Its Dead They Killed It They Will Kill Again

The I-v Killer

With the 428th selection in the 1974 NFL draft, the Green Bay Packers selected. . . one of the most violent killers in U.Southward. history. No ane is saying football led Randall Woodfield down his night path—but did it possibly deter him from it, at to the lowest degree for a while?

Past L. JON WERTHEIM

Due eastven as crime scenes become, this one was sensationally gruesome. Shari Hull, age twenty, lay splayed naked on the floor, blood pooling near her matted hair, encephalon affair seeping from her skull and spackling the carpet. She was surrounded by her discarded apparel. Gradually her moans and her deep, labored breathing macerated until her torso was tuckered of life.

Some time around ix o'clock on the evening of January. 18, 1981, Hull had been nearing the terminate of her Sunday-night shift, cleaning the TransAmerica office building in the primal Oregon town of Keizer. She was preparing to go out when she was grabbed by a human being who'd somehow managed to enter the edifice. He was strikingly handsome, maybe 6 anxiety tall, blessed with a torrent of thick, curly chocolate-brown hair and eyes to lucifer. He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Corralling Hull with one mitt and property a gun in the other, he walked her downwards a hall. Before long he saw another cleaner, twenty-year-old Lisa Garcia.

The assailant took both women into a back room and ordered them to the floor. After sexually assaulting them, he shot them each in the back of the head. This, it would afterwards be revealed, was generally in keeping with his M.O.: some sexual human activity followed by a .32 bullet to the rear of the skull. But while Hull died of her gunshot wounds, Garcia survived by feigning her decease, lying motionless on the floor with slugs lodged in the back of her skull. As soon as her attacker left, she called the police force. En route, one officer noticed a thickly built man plumbing fixtures the assaulter'due south clarification continuing at an intersection—but this was more than a mile from the set on; it would have taken a hell of an athlete to make it that far then chop-chop on pes. So the policeman drove on.

Composite witness sketches, circa 1980 (Robert Brook)

For weeks afterward Garcia worked with detectives to crack the instance. Little did she know, this attack was one of many allegedly carried out by the same man; she was helping track 1 of the most notorious serial murderers in U.Due south. history. Nicknamed the I-5 Killer, he had threaded a trail of near unspeakable brutality up and down the upper left corner of America, killing in California, Oregon and perchance Washington. His orgy of violence started in the mid-1970s; by the fourth dimension he'd gotten to Hull and Garcia, he'd already clustered a sizable necrology. Many more murders would follow.

Based on Dna evidence and advancing crime lab techniques, the I-5 Killer's body count has climbed through the years. Cold example detectives have conservatively put that number at a dozen, though a few journalists and armchair detectives believe he's responsible for as many equally 44 deaths. And that doesn't include a string of more than 100 other crimes, by and large robberies and rapes, that bear his hallmarks.

The I-v Killer'south 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. Only he had his way with them and then snuffed out their lives because he could.

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

The new coach had to have been torn. He wanted to pump upwardly the Portland State programme he had just taken over, and placing a guy in the NFL would become a long manner toward that. Just he also knew that if he oversold a player, he'd lose credibility. And then on that autumn twenty-four hour period in 1973, as Ron Stratten sat in the bleachers of Multnomah Stadium—at present Providence Park, abode to MLS'southward Timbers—he chose his words carefully.

An NFL lookout had come to see Randall Woodfield, the Vikings' leading receiver. He had been impressed with Woodfield's easily and athleticism. But when he asked Stratten for further assessment, the jitney wavered. "Randy runs decent routes," Stratten said with enthusiasm, "and he's practiced to the outside." He spoke positively about the speed that enabled Woodfield to run loftier hurdles for the schoolhouse's rail team. But he also mentioned Woodfield'south glaring deficiency: He didn't like getting hit. Not past the safety. Not by the linebacker. Non by anyone.

The I-v Killer, recalled past his former teammates and coaches

"He was the nicest, most gentlemanly child I ever knew. Years later, a reporter from a San Francisco newspaper chosen me and asked, 'Exercise yous know a Randall Woodfield? Did you know he'south the I-5 killer?' I said, 'That can't exist.Probably the wrong Randall Woodfield.'"

