How Did You Know He Was a Serial Killer

The I-five Killer

With the 428th selection in the 1974 NFL draft, the Dark-green Bay Packers selected. . . i of the most violent killers in U.Due south. history. No 1 is maxim football led Randall Woodfield down his nighttime path—but did it perhaps deter him from it, at to the lowest degree for a while?

BY L. JON WERTHEIM

Eastwardven every bit crime scenes go, this one was sensationally gruesome. Shari Hull, age 20, lay splayed naked on the floor, blood pooling near her disordered hair, brain matter seeping from her skull and spackling the rug. 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 ix o'clock on the evening of Jan. 18, 1981, Hull had been nearing the end of her Sunday-night shift, cleaning the TransAmerica part building in the central Oregon boondocks of Keizer. She was preparing to exit when she was grabbed by a man who'd somehow managed to enter the building. He was strikingly handsome, maybe half dozen feet tall, blessed with a torrent of thick, curly brown hair and eyes to lucifer. He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Corralling Hull with ane hand and holding a gun in the other, he walked her down a hall. Soon he saw some other cleaner, 20-year-old Lisa Garcia.

The assailant took both women into a dorsum room and ordered them to the flooring. After sexually assaulting them, he shot them each in the back of the head. This, it would after exist revealed, was generally 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 every bit her aggressor left, she called the police. En route, i officer noticed a thickly built man fitting the assailant'south description continuing at an intersection—simply this was more than a mile from the assault; it would take taken a hell of an athlete to make information technology that far then chop-chop on foot. So the policeman collection on.

Composite witness sketches, circa 1980 (Robert Beck)

For weeks later on Garcia worked with detectives to crack the case. Niggling did she know, this attack was i of many allegedly carried out by the same man; she was helping rail one of the most notorious series murderers in U.Southward. history. Nicknamed the I-v Killer, he had threaded a trail of almost unspeakable brutality upwards and down the upper left corner of America, killing in California, Oregon and possibly Washington. His orgy of violence started in the mid-1970s; by the time he'd gotten to Hull and Garcia, he'd already amassed a sizable necrology. Many more than murders would follow.

Based on DNA evidence and advancing crime lab techniques, the I-5 Killer's body count has climbed through the years. Common cold case detectives accept conservatively put that number at a dozen, though a few journalists and armchair detectives believe he's responsible for every bit many as 44 deaths. And that doesn't include a string of more than 100 other crimes, mostly robberies and rapes, that deport his hallmarks.

The I-5 Killer'south victims were mostly from the aforementioned 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 way with them and then snuffed out their lives because he could.

And and then at that place's this small detail, which Garcia shared with detectives and which surfaced once more and again across the I-5 Killer'southward crimes: He wore what appeared to exist a strip of athletic tape over the bridge of his nose, in the manner of a football player at the time. Which stood to reason. Considering not long before turning into 1 of America'south almost depraved and remorseless serial killers, Randall Woodfield had been drafted by the Light-green Bay Packers.

The new coach had to have been torn. He wanted to pump up the Portland State program he had merely taken over, and placing a guy in the NFL would become a long way toward that. Only he also knew that if he oversold a player, he'd lose brownie. Then on that fall 24-hour interval in 1973, as Ron Stratten sat in the bleachers of Multnomah Stadium—at present Providence Park, dwelling to MLS's Timbers—he chose his words advisedly.

An NFL scout had come up to see Randall Woodfield, the Vikings' leading receiver. He had been impressed with Woodfield'south hands and athleticism. But when he asked Stratten for farther assessment, the double-decker wavered. "Randy runs decent routes," Stratten said with enthusiasm, "and he'south skillful to the outside." He spoke positively about the speed that enabled Woodfield to run high hurdles for the school'south track squad. Merely he also mentioned Woodfield's glaring deficiency: He didn't like getting hit. Not by the rubber. Not past the linebacker. Non by anyone.

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

"He was the nicest, nigh gentlemanly kid I e'er knew. Years later, a reporter from a San Francisco newspaper called me and asked, 'Practise yous know a Randall Woodfield? Did y'all know he's the I-5 killer?' I said, 'That can't be.Probably the wrong Randall Woodfield.'"

