Serial killer Randy Woodfield's legacy: pain, preening and pointlessness (2024)

View full sizeMarion County Sheriff; Oregon Department of CorrectionsWoodfield in 1981 and in his most recent prison mug shot.

Some people need a smoke break at work, a little something that takes the hard edge off a day in the office. At 53, Chuck Heath's healthier addiction is the Internet, where he devours sports and follows his favorite teams. On Thursday, he never got beyond a news story that contained a ghost.

Randy Woodfield.

Just like that, images long buried rose from the grave.

"As much stuff as I've tried to forget," he said Friday, "it became as clear as it's ever been."

He remembered Woodfield the co-worker, the athlete he looked up to, the smooth-talking operator who had a way with women, the life of the party.

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In horrific tandem came the dark side. Woodfield the armed robber, the rapist, the remorseless I-5 Killer who executed his victims face-down with bullets to the back of the head. Among them was one of Heath's friends, an 18-year-old killed after Woodfield's Valentine's Day party fell flat.

"I'm not ashamed to tell you I put my head on the desk and started to cry," said Heath, who works in Lake Oswego. "I have a 13-year-old son who is the best thing in my life. I think about those parents. I put myself in their shoes. I see the bodies."

Woodfield is doing a life stint in the Oregon State Penitentiary, convicted in 1981 of executing a Salem woman and attempting to kill another.

On Thursday, police announced that the Oregon native, Fellowship of Christian Athletes member and former Portland State University football star had been definitively linked through DNA evidence to five more murders: Heath's friend, Julie Ann Reitz; a young couple in North Portland; and a mother and daughter in California's Shasta County.

After three decades, the detectives, the victims' relatives, the former friends all say they're far from understanding what turned a young man who seemed on top of his game into a sociopath destined to die in prison.

"Everyone has a theory about Randy and what he did," Heath said. "But when it comes to Randy Woodfield, I think we only see the tip of the iceberg."

Thursday's announcement brings Woodfield's definite victims to seven, including another victim linked to him in 2006, all killed in less than five months from October 1980 to February 1981. Detectives think there could be many more.

Woodfield's victims

I-5 Killer Randall Brent Woodfield was convicted in one killing and definitively linked through DNA and ballistic evidence to six other slayings, detectives say:

* Cherie L. Ayers, 29. Found beaten and stabbed in her southwest Portland home on Oct. 11, 1980.

* Darcey Renee Fix, 22, and Douglas Keith Altig, 24. Found shot to death in their North Portland home on Thanksgiving Day in 1980.

* Shari Hull, 20. Found shot to death Jan. 18, 1981, in a Keizer office building where she worked as a cleaner. Woodfield was convicted for killing Hull. A second woman he sexually assaulted and shot in the office building survived to testify against him.

* Jannell Jarvis, 14, and her mother, Donna Eckard, 37. Found shot to death in their Shasta County, Calif., home on Feb. 3, 1981.

* Julie Reitz, 18. Found shot to death in the Beaverton home she shared with her mother on Feb. 15, 1981. Likely killed close to midnight on Valentine's Day.

Woodfield cruised up and down Interstate 5 in his gold Volkswagen bug, prowling from northern California to northern Washington.

During the investigation, a task force created a map littered with names, dates and crimes, all with suspects fitting Woodfield's description or modus operandi. The count: 25 murders and 140 other crimes, mostly robbery, rape and sodomy.

Athletic, good-looking and charismatic, Woodfield had no trouble getting women's phone numbers. He showed off his buff body in one issue of Playgirl magazine, his bulging muscles slicked in oil.

But when he called women, some turned him down. That made him mad.

"Within minutes, he would find a victim," Chris Van Dyke, former Marion County district attorney said Friday. Some he knew. Some he didn't.

In February 1981, he called his sister in Shasta County, Calif., asking to have coffee with her. She said her husband didn't want him around. Soon after, Woodfield forced his way into the Shasta home of Jannell Jarvis, 14, and her mother, Donna Eckard, 37, and killed them.

