Broken Doll Read online

  The body of a seven-year-old . . . discovered by a nine-year-old

  “We were looking for blackberries,” the little girl later told police. “We knew there were lots of blackberries down that trail because we had picked them before. It was about seven o’clock when we decided to go play at the forest. People dump all sorts of stuff there—leaves and things. We were walking and my friend saw a skate. At least she thought she saw one, but we didn’t know for sure. We walked down further and that’s when we saw it.”

  “We were walking side by side,” the other little girl confirmed. “We went around to the other side of the bushes, but we couldn’t find the skate. On the way back up the trail, I saw a human foot. It was under some grass clippings. It looked like a kid’s foot. I screamed, and the other kids came running over.”

  From his pickup truck, Wesley Coulter heard the screams and saw the two crying girls. “On every other telephone pole in all of Everett, there was a poster of Roxanne Doll. I just had a feeling, so I grabbed my phone and went down to where the kids had been playing. I saw some little toes sticking up out of the grass. I looked at them and I didn’t believe they were real.”

  Coulter grabbed a tree limb and prodded the foot to see if it was indeed real, or that of a doll. It was real. “I was filled with anger when I touched the toes. Then I knew for certain that Roxanne had died.”

  BROKEN DOLL

  BURL BARER

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  The body of a seven-year-old . . . discovered by a nine-year-old

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part 1 - MISSING

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part 2 - MURDER

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part 3 - TRIAL

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part 4 - SENTENCING

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Copyright Page

  For Jaja

  Acknowledgments

  This book is an account of events adapted from trial transcripts, police records, and interviews. Conversations, statements, legal arguments, testimonies, and all other remarks quoted herein are adaptations of such as recalled from memory. For purposes of clarity, concision, and continuity, statements and conversations often necessitated condensation and emendation. All efforts have been made to retain the original intent, and any errors are unintentional.

  This book would not have been possible without the exemplary cooperation of the Everett Washington Police Department, and the Snohomish County Prosecutor’s Office.

  Heartfelt appreciation is expressed to the dedicated health-care professional, Donna McCooke, RGN, of Great Britain, whose views of the issue at hand were of significant value in helping the author retain a sense of perspective.

  My editor, the patient and unflappable Michaela Hamilton, deserves credit for the book’s readability. Heartfelt gratitude to Charlotte Dial Breeze, my literary agent for a decade, my dear friend for life.

  An individual who chooses to surrender to the promptings of his material nature can sink to levels of depravity and bestiality which are abhorrent to the discerning eye, and which are totally unworthy of the human station.

  —’Abdu’l-Bahá

  The more often the captain of a ship is in the tempest and difficult sailing, the greater his knowledge becomes. Therefore, I am happy that you have had great tribulations and difficulties.... Strange it is that I love you and still I am happy that you have sorrows.

  —’Abdu’l-Bahá

  Prologue

  May 28, 1988

  On a pleasant spring evening in Everett, Washington, an innocent after-dinner game of hide-and-seek turned traumatic for Angela Rono and her youngest daughter, four-year-old Feather Rahier. “It was about nine P.M,” recalled Rono, “and I had just called my four kids to come in from outside because it was bedtime. They all came right in, except Feather.

  “I sent the kids back outside to get her,” Rono said, “and they were calling her name and looking all over for her. When they couldn’t find her, I sent them to the neighbor’s house to ask if they had seen her. Then I sent them across the alley to the Clark residence.”

  Carol Clark, a kindly woman with a great love of children, had a twenty-year-old nephew named Richard, who often lived there with other members of Carol’s family. Richard Clark knew Feather, let her play with his puppy, and even gave her gifts. He primarily stayed in the garage adjacent to the residence. Feather’s siblings asked Richard if he’d seen the missing child, and he told them that he hadn’t seen her.

  Perhaps it was mother’s intuition or simple persistence that compelled Rono to send her eldest daughter, Misty, back to Clark’s garage. Richard Clark again denied seeing Feather, but the missing child’s desperate sobs were now audible outside his locked garage door.

  “When my daughter told me that he had her in there,” Rono said, “I went running over, yelling at him to open up and let her out.”

  “I don’t have her,” answered Clark from behind the locked door. “I’m trying to sleep. Go away and quit bothering me.”

  “I know she’s in there!” screamed Rono. “I know you have my daughter. Let her out, open the door.”

  “I can’t find the light switch,” replied Clark. “I can’t find the key.”

  Unconvinced and outraged, the distraught mother battered more violently on Clark’s door, alerting the neighbors. “Let me in!” she screamed. “Let me in right now! I swear to God if you’ve hurt my daughter, you’re going to jail. Open the door right this minute.”

  When Clark finally fumbled free the heavy chain and padlock, Rono pushed her way inside. There, in what seemed the most vile of environments, she confronted a bone-chilling scene—her four-year-old daughter stood in front of her, face drenched with tears, green socks tied on her wrists, and the rear of her pants pulled down below her buttocks.