—Gary Hamblet

PSU receivers coach from 1972 to '73

When Stratten was named Portland State'south caput coach, a year earlier, it had marked a rarity. Though scarcely acknowledged at the time, he was just the 2d African-American in the modern era to concord that position at a predominantly white schoolhouse. Stratten was only 29, less than a decade removed from playing at Oregon. And as a erstwhile linebacker, he was quick to discover receivers who resisted cut across the middle of the field. "It'southward a signal of character," Stratten told the scout. "Woodfield doesn't have that."

To Stratten, this softness, this dislike of confrontation, was in keeping with Woodfield's genial personality. It wasn't just that Woodfield was, in the cliché, coachable. Maybe more than than whatever other histrion on the team, he seemed to seek out the staff for companionship and counsel. "He was always bopping by our offices before heading to course," recalls Stratten. "Information technology was like he but wanted to hang out with us."

Teammates' and coaches' memories of Woodfield vary wildly. Some remember him as unassuming and quiet, if a bit odd. "He really didn't fit in," says Anthony Stoudamire, who was a freshman quarterback at PSU in 1973. "He'd make out-of-the-bluish, off-the-wall statements." Stoudamire'south brother, Charles (both are uncles of 1995–96 NBA Rookie of the Year Damon Stoudamire), was a halfback on that squad; he recalls Woodfield for his vanity. "[Randall] was always grooming himself. That even carried over to the style he played. He seemed similar he was more interested in looking cute out in that location than getting the job washed." True every bit that may take been, the pride Woodfield took in his appearance was justified. He was six feet, with negligible torso fat, well-defined muscles and a sly smile framed by what today might be called a pornstache. To trade in understatement, he did not struggle to notice female companionship. "He was a suave, sophisticated fella," says Jon Carey, a PSU quarterback in '72. "Confident in himself, but not to the betoken of being self."

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 former teammate who spoke on the status of anonymity recalls, "It seemed existent important to him that he come across as someone who would do the correct thing—nearly similar it was keeping him together."

Armed with the resources—and facing the public relations pressures—of a modernistic-solar day NFL team, the Packers would accept conducted a detailed groundwork bank check on Woodfield. And the proverbial red flags would accept flapped wildly. Raised mostly in the picturesque Oregon mid-coast town of Otter Rock, Woodfield grew upwardly in a fiercely middle-course home. 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 exist the portrait of normal. But in high school he was caught continuing on a bridge and exposing himself to females. His parents sent him to a therapist, who, past all accounts, was not overly concerned by a teenager'southward exploring his sexuality. According to police force officials, Newport High's coaches knew almost the situation just, wanting to protect their star, chalked it up to an adolescent'due south lapse in impulse control. Police say that when Woodfield turned xviii, his juvenile record was expunged.)

"He was a little strange—maybe stranger than we thought. You just had a bad feeling virtually the guy, similar there was something underneath his mask."

—PSU teammate who asked not to exist named

Later on, at Treasure Valley (Ore.) Community College, where Woodfield played football for 1 flavor earlier transferring, he was arrested for allegedly ransacking an ex-girlfriend'due south home. (With piffling show, 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 larn of those arrests until years later. "If I had known," he says, "I would have said something [to interested NFL teams] for certain."

As information technology was, having done little in the way of intel, Green Bay remained interested in Woodfield. In the first round of the 1974 NFL draft the Packers selected Richmond running back Barty Smith, who would go on to start 42 games in seven seasons. The adjacent mean solar day they used their 15th-round pick on Dave Wannstedt, a natural-born leader who never played a downwards only who went on to become an NFL head coach. 2 rounds later on, with the 428th pick, Green Bay took Woodfield.

Packers media guide (Taylor Ballantyne)

These may not take been the dynastic Packers who won the first ii Super Bowls, in the 1960s, just this was still a celebrated franchise. Woodfield was offered a one-twelvemonth contract to serve as a "skilled football game role player" for $16,000. The bargain came laden with bonuses: an extra $2,000 if he caught 25 passes that fall, $3,000 if he defenseless 30. "Here's what you demand to keep in mind" about those figures, says Bob Harlan, who every bit assistant GM handled the team's contracts that year (and whose son Kevin, now a prominent broadcaster, was a Packers brawl boy back so): "When Bart Starr fabricated $100,000, people idea he was overpaid."

