A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

last moments, saying that she had asked him to kill her after her teeth were accidentally broken. He recalled hitting her four or five times with the powerful sticks. Then he had gotten a steak knife from the kitchen and stabbed her in the neck.
    Paul Barclift barely managed to keep his voice steady. “Did you undress her?”
    “When we were running around, we started to get, you know, sexually involved. She wasn’t hurt at that point. She took off her clothes.” Buddy insisted that they had had consensual sexual intercourse.
    “Did you ever put your hands on Sharon Mason’s throat?”
    “Yes. Because she wouldn’t stop shaking.”
    He had an answer for everything, for all of Sharon’s wounds, all the while maintaining that they had happened “accidental.”
    After he had left Sharon on the bed in her room, Buddy Longnecker said he had dumped out her purse. “And I found $75 in her coat pocket. I bent her driver’s license—to hide her identity.”
    Buddy admitted taking the yellow Oldsmobile. “Al and I went ‘jeeping’ with it on the Army reservation.” That would explain why it was gone for hours, and returned covered with mud and weeds.
    He said he had thrown her keys in the sword ferns behind her apartment house. (When detectives searched later, they found them there.)
    Buddy said he had burned his bloodied clothing in the oil drum that served as a stove in the cabin. “The Numchucks?” He had thrown the broken sticks out in the woods, but he had come back later and gathered them up.
    Once Buddy Longnecker told his story, the investigators found a lot of physical evidence that tied him inextricably to Sharon’s murder. What they never found, however, was a single shred of marijuana in her apartment, a beer bottle, a roach clip, or anything that would substantiate her killer’s claim that the two of them smoked and drank together.
    When Barclift asked him about that, Buddy said that he had “picked up all the pot and roaches and took them with me.”
    “Was there anything else written on her mirror?”
    “Yes,” Buddy said. “ ‘P.S. And one more.’ ”
    “What did that mean?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “After everything was over, what did you do with the knife?”
    “I was kneeling down after she was on the floor, and I poked it into the carpet—between her legs.”
    “Is there anything else you would like to tell me?” Paul Barclift asked.
    “Yes. Before I left, I told her I loved her.”

    Charles “Buddy” Longnecker, Jr. was charged with Murder in the First Degree, First-Degree Rape and Second-Degree Burglary, and bound over for trial in Thurston County Superior Court. He entered a plea of guilty by reason of insanity.
    There was no doubt any longer about who had destroyed Sharon Mason’s safe little world in a sudden, fierce attack. Buddy Longnecker had carried out a classic sexually sadistic homicide. The question was how he got to the place where he could plan and carry out such a cruel murder at the age of nineteen.
    Buddy Longnecker’s parents had divorced when he was a small child, and although he called his mother on the day of Sharon Mason’s murder, she did not raise him. He was separated from her when he was about six—the age of Sharon’s first-graders. By the time he was in his teens, he was a drifter with no real home. He had been arrested for burglary before. The most telling arrest was for entering the bedroom of a sleeping woman. As she slept, unaware that an intruder moved quietly nearby, Buddy stole her purse and her car keys.
    The progression of sexual sociopathy is relentless. Most rapists begin with seemingly innocuous crimes: window peeping and exposing. Sometimes, they move on to fetishes; they steal women’s panties and bras from clothes lines and laundromats or collect their shoes. When those activities no longer satisfy, they move on to closer contact, contriving more stimulating scenarios. Buddy Longnecker had entered at least one woman’s home and pawed through her things. There were probably others. He climbed a tree with his clumsily-built ladder to his perch where he could observe Sharon’s apartment. He must have known her routine perfectly. He knew when she left for work, and when she came home. He knew that she left each weekend, although he probably didn’t know where she went. At length, he broke into her car to get her house keys.
    The horrifying aspect of it all was that Sharon probably never knew about the man in the woods