Last Dance, Last Chance

Methodist church, where Jim worked. She was a compulsive rescuer of animals and people who needed her, even though her chronic disease often confined her to bed.
    Maybe Eloise didn’t like Jim Elledge because she was sensitized to men who could be cruel to women. Perhaps she had encounters with him that frightened her. At any rate, she warned both Rita Bentson and Jim’s wife, Ann, to put him out of their lives. Without thinking of the consequences, Eloise had written letters to Ann, trying to get her to think twice about marrying Jim, warning her about “that horrible man.” She continued to warn Ann even after she and Jim were wed.
    Ann didn’t listen. From the time she met him where he worked as a part-time janitor at a Boeing assembly plant, she had liked Jim, and she didn’t believe Eloise Fitzner was right. She thought Eloise was lying when she said Jim was cheating on her—or trying to cheat on her with Rita.
    But Ann told Jim that Eloise was badmouthing him, and he was furious. “There’s something wrong with my nature,” he explained later. “I had been able to control a lot of it by the power of prayer [but] the hate and the anger that was inside me just came up, and I made up my mind that I was going to get my evens with this woman.”
    It was April 18, 1998. It was spring again in the Northwest, almost exactly 24 years from the time that Bertha Maude Lush had died violently a few miles south of Lynnwood, Washington.
    Jim Elledge had decided to kill Eloise Fitzner.
    She was a naive, gullible woman who didn’t realize the demons she had unleashed in Elledge with her constant meddling. Her friend Rita recalled that Eloise was actually excited when he knocked on her apartment door that Saturday in April. She was willing to forgive him. Jim had on pressed black slacks and his good shoes. He explained that his wife, Ann, was away at a church retreat.
    “He told us he had presents for us at his church,” Rita said. “He said, ‘I have a lot of nice gifts for you girls, and you’re really going to like these gifts.’ He told Eloise that she should bring her car because we’d need it to get all our gifts home. He even said he would treat us to dinner out afterward.”
    Eloise had asked, “Oh! Can we go to the Olive Garden?”
    “Sure,” Jim said easily, “I’ll take you to the Olive Garden.”
    Neither woman got many chances to go out to dinner in a restaurant, and they couldn’t afford to go themselves. Now, they suddenly had plans for a Saturday night out. They got dressed up. Eloise put on a red linen skirt and a pale blue satin blouse. The two women even took photographs of each other so they could remember how good they looked all dressed up.
    They left Eloise’s apartment in her light blue 14-year-old Buick Skylark. They were going to meet Jim at his church. What could be safer than meeting a man they thought they knew at a church?
    Neither Eloise nor Rita knew that Jim Elledge had once murdered a woman, or even that he had spent almost 20 years in prison.
    It was nearly 8:30 in the evening when Jim Elledge, Eloise Fitzner, and Rita Bentson walked into the church. Jim seemed surprised to see that one of the assistant pastors was there, writing his sermon for the next morning. The pastor was a little surprised, too. He smelled the women’s perfume before he saw them, and he noticed that Jim hadn’t turned on the foyer lights as he’d led the women inside.
    Jim introduced his friends to the pastor and said he was going to give them a tour of the church. The minister nodded and went back to his sermon. When he was finished, he left the church, aware, but unconcerned, that Jim and his friends were probably still inside.
     
    Sometime on Sunday, Lynnwood police got an almost hysterical call from Rita Bentson. She had a terrible story to tell them.
    Rita told detectives about Jim Elledge’s invitation the night before. But there had been no gifts and no dinner out. Instead, she said he had taken them to an inner room of the empty church and barricaded the door.
    Suddenly, he’d had a knife in his hand and some lengths of rope that he must have already cut to the size he wanted. Rita said Jim had tied them up, binding them at their wrists and ankles with the rope.
    “Then he covered my eyes with a sweatshirt,” she sobbed, “so I couldn’t see what he was doing.”
    But she could hear. She knew that he was strangling Eloise, and it sounded as if he was stabbing her, too. She heard