A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

people had been interviewed, and not one had information that brought detectives any closer to the blue-eyed killer.
    In downtown Seattle, cabby Ben Noyes, fifty-two, picked up a fare, a slender youth with red hair and hard blue eyes that bore right into Noyes’ own. “Just drive south,” he ordered, “I’ll give you the address later.”
    This was the kind of fare that cab drivers hated. Riders without specific addresses were usually trouble. Sighing, Noyes headed out 10th Avenue South toward Beacon Hill, but he never got an address; instead he felt a gun poking him in the back. His passenger assured him he wouldn’t get hurt if he stayed calm and followed orders. They stopped in a thickly wooded area.
    The gunman took all the cash Noyes had, but it was only ten one-dollar bills, hardly enough to warrant a drawn gun. “Now, turn around and head toward Queen Anne Hill,” the passenger ordered.
    As they drove north, he made conversation that did nothing to allay Noyes’ fears. “That’s where I killed a lady in a store a couple of weeks ago,” he said laconically.
    Just like everybody else in Seattle, Noyes had heard about the Blossom Braham killing. He was scared. If the guy was telling him the truth, he had shot an innocent woman for no reason at all. Noyes figured he was in trouble—and he was. A moment later, the gun roared in the back seat and a bullet tore into the upholstery just behind his back. He wondered if he’d been hit; maybe he was so badly injured he was in shock and couldn’t feel it. And then he realized he hadn’t been shot at all—only the padding in the seat behind his back had been.
    “I just wanted you to know this gun is loaded,” the red-headed kid said. “So no funny tricks.”
    They were on Third Avenue West when the gunman told Noyes to stop. “Don’t call the police,” he warned as he left the cab and ran down the street.
    Noyes did just that, of course, calling his dispatcher.
    Officer Harold Countryman was on an assignment checking parking lots for stolen cars when he heard the call. He was only two blocks away and he wheeled his patrol car around and headed for Third West. As he did so, he saw a young male matching the suspect’s description jaywalking just ahead of him. When he saw the police car, the boy broke into a run and disappeared into an alley.
    Countryman caught the runner in his spotlight. He turned and faced the officer with a gun in his hand. Countryman leapt from his patrol unit with
his
gun drawn and shouted to the kid to surrender. The red-haired youth hesitated for a fraction of a minute, and then he threw his gun down. Countryman handcuffed him and notified other units of his location.
    Was this truly Blossom Braham’s killer, or just a punk kid who had bragged about it to give himself some status?
    Detectives Bob Honz and Bill Pendergast questioned the suspect. He said his name was Michael Andrew Olds, he was seventeen, and he gave them an address on First Avenue West as his home—it was only six blocks from the Samuels store.
    They questioned him and he played cat and mouse with them, first hinting that he was the person who had shot Blossom Braham, and then backing off. It was four in the morning when Michael Olds finally agreed to give them details of the killing.
    He was cocky as he related the story, almost like a child playing cops and robbers. It was hard for the detectives to picture this kid, whose cheeks were still covered with downy fuzz instead of whiskers, as a cold-blooded killer, but he was telling them things that only the shooter could know. Olds claimed that he thought Jay Samuels had moved his hands after he’d warned him not to move. “I meant to kill him,” Olds said. “But she got in the way.”
    Later he changed his story. “I’m sure it was no accident. I shot her twice, didn’t I?”
    Olds seemed almost to revel in the notoriety he’d provoked, and over the next few days he made himself accessible to newsmen who flocked to the jail to see him. A reporter asked him if he was sorry about killing Mrs. Braham, and he gave an incredibly callous answer.
    “At first I thought about the woman’s family and I was pretty shook up,” he said. “But I decided her husband would probably marry again anyway so I stopped thinking about it. I would have killed that cop, too, but he had that spotlight in my eyes and I couldn’t see and I figured he had a gun.”
    Ballistics tests showed that Olds’ gun was the weapon used