—Gary Hamblet

PSU receivers coach from 1972 to '73

When Stratten was named Portland State'south head coach, a year earlier, it had marked a rarity. Though scarcely acknowledged at the fourth dimension, he was just the second African-American in the modernistic era to hold that position at a predominantly white schoolhouse. Stratten was merely 29, less than a decade removed from playing at Oregon. And as a former linebacker, he was quick to notice receivers who resisted cutting beyond the middle of the field. "It'south a indicate of character," Stratten told the scout. "Woodfield doesn't take that."

To Stratten, this softness, this dislike of confrontation, was in keeping with Woodfield's genial personality. Information technology wasn't simply that Woodfield was, in the cliché, coachable. Peradventure more than any other player on the squad, he seemed to seek out the staff for companionship and counsel. "He was e'er bopping by our offices before heading to class," recalls Stratten. "Information technology was like he just wanted to hang out with u.s.a.."

Teammates' and coaches' memories of Woodfield vary wildly. Some remember him as unassuming and quiet, if a fleck odd. "He really didn't fit in," says Anthony Stoudamire, who was a freshman quarterback at PSU in 1973. "He'd make out-of-the-blue, off-the-wall statements." Stoudamire's brother, Charles (both are uncles of 1995–96 NBA Rookie of the Twelvemonth Damon Stoudamire), was a halfback on that team; he recalls Woodfield for his vanity. "[Randall] was always grooming himself. That even carried over to the way he played. He seemed similar he was more than interested in looking cute out there than getting the job done." True every bit that may accept been, the pride Woodfield took in his appearance was justified. He was six feet, with negligible trunk fatty, well-divers muscles and a sly smile framed by what today might be chosen a pornstache. To trade in understatement, he did non struggle to find female person companionship. "He was a suave, sophisticated fella," says Jon Carey, a PSU quarterback in '72. "Confident in himself, but not to the point of being self."

Woodfield may take been all-time known at PSU, though, for his devotion to the Campus Cause for Christ and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. A one-time teammate who spoke on the status of anonymity recalls, "It seemed real important to him that he come beyond every bit someone who would practise the correct affair—almost like it was keeping him together."

Armed with the resources—and facing the public relations pressures—of a modern-mean solar day NFL team, the Packers would take conducted a detailed background check on Woodfield. And the proverbial cherry-red flags would have flapped wildly. Raised mostly 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 task at the telephone company 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 customs. Outwardly, Woodfield appeared to be the portrait of normal. Simply in high school he was caught standing on a bridge and exposing himself to females. His parents sent him to a therapist, who, by all accounts, was not overly concerned by a teenager'southward exploring his sexuality. According to law officials, 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 tape was expunged.)

"He was a little strange—possibly stranger than we thought. You merely had a bad feeling about the guy, like there 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'south home. (With little bear witness, he was found not guilty in a jury trial.) At PSU, Woodfield was arrested multiple times for indecent exposure. (He was convicted twice.) Stratten, who didn't recruit Woodfield, says he didn't learn of those arrests until years later. "If I had known," he says, "I would accept said something [to interested NFL teams] for sure."

Equally information technology was, having done little in the way of intel, Green Bay remained interested in Woodfield. In the starting time circular of the 1974 NFL draft the Packers selected Richmond running back Barty Smith, who would keep to showtime 42 games in vii seasons. The next mean solar day they used their 15th-round choice on Dave Wannstedt, a natural-born leader who never played a down but who went on to go an NFL head coach. 2 rounds later, with the 428th pick, Light-green Bay took Woodfield.

Packers media guide (Taylor Ballantyne)

These may non take been the dynastic Packers who won the showtime two Super Bowls, in the 1960s, but this was all the same a historic franchise. Woodfield was offered a one-year contract to serve equally a "skilled football game player" for $16,000. The deal came laden with bonuses: an extra $2,000 if he caught 25 passes that fall, $3,000 if he caught 30. "Here'southward what y'all need to go on in listen" about those figures, says Bob Harlan, who as assistant GM handled the team's contracts that year (and whose son Kevin, now a prominent broadcaster, was a Packers ball boy back and then): "When Bart Starr fabricated $100,000, people idea he was overpaid."