Woodfield's contract also stipulated that he keep himself in pinnacle condition, avert consorting with gamblers and habiliment a coat and necktie in public places. He signed almost immediately. The money enabled him to quit his job at a Portland-expanse Burger Chef. But across that, this was all validation. He was on the verge of playing in the NFL. "Anybody fabricated such a big thing when he was drafted," 1 of Woodfield'due south roommates told The Oregonian. "He put a lot of pressure on himself to make it big."

That Apr, Woodfield attended a minicamp in Scottsdale, Ariz., an innovation of Green Bay motorcoach Dan Devine. As special teams coach Hank Kuhlmann explained beforehand in a letter to players, the minicamp would be "a get-acquainted period so that in July nosotros tin can all outset working toward our common goal, 'The Championship.' " Afterwards, Woodfield returned to Portland galvanized, impressed with the speed of the other players but confident he would brand the squad.

Per the Packers' asking, he spent the next months staying in shape and working on his pass catching. In June the squad sent him a first-course plane 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 bulldoze out from Oregon. When he arrived, his bio in the Packers' media guide listed him at six feet, 170 pounds and assessed him as follows:

In July, Woodfield was amidst the rookies who competed confronting the Bears in a scrimmage at Lambeau Field. Writing in the Dark-green Bay Press-Gazette, Cliff Christl, now the Packers' team historian, sought out Woodfield for a quote. "I'm pretty excited," the young wideout said. "I'k just really thankful for the opportunity." Woodfield survived early on cuts and reported to friends in Portland that he was acquitting himself well, that he felt as if he belonged.

The Packers thought otherwise. They released Woodfield on Aug. 19, 1974, before their flavour began. Woodfield would later fence—not 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-brake operator. (Nosotros pause to indicate 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, possibly Packers execs would notice him and reconsider their decision.

Teammates from that stop recall Woodfield equally a "smoothen operator," a "ladies man" and a chip 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 actually for sale, so I stole it." Woodfield, adds Auclair, "was on the phone all the time, telling tall 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 Key States Football League championship game he caught a pair of passes for 42 yards, though the Madison Mustangs trounce the Chiefs 14–0. The Packers, meanwhile, went 6–8 and, every bit a team, averaged only 13 completions per game.

"It shocked me when he [went to jail]. If at that place were 100 guys on the team, he'd be the 99th guy I'd doubtable to practice something like that."

—Tim Temple

PSU secondary omnibus in 1973

After the season, though, Woodfield was dropped by the Chiefs. No reason was given publicly. In that location were murmurs, withal, that the team had off-field concerns. (The Chiefs, along with their league, disbanded in 1976.) While there 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 1 Wisconsin law enforcement officer recalls, years later on, Woodfield "couldn't go on the matter in his pants."

By multiple accounts, Woodfield was devastated by being cut. "Deeply injure," was the phrase The Oregonian would afterwards use. And, curiously, Woodfield acted every bit if he knew there would be no more invitations from other teams. With his ambitions of being a pro football game player killed off, he collection dorsum to the Due west Coast. And and so the rampage started.

It took some time earlier Randall Woodfield graduated to murder, merely the buildup was steady. Back in Portland, he drifted to the margins. He was three semesters brusk of completing his physical education degree at Portland Land, but he rejected suggestions that he return to school; instead he cycled from job to job, residence to residence, romance to romance. He was 24 and moving astern in life.

Woodfield would show up at Portland State on occasion to work out with his old squad. By then, Stratten had been replaced by Mouse Davis, who would afterwards coach as an assistant in the NFL and get known every bit the godfather of the run-and-shoot offense. "[Woodfield] seemed like a nice kid; he was a good athlete," Davis recalls today. "But ane of the other players said, 'Coach, don't get too close with that guy. He's strange.' That was the end of my relationship with him."

