Y2K and the three-headed monster

Approaching 25-years ago, the Spokane Country Courthouse hosted three of the most heinous trials it had ever seen. And it occurred in less than a full calendar year...

By Kevin Blocker

Spokane’s court system had a three-headed monster in 2000. As The Spokesman-Review’s newly assigned court reporter, even today, I still don’t know which was the most hideous.

Was it Robert Lee Yates Jr. who pleaded guilty to 13 counts of aggravated murder and one count of attempted murder in Spokane County where victims worked as prostitutes - one of which he buried outside his bedroom window at his former home on the South Hill.

Or was it Stanley Leonard Pietrzak who was convicted by a jury of strangling his female victim in downtown Spokane, dismembering her, throwing her head in a dumpster, burning her remains in a furnace and allegedly serving some of her body parts to dinner guests though the judge ruled that piece of information inadmissible?

Then there was William Bradley Jackson who was convicted of killing his nine-year-old daughter, Valiree Jackson, burying her in a shallow grave then unearthing her when he feared Spokane Valley Sheriff’s Deputies were on to him. He tried to rebury her in Stevens County, but law enforcement snatched him with her remains in his vehicle before he could pull it off having tracked him with GPS.

I had no idea when the paper’s editors asked me to cover the Spokane County court system would the names of these cretins resonate so clearly in my mind a quarter century later.

The apocalypse of Y2K wasn’t and most of us remained

In the days before the Spokane Serial Killer Task Force arrested Yates in April 2000, the newsroom phone belonging to late and legendary reporter Bill Morlin didn’t stop ringing. I’d moved into the newsroom from the sports department in mid-1997 and quickly learned whose phone line was the newsroom’s heartbeat.

My first assignment in the newsroom was covering night cops. Anything substantial happening on the Radio Shack-acquired police scanner between 4 p.m. and midnight was largely mine. After 6 p.m., you could fire a missile across the newsroom and not hit a soul. But even though Bill went home he was still at work.

Early on as the night cop reporter, and suspecting I’d be away from my desk to grab dinner, Bill called my cell – from his home – to tell me about scanner traffic he heard of an emergency medical response inside the former Kaiser Mead Aluminum smelter north of Spokane in the days before operations there shut down.

Only Bill listened to the police scanner at home. If he wasn't, then none of my other former colleagues ever publicly revealed to doing such a thing.

I’d been in Spokane for three years up to then and distinctly remember thinking... “I am a black man in this very white town and don’t have a personal police scanner!”

Bill loved the news.

Originally a cop reporter himself at the former Spokane Chronicle newspaper, Bill had legions of sources across the region and country and eventually became among the leading reporters, and ultimately sources, in the U.S. for tracking white supremacists and hate group activity across the nation.

In April 2000 his phone rang incessantly, and the repeated trips he made in out of editors’ offices was a sign something substantial was either happening or about to. Before the month ended Yates was arrested.

When I accepted the court position, I knew Pietrzak and Jackson were at least scheduled for trial in 2000. They each had been arrested in 1999, and I had hoped to become at least semi-fluent in legalese before their trials arrived. But Yates’ arrest exacerbated the learning curve and suddenly I felt more exposed than a cop reporter on break without a police scanner.

Jeff Humphrey, then at KREM 2 and later at KXLY, was the television version of Morlin. Meanwhile, KHQ sported Gary Darigol, who when he had stories before you, left your bosses staring through your eyes to the back of your head wishing they’d hired someone else instead of you.

Writing about court cases was like writing about baseball. The seasons can drag and are plagued with fits of uninteresting. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the action picked up in a way that made you realize it was tragically exhilarating being underpaid for your college degree.

The legal action in Yates’ case slowed in part since Pietrzak’s trial was set for June, and the often-grinding task of information discovery by the Spokane County Prosecutor’s and Public Defender’s offices – pouring through files and interviewing witnesses – led to a slowdown in actual reportable news.

Contributing to the slowdown from Yates’ case was that then Spokane County Prosecutor Steve Tucker, deliberate or not, was hard to reach.

“Hellooo, this is Steve Tucker… I’m not in right now but please leave a message…”

?A retired Washington State patrolman, Steve beat his former boss, Jim Sweetser, for the job of prosecutor not long after Sweetser fired him. Whereas Sweetser was often regarded as overly involved in his deputies’ cases, Tucker was the man many in the Prosecutor’s Office craved for his hands off approach.

Viewing him publicly, one could easily conclude Steve to be marginally interested in work.

Steve was so hands off that he once told me on the phone, and on the record before the start of a weekend after Yates’ arrest, that he was going to clock out midday and play golf because he didn’t know when he’d have the chance to do be able to do such a thing again soon given his pending workload.

Despite being roundly criticized by several of the family members of Yates’s victims for later reaching a plea deal in exchange for not pursuing the death penalty, Tucker, in later years, survived repeated challenges including a recall attempt. He ultimately won four terms as prosecutor before retiring.

More from Morlin

I did what a beginning court reporter does -- made calls to the most obvious people affiliated with the case only to be turned away prayerful the story didn’t appear on TV later.