Woodfield's contract likewise stipulated that he keep himself in peak condition, avoid consorting with gamblers and wear a glaze and tie in public places. He signed nearly immediately. The money enabled him to quit his job at a Portland-expanse Burger Chef. Merely across that, this was all validation. He was on the verge of playing in the NFL. "Everyone fabricated such a big thing when he was drafted," one of Woodfield's roommates told The Oregonian. "He put a lot of pressure on himself to arrive big."

That April, Woodfield attended a minicamp in Scottsdale, Ariz., an innovation of Light-green Bay double-decker Dan Devine. As special teams coach Hank Kuhlmann explained beforehand in a alphabetic character to players, the minicamp would be "a become-acquainted menstruum so that in July nosotros can all kickoff working toward our common goal, 'The Championship.' " After, Woodfield returned to Portland galvanized, impressed with the speed of the other players simply confident he would make the team.

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

In July, Woodfield was among the rookies who competed against the Bears in a scrimmage at Lambeau Field. Writing in the Green Bay Printing-Gazette, Cliff Christl, at present the Packers' team historian, sought out Woodfield for a quote. "I'm pretty excited," the immature wideout said. "I'chiliad just really thankful for the opportunity." Woodfield survived early 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 contend—non unreasonably—that his prospects were hindered because Green Bay was stressing a run game that season. Police would contend that the squad had other reasons. (Packers officials declined to comment for this story.)

Rather than render to Oregon, Woodfield remained in Wisconsin, settling an hour and a half westward in Oshkosh, where he played for the semipro Manitowoc Chiefs and moonlighted as a press-brake operator. (Nosotros pause to point out the irony: Manitowoc, the 24th-largest city in Wisconsin, would be the setting for the acclaimed 2015 Netflix documentary Making a Murderer.) While he would have preferred to spend his Sundays at Lambeau, Woodfield reckoned that, playing on Saturdays nearby for the Chiefs, maybe Packers execs would notice him and reconsider their decision.

Teammates from that terminate recall Woodfield as a "shine operator," a "ladies man" and a flake 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, "information technology wasn't really for sale, so I stole it." Woodfield, adds Auclair, "was on the phone all the time, telling alpine tales. He had a adult female in every port, information technology seemed."

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

"It shocked me when he [went to jail]. If at that place were 100 guys on the team, he'd be the 99th guy I'd doubtable to practice something like that."

—Tim Temple

PSU secondary charabanc in 1973

Afterwards the flavour, though, Woodfield was dropped by the Chiefs. No reason was given publicly. There were murmurs, yet, that the team had off-field concerns. (The Chiefs, along with their league, disbanded in 1976.) While there are no public arrest records for Woodfield in Wisconsin, a detective would later learn that Woodfield was involved in at least x cases of indecent exposure across the state. Equally one Wisconsin police force enforcement officer recalls, years later, Woodfield "couldn't continue the thing in his pants."

By multiple accounts, Woodfield was devastated by being cut. "Deeply hurt," was the phrase The Oregonian would later use. And, curiously, Woodfield acted as if he knew in that location would exist no more invitations from other teams. With his ambitions of existence a pro football player killed off, he drove back to the Westward Coast. And and then the rampage started.

It took some time earlier Randall Woodfield graduated to murder, but the buildup was steady. Back in Portland, he drifted to the margins. He was three semesters short of completing his concrete educational activity degree at Portland Country, but he rejected suggestions that he render 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 show up at Portland State on occasion to piece of work out with his erstwhile team. By so, Stratten had been replaced by Mouse Davis, who would after motorbus as an banana in the NFL and become known every bit the godfather of the run-and-shoot crime. "[Woodfield] seemed similar a overnice kid; he was a skillful athlete," Davis recalls today. "Just ane of the other players said, 'Passenger vehicle, don't go likewise close with that guy. He's strange.' That was the end of my relationship with him."

Randall Woodfield (No. 5) (Robert Brook)

In early 1975, Portland police were vexed by a series of attacks on women, carried out by a homo—invariably described as athletically congenital and handsome—armed with a pocketknife. After enervating oral sex he would take a adult female'southward bag or wallet and run off. On March v, detectives prepare a sting operation. An undercover female officer walked leisurely through a park, and a man wielding a paring knife darted out from backside some bushes demanding coin. Officers converged and arrested the assailant, who identified himself as one Randall Woodfield.

