He Shot Two Friends and Ran Away. Then He Returned

The I-5 Killer

With the 428th selection in the 1974 NFL draft, the Light-green Bay Packers selected. . . 1 of the virtually trigger-happy killers in U.South. history. No one is saying football led Randall Woodfield downwards his dark path—but did it perhaps deter him from it, at least for a while?

BY L. JON WERTHEIM

Even as offense scenes go, this one was sensationally gruesome. Shari Hull, age 20, lay splayed naked on the flooring, blood pooling near her matted hair, encephalon matter seeping from her skull and spackling the carpet. She was surrounded by her discarded clothes. Gradually her moans and her deep, labored breathing diminished until her body was drained of life.

Some time around nine o'clock on the evening of Jan. 18, 1981, Hull had been nearing the cease of her Sun-night shift, cleaning the TransAmerica part building in the central Oregon town of Keizer. She was preparing to leave when she was grabbed by a man who'd somehow managed to enter the edifice. He was strikingly handsome, maybe six anxiety tall, blest with a torrent of thick, curly brown hair and optics to match. He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Corralling Hull with 1 manus and holding a gun in the other, he walked her downward a hall. Soon he saw another cleaner, 20-year-old Lisa Garcia.

The assailant took both women into a dorsum room and ordered them to the floor. After sexually assaulting them, he shot them each in the back of the caput. This, it would afterwards be revealed, was mostly in keeping with his M.O.: some sexual act followed by a .32 bullet to the rear of the skull. But while Hull died of her gunshot wounds, Garcia survived by feigning her death, lying motionless on the floor with slugs lodged in the back of her skull. As soon as her assailant left, she called the police. En route, one officer noticed a thickly built man fitting the aggressor's description standing at an intersection—just this was more than a mile from the set on; it would have taken a hell of an athlete to go far that far so quickly on foot. And so the policeman drove on.

Blended witness sketches, circa 1980 (Robert Beck)

For weeks after Garcia worked with detectives to scissure the instance. Little did she know, this attack was one of many allegedly carried out past the aforementioned human being; she was helping rails i of the most notorious serial murderers in U.Southward. history. Nicknamed the I-five Killer, he had threaded a trail of nearly unspeakable brutality up and downwards the upper left corner of America, killing in California, Oregon and maybe Washington. His orgy of violence started in the mid-1970s; past the fourth dimension he'd gotten to Hull and Garcia, he'd already amassed a sizable necrology. Many more murders would follow.

Based on Deoxyribonucleic acid evidence and advancing law-breaking lab techniques, the I-5 Killer'southward body count has climbed through the years. Cold case detectives have conservatively put that number at a dozen, though a few journalists and armchair detectives believe he's responsible for as many as 44 deaths. And that doesn't include a cord of more than 100 other crimes, more often than not robberies and rapes, that bear his hallmarks.

The I-v Killer's victims were generally from the same subset: petite, Caucasian women in their teens or 20s. Sometimes they had declined his sexual advances and the killings seemed to be acts of retribution. Other times he didn't know his victims at all. But he had his mode with them and then snuffed out their lives because he could.

And and so at that place's this small detail, which Garcia shared with detectives and which surfaced again and again beyond the I-five Killer's crimes: He wore what appeared to exist a strip of able-bodied tape over the bridge of his olfactory organ, in the fashion of a football game actor at the time. Which stood to reason. Because not long earlier turning into one of America'due south most depraved and remorseless series killers, Randall Woodfield had been drafted by the Green Bay Packers.

The new autobus had to have been torn. He wanted to pump up the Portland State program he had but taken over, and placing a guy in the NFL would become a long way toward that. But he also knew that if he oversold a player, he'd lose credibility. So on that autumn 24-hour interval in 1973, equally Ron Stratten sabbatum in the bleachers of Multnomah Stadium—at present Providence Park, dwelling house to MLS'southward Timbers—he chose his words advisedly.

An NFL sentinel had come to see Randall Woodfield, the Vikings' leading receiver. He had been impressed with Woodfield'south hands and athleticism. Simply when he asked Stratten for further assessment, the motorcoach wavered. "Randy runs decent routes," Stratten said with enthusiasm, "and he's skilful to the outside." He spoke positively well-nigh the speed that enabled Woodfield to run loftier hurdles for the school'southward rails team. But he also mentioned Woodfield'due south glaring deficiency: He didn't like getting hit. Non past the rubber. Not by the linebacker. Not by anyone.