“Hellooo, this is Steve Tucker… I’m not in right now but please leave a message…”

At the very least, Tucker’s chief deputy, Jack Driscoll, was willing to answer his phone and tell me that he had no comment.

Upon the advice of then city editor Richard Waggoner and Bill, I went to the Helen Apartments at 173 S. Adams where Kelly Conway’s remains were found in the basement furnace. At the outset, the Serial Killer Task Force thought that Conway's murder was tied to Yates who hadn't been discovered yet. Ultimately it was determined Conway's death was a one-off performed by Pietrzak.

I was in search of anyone who may have known her or Pietrzak who was the apartment manager at the time of her death in 1998.

Conway, who was 23 and mildly developmentally disabled, lived at what was then a low-income apartment complex known for its transient population. Pietrzak, who was 46 at the time, watched as one witness after another testified that he was infatuated with his victim. The prosecutor’s office ultimately called more than 20 witnesses in the case against him.

It was startling how easy it was to walk into the unsecured building. The front door was unlocked!

I never found anyone to talk to there, but the stairwell to the basement was at the immediate entrance. It was a hot day, and it felt good to get inside. Halfway down the stairs it got cool, then all light disappeared.

At this point the Helen Apartments was far from active crime scene. Law enforcement and attorneys had moved on to other locales. The only thing to see was a reporter with a flashlight still without a police scanner.

I turned on my flashlight, went to the basement and approached the furnace where Conway’s remains were found. Dr. Sarah Keller eventually testified against Pietrzak and reported that she found 1,350 pieces of human bone fragments from a single adult female between the ages of 18 and 30.

The only thing more unsettling than being in that basement was the sadness I felt for Kelly Conway.

A pre-trial bombshell

Days before the start of Pietrzak’s trial, Bridgette Conway, Kelly’s 19-year-old sister who’d come to Spokane for the trial from New Jersey, listened to a series of witnesses share testimony about Kelly’s death before now-retired Spokane Superior Court Judge Linda Tompkins.

My recollection was that there were no more than eight people total in Tompkins’ courtroom, and I was the only media representative. It was another hot day, and it was Friday. It's been a quarter of a century, but even today I’m still stunned there were no other reporters.

Upon a question from prosecution, witness Amy Bofto said she and other tenants of the Helen Apartments were dining with Pietrzak when someone asked what was in the stew he had served them.

“He said they’re eating Kelly Conway,” Bofto said.

Bridgette immediately burst into tears sitting alongside then Spokane County Prosecutor Victim Witness Advocate Linda Carter upon hearing those words.

I went back to The S-R and wrote my story.

Jurors never heard about Pietrzak’s alleged claims of serving Kelly Conway in a stew. They also never heard about the claims of another woman found dead in his bed years earlier in another state in which charges were never filed against him. The presiding judge, Linda Tompkins, believed the information to be inflammatory and not central to Kelly Conway’s death and ruled in favor of Pietrzak’s defense team.

But at the request of Tucker’s office, Tompkins presented him with an exceptional sentence putting him away for 40 years.

Tucker’s October two-fer

On Oct. 4, 2000, a Spokane County jury convicted Jackson of first-degree murder for smothering his 9-year-old daughter. Prosecutors argued that his failed relationship with his girlfriend, who did not get along Valiree, served as his motivation for killing her.

My son was a year old at the time. The two-and-a-half-week trial was the hardest thing I’d ever listened to at that point in my career. I remember watching Sesame Street with Brendan and wondering how a person could kill their child.

Twelve days after Jackson’s conviction, Yates was sentenced to 408 years in prison. He even addressed the court.

“I pray that God will right the wrongs that I have committed and that justice will bring closure,” he said.

It didn’t take long to be a courtroom reporter to hear what true grief and pain sound like. Yates’ voice sounded so far from those like grieving victims it was beyond insulting to hear speak.

The Yates case generated national and even international media attention. The then 48-year-old Army veteran had stints across the globe in his earlier years. Officials at places where he had once served were prompted to dust off cold cases to see if they may have had a connection to the one-time Nation Guard helicopter pilot.

Reaching a plea deal with the Spokane County Prosecutor’s Office, Yates, who was represented by the Spokane County Public Defender’s Office, admitted to 10 Spokane-area killings from 1996 to 1998, the murders of a young man and woman in southern Washington in 1975 and the murder of a woman in northeastern Washington in 1988.

Yates’ case renewed debate about Washington’s death penalty laws. The case prompted legislators to propose making it easier to seek capital punishment by adding serial killing to the list of aggravating circumstances in which the death penalty may be applied.

The next four years and then some

I covered the court system and spent another three-and-a-half years at The Spokesman-Review before leaving the paper in 2004. Following 2000, I barely recall much else of what I covered at the paper.

Later, between the Great Recession and the decline of the media industry, my resume sports no shortage of work at companies that today barely exist or don’t exist at all.

But 25 years later, calendar year 2000 is still very vivid in mind. Sadly, a three-headed monster had a lot to do with it.

?Kevin Blocker served as reporter at The Spokesman-Review from 1994 to 2004.