Charged with robbery, Woodfield gave an extensive interview to constabulary. He claimed he didn't drink or smoke 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. Maybe, he speculated, that charged his sexual practice drive.

"At that place was a conventional wisdom dorsum in the day that someone who was an exposer or a Peeping Tom wouldn't drag to more than serious crimes," says Lieut. Paul Weatheroy, a longtime Portland cold case detective who retired from that job last year. "We've learned that aught's further from the truth."

Former PSU teammates threw Woodfield a party to celebrate his release from prison house, but some idea it strange when the guest of honor arrived 21⁄2 hours tardily to his own event. Woodfield besides got out only in time to attend his 10‑twelvemonth high school reunion in Newport. There, he wore his muscles virtually as a fashion argument and told stories about 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 down, but on reflection, I idea:That does sort of add up."

—Jon Carey

PSU quarterback in 1972

Out of prison house, he cut a contradictory figure. For all his failures—let get from bartending gigs, jettisoned by girlfriends—they hardly seemed to come at the expense of self-confidence. He cruised around Portland in a gold 1974 "Champagne Edition" Volkswagen Beetle and took unmistakable pride in his physique. He was peculiarly 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 accept been selected for possible publication in Playgirl'southward Guy Next Door feature." Woodfield waited for his photo shoot, and that's when police believe he began to murder.

On Oct. 11, 1980, Cherie Ayers, an attractive 29-year-old, was found raped, stabbed and bludgeoned to death in her Portland flat. According to the coroner, she died from blunt-force trauma and knife wounds to her cervix. Former classmates at Newport High, 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 every bit a suspect, based mostly on his recent release from prison house. When homicide detectives questioned Woodfield, they institute his answers "evasive" and "deceptive." But he declined to take a polygraph. A claret test did not link Woodfield to the crime, nor did his semen lucifer that establish in the victim's torso. In a time predating reliable DNA testing, there was no other physical evidence.

Patently emboldened, the one-man crime moving ridge picked up momentum. Seven weeks later, Darcey Fix, 22, and Doug Altig, 24, were shot to death, execution-style and with a .32 revolver, in Gear up'south Portland dwelling house. Once again Woodfield had a connectedness to the murdered woman: Ane of his closest friends—a teammate from PSU'southward track team—had dated Gear up. Again Woodfield was questioned, but constabulary had nix concrete linking him to the murders.

On Dec. 9, 1980, a human being wearing a fake beard held up a gas station in Vancouver, Wash., merely across the Columbia River from Portland. Iv nights subsequently, in Eugene, Ore., a human being wearing a false beard and a Band-Assistance (or what looked similar athletic tape) on his olfactory organ raided an ice cream parlor. The adjacent night, a bulldoze-in restaurant in nearby Albany, Ore., was robbed past 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 forced her to masturbate him. Hull and Garcia were sexually assaulted and shot in primal Oregon four weeks later.

Word began spreading that at that place was an "I-5 Bandit" marauding up and down the northern half of Interstate 5, a ribbon running parallel to the Pacific for the 1,400 miles between the Mexican and Canadian borders. All of the crimes occurred within 2 miles of an interstate get out.

The spree accelerated, each criminal offense more than twisted and horrific than the last. On Feb. 3, 1981, Donna Eckard, 37, and her fourteen-twelvemonth-quondam daughter, Jannell Jarvis, were constitute dead in their habitation in Mountain Gate, Calif., just off I-v. Each had been shot multiple times in the caput. Lab tests would afterwards reveal that the girl had been sodomized. Earlier that same twenty-four hour period, an 18-year-old waitress was kidnapped and raped after a holdup 15 miles to the southward, in Redding. The side by side mean solar day, a similar criminal offence was reported 100 miles up I-v in Yreka, Calif.

By then, word of the I-v Bandit had amplified to the bespeak that women were being warned to do caution. On Valentine's Day 1981, Candee Wilson implored her 18-twelvemonth-old girl, Julie Reitz, to "exist conscientious—in that location's a dangerous person out there." Later that night, Julie was shot and killed at their dwelling in Beaverton, Ore., not far from where the Nike campus now sits. She had known Woodfield previously. In his job as a bouncer he had overlooked her false ID and let her into a bar.

