Don’t Look Behind You

about four and a half inches long.
    Informed by detectives Nolan and Harrison that they intended to take Vinetti downtown for further questioning, Rigglestatt said that he had some loaded guns in the unit and that he would be willing to go up first and unload them before any attempt was made to take Vinetti into custody.
    He didn’t think Paul would be dangerous when they arrested him, but he wanted to be sure.
    Weighing Vinetti’s mild demeanor during previous questioning against the maniacal rage that had exploded on the lakeshore, and knowing that Al and Cindy’s motel unit was at the dead end of a hall—with Paul waiting inside—the detectives agreed that loaded guns might well turn the apartment into an armed fortress. They waited until Rigglestatt returned to tell them that the guns were secured.
    Joined by Sergeant Don Actor, Nolan and Harrison knocked once more on the door of the second-floor unit and informed Vinetti that he was under arrest. He was handcuffed and advised of his rights.
    “I know my rights,” the hulking suspect responded, but finally he agreed to read the card that outlined his constitutional rights.
    The King County investigators obtained a search warrant—although Al and Cindy were completely cooperative—and Sergeant Actor and Detective Howard Reynolds removed several items of clothing that Paul Vinetti had worn on the night of July 3: jockey shorts, a black short-sleeved turtlenecked sweater, a white T-shirt, and a pair of heavy black boots with horseshoe-shaped cleats on the heels.
    At the sheriff’s office, Paul Anthony Vinetti gave two statements to Harrison—statements that would lead to second-degree murder charges being filed against the lanky suspect. However, these statements would not become known to the public until Vinetti’s trial in Judge Nancy Ann Holman’s courtroom during the first weeks of November.
    In extensive preparation for that trial, Dan Nolan and DuWayne Harrison contacted many witnesses. Among them were people who had sat at the bar of the Frontier Tavern with Vinetti and Bethany Stokesberry. One of these witnesses was Tom Fogarty,* whose name was given to the detectives by the bartender.
    “We were there, all right,” Fogarty said. “My girl, my sister, and her husband stopped in at about eleven or eleven thirty, after we’d been out to dinner. We sat at the bar and had one or two schooners of beer. Long-tall-Paul—who I’d seen before maybe once or twice—was there and a woman we met as ‘Bethany’ sat beside him.”
    “To your knowledge, was either of them intoxicated?” Nolan asked.
    “No, sir. As far as I could tell, they hadn’t had any more to drink than we had. This guy—Paul—asked me if I wanted to play a game of pool for four-fifty, and I said no. At one time, he called me over to the side of the bar and asked me, ‘What’s Bethany’s problem?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about so I just shrugged.”
    “But Bethany and Paul left with you and your girlfriend. Is that right?” Nolan asked.
    “I guess you could say that. But it was just becauseLong-tall-Paul asked if I’d drive them down to Melby’s. I don’t know if Bethany wanted to go there or not. At first I hesitated because my car’s a sport model that only holds four people—but then my sister and her husband said they’d wait for us in the parking lot, so we drove the two of them down toward Melby’s. When we got to the car wash place, Paul said, ‘This is close enough,’ and he pulled her hand, and they got out on Aurora.”
    “You didn’t see them after that?”
    “No, sir. We let them off about midnight and drove on home after we picked up my sister.”
    The Bethany Stokesberry–Paul Anthony Vinetti case took a backseat to other news in Seattle papers as summer eased into fall. And then, as “Long-tall-Paul” Vinetti faced a jury of five men and seven women in Judge Holman’s court, it once again made headlines.
    The huge defendant himself sat placidly in the courtroom, dressed in slacks, a long-sleeved shirt, and sandals. His brown hair was long and he wore a mustache and a Vandyke beard. He was extremely thin.
    Occasionally, as he wrote continuously on the yellow legal pad in front of him, the tattoo described by those who had sat with him in the Frontier Tavern was exposed to our view—an ironic combination that drew murmurs from the press bench. It was the image of a devil, under which the words “Love Forever” were