  “He was trying to pull up her pants with one hand, and trying to get the sock off her wrist with the other hand, “recalled Rono, who grabbed young Feather and hurried her out of the garage. Clark followed her outside, then turned and ran. Two men from the neighborhood aiding in the search for Feather grabbed him at the end of the alley.

  When police arrived, they found Richard Mathew Clark standing stoic and silent as Feather’s mother beat upon his chest with her fists. On either side of Clark were the two neighbor men, who chose not to intervene on Clark’s behalf.

  “I was dispatched to the report of a sexual assault,” recalled Officer Dwight Snyder. “When I got back in the area, I heard a lot of people yelling and screaming, separated them, and began to talk to each individual to sort out what had occurred. I knew detectives would want to talk with a child that young—I didn’t want to get too detailed—so I just wanted a general idea of what occurred. I was pretty general on my questions. Feather said she had been outside playing,” explained Snyder, “and that Mr. Clark had come up and talked to her. And then she looked at me and said, ‘He put a sock in my mouth.’ And I asked her if she had talked to Mr. Clark, and she said, ‘Yes, he gives me things.’ She showed
me a small, kind-of-statuette, I guess, of a dog that had been given to her. She showed me that, and after she showed me the dog, she looked at me and said, ‘He touched me.’ And I asked her, at that point, well, how did he touch you? And she would just turn away, look at the TV, and not say anything. So I didn’t press the matter. At that point, I decided to arrest Mr. Clark.”

  “Richard tied me up with socks and tried to put his hand down my pants,” said Feather. She didn’t simply say it once; she said it repeatedly all the way to the hospital.

  Feather’s version of events, detailed five days later to Detective Diane Berglund of the Everett Police Department, related that she was happily playing when Richard Clark picked her up and carried her off.

  “It was dark in there,” she said of his garage. “He put a sock in my mouth and a sock around my wrist and tied it in back,” explained Feather, “and a sock over my eyes and another one on my arms—he put the wrist one on first. When Richard put a sock over my mouth, I cried. I was crying and screaming. No one else was in there with me. I knew Misty came over to Richard’s house because I could hear her.”

  Although Feather was assuredly mistreated, she was not technically sexually violated. He did not put his hands inside her pants, said the child. “He touched me on the outside,” explained Feather.

  Locking a four-year-old girl in a garage, stuffing a sock in her mouth, and tying her up is against the law in Everett, Washington. Richard Mathew Clark was charged with unlawful imprisonment and convicted of the crime.

  The entire horrific event in Clark’s dark garage lasted no more than a few minutes, but the effect on Feather was indelible. At the age of four years old, young Feather had now been twice traumatized by inappropriate adult male behavior. Her first sexual molestation was when she was only two years old. The perpetrator didn’t live across the alley or down the road. “It was her own father,” confirmed Angela Rono.

  By the time Feather reached adolescence, the troubled teen no longer lived with her mother. From May 20, 1995, until March 29, 1997, Feather lived with a foster family lovingly headed by matriarch Julie Gelo.

  The residual trauma of her violated childhood, the predictable pains of puberty, and the instability engendered by frequent placement in foster care raised Feather into a significantly troubled preteen. The aforementioned afflictions resulted in emotional chaos, fragmented relationships, inconsistent school attendance, and precocious sexuality.

  Although the stability and structure of the loving Gelo family provided innumerable benefits and blessings, one horrific event immediately preceding her placement in the Gelo household precipitated a maelstrom of devastating emotional impact—the brutal sex slaying of a seven-year-old Everett girl named Roxanne Doll.

  Part 1

  MISSING

  Chapter 1

  On the final night of her life, Roxanne Doll spent the hour before bedtime watching a Disney video with her mother, sister, and brother. It was Cinderella, the fairy-tale romance about castles, glass slippers, and an adorable, exploitable young girl rescued by love and magic from a life of mistreatment and toil. Roxanne didn’t live to see sunrise.

  Sometime during the night, she was abducted from her bed, raped, and stabbed to death. Her body was found on April 8, 1995, dumped down a brushy north Everett hillside. The blond-haired, blue-eyed second grader lay there for a week, partially buried under a heap of grass clippings and other yard debris.

  Roxanne’s disappearance and death struck a nerve in Snohomish County. Hundreds of people beat the brush around south Everett looking for the missing child near her home. When her body was found, hundreds more openly mourned her. Family, friends, and strangers wept at the funeral—a funeral that her parents, on their own, could ill afford.

  “If it wasn’t for some very wonderful strangers,” said Roxanne’s mother, Gail Doll, “Roxanne’s funeral would have been nearly impossible to do. So many people gave to us so we could bury her with more dignity and the respect she deserved.” A makeshift roadside shrine was erected where two children picking berries discovered her body.