From one act to the next, the descriptions were remarkably similar: An athletic man, armed with a silver .32 revolver and wearing tape or a Band‑Aid over his nose, abducted a woman, committed a sexual deed then shot her execution-fashion. Detectives targeted Woodfield as their suspect, convinced that the receiver who turned squeamish running across the middle of the field had become an astonishingly brazen murderer.

Pick a land and yous likely tin find a citizen who has killed ritualistically and repeatedly. Consider the phrase run amok, which derives from a Malay word translated loosely equally "to assail with homicidal mania." Believing that amok was caused by an evil spirit, Indonesian culture tolerated these fierce outbursts and dealt with the aftereffects with no ill will toward the assailant. The underlying premise: The capacity to kill indiscriminately dwells in all of us; almost people but suppress the urge or avoid the spirit.

Still, the serial killer occupies a singular role in the bandage of Americana. Here he—and the vast bulk take been male person—has been hyperbolized and fetishized, even romanticized. Serial killers are responsible for only a small fraction of the murders committed in the U.S., only they are some of the nearly notorious figures in our history and culture. Says Sarah Weinman, who runs the newsletter The Criminal offense Lady, "[Serial killing] is twisted fantasy that has roots in the wide-open American landscape, where information technology is all besides easy to hunt and impale without detection and with impunity."

It was in the 1970s that agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas of the FBI's behavioral science unit of measurement coined and defined the term serial killer, distinguishing one from a mass murderer (who may impale many at once) or a spree killer (who lacks a and then-chosen "cooling off" period between murders). Indeed, the '70s marked the ruby-red-stained pinnacle of serial killing in the U.S. 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 inexpensive gas. And from the famine of surveillance technology to the spotty coordination amidst law precincts, information technology may never have been easier to avoid getting caught.

"He was a pretty quiet guy—non very talkative; kept to himself. I've got a team photo and he's sitting right behind me. I would acceptnever idea he was capable of being [a killer]."

—Rick Risch

Manitowoc Chiefs defensive dorsum in 1974

Woodfield wasn't the but sociopath terrorizing the West Coast around that fourth dimension. Ted Bundy'southward killing orgy in the Northwest is believed to have begun in 1974, his start 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, mostly targeting young women. It would take 20 years before he was caught, but 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 every bit information technology might be—with series killers? Evolutionary biologists take pointed out that equally a species, we are hardwired to run away from predators in a way that we don't reflexively run away from, say, sunbathing or eating salary or other potential causes of death. So the series killer triggers fear and a visceral reaction rooted in the most basic man nature.

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

More True Crime from SI

Hollandsworth even sees overlapping elements with football. "The reason we love to scout broad receivers is because they are and then elusive. They run a particularly designed route, hoping to wriggle complimentary and catch a laissez passer despite a defence force stacked confronting them. It's the same reason we are fascinated with series killers. They come up with a especially designed killing road, carry out the kill and and so make their escape, eluding the cops and crime-scene technicians—only to do information technology all once more afterwards taking a breather."

And while we phone call serial killers monsters, ofttimes they are all too human. In that location'south something unsettling but also a niggling tantalizing in the capacity of everyday people—siblings, classmates, coworkers, teammates—to carry out such chilling acts. "He seemed like such a normal guy" is the inevitable refrain from the shocked neighbor. This was a primal theme for Ann Rule, a prominent true crime writer who in her best-selling volume The Stranger Abreast Me portrays Ted Bundy equally a handsome, well-spoken, good-looking law student . . . who happened to kill at least 30 women. Rule has conceded, "I can remember thinking that if I were younger and unmarried, or if my daughters were older, [Bundy] would be well-nigh the perfect human."

From her dwelling base in the serial killer hotbed of Seattle, Rule grew interested in the I-five instance and published a volume in 1984 about Woodfield titled The I-5 Killer. A meticulously reported account—and an invaluable resource in this story—Rule'southward book relied on public documents as well as interviews with detectives, family members and the socio-path himself. She was clearly captivated by Woodfield's conventional upbringing, jock pedigree and good looks. Even the incoherent jacket synopsis asks how "a suspect who seemed [so] handsome and appealing [could] have committed such ugly crimes."

