Randall Woodfield
The I-5 Killer

Born at Salem, Oregon, in December 1950, Randy Woofield was the classic, all-American boy next door. He made good grades, and high school coaches recognized his natural athletic talents, making him the star of Newport's football team. When woodfield started to expose himself in public, everybody laughed it off at first, and members of the coaching staff supressed his first arrest to keep him eligible for the squad.

In August 1970, attending college in Ontario, Oregon, he was picked up again, this time for vandalizing an exgirlfriends apartment. Two years later, in Vancouver, Washington, he logged his first adult arrest on charges of indecent exposure, receiving a suspended sentence. A similar arrest in Portland, earned him more suspended time in June of 1973.

Woodfield got a break that year, when he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers, but he could not shake his problems with a trip across the country. In 1974, after a dozen "flashing" incidents called unwelcome attention to Randy, the Packers gave up and sent him home. The local boy-made-good was coming home in failure, a disgrace.

In early 1975, several Portland women were accosted by a knife-wielding young man, forced to perform oral sex before they were robbed of their handbags. Policewomen were staked out as decoys, and Woodfield was arrested on March 3, after stealing marked money from one of the officers. In April, he pled guilty to reduced charges of second-degree robbery, receiving a sentence of ten years in prison. Four years later, in July 1979, Woodfield was freed on parole.

On October 9, 1980, a former classmate of Randy's Cherie Ayers was raped and murdered in Portland, bludgeoned about the head and stabbed repeatedly in the neck. Woodfield was routinely questioned and refused to sit for polygraph examinations. Homicide detectives found his answers generally "evasive and deceptive," but his blood type did not match the semen found inside the victim's body, and he was not charged.

A short month later, still in Portland, Darci Fix and Doug Altic were shot to death, execution-style, in Altic's apartment. A .32 caliber revolver was missing from the scene, and while the female victim had been formerly involved with one of Woodfield's closest friends, police had nothing to suggest that Randy was the killer.

On December 9, 1980, a young bandit wearing a fake beard held up a gas station in Vancouver, Washington. Four nights later, in Eugene, Oregon, the same man raided an ice cream parlor, rebounding on December 14 with the robbery of a drive-in restaurant at Albany. A week later, in Seattle, the gunman added a new twist, trapping a waitress in the restoom of a chicken restaurant and forcing her to masturbate him. Twenty minutes later, smiling through his phony beard, he robbed another ice cream parlor and escaped with cash in hand.

January was another busy month for the gunman police were already calling the "I-5 bandit," after his apparent highway of preference. On the eighth, he raided the same Vancouver gas station a second time, forcing a female attendant to expose her breasts after looting the till. Three days later, he robbed a market in Eugene, surfacing at Sutherlin, Oregon, on January 12, to wound a female grocery clerk with gunfire. He was wearing a fake beard in Corvallis, on January 14, when he invaded a home occupied by two sisters, aged eight and ten; the girls were foreced to disrobe before fellating their assailant. In Salem, four days later, the target was an office building, where he killed Shari Hull and wounded Beth Wilmot, after sexually abusing both women. The bandit rouned off his month on January 26 and 29, with robberies in Eugene, Medford, and Grant's Pass (fondling a clerk and female customer in the latter case).

On February 3, 1981, Donna Eckard, 37, and her 14-year-old daughter were found dead in their home at Montain Gate, California, north of Redding. Together in bed, each had been shot several times in the head, with lab tests revealing the girl had been sodomized. The same day, a female clerk was kidnapped, raped and sodomized after a holdup in Redding. An identical crime was reported from Yreka, on February 4, and the bandit robbed an Ashland motel that same night. Five days later, in Corvallis, he held up a fabric store, molesting the clerk and her customer before departing. February 12 witnessed a triple-header, with robberies in Vancouver, Olympia, and Bellevue, Washington---the last two stops included three more sexual assaults.

On February 15, Julie Reitz---a former girlfriend of Woofield's---was shot and killed at her home in Beaverton, Oregon. The investigation had focused on Randy by February 28, and by that time the I-5 gunman had struck three more times, in Eugene on February 18 and 21, with a final sex assault in Corvallis on February 25.

Interrogation of Woodfield on March 3, 1981, led to a search of his apartment two days later. On March 7, he was taken into custody after several victims picked him from a police lineup. By March 16, indictments were rolling in from various jurisdictions in Washington and Oregon, including multiple counts of murder, rape and sodomy, attempted kidnapping, armed robbery, and possession of firearms by an ex-convict.

The courts in Salem got to Woodfield first, on charges of murder, attempted murder, and two counts of sodomy. Convicted of all counts on June 26, 1981, the all-American killer was sentenced to a prison term of life plus 90 years. By December, conviction of sodomy and weapons charges in Benton County, Oregon, had added 35 more years to Randy's time.

As officer began to follow Woodfield's trail along I-5, they stumbled over other victims. Sylvia Durante, 21, had been strangled in Seattle and dumped beside the highway in December 1979. Three months later, 19-year-old Marsha Weatter and 18-year-old Kathy Allen had vanished while thumbing rides along I-5, outside Spokane; their corpses had been found in May, following the eruption of Mt.Saint Helens. At least four women had died around Huntington Beach, California, while Woodfield was sunning himself in the area, all killed in typical style.

Despite his seeming links with 13 homicides (at least) and countless other crimes, the I-5 killer would not go to court on the majority of his offenses. Unable to afford endless string of trials, the state was satisified to know that Woodfield would be off the highways for a century or so.

 

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