UBC, Rule, The I-5 Killer

The I-5 Killer by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is another get in, get it done, get out account of a serial killer, this one Randall Woodfield, the I-5 Killer, who committed robbery, kidnapping, rape, sodomy (which by its legal definition seems to be an umbrella term for any kind of sex that isn't human-penis-in-human-vagina: Woodfield was fond of fellatio), and murder. He was convicted of the murder of Shari Hull and charged but never prosecuted for the murders of Donna Eckard and Jannell Jarvis (after Woodfield was sentenced to life plus 165 years in the Oregon State Penitentiary, the Shasta County, California, District Attorney decided the ruinous cost of the prosecution wasn't worth the outside chance that Woodfield would not only be sentenced to death but would actually have the sentence carried out). Since Rule's book came out in 1984 (revised edition in 1988) and Woodfield's $12 million libel suit against her was dismissed, he has been linked by DNA testing to the murders of Cherie Ayers, Darci (or Darcey, sources vary) Fix, Douglas Altic, and Julie Reitz (all of whom he was strongly suspected of murdering in 1984).

A lot of murders in America in the twentieth century seemed to have been committed because, as a very broad generalization, there is a significant subset of men who never made the cognitive/psychological leap to understanding that women are human beings who have independent existences, and that that is not wrong. To put it glibly, men whose world view fails the Bechdel Test. And I don't just mean serial killers like Bundy or Brudos or Woodfield, although certainly you can pick that out as an underlying theme in the careers of a number of American serial killers. I'm also thinking of men who stalk and murder ex-girlfriends or ex-wives, or who murder before they even get to the "ex" part. And I'm thinking of Jon Krakauer's book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, in which a big part of what's going on, both with the Lafferty brothers' turn to Mormon fundamentalism and with their eventual recourse to murder, is the desperate attempts of men who feel entitled to patriarchal control over the female members of their households and see that control slipping away. (For a man like that, his control is always slipping, no matter how obedient his wife (or wives) and daughters try to be. Ron Lafferty turned to the fundamentalist Mormon church because, when he felt he didn't have enough control and reality suggested that perhaps that was because he wasn't supposed to have that kind of micromanaging draconian control, the fundamentalist Mormon church reassured him that, no, it was reality that was wrong.

We have a mismatch, in other words, between two sets of cultural expectations, one that the world works like a fifties sitcom (Father Knows Best, to pick the most obviously, glaringly iconic example), and one that the world is made up of human beings, roughly half of whom are XX and half of whom are XY, and that being one or the other doesn't entitle you to anything. I hope that as the decades roll past, the expectations of patriarchal entitlement will become less ingrained--and less damaging when thwarted, something that little boys can get over, instead of growing up to commit murder simply because their "toys" refuse to wait quietly in the "toybox" when not being played with. No, I'm not saying that all men are like this; I'm saying that a remarkably broad cross-section of men who commit murder are men who murder because it's the only way they can control either one specific woman or, in the case of serial killers, women in general.

Once she's dead, she can't say no. She can't get up and leave. She can't choose another man.

Woodfield used I-5 to spread his crimes out between jurisdictions, ranging from Washington to California. This gave him more time in 1980-81 than it would today, but the law enforcement departments of the I-5 corridor deserve tremendous kudos for figuring out so quickly that they were all looking for the same guy. And for finding him. That's the brighter side to cases like this. For every one guy like Woodfield, there are a dozen or two dozen or three dozen guys who want with every atom of their beings to stop him. And those guys are the reason I read books about guys like Woodfield.





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