The I-5 Killer, recalled past his former teammates and coaches

"He was the nicest, most gentlemanly kid I ever knew. Years afterwards, a reporter from a San Francisco newspaper called me and asked, 'Do y'all know a Randall Woodfield? Did yous know he'south the I-five killer?' I said, 'That can't be.Probably the incorrect Randall Woodfield.'"

—Gary Hamblet

PSU receivers coach from 1972 to '73

When Stratten was named Portland State's caput coach, a year earlier, it had marked a rarity. Though scarcely best-selling at the time, he was just the second African-American in the modernistic era to hold that position at a predominantly white schoolhouse. Stratten was only 29, less than a decade removed from playing at Oregon. And equally a quondam linebacker, he was quick to notice receivers who resisted cut beyond the middle of the field. "It's a point of grapheme," Stratten told the scout. "Woodfield doesn't take that."

To Stratten, this softness, this dislike of confrontation, was in keeping with Woodfield'south genial personality. It wasn't only that Woodfield was, in the cliché, coachable. Perhaps more than whatever other player on the team, he seemed to seek out the staff for companionship and counsel. "He was e'er bopping by our offices earlier heading to class," recalls Stratten. "It was similar he simply wanted to hang out with us."

Teammates' and coaches' memories of Woodfield vary wildly. Some remember him as unassuming and tranquility, if a fleck odd. "He really didn't fit in," says Anthony Stoudamire, who was a freshman quarterback at PSU in 1973. "He'd brand out-of-the-bluish, off-the-wall statements." Stoudamire's brother, Charles (both are uncles of 1995–96 NBA Rookie of the Year Damon Stoudamire), was a halfback on that team; he recalls Woodfield for his vanity. "[Randall] was always grooming himself. That even carried over to the way he played. He seemed like he was more interested in looking cute out there than getting the job done." True every bit that may have been, the pride Woodfield took in his appearance was justified. He was vi anxiety, with negligible body fat, well-defined muscles and a sly smile framed past what today might be chosen a pornstache. To trade in understatement, he did not struggle to find female person companionship. "He was a suave, sophisticated fella," says Jon Carey, a PSU quarterback in '72. "Confident in himself, only not to the indicate of beingness cocky."

Woodfield may have been best known at PSU, though, for his devotion to the Campus Crusade for Christ and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. A old teammate who spoke on the condition of anonymity recalls, "It seemed existent important to him that he come across as someone who would practice the correct affair—nigh like it was keeping him together."

Armed with the resources—and facing the public relations pressures—of a modern-day NFL squad, the Packers would take conducted a detailed background check on Woodfield. And the proverbial cerise flags would have flapped wildly. Raised by and large in the picturesque Oregon mid-coast town of Otter Rock, Woodfield grew up in a fiercely middle-class domicile. His father had a steady managerial job at the phone company Pacific Northwest Bell; his mother was a homemaker. Woodfield had two older sisters, who would babysit him. The family was well-known and well-regarded in the community. Outwardly, Woodfield appeared to be the portrait of normal. Simply in high school he was caught standing on a span and exposing himself to females. His parents sent him to a therapist, who, by all accounts, was not overly concerned past a teenager's exploring his sexuality. According to law officials, Newport High's coaches knew virtually the state of affairs simply, wanting to protect their star, chalked it up to an boyish's lapse in impulse control. Police force say that when Woodfield turned eighteen, his juvenile tape was expunged.)

"He was a little foreign—maybe stranger than we idea. You just had a bad feeling about the guy, similar in that location was something underneath his mask."

—PSU teammate who asked not to exist named

Later, at Treasure Valley (Ore.) Community College, where Woodfield played football game for i season before transferring, he was arrested for allegedly ransacking an ex-girlfriend's home. (With little evidence, he was found non guilty in a jury trial.) At PSU, Woodfield was arrested multiple times for indecent exposure. (He was bedevilled twice.) Stratten, who didn't recruit Woodfield, says he didn't acquire of those arrests until years later. "If I had known," he says, "I would take said something [to interested NFL teams] for sure."

As information technology was, having done little in the style of intel, Green Bay remained interested in Woodfield. In the commencement circular of the 1974 NFL draft the Packers selected Richmond running back Barty Smith, who would keep to start 42 games in vii seasons. The next day they used their 15th-round choice on Dave Wannstedt, a natural-born leader who never played a down but who went on to become an NFL head coach. Two rounds later, with the 428th pick, Dark-green Bay took Woodfield.