The I-v 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. 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 than, Marion County detectives put together a pay-telephone call log that showed Woodfield using calling cards inside a few miles of various murders. The irony was rich: The son of a Pacific Northwest Bell employee would be done in partly by phone records.

After Lisa Garcia picked Woodfield's photograph 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 institute telling show: the same brand of tape that had been used to bind victims . . . a .32 bullet in Woodfield's racquetball pocketbook. . . .

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

Four days later on, police force charged him with Hull's murder, Garcia'south 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. The obligatory Oregonian headline: friends 'utterly shocked' by arrest of woodfield. Merely that wasn't actually the example. As one sometime PSU teammate puts information technology, "Yous just had a bad feeling about the guy, like there was something underneath his mask." Says Carey, Woodfield'southward quarterback, "I was surprised when some of this stuff started coming down, but on reflection, I thought, That does sort of add upwardly."

When Woodfield'south trial for the incident with Hull and Garcia began in the summertime of 1981, information technology marked the first murder trial for an earnest, fledgling Marion County prosecutor named Chris Van Dyke (whose famous father, Dick, had recently finished upwardly a run on The Carol Burnett Show). At the time, the prosecutor characterized the accused as "an big-headed, cold, unemotional individual . . . probably the coldest, near detached defendant I've ever seen." By his ain reckoning, Van Dyke had "armloads of evidence, overwhelming evidence." And Woodfield's defence force was flimsy, predicated on mistaken identity. At one point the defendant'due south lawyer went and then far as to suggest that Garcia'south identification of Woodfield was influenced by a detective'southward hypnosis.

When Woodfield eventually took the stand, he spoke softly, with his arms crossed, looking aught like a star athlete or a handsome lothario. Here'due south how Rule put it: "Randy Woodfield had been touted in the media equally a massively muscled professional person athlete. The man in person seemed strangely diminished, not a superman after all. . . . He looked, if annihilation, humbled—a predatory creature brought down and caged in mid-rampage." Bizarrely, he 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.

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

Lisa Garcia, meanwhile, was the cardinal witness, recalling the horrific night at the function building five months earlier. She maintained that the man she faced in the courtroom was the same homo who, she alleged, shot her and killed her coworker. It took the jury 31⁄2 hours to accomplish its verdict.

On June 26, 1981, Randall Woodfield was convicted on all counts. With no death penalization selection 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 judgement when a jury in Benton County, Ore., bedevilled him of sodomy and weapons charges tied to another assault in a restaurant bathroom.

District attorneys up and down the I-5 corridor had a decision to make. Fifty-fifty if they could secure a conviction, what would be the bespeak? Woodfield was already almost sure to die in prison. Additional trials would bleed 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 female parent and her daughter, and where the death penalty would have been an pick—the local prosecutor somewhen decided against pursuing Woodfield.

Still, the list of his victims has grown. In 2012, detectives in the Portland Law Bureau's common cold case unit of measurement, benefiting from new magnetic bead technology at the Oregon state police crime lab, appear they had matched Woodfield'southward Deoxyribonucleic acid to evidence from five victims: Fix, Jarvis, Eckard, Altig, and Reitz.

In July 2005, on account of similar DNA matches, Weatheroy, the former Portland lieutenant and cold example supervisor, interrogated Woodfield about his connectedness to the unsolved crimes. Out of the Oregon Country Penitentiary for a twenty-four hours, sitting across from Weatheroy on the 13th flooring of the justice building in downtown Portland, Woodfield was pleasant company. "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 allow their baby-sit down." Woodfield, though, confessed to nothing.

Deoxyribonucleic acid show which helped convict Randall Woodfield (Robert Brook)

Ultimately, as in other jurisdictions, authorities in Portland's Multnomah Canton decided non to prosecute the murders of Altig, Ayers and Fix. They did, yet, concord a printing conference to brand clear: In the unlikely consequence that Woodfield was e'er granted a parole hearing, they would pursue these additional indictments.

Jim Lawrence, another detective in Portland's 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'due south utter lack of accountability or remorse—even decades later, even in the face up of indisputable show. "If yous're talking about somebody moving toward some form of rehabilitation, they had to at some signal acknowledge they are responsible for their own behaviors," says Lawrence. "That is not Randy Woodfield."

