A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

watching her. She always felt safe at home except when the lights went out. And all the while, he had been out there in the forest.
    Buddy Longnecker went on trial in Superior Court Judge Hewitt A. Henry’s courtroom in May 1976. His trial would last ten days—shocking days for jurors who listened to testimony from the medical examiner and the investigating detectives. Dr. Nackoneckny described his autopsy findings, explaining that Sharon Mason had bled to death from the deep wound in her neck. “This was complicated by asphyxia and the blunt trauma injuries,” he added.
    The jurors had never heard of Nunchaku Sticks, but the force behind Sharon’s injuries was dramatically demonstrated when an expert in the ancient martial art demonstrated. With one swing of the Nunchaku, he cleaved a solid concrete block in two. Everyone in the courtroom gasped involuntarily at the sound. The jurors had seen the awful pictures of Sharon’s face. Now they knew what had caused her wounds.
    Prosecutors Darkenwald and McCleary presented the damning physical evidence and the many confessions, however outlandish, that the suspect had made.
    The Defense countered with its insanity defense. Dr. Gerald McCarty told the jury that Buddy Longnecker had “a very flaky, unreliable cognition of realities . . .some awareness and sense of reality, but no recognition of what was reality and what was not.”
    This was nebulous testimony, and the jurors looked puzzled. Under the M’Naughton Rule, in order to be found innocent by reason of insanity, a defendant must be shown to have been unable to tell the difference between right and wrong at the time of his crime. Longnecker had taken definite steps to cover up his crime, he had lied to the detectives who first asked him if he knew Sharon Mason, and he had told various contrived lies about his relationship with his victim. He did not seem to qualify as insane under the M’Naughton parameters.
    Dr. Richard Jarvis, a forensic psychiatrist from Bellevue, Washington, testified for the State. He disagreed with Dr. McCarty and found that Buddy Longnecker showed “an awareness of the wrongfulness of his act.”
    It took the jury fourteen hours to return with a guilty verdict. If ever there was a murder that demanded the death penalty, Buddy’s attack on Sharon Mason qualified.But he had managed to slip in under the wire. Although Washington State voters had approved the death penalty in the November elections three months before Sharon was killed, the statute decreed that it would apply only to murders
after
July 1, 1976. Sharon Mason had been killed four months too soon for her killer to receive the death penalty, and no matter how George Darkenwald argued that Longnecker’s slipping through the cracks was a “travesty of justice,” he could not change the law.
    In a sense, Buddy had skated for a long time.
Four
years before Sharon Mason died a terrifying death, a psychological evaluation of then-fifteen-year-old Buddy Longnecker warned of trouble ahead. A psychiatrist who tested him in 1972 said flatly that there was no punishment that would prove effective on Buddy. “He should be put away,” the counselor wrote. “He is dangerous. He has committed crimes simply because he wants to draw attention to himself and he has no conscience . . .”
    But there were no permanent facilities where Buddy Longnecker could have been locked up. Whatever caused his disconnection from other people, he was a creature who lived for pleasure and games and thrills. He had no brakes, and no regret over what he might have done to other people to get what he wanted at any given moment.
    George Darkenwald wrote to Judge Henry about Buddy’s lies about Sharon, “What is not credible is the story that Buddy took a full month between the murder and his capture to concoct. It tells nothing about Sharon and too little about the events, but much about Buddy, himself. No one who knew Sharon could possibly even imagine the obscenities he uttered about her. But those who knew Buddy could understand only too well how he would like things to have happened the way he said they did. Buddy is a sociopath. His values and goals are those society cannot tolerate. He is not crazy, but he is dangerously different.
    “Anyone who would even consider the possibility of releasing Buddy on society should imagine him back in the apartment, rolling Sharon’s body over, placing the bloody knife between her spread legs, repeatedly