Packers media guide (Taylor Ballantyne)

These may not accept been the dynastic Packers who won the first ii Super Bowls, in the 1960s, only this was still a celebrated franchise. Woodfield was offered a i-year contract to serve as a "skilled football actor" for $sixteen,000. The bargain came laden with bonuses: an extra $ii,000 if he caught 25 passes that fall, $3,000 if he caught thirty. "Here's what you need to proceed in heed" about those figures, says Bob Harlan, who as assistant GM handled the team's contracts that year (and whose son Kevin, now a prominent broadcaster, was a Packers brawl male child back and so): "When Bart Starr fabricated $100,000, people thought he was overpaid."

Woodfield'southward contract too stipulated that he keep himself in peak condition, avoid consorting with gamblers and habiliment a coat and necktie in public places. He signed well-nigh immediately. The coin enabled him to quit his job at a Portland-area Burger Chef. Merely beyond that, this was all validation. He was on the verge of playing in the NFL. "Everyone made such a big thing when he was drafted," ane of Woodfield'southward roommates told The Oregonian. "He put a lot of pressure level on himself to make information technology large."

That Apr, Woodfield attended a minicamp in Scottsdale, Ariz., an innovation of Dark-green Bay coach Dan Devine. Every bit special teams motorbus Hank Kuhlmann explained beforehand in a alphabetic character to players, the minicamp would be "a go-acquainted menses so that in July we tin all start working toward our common goal, 'The Championship.' " Afterward, Woodfield returned to Portland galvanized, impressed with the speed of the other players but confident he would make the squad.

Per the Packers' asking, he spent the adjacent months staying in shape and working on his pass catching. In June the team sent him a first-class airplane ticket, forth with instructions for an airport limo pickup that would accept him to the team's grooming camp in De Pere, Wis. Woodfield declined, opting instead to drive out from Oregon. When he arrived, his bio in the Packers' media guide listed him at vi feet, 170 pounds and assessed him every bit follows:

In July, Woodfield was among the rookies who competed against the Bears in a scrimmage at Lambeau Field. Writing in the Light-green Bay Printing-Gazette, Cliff Christl, now the Packers' squad historian, sought out Woodfield for a quote. "I'm pretty excited," the immature wideout said. "I'thousand just really thankful for the opportunity." Woodfield survived early cuts and reported to friends in Portland that he was acquitting himself well, that he felt every bit if he belonged.

The Packers idea otherwise. They released Woodfield on Aug. 19, 1974, before their flavour began. Woodfield would subsequently fence—non unreasonably—that his prospects were hindered because Green Bay was stressing a run game that season. Police would contend that the team had other reasons. (Packers officials declined to comment for this story.)

Rather than return to Oregon, Woodfield remained in Wisconsin, settling an hour and a half west in Oshkosh, where he played for the semipro Manitowoc Chiefs and moonlighted every bit a press-restriction operator. (We pause to bespeak out the irony: Manitowoc, the 24th-largest city in Wisconsin, would be the setting for the acclaimed 2015 Netflix documentary Making a Murderer.) While he would have preferred to spend his Sundays at Lambeau, Woodfield reckoned that, playing on Saturdays nearby for the Chiefs, peradventure Packers execs would notice him and reconsider their decision.

Teammates from that stop recall Woodfield every bit a "smooth operator," a "ladies human" and a bit strange. Fred Auclair, a teammate and roommate, recalls Woodfield bringing home a trinket he had acquired at a local Christian bookstore. "How much was that?" Auclair inquired. "Well," said Woodfield, "information technology wasn't really for sale, and then I stole it." Woodfield, adds Auclair, "was on the phone all the fourth dimension, telling alpine tales. He had a woman in every port, it seemed."

As Woodfield had at Portland State, he ran precise routes and distinguished himself with speed in Manitowoc. In the 1974 Fundamental States Football game League championship game he caught a pair of passes for 42 yards, though the Madison Mustangs beat the Chiefs xiv–0. The Packers, meanwhile, went vi–eight and, as a team, averaged but xiii completions per game.

"It shocked me when he [went to jail]. If there were 100 guys on the team, he'd be the 99th guy I'd suspect to do something similar that."

—Tim Temple

PSU secondary coach in 1973

Subsequently the season, though, Woodfield was dropped by the Chiefs. No reason was given publicly. There were murmurs, however, that the team had off-field concerns. (The Chiefs, along with their league, disbanded in 1976.) While at that place are no public arrest records for Woodfield in Wisconsin, a detective would later learn that Woodfield was involved in at least ten cases of indecent exposure across the state. As ane Wisconsin law enforcement officer recalls, years later, Woodfield "couldn't go on the thing in his pants."

