Don’t Look Behind You

blanket wrapped around his shoulders.
    As Dan Nolan told me later, “There was a step up into the apartment as it was, adding to the illusion of height, but the man who came to the door appeared to be about eight feet tall.”
    The man identified himself as Paul Anthony “Long-tall-Paul” Vinetti* and said he would be willing to talk with the detectives if they didn’t mind being exposed to the flu, as he was sick.
    When they walked into the motel unit, the two detectives saw that Long-tall-Paul Vinetti was almost as tall as he had first appeared in the doorway. He stood well over seven feet!
    Questioned about Bethany Stokesberry, Vinetti said that he had talked with her briefly in the Frontier Tavern on July 3, but he hadn’t left with her.
    “Did you know her?” Nolan asked.
    Vinetti shook his head. “Not before Saturday night—I made some conversation with her while we were sitting at the bar.”
    Before pressing him further on his statement, detectives Nolan and Harrison made arrangements to talk privately with the couple he lived with: Al Rigglestatt* and Cindy Mateska.*
    That way they might have a clearer idea if Paul was telling them the truth about Saturday night when they questioned him in depth.
    Dan Nolan talked with Rigglestatt just outside the motel unit, while DuWayne Harrison talked with Cindy. The revelations gleaned from these interviews cast seriousdoubts on Vinetti’s statement that he hadn’t left the tavern with the murder victim.
    Rigglestatt told Detective Nolan that he had met Long-tall-Paul, twenty-three, at Smokey Joe’s Tavern in downtown Seattle about six months earlier.
    “When I found out that he didn’t have any place to live and no job and hardly any money, I felt sorry for him and invited him to live with me and Cindy. We didn’t have any beds or couches in our unit that he could fit into—he’s about seven foot two or three—but he was happy to sleep on this kind of makeshift pallet on the floor.”
    Paul had chipped in on their household expenses whenever he made a few dollars, and Al and Cindy found him a docile, easygoing houseguest who was always willing to help clean or walk the couple’s pet dogs.
    “What happened on Saturday night?” Dan Nolan asked.
    “Well, Cindy and I were both home when Paul came in between twelve thirty and one. He was breathing heavy and he seemed pretty upset. He had blood all over his shirt and Levi’s and on his arms. I asked him what happened. He said he was in a fight at the Frontier Tavern.
    “He told me the name of the other guy in the fight, and I believed him because he’s a fellow we’ve had trouble with. Paul said, ‘I really beat the guy—I took my boots to him.’
    “When he took his boots off, I noticed blood up on the instep and long hair caught in the cleats. I told him he’d better just go to bed and he did. Cindy took his clothes and threw them in the closet, and I took and washed his bootsoff and pulled the hair out of them. Cindy washed the blood off his arms. Then Cindy and I went downtown for a while, but I got to worrying about the guy Paul beat up, so I drove back to the Frontier Tavern, but I couldn’t find anyone in the alley.
    “Paul had told me, ‘Every time the guy moved or moaned, I kicked him,’ and I was afraid he might really have been hurt bad.
    “The next day, Cindy went down by the lake and came back and said, ‘They’re taking some young girl’s body out of the lake. She’s been raped and murdered.’ When I told this to Paul, he seemed nervous and sick.”
    In the meantime, Cindy Mateska was telling Detective Harrison an identical version of Paul Vinetti’s homecoming on Saturday night. “Paul came in with his sleeves rolled up and blood all over his hands and arms. He knows I disapprove of drinking and I scolded him and told him to go to bed. He gave me a twenty-dollar bill and two or three ones to hold for him and he gave Al a five-dollar bill. He said it was the five that this fellow he beat up owed us for a guitar we’d sold him.
    “The next day,” Cindy continued, “when I told Paul about them bringing a girl’s body up out of the lake, he seemed completely surprised.”
    Although the couple who had “adopted” Paul Vinetti were only a dozen years older than he was, they seemed to the detectives to have assumed a parental role with him. Rigglestatt recalled that the hair he’d cleaned from the metal cleats of Vinetti’s boots had been blond or light brown and