If Woodfield were, somehow, to exist paroled tomorrow? "He would re-offend, there'southward no doubt about it," says Lawrence. "Even to this day, he is nevertheless a stone-cold killer."

Psychologists volition tell you information technology's a fool's errand, a gross oversimplification, that at that place'due south no sense looking for one trigger or single event that can explain what internal misfire, what faulty circuitry, could take turned a man into a series killer. And however, at that place'due south a temptation, near irresistible, to plumb the psyche and mode an answer to the elemental question we all take of serial killers: Why?

Ann Rule, who passed away last twelvemonth at 83, long ago ended that Woodfield killed women as a form of rebellion against his authoritarian mother and two 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 acquired him to look at sex as power fulfillment as opposed to an area of procreation and of intimacy."

What about the sport Woodfield played so expertly? Football did this has become the quick-and-piece of cake explanation for all sorts of antisocial acts, from slugging a fiancée in a casino lift to running a dog-fighting ring. A sensationally fierce sport breeds sensationally violent behavior. Special rules are conferred on star athletes, plumping senses of entitlement. The peculiar rhythms of the sport—one intense twenty-four hours followed by six days of recovery and training—are out of whack with the rest of society. Teams (and an paradigm-obsessed league) have mastered the arts of willful incomprehension and damage control.

"He was kind of a good-looking guy, peradventure kind of a ladies homo, good physique and the whole thing. . . . I don't recollect annihilation specific about him.What is he up to now?"

—Gary Scallon

Manitowoc Chiefs wide receiver in 1974

Asked about Woodfield in September, Bill Tobin, a longtime NFL exec who was Green Bay's manager of pro scouting in 1974, claimed non to recall Woodfield every bit a thespian, much less know that a erstwhile typhoon option of his was a convicted killer. Yet Portland detectives maintain that the Packers quietly cut Woodfield in role because of off-field concerns. "I know that was a factor," says Lawrence, "that he was caught exposing himself."

Only in the case of Randall Woodfield, information technology's not merely an oversimplification to blame football; it's at odds with the facts. If anything, football game was a temporary source of salvation, delaying Woodfield's horrific behavior. Survey the time line and it'due south easy to brand the case that football, beyond being a driving motivation for him, was also a distraction from a fundamental instinct that had, mayhap always, churned inside. Just when football game was no longer part of his life did he take a truly nighttime turn.

The Portland Police force Section's property room sits in an industrial pocket of boondocks, right past the Willamette River. At that place is a section dedicated to the documents pertaining to Woodfield. Here lie copies of decades-old search warrants and affidavits, as well equally a trove of relics from the Packers. Police searching Woodfield's residence realized that he'd kept every correspondence bearing that green-and-yellow logo, every envelope with the return address of 1265 Lombardi Avenue, in Green Bay.

Search warrants, psych profiles, NFL contracts: Go fifty-fifty deeper into the I-5 case by exploring the documents (Robert Beck)

According to Rule, Woodfield even kept in his wallet a carbon copy of the airline tickets the Packers sent him back in June 1974. Woodfield, she wrote, "would carry 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." One time the magic went abroad, it was replaced by the sinister.

Woodfield is 65 now. Thirty-five years after his confidence, he sits in Oregon Country Penitentiary, nestled amidst Douglas firs and the Cascades, located in Salem, fittingly, barely a mile from I-5. The Oregon Section of Corrections denied an interview request on the grounds that it "brings notoriety to the inmate—and this is already a high-contour individual—and doesn't fall within the rehabilitation and correctional program of the inmate." Woodfield did not respond to letters or electronic correspondences from SI seeking comment.

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

Woodfield did join MySpace in 2006, and his contour was as close every bit he'south always come to taking ownership of his past. Information technology besides says plenty about how he still self-identifies: "I spend the remainder of my days in prison because I have committed a murder along with many other crimes. I once tried out for the Green Bay Packers. The only reason I didn't make information technology is because the skills I had to offer they didn't demand at the time."

Additional reporting by Michael Cohen and Kerry Eggers

SI Truthful Law-breaking, a new ongoing serial from SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, will dive deep on stories of sports criminal offense and penalty through in-depth storytelling, enhanced photos, video and interactive elements.

Check back oft to find new pieces from SI's honor-winning journalists too as classics from the SI Vault.

hammondlarearme96.blogspot.com

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