Last Dance, Last Chance

step in allowing him to go entirely free. He soon got drunk and walked away from work-release. He went back to prison.
    Elledge became a Christian in prison after a delegate from the Free Methodist Church came into the penitentiary to minister to him. And he was finally paroled from the Monroe Reformatory in 1995. He moved to Tacoma, Washington.
    Jim Elledge was no longer the muscular tanned man with the crew cut who had murdered Bertha Lush. He had aged in double-time while he was locked up. He was thin and balding, and his short gray beard and moustache and horn-rimmed glasses made him resemble an Amish elder more than an ex-con.
    He looked harmless. But he knew there was another side to him, a violent side that he had to struggle to control. Rage often bloomed in him.
    Duane Grooters, who had come into the Monroe Reformatory to share the Bible with him, believed that Jim could learn to be good. The Free Methodist Church had a portion of their belief system that said they must help prisoners, using compassion, to seek the right path. “Jim seemed like someone who really had a desire to change. He had a desire to get out and do something and help others and make it on his own.”
    Although the Lynnwood Lighthouse Free Methodist Church that had helped him while he was in prison was fifty miles north of his apartment in Tacoma, Jim took a bus to attend services there. He eventually moved to Lynnwood after one of the church members, Bill Hubbard, who was a local city councilman, said he could sleep on his couch.
    “Jim was like a cheerleader to me,” the good Samaritan said. “He greeted me with coffee after late nights at work or council meetings. This guy would cook and clean. He was a real trouper.”
    Jim walked three miles to the red brick church for Bible study, and never missed Sunday service. The Lighthouse Free Methodist Church hired him as a janitor. He was popular with the members, a very friendly and likable man. Many knew he had been in prison; fewer knew what his crimes had been.
    Jim found a girlfriend who loved him and agreed to marry him. She described herself as “slow,” but Jim made her feel smart and beautiful. He and his fiancée, Ann, were married in late 1997. He started a little side janitorial business. He seemed to have made it through, despite the warnings of corrections and parole officers.
    Sometimes he drove by the cemetery where his 1974 victim was buried. “Bertha,” he recalled. “Bertha Maude. Every time I’d drive by the graveyard out there where’s she’s buried at—well…I just felt so damn guilty.”
     
    Jim Elledge might as well have had “love” and “hate” tattooed on either hand; the compassionate, helpful side of him did exist, but so did the vengeful, angry part of him. He harbored intense hatred for a woman named Eloise Fitzner, who was 47 and single. She lived in the Sherwood Springs Apartments in Lynnwood in a unit upstairs from the apartment Jim shared with Bill Hubbard, his benefactor. Jim got to know her there in the mid-nineties. But it wasn’t Eloise he was attracted to—it was her friend, Rita Bentson * , 39, who fascinated him.
    “He loved her,” Lynnwood Detective Mike McBride said later. “He had the hots for her. It was not a mutual feeling at all.”
    Rita, fifteen years younger than Jim Elledge, wasn’t the least bit attracted to him. Besides that, he was newly married to Ann; he was practically on his honeymoon.
    Eloise just didn’t like him. That was unusual because Eloise Fitzner liked almost everyone. Eloise was an attractive woman who wore her dark blond hair in bangs. Her photographs usually showed her smiling, even though she had suffered for years with fibromyalgia that left her with severe muscle pain much of the time.
    “Eloise was always on the side of the lost and the wayward, always pulling for the underdog,” her brother, Mike Helland, commented. “She often bonded with people who needed help.”
    Nothing had worked out in Eloise’s life, but she still had an optimistic attitude. Born in Spokane into a happy family, she had gone to secretarial school and worked in Hawaii, Houston, and New Orleans. Neither of her two marriages succeeded, and one was marred by domestic violence. Frightened by her husband’s threats and stalking, she moved far away to escape him. Eventually, she came back to Washington State.
    Eloise Fitzner was dedicated to God, Bible study, and her church—which was a different church than the Free