The End of the Dream (50 page)

Thinking that English must have misunderstood, Rolf Grunden called the insurance company’s headquarters. He got no further than Milt English had. Someone had the missing car, but there was nothing in their records beyond that tantalizing and frustrating information. The use of computers in law enforcement was in its infancy in the mid-seventies.

Glitches were more the rule than the exception. The failure of the insurance company’s computers would considerably delay the capture of fourteen-year-old John English. Eventually, King County authorities would find out what had happened. At 9,30 P. M. on October 16, Louisiana State Patrol Sergeant Maurice Roy was on routine patrol in unit I-76 on Louisiana State Road 93 near an exit of the I-10 freeway.

Roy noticed a bronze Nova that was about to enter the freeway on an exit ramp. The driver appeared to be totally confused, and perhaps intoxicated. Sergeant Roy signalled to the car to pull over. The driver complied, narrowly averting a head-on collision. When Roy walked over to the car, he saw that the person behind the wheel was only a kid who looked far too young to be driving. The Louisiana trooper asked for a driver’s license, but the boy was unable to produce one. “I guess I put it in my other shirt, “ the driver stuttered. “I can’t find it.” Roy walked around the dusty car and saw that it had Washington State plates.
 
The kid was a long, long way from home. He seemed very calm, and he was polite and cooperative, and there was no odor of alcohol about him.
 
“Whose car is this? “

“It belongs to my father, sir. He loaned it to me so I could take a trip to Florida.”

“Do you have any identification? “ Roy asked. The boy dug in his wallet and produced a student body card for a high school in Washington State and several credit cards in the name of Milton English. While the driver waited with apparent nonchalance, Roy walked back to his patrol car and asked radio to check the Nova’s license plates, and the boy’s name through the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) computers. Again, computer malfunction played into John English’s hands. The NCIC computers at the FBI headquarters in Quantico were temporarily down and the Louisiana State Patrol radio dispatcher was unable to get a response.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to follow me into headquarters until we get this straightened out, “ Sergeant Roy told the boy who said his name was John English. The kid nodded agreeably Sergeant Roy headed east on I-10 and the Nova followed but another vehicle pulled between his patrol car and the Washington car just as Roy eased off the freeway at an exit. The Nova did not follow.

Rather, it accelerated and raced on down the freeway. Roy wrenched his steering wheel and hurtled across a berm planted with bushes to get back on the highway. The Louisiana trooper was in hot pursuit as the taillights of the Nova grew smaller ahead of him. He hit his siren and called for backup. His speedometer climbed above ninety miles per hour as he closed the gap between his patrol unit and the Washington car.

And then, suddenly, the Nova spun out of control and crashed into trees in a roadside rest area. Roy leapt from his cruiser expecting to find the driver injured, but he wasn’t even in the wrecked Nova, he had disappeared into the thickly wooded area. By this time, several other Louisiana troopers had arrived at the scene and they fanned out through the brush. All to no avail, the youthful suspect had vanished. The troopers surveyed the wrecked Nova and noticed that its trunk was tied down with cotton rope. Inside, they found two sets of handcuffs, a man’s clothing, and a knife. Sergeant Roy still held John English’s student-body card, and he fed the name and the car’s description into the computer at NCIC again as soon as he got back to his station. Only then did he learn that he had stopped a fugitive wanted all across the country. Roy contacted Rolf Grunden at once and told him that a widespread search for John English was currently going on all across Louisiana. But once again, fourteen-year-old John English had managed to escape.

However, now he was on foot. It didn’t seem possible that a ninth grader could still be leading police on such a chase. While the car was being processed by the Louisiana State Crime Lab, Grunden received a communication from the Barton, Alabama Police Department. They were investigating a homicide in which the victim had been shot several times with a . 22 while handcuffed, and requested information on the handcuffs missing from the English residence. Grunden checked with Milton English and found that the stolen cuffs were a Japanese make.

That eliminated young John English as a suspect in the Alabama case.