Randall Woodfield (No. 5) (Robert Beck)

In early 1975, Portland constabulary were vexed past a serial of attacks on women, carried out by a human being—invariably described every bit athletically built and handsome—armed with a knife. Later demanding oral sex he would take a woman'due south purse or wallet and run off. On March 5, detectives set up a sting operation. An hole-and-corner female officer walked leisurely through a park, and a man wielding a paring knife darted out from behind some bushes demanding money. Officers converged and arrested the attacker, who identified himself equally one Randall Woodfield.

Charged with robbery, Woodfield gave an extensive interview to law. He claimed he didn't drink or fume and that he was committed to the Christian faith. He admitted to some impulse-command issues and some "sexual bug." And he confessed to one vice: He'd taken steroids to augment his physique. Maybe, he speculated, that charged his sex bulldoze.

"There was a conventional wisdom back in the day that someone who was an exposer or a Peeping Tom wouldn't elevate to more serious crimes," says Lieut. Paul Weatheroy, a longtime Portland cold case detective who retired from that job concluding year. "We've learned that nothing's further from the truth."

Erstwhile PSU teammates threw Woodfield a party to celebrate his release from prison, but some idea it strange when the guest of honor arrived 21⁄2 hours tardily to his own outcome. Woodfield too got out just in time to attend his 10‑yr loftier schoolhouse reunion in Newport. There, he wore his muscles nearly as a manner statement and told stories nigh 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, but on reflection, I thought:That does sort of add together upward."

—Jon Carey

PSU quarterback in 1972

Out of prison, he cut a contradictory figure. For all his failures—permit go from bartending gigs, jettisoned by girlfriends—they hardly seemed to come at the expense of self-confidence. He cruised around Portland in a gold 1974 "Champagne Edition" Volkswagen Beetle and took unmistakable pride in his physique. He was particularly fond of sending naked photos of himself to women. In belatedly '79, Woodfield was photographed in a state of undress, his abundant muscles abundantly oiled. He mailed the image to Playgirl for consideration. The following May, he received a letter back: "Congratulations! You have been selected for possible publication in Playgirl's Guy Next Door characteristic." Woodfield waited for his photograph shoot, and that's when police believe he began to murder.

On Oct. eleven, 1980, Cherie Ayers, an attractive 29-twelvemonth-onetime, was found raped, stabbed and bludgeoned to death in her Portland apartment. According to the coroner, she died from blunt-strength trauma and pocketknife wounds to her neck. Erstwhile 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 by and large on his recent release from prison. When homicide detectives questioned Woodfield, they constitute his answers "evasive" and "deceptive." Just he declined to have a polygraph. A blood test did not link Woodfield to the criminal offence, nor did his semen match that found in the victim's body. In a fourth dimension predating reliable Deoxyribonucleic acid testing, there was no other concrete evidence.

Apparently emboldened, the 1-human being crime wave picked up momentum. 7 weeks afterwards, Darcey Set up, 22, and Doug Altig, 24, were shot to decease, execution-style and with a .32 revolver, in Fix's Portland home. Again Woodfield had a connexion to the murdered woman: Ane of his closest friends—a teammate from PSU'due south track team—had dated Fix. Once again Woodfield was questioned, but police had nothing physical linking him to the murders.

On December. 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 afterwards, in Eugene, Ore., a human wearing a simulated beard and a Band-aid (or what looked like athletic record) on his nose raided an water ice foam parlor. The next night, a bulldoze-in eating house in nearby Albany, Ore., was robbed past a bearded man. A calendar week after that, in Seattle, a gunman matching the same description pinned downward a 25-year-old waitress inside a restroom and forced her to masturbate him. Hull and Garcia were sexually assaulted and shot in key Oregon four weeks later.

Word began spreading that there was an "I-5 Bandit" marauding upwardly and down the northern one-half of Interstate five, a ribbon running parallel to the Pacific for the 1,400 miles between the Mexican and Canadian borders. All of the crimes occurred within ii miles of an interstate exit.