He murdered Darcey Renee Fix, a 22-year-old he knew from Portland State University, after he went to her home to rape her. But she was with Douglas Keith Altig, 24. Woodfield murdered them both.

He stole a .32-caliber pistol in the home, which he used to shoot Shari Hull, 20, and a 21-year-old woman, two students working as nighttime janitors in a Salem-area office. The 21-year-old survived, later testifying that Woodfield raped them both at gunpoint, then shot each of them twice in the back of the head.

Her testimony was key to putting Woodfield in prison for good.

Woodfield always wore a Band-Aid or tape over his nose to distract his victims, detectives said, thinking they wouldn't recognize him in a lineup without it.

"He didn't feel or demonstrate any remorse for any of the cases," Van Dyke said. "He was probably the coldest, most detached defendant I've ever seen."

In his early years, Woodfield's trajectory seemed harmless.

He grew up in Newport in a middle-class home, excelling in athletics. He was a star wide receiver on PSU's football team, joining the Campus Crusade for Christ and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. In 1974, he was drafted in the 14th round by the Green Bay Packers.

But there were problems early on, said Ann Rule, the Seattle author who documented Woodfield's case in her bestseller, "The I-5 Killer." Woodfield was overshadowed as a youth by his two older sisters, Rule said in an interview Friday. They did well in school. One a doctor, the other an attorney.

Woodfield's mother was a perfectionist, Rule said. His father, an executive in the phone company, pushed him into athletics.

Rule said Woodfield was caught peeping in windows and exposing himself when he was 13, but his coaches hushed it up. While Woodfield was at PSU and soon afterward he was convicted of indecent exposure four times, in 1972 in Vancouver, Wash., and in 1973, 1974 and 1975 in Multnomah County.

The Packers cut him, Rule said, after he was caught exposing himself yet again.

"That was the high point in his life, but he didn't get it," she said. "I think he's always felt inadequate because his sisters excelled in school and in their careers."

Decades later, Detective Jim Lawrence of Portland's Cold Case Unit combed through 12 binders of case files to help pin down Woodfield's murders. He found a report filed after Woodfield's father, a phone company executive, visited him in jail.

"It was a really short meeting," Lawrence said. "When the dad walked out, he told the detectives, 'He's not the son I know.'"

"He said he wasn't going to help the detectives put away his son. No one from Woodfield's family has ever spoken again."

Former Beaverton Police Chief David Bishop was a detective when Reitz, Heath's friend, was murdered about 4 a.m. on Feb. 15, 1981, shot twice in the back of the head after being raped.

Her body was found at the bottom of the stairs about 8:30 a.m. by her mother. Reitz and her attacker had had a glass of wine and were planning on coffee -- instant was on the counter and water had boiled down in a kettle.

Bishop interviewed as many people as possible. Woodfield's name kept popping up.

Woodfield met Reitz while working at the Faucet Tavern in Raleigh Hills. She was underage, but Woodfield let her in anyway.

Woodfield later moved to Springfield but often visited Portland. To celebrate Valentine's Day, he organized a party for himself at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Portland. Nobody showed up. After the embarrassment, Woodfield turned up on Reitz' doorstep at 2 a.m., Bishop said, ready to rape and murder.

Heath worked at The Faucet and met both Woodfield and Reitz there. At 21, eight years younger than Woodfield, Heath looked up to him. Heath had played football and tried out at PSU. They'd throw the football around. But Heath started to have misgivings.

Other serial killers with Oregon tracks

* Jerome Henry Brudos. Kidnapped and murdered young Oregon women in the late 1960s. Sometimes referred to as "The Lust Killer" and "The Shoe Fetish Slayer." Convicted of three murders, confessed to four, suspected of at least one more. Died in 2006 in the Oregon State Penitentiary at age 67 from natural causes.

* Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy. Murdered numerous young women nationwide during the 1970s, often luring his victims into his car by pretending to be injured and asking for help. Convicted of three Florida murders. Bundy's lawyer has said he believes Bundy killed a total of 36 people. Confessed to killing Roberta Kathleen Parks, 22, who vanished from the Oregon State University campus in May 1974. Executed in Florida in 1989.

