A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

envelope from the phone company and read down through the calls listed. Sharon’s father looked up, puzzled. He recognized most of the numbers but there were some he did not.
    This was the information that the sheriff’s office had requested, but it had been mistakenly sent to Sharon’s parents. When Mr. Mason brought it to the investigators, they saw why he was concerned.
    There it was. Two telephone calls made from Sharon’s apartment on the day she was murdered. The calls were both to San Diego.
    The first call was placed at 10:40 A.M. and lasted eight minutes. Sharon Mason was teaching school miles away, unaware that anyone was in her apartment using her phone. The second call was made at 4:40 P.M. and lasted seven minutes. Less than ten minutes later, Sharon arrived home and hurried up the stairs to get her overnight bag.
    It didn’t take long to find out who Sharon’s killer had called. The morning call had been to a middle-aged woman. When detectives called her and asked her who had called her from Tumwater, Washington, on February 23, she answered quickly, “Oh, that would have been Buddy—my son, Buddy Longnecker—Charles Longnecker, Jr.”
    Buddy Longnecker.
Buddy Longnecker, who often lived in the log cabin in the woods behind Sharon Mason’s apartment.
    Buddy’s mother said he had called her to say that he had a new job, and that he was on his lunch hour. He had asked to speak to his brothers and his uncle, but they weren’t home. His mother said he had seemed calm, cheerful and completely normal.
    When Buddy had called back shortly before five, he had talked to a male relative—a man who had once been convicted of rape, and who had since been jailed once more after an arrest for sexual assault. His mother didn’t know what Buddy had said to him.
    The man told the Thurston County detectives that Buddy had sounded fine, but that he had hung up hurriedly.

    Buddy Longnecker’s use of his planned victim’s phone to make those calls was patently stupid. Didn’t he
know
that long distance calls were easily traceable? Apparently not. Still, the investigators were haunted by the picture of a man who had apparently spent a leisure ly day in a woman’s apartment, pawing through her private things while he waited for her to come home. Sharon Mason’s home had meant the world to her. She had felt safe there. It was so hideously ironic that one of the few places in the world where she felt secure was the spot where she was murdered.
    It was time to bring Buddy Longnecker in. The Thurston County investigators staked out Al Wilkes’ house all night on March 23, ready to arrest Buddy if he showed up there since he wasn’t at the log house in the woods. It was very early in the morning when they saw the back door open and a slight figure emerge. It was Buddy. They saw that he was headed for the woods behind Sharon’s apartment house and radioed ahead to Sergeant Miller and Officer Strohmeyer of the Tumwater police to watch for him and arrest him.
    Buddy Longnecker was brought in for questioning, read his rights under Miranda, and told why he was under arrest. He denied ever knowing Sharon or ever being in her home.
    K. C. Jones told him that they knew he had been in Sharon’s apartment shortly before she was murdered. “You made calls from her phone,” he said flatly. “We have the records—we can show you. You’re a liar.”
    Buddy glared back at Jones. “I am not a liar.”
    K. C. Jones looked at Buddy Longnecker with disgust, while Paul Barclift sat quietly by, betraying no emotion at all.
    Paul Barclift and K. C. Jones were playing a highly refined version of “good cop/bad cop,” and Longnecker bought it. He announced that he didn’t like Jones because Jones doubted his truthfulness. “I won’t talk to you,” Buddy said, “But I’ll talk to
him
if you leave.”
    The Tumwater investigator nodded to Barclift and left the interrogation room. They didn’t care
which
of them got the truth as long as he confessed. As soon as the door closed, Buddy Longnecker broke into tears. He sobbed as he told Barclift that he was ready to tell the truth.
    But Buddy Longnecker scarcely seemed to recognize fact from contrived fantasy. He wiped his eyes and began a bizarre story.
    “I knew her,” he said earnestly. “I met Sharon a few weeks ago at the Southgate Shopping Center. She had a For Sale sign on her car—a 1972 Oldsmobile 360 Rocket Jet Automatic.”
    That was an accurate description of