The spree accelerated, each crime more twisted and horrific than the last. On Feb. 3, 1981, Donna Eckard, 37, and her 14-yr-old girl, Jannell Jarvis, were plant dead in their home in Mount Gate, Calif., just off I-five. Each had been shot multiple times in the caput. Lab tests would later reveal that the daughter had been sodomized. Earlier that same day, an 18-year-old waitress was kidnapped and raped after a holdup xv miles to the south, in Redding. The side by side day, a similar crime was reported 100 miles up I-5 in Yreka, Calif.

By so, word of the I-5 Bandit had amplified to the point that women were being warned to exercise caution. On Valentine'southward Day 1981, Candee Wilson implored her 18-year-old daughter, Julie Reitz, to "be careful—at that place'southward a unsafe person out there." Afterwards that night, Julie was shot and killed at their home in Beaverton, Ore., not far from where the Nike campus now sits. She had known Woodfield previously. In his job equally a bouncer he had disregarded her imitation ID and let her into a bar.

From one act to the next, the descriptions were remarkably similar: An athletic man, armed with a silver .32 revolver and wearing record or a Band‑Aid over his olfactory organ, abducted a woman, committed a sexual act so shot her execution-style. Detectives targeted Woodfield as their suspect, convinced that the receiver who turned squeamish running across the middle of the field had become an astonishingly brazen murderer.

Pick a country and you probable can find a citizen who has killed ritualistically and repeatedly. Consider the phrase run amok, which derives from a Malay word translated loosely as "to set on with homicidal mania." Assertive that amok was caused by an evil spirit, Indonesian civilisation tolerated these violent outbursts and dealt with the aftereffects with no ill will toward the assailant. The underlying premise: The capacity to kill indiscriminately dwells in all of us; virtually people just suppress the urge or avoid the spirit.

Still, the series killer occupies a atypical role in the cast of Americana. Here he—and the vast majority take been male—has been hyperbolized and fetishized, even romanticized. Serial killers are responsible for only a small fraction of the murders committed in the U.Due south., only they are some of the most notorious figures in our history and civilisation. Says Sarah Weinman, who runs the newsletter The Crime Lady, "[Series killing] is twisted fantasy that has roots in the broad-open American landscape, where it is all likewise easy to chase and kill without detection and with impunity."

It was in the 1970s that agents Robert Ressler and John Douglas of the FBI'due south behavioral science unit coined and divers the term series killer, distinguishing one from a mass murderer (who may impale many at once) or a spree killer (who lacks a so-called "cooling off" menstruation betwixt murders). Indeed, the '70s marked the ruddy-stained height of series killing in the U.S. In that era there were a number of factors working in the assailant'southward 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 science to the spotty coordination amid law precincts, it may never have been easier to avoid getting caught.

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

—Rick Risch

Manitowoc Chiefs defensive back in 1974

Woodfield wasn't the only sociopath terrorizing the West Coast effectually that time. Ted Bundy'south killing orgy in the Northwest is believed to have begun in 1974, his first eight known victims slain in either Oregon or Washington. And roughly concurrent with the I-v Killer, Gary Ridgway had begun committing ritualized murder in Seattle, mostly targeting young women. It would take twenty years earlier he was caught, simply immediately he was known as the Green River Killer, a nod to the waterway where his offset 5 known victims were establish.

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 mode that nosotros don't reflexively run away from, say, sunbathing or eating salary or other potential causes of death. So the serial killer triggers fear and a visceral reaction rooted in the almost bones human nature.

Others cite the stirring exploration of the darkest corners of humanity. Serial killers may commit acts of unadulterated evil, simply they are as well figures that generate at least a teensy measure of titillation, sometimes even amore. (See: Lecter, Hannibal.) "In a perverse way, y'all sometimes terminate up rooting for these guys," says Skip Hollandsworth, a true crime writer whose latest volume, The Midnight Assassin, focuses on a serial of unsolved murders in 1880s Austin.

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Hollandsworth fifty-fifty sees overlapping elements with football. "The reason we beloved to watch broad receivers is because they are so elusive. They run a particularly designed route, hoping to wriggle free and catch a pass despite a defence stacked against them. It's the same reason we are fascinated with serial killers. They come up with a especially designed killing road, deport out the impale and and then make their escape, eluding the cops and crime-scene technicians—merely to do information technology all again after taking a sabbatical."

