A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

of the walls of the prison didn’t seem to bother him. He obtained a job at the City Zoo Pet Center, and he began to court a divorcée with six children. He married her, and for a while it looked as if the jury’s faith in him fourteen years before had not been misplaced; they had saved him from hanging, and now he was still a young man—and free.
    The owner of the City Zoo found him a dependable employee who did his job well. He didn’t make a lot of money, but he tried to supplement his salary by playing cards.
    Olds’ marriage soured in the fall of 1976. He complained that his wife nagged him all the time and that she and the children wanted to move back to Wisconsin. He had tried to go along with that, and they all relocated to the Midwest. But after a few months, Olds was back in Walla Walla—alone. He didn’t want to talk about what had happened, but he went back to work at the pet store. They were glad to have him. He found himself a room with a kitchenette and half-bath for fifty dollars a month.
    The female manager of his rooming house was later to describe him as “an awfully sweet guy” who had few visitors but who would often visit with her. Sometimes, they watched television together.

    At 1:30 A.M. , on Sunday, April 3, 1977, Michael Olds was playing cards in a Walla Walla tavern. The other patrons noticed that he was flashing a thick stack of bills when he had always been close to broke before. It was almost sixteen years to the day since Olds had left a card game in Seattle to kill Blossom Braham.
    Sometime later that night, Stephen Schmerer, a twenty-three- year-old Walla Walla cab driver, called his office to let them know he had a fare who wanted to be driven to Pendleton, Oregon, some forty-two miles south of Walla Walla.
    Schmerer’s cab should have been back in service within two hours, but he didn’t notify the dispatcher that he was back in Walla Walla. Efforts to reach him via radio elicited only silence. The dispatcher worried, but then he figured that Schmerer had decided to call it a night after his Pendleton run.
    When Michael Olds’ employer opened the pet shop for business the next morning, she discovered that $356—which had been in the cash register—was gone. She didn’t want to think that Michael had taken the money, but he was the only one besides herself who had the key to the cash register.
    On Tuesday, April 5, Stephen Schmerer’s cab was found burrowed deep in a wheat field north of Pendleton. Schmerer was found inside, long dead of bullet wounds.
    Law enforcement authorities looked at the series of coincidences: Michael Olds hadn’t shown up for work, the pet store had been robbed, and Olds hadn’t been seen at his rooming house. All of these things had happened within the same time frame as Stephen Schmerer’s departure for Pendleton with his fare. It was too much to overlook when they considered what Olds had gone to prison for in the first place.
    A “stop for questioning” teletype on Michael Olds was transmitted to the thirteen Western states, and Seattle police were alerted that Olds might be heading to the coast. He had several relatives in the Seattle area and was rumored to have a grudge against some of them. The name “Olds” sent shivers through the officers who remembered him from 1961. They looked at the current photo of the suspect. The boyish facial planes were now gone; at thirty-four, Olds was a beefy man who was five feet nine inches tall and weighed 180 pounds.
    Although stake-outs were set up at the homes where he might be expected to turn up, there were no sightings of Olds reported in Seattle.

    On Wednesday, April 6, friends of a frail, arthritic, seventy-five-year-old widow named Mary Lindsay became concerned. Mary lived by herself in Ione, Oregon—near Pendleton—and her friends tried to check on her every day, but today she hadn’t answered her phone. They drove out to her country place and found her always neat kitchen a mess and her usually well stocked ice box was empty. Mary Lindsay was a light eater; she couldn’t have devoured all that food. And there was no way that the elderly woman would have left her home for more than a few hours without informing someone. They reported Mary Lindsay missing.
    A call from Mrs. Tom Young* who lived near Pendleton did nothing to assuage the worst fears of local lawmen. Mrs. Young said that she and her husband, seventy-two, had been driving on a back road near Pendleton the evening