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couldn't do a good job of raising sons, and they strived to excel to
prove them wrong. "I always wanted to do something to make my mother
proud of me," Vern Henderson said. Now Vern would never be proud of
himself, not really, until he found Morris's killer. Morris had been so
kind to everyone. "If Morris Blankenbaker liked you, he would do
anything for you. He was like a bull on the football field," Vern said.
"He could run right over anybody. He could have whipped half the school,
but he wasn't a bully, he wasn't like that." Everyone on the Yakima
Police Department wanted to solve the bizarre double murders of the two
popular coaches, but not one of them felt the impetus to do so in his
gut the way Vern Henderson did. In that dismal period between a bloody
Christmas and a cheerless New Year, Vern thought about all that had
happened and wondered where to start. Which brick could he remove from
the wall that a killer had built up around himself? How could he make
that wall tumble? Bob Brimmer was Vern's sergeant upstairs in the
detectives'
office. He was an old-school investigator with decades on the job. He
would work the case his way, and Vern would work it his. He knew what
his strengths were. He was a "listener" and he had spread out a network
that snared information during his years investigating juveniles. He
counted on his network now. Yakima was a small town, and people talked.
Sooner or later, some names were going to work their way back to
Henderson. At a time when he had the least inclination to be patient,
that was just what he was going to have to be. Vern Henderson, always
taciturn, became doubly so as the old year passed away and 1976 dawned.
Somebody knew who had shot Morris and who had shot Gabby. It might be
the same manor woman. It might be two different me nor women. Even
though Gabby Moore had begun as the prime suspect in Morris
Blankenbaker's murder, Bob Brimmer and Howard Cyr had established that
he could not have killed Morris not with his own hands. But then who
had?
When Vern Henderson said everybody in Yakima liked Morris, he wasn't
overstating it. Everybody had.
It's an old rule of thumb in homicide investigation that detectives look
for the killer among those closest to the victims. Family first. Then
friends.
Then coworkers, and out into a continually widening circle. There had
been no obvious reason at all for strangers to kill either Morris or
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Gabby. They hadn't been robbed. Neither had been involved in a fight or
altercation with anyone. Their only "enemies" were one another. And
their main "connection" was Jerilee. All of the witnesses who had seen
Jerilee the morning she found Morris's body agreed that this was a woman
in deep shock and excruciating grief. She was never a serious suspect.
Why should she be? If she had wanted to be free of Morris a second time,
he would have let her go as gently as he had the first time. But she
hadn't wanted to leave the father of her two little children, she loved
Morris, and she was looking forward to remarrying him. She had no gun.
She had no gun debris on her hands.
Her recall of events of the night/morning of November 21/22
dovetailed perfectly with witness statements and with the detectives'
reconstruction of events. Morris had stuck close to home when he wasn't
teaching, coaching, or moonlighting at the Lion's Share. Gabby had
stayed in his apartment in the last weeks of his life. His closest
companions had been his son, his daughters, and the former athletes who
had tried to comfort him and to cover for him so he wouldn't lose his
job. Even in the weeks when he had not been officially assigned to the
Blankenbaker case, Vern Henderson had gone over Morris's last moments a
hundred times in his mind. "He knew who it was," Vern said. "The reason
I know Morris knew who it was was because there were no defensive
wounds. I looked for that when I was at his autopsy." Vern Henderson
knew Morris's habits almost as well as he knew his own. Morris would
have driven into the alley behind his house, parked his car next to the
carport, and headed for the side gate. "He had gotten through the gate,"
Henderson surmised. "And he was probably shutting it, and someone
called, Morris!" and he turned around. He knew who it was. As good as
Morris was, you might have killed him, but not without his having some
defensive marks, unless he knew who it was. As close as the shooter was,
it made me know it wasn't an enemy' who shot him, to get that close to
Morris because Morris was too good at hand-to-hand combat. No, he knew
him." There would always be times when Vern Henderson regretted that he
carried the visual memory of Morris lying on the autopsy table, but that
was the price he had to pay. He had needed to know that there were no
defensive marks on his friend at all, to know how close the shooter had
gotten to Morris. It helped him to picture who he was looking for. "I
knew that Morris not only knew the person who shot him he had to have
trusted him to let him get that close." Now, at last, Vern was right in
the middle of the investigation not only of Morris's murder but also of
Gabby's. He had watched Gabby from a distance during the last weeks of
his life. "I expected that Gabby had had something to do with it," he
said.
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