By multiple accounts, Woodfield was devastated by being cut. "Deeply hurt," was the phrase The Oregonian would afterwards employ. And, curiously, Woodfield acted every bit if he knew in that location would be no more than invitations from other teams. With his ambitions of being a pro football player killed off, he drove back to the W Declension. And so the rampage started.

It took some time before Randall Woodfield graduated to murder, but the buildup was steady. Back in Portland, he drifted to the margins. He was three semesters short of completing his physical didactics degree at Portland Land, just he rejected suggestions that he render to school; instead he cycled from job to job, residence to residence, romance to romance. He was 24 and moving backward in life.

Woodfield would bear witness upwards at Portland State on occasion to work out with his old team. By so, Stratten had been replaced by Mouse Davis, who would later charabanc as an banana in the NFL and become known as the godfather of the run-and-shoot offense. "[Woodfield] seemed like a nice kid; he was a good athlete," Davis recalls today. "Just ane of the other players said, 'Coach, don't become too shut with that guy. He'southward strange.' That was the end of my relationship with him."

Randall Woodfield (No. 5) (Robert Beck)

In early 1975, Portland law were vexed by a serial of attacks on women, carried out by a man—invariably described equally athletically built and handsome—armed with a knife. After demanding oral sex he would take a woman's bag or wallet and run off. On March v, detectives fix a sting functioning. An hole-and-corner female officeholder walked leisurely through a park, and a human wielding a paring knife darted out from behind some bushes demanding coin. Officers converged and arrested the assailant, who identified himself every bit one Randall Woodfield.

Charged with robbery, Woodfield gave an extensive interview to police. He claimed he didn't potable or smoke and that he was committed to the Christian faith. He admitted to some impulse-command bug and some "sexual problems." And he confessed to ane vice: He'd taken steroids to augment his physique. Perhaps, he speculated, that charged his sex drive.

"There was a conventional wisdom dorsum in the day that someone who was an exposer or a Peeping Tom wouldn't drag to more serious crimes," says Lieut. Paul Weatheroy, a longtime Portland cold example detective who retired from that job final year. "Nosotros've learned that cypher's further from the truth."

One-time PSU teammates threw Woodfield a party to celebrate his release from prison, but some thought it foreign when the invitee of honor arrived 21⁄2 hours late to his own event. Woodfield also got out just in fourth dimension to attend his ten‑twelvemonth high schoolhouse reunion in Newport. There, he wore his muscles nigh as a fashion statement and told stories most his time in the Packers' organization.

"I got to know him; he was a friend. . . . I was surprised when some of this stuff started coming down, just on reflection, I thought:That does sort of add up."

—Jon Carey

PSU quarterback in 1972

Out of prison, he cut a contradictory figure. For all his failures—allow go from bartending gigs, jettisoned past girlfriends—they hardly seemed to come at the expense of self-conviction. He cruised around Portland in a gilded 1974 "Champagne Edition" Volkswagen Beetle and took unmistakable pride in his physique. He was especially addicted of sending naked photos of himself to women. In tardily '79, Woodfield was photographed in a state of undress, his abundant muscles abundantly oiled. He mailed the paradigm to Playgirl for consideration. The following May, he received a letter dorsum: "Congratulations! Yous have been selected for possible publication in Playgirl's Guy Next Door feature." Woodfield waited for his photo shoot, and that's when police believe he began to murder.

On Oct. 11, 1980, Cherie Ayers, an attractive 29-year-one-time, was found raped, stabbed and bludgeoned to death in her Portland apartment. Co-ordinate to the coroner, she died from edgeless-force trauma and knife wounds to her neck. Former classmates at Newport High, Ayers and Woodfield had reconnected at the reunion and had then seen each other socially.

Letters from Randall Woodfield to Cherie Ayers (Robert Beck)

Immediately Woodfield was pegged as a suspect, based mostly on his contempo release from prison. When homicide detectives questioned Woodfield, they found his answers "evasive" and "deceptive." Merely he declined to take a polygraph. A claret test did not link Woodfield to the crime, nor did his semen match that constitute in the victim's body. In a time predating reliable DNA testing, there was no other physical prove.

Plain emboldened, the one-man criminal offense moving ridge picked up momentum. Vii weeks later, Darcey Fix, 22, and Doug Altig, 24, were shot to death, execution-way and with a .32 revolver, in Fix'south Portland abode. Again Woodfield had a connectedness to the murdered adult female: Ane of his closest friends—a teammate from PSU's track squad—had dated Set up. Again Woodfield was questioned, simply police had null physical linking him to the murders.