But where was John English? He had told Sergeant Roy that he was headed for Florida, and lab men in Louisiana had found an address in the wrecked car which listed a street in Tallahassee, Florida. Rolf Grunden requested a stakeout by Tallahassee police. This was set up, but English did not appear. The days passed with no more word on the fugitive teenager. Grunden knew where he had been, he had, in fact, a complete chart of the route John had taken from the credit card hits that were now pouring in, Manzanita, Oregon, Eureka and Wasco, California, Las Vegas, Nevada, Tucson, Kingman, and Peoria, Arizona, and then three purchases in Benson. Almost miraculously, the kid hadn’t been stopped as he moved through Deming, New Mexico, and San Antonio, Schulenburg, and Van Horn, Texas. All of the purchases had been for gasoline and oil.

That was probably why he hadn’t drawn attention to himself. If he’d tried to buy high-ticket items like tires or other auto accessories so that he could resell them to make money, John English might have raised suspicions among the station attendants, but he’d played it very carefully. On October 27, John had been missing almost four weeks when Grunden received a phone call from the Miami Beach Police Department.

They had John English in custody. Ironically, after being wanted for suspicion of murder, car theft, reckless driving, and evading arrest, it was a simple littering violation that tripped him up. Two Miami patrolmen had observed a man who appeared in his early twenties and a teenager tossing litter into the street. They walked over to talk to the litterers and asked them for identification. The older man said he was Bo Dennis* and that he lived nearby and worked at a local establishment.
 
He had ID that verified this. The younger man had no ID at all. He said he was seventeen, but he looked to be much younger.

He also looked like an unmade bed and appeared to have been on the streets for some time When the officers started to put the boy into their squad car, he broke and ran. After a foot and vehicle chase through nearby buildings and streets, the runner was apprehended. At the station house, the youthful captive admitted that he was John English, fourteena runaway from Washington State. “My mother’s dead, “ he said.
 
“And I live with my father.

“ The arresting officers in Miami had no idea that, while his words were true, they told a far more grim story. English was transferred to a detention home pending correspondence with Washington authorities.

Bo Dennis said that he’d only been in Miami for three days when he met John English, who had told him he was seventeen. The teenager had been sitting on a park bench on the night of October 19, holding a blanket and looking forlorn.

He told Dennis that someone had robbed him of his backpack, clothes, and fifty dollars in Mississippi. “He told me he had to jump out of a speeding car and that’s what caused all those scratches on his arms, “ Dennis said. “I was down to my last ten bucks myself, so I offered to join up with him. We got a cheap hotel room and started looking for jobs the next day.” John English had given Bo Dennis a story of his life that sounded like something out of Dickens. “He’s had a rough time, “ Dennis told the Miami cops. “His parents were both killed in a car crash and then he lived with stepparents who hated him and told him he had to leave.” Bo had felt sorry for the kid and taken him under his wing. They had spent the next few days at a friend of Dennis’s.

“But we were watching this prison movie on TV one night, “ he said, “and I noticed John was crushing beer cans with his bare hands. I kidded him about acting so violent, and he said, Yeah, I have a violent temper. But I didn’t think too much of it. I thought he was just trying to be tough.” The new buddies had gone to the Florida State Employment Agency looking for jobs and then to Traveler’s Aid, where they were given five dollars apiece. A woman there asked John English if he was a runaway and offered to provide transportation home. She assured him that he wouldn’t get in any trouble, but he told her that he was a high-school graduate and had his family’s permission to be in Miami. Bo and John had subsisted by selling their blood until John found a job as a stockboy at a dress shop. He had only worked one day when he and Bo went out “cruising around looking for girls.” They found the police instead. Bo Dennis told the Miami detectives that John had never mentioned any criminal activity in his past. “He told me he stayed overnight with a gay guy one night in Louisiana, but he said nothing happened.” Fourteen-year-old John English was nothing if not a survivor. Despite widespread BOLOS (Be On the Lookout For) from law-enforcement agencies, he had managed to drive the same stolen car thirty-four hundred miles from home.

