that was a gene," says Lawrence, "that he was defenseless exposing himself."

But in the case of Randall Woodfield, information technology's not merely an oversimplification to arraign football game; it's at odds with the facts. If anything, football was a temporary source of salvation, delaying Woodfield's horrific behavior. Survey the time line and it's easy to make the example that football, across existence a driving motivation for him, was also a distraction from a key instinct that had, peradventure always, churned inside. But when football was no longer part of his life did he accept a truly dark turn.

The Portland Police Department's property room sits in an industrial pocket of boondocks, right by the Willamette River. There is a section dedicated to the documents pertaining to Woodfield. Here lie copies of decades-old search warrants and affidavits, too as a trove of relics from the Packers. Police searching Woodfield's residence realized that he'd kept every correspondence begetting that green-and-yellow logo, every envelope with the render address of 1265 Lombardi Avenue, in Greenish Bay.

Search warrants, psych profiles, NFL contracts: Go even deeper into the I-5 instance past exploring the documents (Robert Beck)

According to Dominion, Woodfield even kept in his wallet a carbon re-create of the airline tickets the Packers sent him back in June 1974. Woodfield, she wrote, "would deport the stack of personal letters and mimeographed sheets with him throughout his myriad changes of residence. . . . They were akin to messages from Hollywood to a would-exist starlet. They were magic." Once the magic went away, it was replaced past the sinister.

Woodfield is 65 now. Thirty-five years afterwards his conviction, he sits in Oregon Land Penitentiary, nestled among Douglas firs and the Cascades, located in Salem, fittingly, barely a mile from I-5. The Oregon Department of Corrections denied an interview request on the grounds that it "brings notoriety to the inmate—and this is already a high-profile individual—and doesn't autumn within the rehabilitation and correctional programme of the inmate." Woodfield did not answer to messages or electronic correspondences from SI seeking annotate.

This much we know, however: Woodfield is notwithstanding a football fan. Prison house guards call up that he loves to talk about the sport and nonetheless remembers his playing days, 4 decades agone, with striking specificity. Weatheroy, the detective, saw this firsthand. When Woodfield learned that Weatheroy's son was a high school star in Portland who went on to play for Air Force, the inmate grew animated. "He loved talking about sports," says Weatheroy. "His loftier school career, playing in college, his time with Light-green Bay. . . ." When the conversation turned to weightier topics, however, Woodfield clammed upwardly, tried to alter the subject and grew distant.

Woodfield did join MySpace in 2006, and his profile was as shut equally he's ever come to taking ownership of his by. It besides says plenty most how he however self-identifies: "I spend the remainder of my days in prison house because I have committed a murder along with many other crimes. I once tried out for the Dark-green Bay Packers. The merely reason I didn't make information technology is because the skills I had to offer they didn't need at the time."

Boosted reporting by Michael Cohen and Kerry Eggers

SI True Criminal offence, a new ongoing series from SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, will dive deep on stories of sports criminal offense and punishment through in-depth storytelling, enhanced photos, video and interactive elements.

Bank check back often to observe new pieces from SI'southward award-winning journalists as well as classics from the SI Vault.

simstheming.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.si.com/longform/true-crime/i-5-killer-green-bay-packers-randall-woodfield/index.html