On Dec. ix, 1980, a man wearing a fake beard held up a gas station in Vancouver, Wash., just across the Columbia River from Portland. Four nights later on, in Eugene, Ore., a homo wearing a fake beard and a Ring-Assistance (or what looked like athletic record) on his nose raided an water ice foam parlor. The next night, a bulldoze-in restaurant in nearby Albany, Ore., was robbed by a bearded man. A week afterwards that, in Seattle, a gunman matching the aforementioned clarification pinned down a 25-year-old waitress inside a restroom and forced her to masturbate him. Hull and Garcia were sexually assaulted and shot in cardinal Oregon four weeks later.

Discussion began spreading that there was an "I-5 Bandit" marauding up and downward the northern half of Interstate 5, a ribbon running parallel to the Pacific for the 1,400 miles between the Mexican and Canadian borders. All of the crimes occurred inside two miles of an interstate exit.

The spree accelerated, each crime more twisted and horrific than the last. On February. 3, 1981, Donna Eckard, 37, and her 14-yr-old daughter, Jannell Jarvis, were constitute expressionless in their dwelling house in Mountain Gate, Calif., just off I-5. Each had been shot multiple times in the caput. Lab tests would after reveal that the girl had been sodomized. Earlier that same day, an 18-twelvemonth-onetime waitress was kidnapped and raped subsequently a holdup fifteen miles to the south, in Redding. The adjacent day, a like law-breaking was reported 100 miles upward I-5 in Yreka, Calif.

By then, give-and-take of the I-v Bandit had amplified to the betoken that women were being warned to exercise caution. On Valentine's Day 1981, Candee Wilson implored her 18-twelvemonth-erstwhile daughter, Julie Reitz, to "be careful—in that location's a unsafe person out in that location." After that night, Julie was shot and killed at their abode in Beaverton, Ore., not far from where the Nike campus at present sits. She had known Woodfield previously. In his job as a bouncer he had disregarded her imitation ID and let her into a bar.

From one human activity to the next, the descriptions were remarkably similar: An athletic man, armed with a silverish .32 revolver and wearing tape or a Band‑Aid over his nose, abducted a woman, committed a sexual act so shot her execution-way. Detectives targeted Woodfield every bit their suspect, convinced that the receiver who turned prissy running across the middle of the field had become an astonishingly brazen murderer.

Pick a country and y'all likely tin detect a citizen who has killed ritualistically and repeatedly. Consider the phrase run amok, which derives from a Malay word translated loosely equally "to attack with homicidal mania." Believing that amok was caused past an evil spirit, Indonesian culture tolerated these violent outbursts and dealt with the aftereffects with no ill volition toward the attacker. The underlying premise: The chapters to impale indiscriminately dwells in all of united states; most people only suppress the urge or avert the spirit.

Still, the serial killer occupies a singular office in the cast of Americana. Hither he—and the vast bulk have been male—has been hyperbolized and fetishized, even romanticized. Serial killers are responsible for just a small fraction of the murders committed in the U.Southward., but they are some of the well-nigh notorious figures in our history and culture. Says Sarah Weinman, who runs the newsletter The Crime Lady, "[Serial killing] is twisted fantasy that has roots in the wide-open up American landscape, where it is all too like shooting fish in a barrel to chase and kill without detection and with impunity."

It was in the 1970s that agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas of the FBI'south behavioral science unit coined and divers the term serial killer, distinguishing i from a mass murderer (who may impale many at once) or a spree killer (who lacks a and then-chosen "cooling off" period between murders). Indeed, the '70s marked the ruddy-stained tiptop of serial killing in the U.S. In that era at that place were a number of factors working in the assaulter's favor, from lax gun laws to the popularity of psychedelic drugs to the sprawling interstate highway system to cheap gas. And from the dearth of surveillance engineering to the spotty coordination among police precincts, information technology may never accept been easier to avert getting defenseless.

"He was a pretty placidity guy—not very talkative; kept to himself. I've got a team photo and he's sitting right backside me. I would havenever thought he was capable of being [a killer]."