And while we call serial killers monsters, often they are all too homo. In that location's something unsettling but besides a footling tantalizing in the capacity of everyday people—siblings, classmates, coworkers, teammates—to acquit out such chilling acts. "He seemed like such a normal guy" is the inevitable refrain from the shocked neighbor. This was a fundamental theme for Ann Dominion, a prominent true crime writer who in her best-selling volume The Stranger Beside Me portrays Ted Bundy as a handsome, well-spoken, good-looking law student . . . who happened to kill at least 30 women. Rule has conceded, "I can retrieve thinking that if I were younger and single, or if my daughters were older, [Bundy] would exist near the perfect homo."

From her home base of operations in the series killer hotbed of Seattle, Rule grew interested in the I-5 instance and published a book in 1984 about Woodfield titled The I-5 Killer. A meticulously reported business relationship—and an invaluable resource in this story—Rule'due south book relied on public documents as well as interviews with detectives, family members and the socio-path himself. She was clearly absorbed by Woodfield's conventional upbringing, jock full-blooded and proficient looks. Even the breathless jacket synopsis asks how "a suspect who seemed [and so] handsome and highly-seasoned [could] accept committed such ugly crimes."

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

After Lisa Garcia picked Woodfield'south 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 evidence: the same brand of tape that had been used to bind victims . . . a .32 bullet in Woodfield's racquetball pocketbook. . . .

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

Four days later on, police charged him with Hull'due south murder, Garcia'southward attempted murder and two counts of sodomy. Woodfield, employing a public defender, entered a plea of not guilty. Past 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 abort of woodfield. But that wasn't actually the case. Every bit 1 one-time PSU teammate puts it, "You simply had a bad feeling near the guy, like there was something underneath his mask." Says Carey, Woodfield's quarterback, "I was surprised when some of this stuff started coming downward, but on reflection, I thought, That does sort of add upwardly."

When Woodfield'south 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 male parent, Dick, had recently finished upwardly a run on The Ballad Burnett Show). At the time, the prosecutor characterized the accused as "an big-headed, cold, unemotional private . . . probably the coldest, most detached defendant I've ever seen." By his own reckoning, Van Dyke had "armloads of evidence, overwhelming prove." And Woodfield'southward defense force was flimsy, predicated on mistaken identity. At 1 signal the defendant's lawyer went and 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 nil like a star athlete or a handsome lothario. Hither's how Rule put it: "Randy Woodfield had been touted in the media as a massively muscled professional athlete. The man in person seemed strangely macerated, not a superman afterwards all. . . . He looked, if anything, humbled—a predatory creature brought down and caged in mid-rampage." Bizarrely, he admitted in court to having owned a .32 pistol but 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 key witness, recalling the horrific night at the office building five months earlier. She maintained that the man she faced in the courtroom was the aforementioned man who, she alleged, shot her and killed her coworker. It took the jury 31⁄2 hours to reach its verdict.

On June 26, 1981, Randall Woodfield was convicted on all counts. With no capital punishment pick in Oregon, Woodfield, then 30, was sentenced to a prison term of life plus 90 years. That December, 35 more years were added to his sentence when a jury in Benton Canton, Ore., bedevilled him of sodomy and weapons charges tied to another assault in a restaurant bathroom.

District attorneys upwardly and down the I-five corridor had a decision to brand. Even if they could secure a conviction, what would exist the point? Woodfield was already nigh certain to die in prison. Boosted trials would drain their offices of fourth dimension and resource and would put the victims' families through an excruciating ordeal. Fifty-fifty in California—where Woodfield was accused of killing a mother and her daughter, and where the capital punishment would have been an selection—the local prosecutor somewhen decided against pursuing Woodfield.

Still, the list of his victims has grown. In 2012, detectives in the Portland Police force Agency's cold case unit of measurement, benefiting from new magnetic bead technology at the Oregon state law criminal offense lab, announced they had matched Woodfield'south DNA to evidence from v victims: Fix, Jarvis, Eckard, Altig, and Reitz.

