Last Dance, Last Chance

First. He leaned against a light pole, his eyes searching the street for someone. The Albuquerque detectives moved in and arrested him on suspicion of auto theft. Elledge had a loaded .38 Smith and Wesson snubnosed revolver tucked into the waistband of his pants. The cylinder had two spent, and three live rounds.
    “When we inventoried his car later,” Lehner said, “we found a bowie knife under the driver’s seat.
     
    Something lay heavily on Jim Elledge’s conscience. The Seattle detectives hadn’t even packed their bags to go to Albuquerque when Jim Elledge felt the need to unburden himself again. He talked to Sergeant Jim Lehner.
    Lehner called DePalmo to relate his confession. Elledge had confirmed that he’d stayed at the Eldorado, and that he’d run out of money after three days. He hadn’t been able to get money from his friend in New Mexico, so Bertha Lush had taken the phone and received a promise that she would get her money if she billed the friend.
    “But that wasn’t good enough for her,” Lehner said. “She told Elledge he had to leave. He spent a couple of nights sleeping in a field across the street from the motel. Is there a field there?”
    “Yeah,” DePalmo said. “There is.”
    “So he goes back on Saturday and offers to do some chores to pay for a room, but she said no. Then he told her he had jewelry and personal items worth $200 and she could hold them if she’d give him a night or two in the motel. But she didn’t want him there.”
    Lehner read from the confession Jim Elledge had signed:
    “…She got angry and called me a bum and an ‘S.O.B.’ I think I was leaning on the counter and she was coming at me. I don’t remember who grabbed who first. I remember having the hammer in my hand. She grabbed my wrist, and I remember hitting her in the face with the blunt side of the hammer.
    “We struggled, and I came to standing over her. I had blood all over my hands, face, and white shirt. I got a pink shirt out of the suitcase and washed at the basin. I do remember that I was scared as hell. After I washed my hands, I remember grabbing money from the office—$80 or $85—took a taxi to the airport, and took a plane to Portland.”
    In a fictional mystery, a confession would be enough. But in reality, direct physical evidence is better. The best evidence of all is a fingerprint in blood. The Seattle detectives had that. When Jim Elledge’s fingerprints arrived from New Mexico, Criminalist Jean Battista was able to match his left middle finger to the bloody print inside the toilet paper roll and his left thumbprint to a partial latent print left on the Brut spray bottle.
    Elledge was turned over to the New Mexico Parole Board for a hearing in Santa Fe. He still had ten years hanging over him for an earlier sentence for assault and robbery. He hadn’t proved to be the ideal candidate for parole.
    Detectives DePalmo and John Boren flew to New Mexico to bring Elledge back to Seattle to face charges of first-degree murder. Jim Elledge said he was afraid to fly, and under New Mexico law he had the right to refuse to fly, so DePalmo and Boren had to take the tediously long train trip with their prisoner handcuffed to them. Once arraigned in Seattle, he was held without bail.
    James Elledge went on trial in Judge Horton Smith’s courtroom in March 1975. His defense was “diminished responsibility” because of his long history of alcoholism.
    The jurors didn’t believe it, particularly when they heard how he had bought the hammer hours before Bertha Lush was killed. They returned with a verdict of premeditated first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon.
    Under existing Washington statute, Elledge’s earliest release would be in 13 years, four months plus a mandatory five years for the deadly weapon. This was to run consecutively to the 10-year New Mexico sentence. The jurors who convicted Jim Elledge believed that he would not be released until he was almost 60.
     
    For Elledge, prison was safer than being on the outside. He rapidly became institutionalized. He admitted that he “didn’t feel comfortable at all” outside prison, and almost all of his crimes had been exacerbated by imbibing alcohol. In prison, he had limits, and he knew he would have a bed and three meals a day.
    Although it didn’t excuse his crimes, anyone who knew James Elledge’s background might understand that—as well as wonder that he survived to grow up. He had begun life in a rural