Cloyd Steiger - Homicide: The View from Inside the Yellow Tape: A True Crime Memoir

Homicide: The View from Inside the Yellow Tape

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Cloyd Steiger

2018

https://cloydsteiger.com

To the secondary victims of homicide;

the loved ones left behind.

Acknowledgements

There are a lot of people to thank for a project like this. First, Id like to thank Casey McNerthney, who spent years as a local Seattle reporter watching me from outside the yellow tape, for his enthusiasm, and editing skills.

Id also like to thank all the partners I worked with in Homicide: John Nordlund, Greg Mixsell, Donna ONeal, Mike Ciesynski, Jason Kasner, and Sonny Davis, (yes, even Sonny).

Id like to thank my sons, Casey, Landon and Dylan for all the times I had to leave to go to work for long hours, sometimes missing family events.

All my friends and family, who repeatedly over the years have told me, You should write a book!

My six favorite people in the world; my grandchildren, Keaton, Kai, Kenley, Reese, Wyatt, and Dakota.

My wife Doreen, who when we first met, told me, I could never be married to a police officer, and not only married one, but has two sons who are cops now, for all the times that damned phone rang in the middle of the night, sending me away for hours, and sometimes days, usually at very inconvenient times.

Finally, the Seattle Police Department, who hired a 21-year-old kid and made my dream come true.

My jobs been murder lately.

I mean that literally; the blood, and the gore. And dont even get me started about the smell; the metallic scent of blood, usually mixed with alcohol, the putrid odor of decaying human flesh, the maggots, and blood spatter. Its not the clean, tidy murder like you see on CSI or several other television dramas that think they got it right.

They didnt.

My work life is about depravity; about asshole gang-bangers to whom life is some gangsta rap song advocating pulling out your gat at the slightest provocation, about sexual psychopath serial killers, domestic terrorists, the criminally insane, and a whole bunch of just stupid people who kill other people for no damned good reason.

At home, my life is PG-13, but my work life is definitely MA-17.

Its not a job for people who dont want to get their hands dirty.

This morning was no exception.

I drove the downtown Seattle streets, usually bustling with pedestrian and vehicle traffic, abandoned at that hour, except an occasional street sweeper or transient sifting through ashtrays, seeking out cigarette butts discarded with tobacco enough to roll their own.

The red and blue lights at the top of my windshield pierced the streetlight-lit night, I paused only briefly at each red light before driving through, eventually pulling my unmarked Chevy Impala detective car up to the scene, a gas station off Denny Way in the shadow of the Space Needle. Well, it would have been in the shadow if it wasnt four in the morning.

Another homicide.

Yellow crime scene tape encircled the lot, a dead black male lying near a gas pump, his head surrounded by a large pool of blood, his eyes in the fixed cloudy stare of death Id seen hundreds, if not thousands of times in my career.

A young patrol officer stood at the edge of the tape, a clipboard in his hands logging everyone entering the crime scene, his uniform immaculately clean and pressed; obviously a rookie.

Can I get your name, sir?

Steiger, I told him, from Homicide.

Serial number?

Four-three-one-three.

I saw the look in his eyes; he was looking at a dinosaur. His serial number was probably in the mid-eight thousands.

Two of my sons are patrol officers. Hed consider them old guys with seven and a half and eight years on respectively.

Johney Stevens was the Patrol Sergeant at the scene. I knew him well. I was a patrol officer with several years on when he was the rookie holding the clipboard.

Whats going on here, Johney?

The clerk inside heard a bunch of shots. He ducked and called 911. My guys got here and found this dude obviously dead, he said, gesturing to the body. We found four guns; two in the car, and two outside. The thing is, all the shell casings are in the car, none outside. It looks like these guys were all sitting in the car when the shooting went down.

Wow, I smiled. The shootout at the OK Corolla.

I walked up to the car and looked in, the scent of cordite and blood in the air. A semiautomatic pistol lay just outside the front passenger door. Another was in the backseat. The magazine was inserted backward. It couldnt have fired in that condition.

Sucks to be that guy.

Another gun lay on the ground near the dead guy.

This wasnt my case. I was there to help the primary detectives, in this case Tom Mooney and Jeff Mudd.

Bob Merner, the Chief of Investigations pulled up in his car.

Chiefs rarely show up at routine murder scenes. Bob isnt like a normal Chief. Hed recently come to Seattle from Boston PD, where hed spent most his career as a Homicide detective or supervisor. He shot up the ranks late in his career to Superintendent of Investigations, Bostons equivalent of Assistant Chief.

I met Bob a couple years ago. He was a lieutenant with Boston Homicide when I attended a Homicide conference in New York.

I was glad to have him in Seattle.

How is it I live in the suburbs, twenty-five miles from here, and you live just a few blocks away, but I beat you to the scene?

My phone only rang twenty minutes ago!

I explained the scene to him.

It looks as though these mopes shot it out in the car, I said. Its amazing only one of them was killed. Most likely, its a drug rip. A thinning of the gene pool.

Its what we sometimes referred to as a Misdemeanor Murder.

Later that Saturday morning, my contribution to this case was complete. Because of this case, the next murder would be mine. My partner, Jason Kasner, was out of town on vacation, so Id be on my own. I went home at eleven AM.

By eight oclock that night, my ass was dragging. Im too old for this shit, and my years in Homicide has taught me, always assume youll get called right back in. Get sleep when you can.

I went to bed.

My instincts were correct.

I woke to my cellphone ringing. I looked at the clock on my nightstand. Three-thirty in the morning again; two nights in a row.

Within a few minutes, I was in my car, red and blue lights flashing, heading up I-5 on my way to another murder. Im definitely too old for this shit. This case is mine. Ill be at work for fifteen or sixteen hours.

At least its my day off.

Id been thinking of retiring. Id been a cop thirty-six years. Thats a long time. Twenty-two in Homicide.

Id seen a lot during that time that someone not in this business wouldnt believe.

Its been a long road.

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My telephone rang just before six in the morning on August 11, 1994. I was already up getting ready for work.

A seven-year-old girl was dead, reportedly shot while she slept at an address on South Chicago Street in Rainier Valley.

It would be my first case as a primary detective in a homicide. Id transferred from Sex Crimes a few weeks earlier. I had fifteen years on the Seattle Police Department and had been a detective for four years, working as a precinct detective before my stint