Last Dance, Last Chance

told me Cherie didn’t live there any more. I told her I wanted all three of us to get together and talk. I kept talking to Gladys, but I wasn’t getting the right answers—not the answers Cherie had given me. I put my arm under her chin. She said, ‘Denny, please let me go and I’ll give you the right answers.’ I moved toward the back bedroom and laid her down. One hand moved. Then I got scared and I left by the back door.”
    It seemed impossible that Tuohmy had been able to overpower Gladys Bodine so easily. The detectives knew that she was almost six feet tall and had outweighed him by about 40 pounds. And yet, they had seen her body, and she had been brutally strangled.
    “I went downtown and had a few beers with [my friend] Fritz Donohue,” Tuohmy continued. “I rested in his car for a while alone, and then he came out and we went to his place to sleep. I stayed up and I tried to call Cherie at 8:15, then 8:30. I went down to my sister-inlaw’s car and got my rifle and my bowling ball. Then I went home and packed my clothes to go to Cherie’s house in Kent and see if she would go to California with me. I called Fritz to take me to Cherie’s nursing home on the West Valley Highway near the Smith Brothers’ Dairy. He said he would if he didn’t have to work overtime; he’d be by at 3:15.”
    Apparently, Fritz had kept his promise to Denny, and he had come home to pick him up around three in the afternoon. The next part of the confession was a complete surprise to the detectives.
    “We went out to Kent and missed turns and came to a bridge where we couldn’t go any further. We started to back up, and then decided to get out of the car and relieve ourselves. I said, ‘Hey, Fritz, I want to show you something.’ He looked at the rifle and said, ‘Yeah, your gun.’
    “I carried the rifle in my right hand. I remember my foot slipping. The rifle went off and I saw a shadow moving. I got scared and tried to start the car. It wouldn’t start, so I ran through the woods and the branches slapped me in the face.”
    Denny seemed to be telling them in an oblique way that he had shot Fritz. But there hadn’t been any reports of a dead man found near Kent. Was he only saying that he had left his friend in the woods with a broken-down car?
    Givens looked at Denny to see if he was making a bad joke or if he was tricking them. But he seemed rational enough, so Givens immediately detailed a patrol car to search the area for Fritz Donohue.
    “Our prisoner says that he’s lying out there somewhere, wounded.”
    At this point, Fritz Donohue’s fate was in limbo. Radio had received a complaint from a couple who lived in the south end of the county. They reported that an older model car was parked at the end of the road past their home with its lights on. Hours passed, and still the car sat there with its lights burning. Near midnight, when no one had approached the car, the couple called the sheriff’s office. The deputies sent there walked toward the abandoned car.
    Fritz Donohue had been found. He lay on the frozen ground, his left leg outstretched and his right leg under it, crossed at the knee. His sightless eyes gazed up at nothing, and the ground beneath his head was soaked with blood.
    Working in the icy early morning rain, detectives brought in floodlights and took triangulation measurements so that later they could tell exactly where the victim’s body had lain and where evidence was found. They marked the scene off into grids, looking for the spent bullet casing from a .303 Britisher bullet, like the bullets in Tuohmy’s gun. They finally found it 43 feet from the car. Carefully, they checked to see if the victim’s car would start, and it wouldn’t turn over. So far, Tuohmy’s information was accurate.
    Fritz Donohue, a small man like the suspect, was finally removed from the crime scene and taken to the morgue to await autopsy.
     
    The postmortem exam of Gladys Bodine’s body began first. Dr. Gale Wilson described the procedure in his report, as he would in trial testimony one day.
    “The deceased was a woman of 58, 5’10" tall and weighing 174 pounds. Her face was livid, her lips blue,” the pathologist dictated. “A large number of petechiae—small reddish spots resembling paprika and resulting from rupture of capillaries—were evident on her forehead, cheeks, lips, within the small vessels of her brain, the left strap muscle of her throat, her larynx, and her heart.”
    Since