—Rick Risch

Manitowoc Chiefs defensive back in 1974

Woodfield wasn't the just sociopath terrorizing the West Coast around that time. Ted Bundy'due south killing orgy in the Northwest is believed to have begun in 1974, his get-go eight known victims slain in either Oregon or Washington. And roughly concurrent with the I-5 Killer, Gary Ridgway had begun committing ritualized murder in Seattle, mostly targeting young women. Information technology would have 20 years before he was defenseless, but immediately he was known every bit the Dark-green River Killer, a nod to the waterway where his first five known victims were found.

What accounts for our captivation—warped as it might be—with serial killers? Evolutionary biologists have pointed out that as a species, we are hardwired to run away from predators in a way that we don't reflexively run away from, say, sunbathing or eating bacon or other potential causes of decease. So the series killer triggers fear and a visceral reaction rooted in the most basic human nature.

Others cite the stirring exploration of the darkest corners of humanity. Serial killers may commit acts of unadulterated evil, but they are likewise figures that generate at least a teensy measure of titillation, sometimes fifty-fifty affection. (Run across: Lecter, Hannibal.) "In a perverse style, you sometimes cease up rooting for these guys," says Skip Hollandsworth, a true crime writer whose latest book, The Midnight Assassin, focuses on a series of unsolved murders in 1880s Austin.

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Hollandsworth even sees overlapping elements with football game. "The reason we love to watch broad receivers is because they are and so elusive. They run a particularly designed route, hoping to wriggle costless and catch a pass despite a defense stacked against them. It's the same reason nosotros are fascinated with serial killers. They come up up with a specially designed killing route, carry out the impale and then make their escape, eluding the cops and offense-scene technicians—only to practise it all once more after taking a breather."

And while nosotros call serial killers monsters, frequently they are all as well human. There's something unsettling but also a little tantalizing in the chapters of everyday people—siblings, classmates, coworkers, teammates—to behave out such chilling acts. "He seemed like such a normal guy" is the inevitable refrain from the shocked neighbor. This was a cardinal theme for Ann Dominion, a prominent true crime writer who in her best-selling book The Stranger Abreast Me portrays Ted Bundy as a handsome, well-spoken, good-looking law pupil . . . who happened to kill at least 30 women. Rule has conceded, "I can remember thinking that if I were younger and unmarried, or if my daughters were older, [Bundy] would be almost the perfect human being."

From her home base in the serial killer hotbed of Seattle, Rule grew interested in the I-5 case and published a volume in 1984 about Woodfield titled The I-5 Killer. A meticulously reported account—and an invaluable resources in this story—Rule's volume relied on public documents every bit well every bit interviews with detectives, family members and the socio-path himself. She was conspicuously captivated by Woodfield'south conventional upbringing, jock pedigree and good looks. Even the breathless jacket synopsis asks how "a doubtable who seemed [and then] handsome and highly-seasoned [could] have committed such ugly crimes."

The I-5 Killer'due south downfall came swiftly and without much drama. A persistent detective, Dave Kominek, led the investigation. He worked in the sheriff's function of Marion Canton, Ore., where Hull had been murdered, and he had his suspect pegged early on. Woodfield had already served a prison house sentence for preying on women. He was acquainted with multiple victims. He certainly knew his way around the I-v corridor. And he matched the concrete description provided past multiple witnesses. What's more, Marion County detectives put together a pay-phone phone call log that showed Woodfield using calling cards inside a few miles of various murders. The irony was rich: The son of a Pacific Northwest Bell employee would be done in partly by phone records.

After Lisa Garcia picked Woodfield's photo out of a lineup, police interrogated him on March 5, 1981. They searched his residence—a room he had been renting from an unsuspecting family in Springfield, Ore.—and found telling testify: the aforementioned brand of tape that had been used to bind victims . . . a .32 bullet in Woodfield's racquetball bag. . . .

Spent ammo found in Woodfield'southward bag (Robert Beck)

Four days later, police charged him with Hull's murder, Garcia'south attempted murder and ii counts of sodomy. Woodfield, employing a public defender, entered a plea of not guilty. By March 16, indictments were rolling in from various jurisdictions in Washington and Oregon, including multiple counts of murder, rape, sodomy, attempted kidnapping, armed robbery and possession of firearms by an ex-convict. The obligatory Oregonian headline: friends 'utterly shocked' past arrest of woodfield. Just that wasn't actually the example. As one former PSU teammate puts it, "You just had a bad feeling about the guy, similar at that place was something underneath his mask." Says Carey, Woodfield'south quarterback, "I was surprised when some of this stuff started coming down, but on reflection, I thought, That does sort of add up."

