A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

described as tall and slender with a mop of brown hair streaked with gray, did move away—but only for a moment. He kept coming back, and walking much too close to the shower area several times, initially ignoring the father’s warnings. “On the third warning, he finally left,” the father told the Lynnwood police. “But I remembered him and what he looked like.”
    One of the lifeguards had noticed the man too, and she wondered why he was hanging around the pool.
    A week after the incident, the girl and her father were again at the Montlake Terrace pool when he saw the man who had acted so strangely before. He decided that he wasn’t going to wait for trouble; he dialed 911. The officer who responded to the call spotted the suspect in the Jacuzzi, and waited for him to move into the locker room. There, he attempted to talk with him. He took the most basic initial approach, asking the tall man who he was and when his birthday was. But the stranger insisted he didn’t have any identification on him. Finally, he agreed to give the officer his name.
    “Stewart Coltrane*,” he said, adding that his birthdate was May 15, 1957.
    “Why were you hanging around the girls’ showers last week?” the policemen asked. “You were making people nervous.”
    Coltrane was adamant that he had done nothing wrong. “I just wanted to use the shower,” he said. “She was taking too long, and I was getting impatient. I just wanted to see if she was done yet.”
    But he had been so persistent that he had alarmed the little girl’s father, and he didn’t seem to understand that, at best, he had used bad judgment. He insisted that he’d been within his rights. The officer told Coltrane it would be best if he left the Rec Pavilion. He headed off down the street, while the investigating officer checked computer bases for Coltrane’s name. He learned there
was
no Stewart Coltrane who’d been born on 5/15/57, and he quickly steered his patrol car in the direction the suspect had walked.
    “I got nothing on that name and birthday you gave me,” the officer said when he caught up with the tall man, and Coltrane quickly gave him three more birthdays: May 14, 1957, May 15, 1959, and May 14, 1959. He didn’t seem to be developmentally disabled, but he didn’t even know his own birthdate! None of the dates he gave drew any hits on the computers as matching up with the name Stewart Coltrane. The suspect had then explained that he was from New Jersey. Maybe that was why the Northwest computers had no record of him. The policeman nodded and ran the name and the four birthdates through New Jersey computers. They drew no hits either.
    Coltrane refused to show any documentation that would prove his identity, nor would he give the names of anyone who might identify him. If he hadn’t been hanging around kids in the shower, the officer would have let it go. But there was something a little ominous about the man. He wouldn’t give his home address or phone number. He demanded to talk to an attorney, deliberately escalating the conversation into an incident. At length, when he still would not give any accurate information about himself, he was booked into the Lynnwood jail for “obstructing.”
    “Stewart Coltrane” was given a “cash only” bail of $1,000. He wasn’t in jail long. Someone in New Jersey contacted a bail bondsman in Seattle who provided the $1,000 bail. Stewart Coltrane, the alias for Steve Coole, walked out of the Lynnwood Jail a free and unidentified man.
    O’Leary and Nordlund found the latest information confusing. If the dead man from the bus crash was both the shooter and the suspected child molester in Lynnwood, it made no sense. The M.O.s were completely different, and they both knew that the profiles for sex offenders and mass killers weren’t the same.
    Even so, the Seattle homicide detectives were getting closer to finding out who the dead man really was. They ran the name Stewart Coltrane and found an address on 15th N.E. Gene Ramirez, O’Leary and Nordlund headed out there at 10:30 Friday night. They found the Ponderay Apartments easily enough, a four-story, square building in the University District.
    It wasn’t difficult locating Coltrane’s unit; he was listed as the manager of the apartment house there.
That
was a bit of a surprise. They knocked, not really expecting anyone to answer; they figured Coltrane was lying on a slab at the M.E.’s office.
    But someone answered the door, a large