Now, the King County Prosecutor’s Office began extradition proceedings to bring him back to face murder charges. Two days before Halloween, Rolf Grunden flew out of the Sea-Tac Airport to bring John English back home. It was agreed between the prosecutors office and the sheriff’s detectives that the boy was not to be interrogated, but if he chose, he could give a voluntary statement about the events of the evening of October 1 and his adventures since. As it turned out, John English did want to talk. He had held terrible secrets inside for long, solitary weeks on the road. He agreed to a tape-recorded interview on the flight to Seattle from Miami. Rolf Grunden was careful to explain John’s Miranda rights to him, and the teenager repeated them back, paraphrasing them to indicate he fully understood them.

As Ben Brown had said after he returned from California, the runaway plans had been a spur of the moment thing. On the morning of October I, John said he had gone to school and heard that Ben wanted to run away.
 
John said he’d offered to go with him and provide a car. After school that night, he had tried to figure out how he could get the car.

Finally, he’d concluded that if he knocked out his stepmother and tied her up, he could take the car without interference. He had hidden the hammer in his room. Just as Vera English was leaving for work, he had called her into his room and told her to look out the window. He recalled hitting her only a “few” times when she started to turn back toward him. He told Grunden he remembered that she tried to protect her head by putting her hands up. He had been surprised when she had gone into convulsions instead of just passing out. That had apparently bothered him. “I used her belt to strangle her “because I didn’t want her to suffer.” John English vehemently denied that sex had anything to do with his attack on his stepmother, but he admitted that he had taken her clothes off after she was dead because he was curious. The thought of rape had flashed through his mind then, he said, but he insisted he had decided against it. While his stepmother was either dead or dying, he said he had left the room and began to pack his clothes. During this time, the little girls were downstairs in the rec room watching television and apparently thought their mother had left for work. John said he’d stopped to call the gift shop where Vera worked and told them she was ill with the flu and would not be in that night. The boy steadfastly denied he had thought of his stepmother in a sexual manner.
 
This question seemed to upset him far more than those about her murder.

He said that there had been nude pictures of her in the house, but that she had never gone around nude. “She did wear those see-through blouses a lot, though.”

“One of your friends told us that you were always talking about what a great figure your stepmother had, “ Grunden said. The teenager reddened, but shook his head. He said he hadn’t really noticed. He described the atmosphere in his family as “very open, “ and said that his parents had never hidden anything from him.

Grunden asked him about the mobile in his room with the garroted nudes.

“That was just part of one that they had hanging someplace in the house, “ he said.

“They said I could have it.”

“How about all those pictures under your mattress? “

“Well, we had this family project to make a collage of different stuff.
 
But nobody ever finished it, and I found them in a garbage can.” Grunden had no comment to that.

Either the Englishes had an offbeat approach to family projects or the kid was making it all up. John filled in the details of the one part of his flight that had not already been traced. He said that after he escaped from Sergeant Roy in Louisiana, he had jumped over a couple of fences and run into a field. He took what money he had left out of his wallet and then threw away all of his ID and the wallet. “I just kept walking until I came to a road. Then I hitchhiked all the way to Miami.
 
I met up with Bo there. I only ran away from the cops because they said Bo would go to jail if it turned out I was under seventeen.

“ After that, he figured he’d run about as far as he could and he just decided to give up. John English wasn’t very bigonly five foot seven and 135 pounds. If he had not taken his stepmother completely by surprise, she might well have survived the attack. He was booked into the juvenile detention facility in Seattle on charges of first-degree murder. Had he been two years older, the Juvenile Court system would probably have declined to try his case and he would have been tried as an adult. On November 15, 1974, however, John English appeared before Juvenile Court Commissioner Norman Quinn and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He was bound over to the Department of Institutions, Juvenile Division, until he reached the age of twenty-one. In 1981, he went free.