  The man arrested, charged, and convicted of this most heinous crime was no stranger to Roxanne Doll or Feather Rahier. According to the newspaper, the twenty-six-year-old suspect lived in a garage on Lombard Street. His name was Richard M. Clark.

  Snohomish County prosecutors, seeing similarities between the 1988 incident involving Feather and the 1995 kidnapping/murder of Roxanne Doll, subpoenaed Feather in February 1997. “When it was opened and she read it, she became very angry,” recalled Gelo.

  “I refuse, I’ll not testify. I don’t want to be in the courtroom,” Feather said. “I don’t want to remember what happened to me.”

  Clark’s defense attorneys also wanted a deposition, which she reluctantly provided that very month. During the deposition, Feather repeatedly deflected questions by saying, “I don’t remember.” In truth, she remembered.

  “I knew Feather had disclosed things to me that would have answered some of those questions,” recalled Gelo. “And so I asked her, I said, you didn’t tell him everything, did you? She hung her head and kind of got tears in her eyes. She said, ‘No, I didn’t. I could have answered just about all of his questions, but I don’t want to remember. I get so scared and I get so sad that I’m afraid of what I might do, and what others might do. I just don’t want to think about it; I don’t want to talk about it.’”

  Feather’s anger and resentment soon influenced all aspects of her life. “I started getting telephone calls from her school,” recalled Gelo. “They told me that she was losing control in the classrooms, yelling at the teachers, saying that she had to get out of the classroom, that she felt she was being closed in. Then, on Sunday, February twenty-third, she lost control at our house and threatened to hurt herself or to kill herself, and to hurt another child in my home. She ran away, going out her bedroom window.”

  The police found Feather fifteen miles away—she had walked the entire distance. When Gelo arrived at the Everett Police Department, Feather was in handcuffs because she was still threatening to hurt herself or hurt others.

  “At this point,” said Gelo, “it was decided to take her to Everett General Hospital. She was released from handcuffs for a while at the hospital and she took a paper clip and was trying to carve in her arm. Two mental-health professionals evaluated her at the hospital that night, and had her transported by ambulance to the Fairfax Psychiatric Hospital in Kirkland, Washington, arriving about five in the morning on Monday the twenty-fourth.”

  Gelo took Feather to Harborview Hospital for an involuntary-commitment hearing, requesting that the youngster be held for fourteen days for a complete psychiatric evaluation. The involuntary-commitment order was declined, Gelo explained, because “Despite Feather’s threats, there had never been any actual harm done to another child in my home, and because the scratching and the carving on her arm had not drawn blood.”

  The Department of Social and Health Services decided that it would not be safe for Feather to return to Gelo’s home until there were other services in place to make sure she would not carry through with her threats.

  “At that point, she was placed in a facility called Cedar House from Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of February, until Monday, March third,” said Gelo. “I had numerous contacts with her while in Cedar House, and we worked on things such as family reconciliation, and we worked on getting additional services in place to make it possible for Feather to return to my home, which she did on March third.”

  Feather returned under close supervision and heavy medication, including twenty milligrams of Prozac, one milligram of Klonopin, and forty milligrams of Ritalin. Near comatose from Klonopin, she sleepwalked through school on Tuesday, March 4, before that medication was removed from her regimen.

  “We also had, in addition to once-a-week group therapy sessions, a case manager and outreach worker appointed for her by LifeNet Mental Health,” Gelo said. “We had no-harm contracts drawn up betwee
n Feather and our household and a crisis-intervention plan was set into place. And with that, she seemed to level off for a little while.”

  Tuesday, March 11, Feather came home after a session with the outreach worker and told Gelo that she had something to show her. “She took me into the kitchen and showed me that on the inside of her right ankle that she had started to carve initials, initials of a boy. These actually were cut into the skin,” Gelo recalled. “It was not a scratch, and it was an actual cut done by a razor blade. We then put into place more precautions at home, locking up all knives, even dinner knives and kitchen knives, taking away all mirrors, everything that we could find that could be potentially dangerous.”

  The following day, March 12, deputy prosecutor Ronald Doersch sent Feather a fax via Lori Vanderberg at LifeNet Health. The transmission contained an avalanche of embarrassing and troubling questions.

  Doersch requested the girl’s recollection of how often she was touched, what she felt, what it felt like, what he said before, during and after she was tied up, where she was touched after being tied up, and what parts of Richard Clark’s body touched her body. He also asked if Richard touched himself while touching her, and what parts of his body were touched, why and when he stopped touching her, what he did after the touching stopped, and if Richard Clark told her not to tell anyone, or he threatened her in any way.

  “Thank you in advance for your cooperation in this matter,” wrote Doersch. “We realize how difficult this is for you.” It was more difficult than Doersch knew.

  “She completely lost her appetite,” recalled Gelo. “She was now down to ninety-eight pounds and was being monitored twice a week by the pediatrician because we were really concerned about her weight loss and her not wanting to eat.”