In July 2005, on account of similar Deoxyribonucleic acid matches, Weatheroy, the one-time Portland lieutenant and common cold case supervisor, interrogated Woodfield about his connection to the unsolved crimes. Out of the Oregon State Penitentiary for a twenty-four hour period, sitting across from Weatheroy on the 13th floor of the justice building in downtown Portland, Woodfield was pleasant company. "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 baby-sit down." Woodfield, though, confessed to nothing.

Dna show which helped convict Randall Woodfield (Robert Brook)

Ultimately, as in other jurisdictions, government in Portland's Multnomah County decided non to prosecute the murders of Altig, Ayers and Fix. They did, however, hold a press conference to brand clear: In the unlikely effect that Woodfield was always granted a parole hearing, they would pursue these boosted indictments.

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

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

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

Ann Rule, who passed abroad last year at 83, long agone concluded that Woodfield killed women equally a form of rebellion against his authoritarian mother and two older sisters. (While in prison, Woodfield sued Rule, unsuccessfully, for $12 1000000 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 caused him to look at sexual activity as power fulfillment as opposed to an area of procreation and of intimacy."

What nigh the sport Woodfield played and so expertly? Football did this has get the quick-and-easy explanation for all sorts of antisocial acts, from slugging a fiancée in a casino elevator to running a dog-fighting ring. A sensationally violent sport breeds sensationally fierce behavior. Special rules are conferred on star athletes, plumping senses of entitlement. The peculiar rhythms of the sport—one intense solar day followed by half dozen days of recovery and preparation—are out of whack with the residue of society. Teams (and an paradigm-obsessed league) accept mastered the arts of willful incomprehension and harm control.

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

—Gary Scallon

Manitowoc Chiefs wide receiver in 1974

Asked about Woodfield in September, Nib Tobin, a longtime NFL exec who was Green Bay's director of pro scouting in 1974, claimed not to recall Woodfield as a role player, much less know that a one-time draft selection of his was a convicted killer. Still Portland detectives maintain that the Packers quietly cut Woodfield in part considering of off-field concerns. "I know that was a factor," says Lawrence, "that he was defenseless exposing himself."

Just in the instance of Randall Woodfield, it'south not but an oversimplification to arraign football; it's at odds with the facts. If annihilation, football game was a temporary source of salvation, delaying Woodfield's horrific beliefs. Survey the time line and it'southward easy to make the instance that football game, beyond being a driving motivation for him, was also a distraction from a primal instinct that had, perhaps always, churned within. Only when football was no longer part of his life did he take a truly dark turn.

The Portland Constabulary Section's property room sits in an industrial pocket of boondocks, right by the Willamette River. At that place is a department defended to the documents pertaining to Woodfield. Here prevarication copies of decades-onetime search warrants and affidavits, as well as a trove of relics from the Packers. Police searching Woodfield'southward residence realized that he'd kept every correspondence bearing that green-and-yellow logo, every envelope with the render accost of 1265 Lombardi Artery, in Greenish Bay.

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

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

Woodfield is 65 now. Thirty-five years after his conviction, he sits in Oregon State Penitentiary, nestled among 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 inside the rehabilitation and correctional plan of the inmate." Woodfield did non respond to letters or electronic correspondences from SI seeking comment.

This much we know, nonetheless: Woodfield is however a football fan. Prison guards call back that he loves to talk most the sport and still remembers his playing days, 4 decades ago, with hit specificity. Weatheroy, the detective, saw this firsthand. When Woodfield learned that Weatheroy's son was a high school star in Portland who went on to play for Air Force, the inmate grew animated. "He loved talking nigh sports," says Weatheroy. "His high schoolhouse career, playing in college, his fourth dimension with Dark-green Bay. . . ." When the conversation turned to weightier topics, however, Woodfield clammed upwardly, tried to change the bailiwick and grew distant.

Woodfield did join MySpace in 2006, and his profile was as close as he's ever come up to taking ownership of his past. Information technology also says plenty about how he still self-identifies: "I spend the remainder of my days in prison because I have committed a murder along with many other crimes. I once tried out for the Green Bay Packers. The only reason I didn't get in is because the skills I had to offering they didn't need at the time."

Boosted reporting by Michael Cohen and Kerry Eggers

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How Did You Know He Was a Serial Killer

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