* Dayton Leroy Rogers. Convicted of murdering seven prostitutes in Oregon after police found the bodies of seven women in 1987 in the woods near Molalla. Dubbed the "Molalla Forest Killer." On Oregon's death row.

* Gary Ridgway. Acknowledged killing 49 young women during the 1980s and early 1990s; true number likely higher. Dubbed the "Green River Killer" because several of his victims were dumped in or posed along the Green River in Kent, WA. Targeted Washington runaways and prostitutes. Remains of four victims found in Oregon's Washington County. Sentenced to life in prison at the Washington State Penitentiary in 2003.

-- Compiled by News Researcher Lynne Palombo

"Randy was fired from the bar," Heath said. "His thing was young girls. He was always bringing underage girls into the place. Then he asked me to go with him to small claims court and lie. I realized he was kind of weird."

The last time Heath heard from him was the night of Woodfield's no-show Valentine's party, when Woodfield left a message with Heath's parents. "He wanted me to come down and join him," Heath said. "I got the message too late and didn't make it."

That was the night -- it was announced with certainty Thursday because of DNA evidence -- that Woodfield killed again.

Woodfield had spent time in prison before he began his killing spree. In 1975, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison in a sting operation after a series of rapes of young women in Duniway Park in Southwest Portland.

But he was paroled four years later, in 1979, after a favorable report from a corrections division psychologist. His known killings started the next year.

After Reitz's death, Bishop and Woodfield's parole officer visited the Springfield home where Woodfield was renting a room. When Bishop flashed his badge, Woodfield didn't flinch. Bishop showed him a picture of Reitz. Woodfield insisted he didn't know her.

That reaction, Bishop discovered, was typical. Woodfield rarely showed emotion while being grilled for hours by police. When confronted about his crimes, Woodfield smiled and slicked back his dark wavy hair with both hands.

Bishop searched the home, finding only gun-cleaning materials. But when the landlady arrived, she supplied a lengthy phone bill with a trail of calls from San Francisco to Bothell, Wash. That's when he realized they had a serial killer on their hands.

"All of a sudden it became obvious: It was a map of I-5," Bishop said. "Woodfield was addicted to the phone. He made thousands of calls. He had 'girlfriends' everywhere."

Bishop said Woodfield had two personalities: Randy, the bad boy, and Randall, the good one. In interviews, the detective would push "Randy" into a corner with the facts, then ask to talk to "Randall," trying to squeeze information from him.

Years later, Bishop said, Woodfield wrote him letters from prison, asking about his family and his life. It was as if he believed they were good friends.

Woodfield has never admitted guilt or taken responsibility. At his sentencing for murder in 1981, he issued a rambling, barely audible statement, professing his innocence.

Oregon didn't have the death penalty at the time. If it did, Marion County Circuit Judge Clarke Brown told Woodfield, he would have "no hesitancy" imposing it.

Thirty-one years later, at the news conference Thursday, Reitz's mother, Candee Wilson, agreed. In a calm but firm voice, she said serial killers should be put to death. "It is my belief that killing is in their genetic code," she said. "Short of discovering the wayward gene, no amount of counseling will ever prevent them from killing again."

Most serial killers at least have a cooling-off period after killing. Woodfield never did, said Lawrence, the Portland detective.

"He killed and then five weeks later killed again," Lawrence said. "Then it was three weeks, then two weeks. I believe that it would have soon been every few days. He was like the bogeyman."

Over the years, when Lawrence traveled to the Oregon State Penitentiary to interview inmates on cases, he'd ask the guards how Woodfield was doing. The male guards said Woodfield, now 61, spent most of the time sitting on his bunk and ignoring people around him.

The female guards told another story, Lawrence said: "When he sees them, he's up prancing in his cell and working on his hair."

"Woodfield," the detective said, "will always be that guy."

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