When Woodfield's trial for the incident with Hull and Garcia began in the summertime of 1981, it marked the beginning murder trial for an earnest, fledgling Marion County prosecutor named Chris Van Dyke (whose famous father, Dick, had recently finished upwards a run on The Carol Burnett Evidence). At the time, the prosecutor characterized the accused as "an arrogant, cold, unemotional individual . . . probably the coldest, most detached defendant I've ever seen." Past his ain reckoning, Van Dyke had "armloads of evidence, overwhelming evidence." And Woodfield'southward defense was flimsy, predicated on mistaken identity. At i bespeak the defendant's lawyer went so far as to suggest that Garcia'southward identification of Woodfield was influenced by a detective's hypnosis.

When Woodfield eventually took the stand, he spoke softly, with his arms crossed, looking zilch like a star athlete or a handsome lothario. Hither's how Dominion put it: "Randy Woodfield had been touted in the media as a massively muscled professional athlete. The human being in person seemed strangely macerated, not a superman after all. . . . He looked, if anything, humbled—a predatory creature brought downwards and caged in mid-binge." Bizarrely, he admitted in court to having owned a .32 pistol merely said that when he'd learned that as a parolee it was a violation to own a firearm, he threw the gun into a river.

Randall Woodfield's mugshot from the Duniway Park sting in Portland, 1975 (Robert Beck)

Lisa Garcia, meanwhile, was the cardinal witness, recalling the horrific night at the role edifice 5 months earlier. She maintained that the man she faced in the court was the aforementioned man who, she alleged, shot her and killed her coworker. Information technology took the jury 31⁄2 hours to reach its verdict.

On June 26, 1981, Randall Woodfield was convicted on all counts. With no death penalty pick in Oregon, Woodfield, then 30, was sentenced to a prison term of life plus xc years. That December, 35 more years were added to his sentence when a jury in Benton County, Ore., convicted him of sodomy and weapons charges tied to another assault in a restaurant bathroom.

District attorneys up and down the I-5 corridor had a decision to brand. Even if they could secure a conviction, what would exist the point? Woodfield was already almost sure to die in prison. Additional trials would bleed their offices of time and resources and would put the victims' families through an excruciating ordeal. Fifty-fifty in California—where Woodfield was accused of killing a mother and her girl, and where the capital punishment would have been an option—the local prosecutor somewhen decided against pursuing Woodfield.

Still, the listing of his victims has grown. In 2012, detectives in the Portland Police Bureau'southward cold case unit, benefiting from new magnetic bead engineering science at the Oregon state police force crime lab, announced they had matched Woodfield's DNA to evidence from v victims: Fix, Jarvis, Eckard, Altig, and Reitz.

In July 2005, on account of similar Dna matches, Weatheroy, the former Portland lieutenant and cold case supervisor, interrogated Woodfield about his connection to the unsolved crimes. Out of the Oregon Land Penitentiary for a mean solar day, sitting across from Weatheroy on the 13th floor of the justice building in downtown Portland, Woodfield was pleasant visitor. "I remember that his hair was perfect, feathered and combed; he had a perfectly even tan, nails manicured," says Weatheroy. "He was very charismatic, which makes sense because he would lure victims and get them to let their guard downwards." Woodfield, though, confessed to nothing.

Deoxyribonucleic acid bear witness which helped convict Randall Woodfield (Robert Brook)

Ultimately, as in other jurisdictions, authorities in Portland'due south Multnomah County decided not to prosecute the murders of Altig, Ayers and Ready. They did, however, hold a press briefing to brand articulate: In the unlikely event that Woodfield was ever granted a parole hearing, they would pursue these additional indictments.

Jim Lawrence, another detective in Portland's cold case unit, is intimately familiar with the example of the I-5 Killer. A veteran detective who has interviewed the virtually hardened criminals, he is struck most past Woodfield's utter lack of accountability or remorse—even decades later on, even in the face of indisputable evidence. "If you lot're talking about somebody moving toward some course of rehabilitation, they had to at some point acknowledge they are responsible for their ain behaviors," says Lawrence. "That is not Randy Woodfield."

If Woodfield were, somehow, to be paroled tomorrow? "He would re-offend, there'south no doubt about it," says Lawrence. "Fifty-fifty to this day, he is still a stone-cold killer."

Psychologists will tell you it'south a fool'due south errand, a gross oversimplification, that there's no sense looking for one trigger or single event that can explicate what internal misfire, what faulty circuitry, could have turned a man into a series killer. And yet, there's a temptation, near irresistible, to plumb the psyche and fashion an answer to the elemental question nosotros all have of series killers: Why?

