A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

to kill Blossom Braham. He had stolen it in a robbery in the north end a few days before the murder. Olds reveled in his infamy, and enjoyed seeing his picture in the paper, even though he was going to spend his eighteenth birthday in jail. He had never had any identity and now he did.

    Michael Olds was charged with first degree murder and robbery and went on trial on December 11, 1961. He pleaded innocent by reason of mental irresponsibility. Olds’ sordid and unhappy past became familiar to Seattle readers. The pictures of him in the newspaper showed him as a soft-faced Mickey Rooney–lookalike; he didn’t look anything at all like a killer. The defense cited the number of foster homes he had endured and said he had been “neglected, ill-treated and ill-fed during most of his life.”
    The trial was a tear-jerker that fostered Olds’ vision of himself as a criminal folk-hero. His real mother, now thirty-two and married, surfaced and told reporters she had come at last to stand beside her son. She sobbed as she said she regretted that she had never been in a position to help him. But there was surely no way she could help him now.
    King County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Tony Savage did not dispute the facts concerning Olds’ childhood, but he questioned whether the past entitled Olds to kill capriciously and coldly. He produced a witness who said Olds had left a card game a half hour before the murder, and returned an hour later. They had all sat there, cards in hand, listening to the radio bulletins about the killing. Mike hadn’t betrayed any nervousness at all.
    On December 15, 1961, the nine-man, three-woman jury returned with a verdict at 11:00 P.M. They had found Olds guilty of murder in the first degree but recommended mercy. Savage didn’t fight for the death penalty. “I am personally opposed to the death penalty in all cases,” he said years later. “I had a deal with my boss that any time I tried a first-degree murder case I didn’t have to ask for the death penalty.”
    Because the death penalty wasn’t requested, Judge George Revelle sentenced Michael Olds to two life terms, to run concurrently. Washington State law at the time pretty much dictated that a life term was thirteen years and eight months, so the earliest date Olds could be paroled would be when he was just over thirty. The public didn’t realize that; they thought he would be in prison for life.
    Judge Revelle recommended that Michael Olds be given psychiatric treatment. Everyone involved expected that he would be transferred to the maximum security unit at the Eastern State Hospital where psychiatric treatment for prisoners was handled.
    There is no evidence that Olds ever received psychiatric care.

    Over the years, the winds of change affected many of the principals in the case. Tony Savage left the prosecutor’s office and started a private practice that was to see him become one of the most noted criminal defense attorneys in Seattle. Detectives Bob Honz and Bill Pendergast rose through the ranks of the Seattle Police Department and, tragically, both died young. Harold Countryman resigned from the force. Dick Schoener became assistant chief of police.
    Somewhere in the morass of files concerning Michael Andrew Olds, a psychiatrist’s urgent warning was lost, or forgotten, or disregarded: “The superficial conforming facade that masks sadistic sexual impulses adds to the danger that Michael poses to the community,” the doctor wrote. “Michael requires close surveillance and external controls.”
    Olds “really adjusted well” to prison life, according to an assistant superintendent of the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. He became an active member of the Lifers With Hope Club. He was “just a regular type resident [prisoner],” his friends and guards noted.
    The memory of Blossom Braham, dead with a bullet in her brain at the age of thirty-eight, faded in the minds of everyone except for the sons and husband and family who lost her so suddenly.
    By 1974, Michael Olds was no longer a hot-tempered eighteen-year-old kid. He was a thirty-one-year-old man, a “model prisoner,” with nothing negative on his prison record. With so much good time, Olds was paroled on November 4, 1974. Ironically, his early release didn’t even rate a line in the Seattle papers.
    Michael Olds settled down in Walla Walla, the eastern Washington city where he’d finally found a home in the penitentiary there; the shadow