Ann Dominion, who passed away terminal year at 83, long agone ended that Woodfield killed women as a class of rebellion against his disciplinarian female parent and two older sisters. (While in prison, Woodfield sued Rule, unsuccessfully, for $12 one thousand thousand on grounds of libel.) Lawrence, the Portland detective, offers a different theory: "There had to be something that happened to him sexually in his formative teenage years that acquired him to look at sexual activity every bit ability fulfillment as opposed to an surface area of procreation and of intimacy."

What nearly the sport Woodfield played then expertly? Football game did this has become the quick-and-easy explanation for all sorts of antisocial acts, from slugging a fiancée in a casino lift to running a dog-fighting ring. A sensationally violent sport breeds sensationally violent behavior. Special rules are conferred on star athletes, plumping senses of entitlement. The peculiar rhythms of the sport—1 intense mean solar day followed by six days of recovery and grooming—are out of whack with the rest of society. Teams (and an paradigm-obsessed league) have mastered the arts of willful blindness and damage control.

"He was kind of a good-looking guy, maybe kind of a ladies human, practiced physique and the whole thing. . . . I don't remember anything specific about him.What is he upwards to now?"

—Gary Scallon

Manitowoc Chiefs wide receiver in 1974

Asked about Woodfield in September, Bill Tobin, a longtime NFL exec who was Green Bay's manager of pro scouting in 1974, claimed non to recall Woodfield as a actor, much less know that a former typhoon selection of his was a convicted killer. Yet Portland detectives maintain that the Packers quietly cut Woodfield in role considering of off-field concerns. "I know that was a factor," says Lawrence, "that he was caught exposing himself."

But in the example of Randall Woodfield, it'southward not merely an oversimplification to blame football; information technology's at odds with the facts. If anything, football was a temporary source of salvation, delaying Woodfield'southward horrific behavior. Survey the time line and it's easy to make the case that football, across being a driving motivation for him, was also a lark from a primal instinct that had, perhaps always, churned within. Only when football game was no longer function of his life did he accept a truly night turn.

The Portland Police Department's belongings room sits in an industrial pocket of town, right by the Willamette River. At that place is a section dedicated to the documents pertaining to Woodfield. Hither lie copies of decades-old search warrants and affidavits, likewise as a trove of relics from the Packers. Police searching Woodfield's residence realized that he'd kept every correspondence bearing that green-and-yellowish logo, every envelope with the render address of 1265 Lombardi Avenue, in Green Bay.

Search warrants, psych profiles, NFL contracts: Go even deeper into the I-5 instance by exploring the documents (Robert Beck)

According to Dominion, Woodfield even kept in his wallet a carbon copy of the airline tickets the Packers sent him dorsum in June 1974. Woodfield, she wrote, "would conduct the stack of personal letters and mimeographed sheets with him throughout his myriad changes of residence. . . . They were alike to letters from Hollywood to a would-be starlet. They were magic." In one case the magic went away, it was replaced by the sinister.

Woodfield is 65 at present. Xxx-five years after his conviction, he sits in Oregon Country Penitentiary, nestled amid Douglas firs and the Cascades, located in Salem, fittingly, barely a mile from I-5. The Oregon Section of Corrections denied an interview request on the grounds that it "brings notoriety to the inmate—and this is already a high-profile individual—and doesn't fall within the rehabilitation and correctional plan of the inmate." Woodfield did non respond to letters or electronic correspondences from SI seeking comment.

This much nosotros know, notwithstanding: Woodfield is yet a football fan. Prison house guards recall that he loves to talk about the sport and however remembers his playing days, iv decades ago, with striking specificity. Weatheroy, the detective, saw this firsthand. When Woodfield learned that Weatheroy's son was a high schoolhouse star in Portland who went on to play for Air Force, the inmate grew blithe. "He loved talking virtually sports," says Weatheroy. "His high school career, playing in college, his time with Green Bay. . . ." When the conversation turned to weightier topics, however, Woodfield clammed upwardly, tried to change the subject and grew distant.

Woodfield did join MySpace in 2006, and his profile was every bit shut as he's ever come to taking ownership of his past. Information technology likewise says enough well-nigh how he yet self-identifies: "I spend the residual of my days in prison because I have committed a murder forth with many other crimes. I once tried out for the Green Bay Packers. The but reason I didn't make it is because the skills I had to offering they didn't need at the fourth dimension."

Additional reporting by Michael Cohen and Kerry Eggers

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