Month: October 2021

On October 31, 2009, just after ten o’clock in the evening, I received the call that no detective wanted to receive. An officer had been shot and killed in Seattle.
The call was more personal because that night, I had a son working patrol in the same part of the city that the officer had been shot. I didn’t know who the victim officer was.
A call from my son as I left my house let me know that I was lucky that night. It wasn’t him, though he was on the scene.
There was added burden to the call. My partner, Jason Kasner and I were next-up. That meant that the responsibility to find the fucker who did this was ours.
I arrived at the scene amid a cacophony of sights and sounds. Dozens of patrol cars were at the scene; probably forty more scoured the area for the shooter. Helicopters buzzed overhead, and the stunned faces of officers, some I knew, but most I didn’t, were the norm.
I approached one of the many officers I didn’t know that night.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“Tim Brenton,” he said.
I didn’t know Tim, but I most certainly had crossed paths with him in the past at another homicide scene.
“Is he related to Boyd Brenton?” I asked.
“It’s his son.”
Boyd Brenton had been an older officer I worked around in the Georgetown Precinct many years before. I didn’t know him well but went on many calls with him before his transfer to the Narcotics Section.
He hadn’t been as lucky as I had that night.
I was the first detective to arrive. A Seattle Police patrol car was parked on a residential street off East Yesler Way. A yellow police blanket covered the passenger side of the vehicle. There was yellow crime scene tape surrounding the car and the area around it.
I ducked under the tape. As I did, all the noise and confusion I had been in a moment before disappeared. It was eerily quiet.
I looked in the driver’s window of the car and saw the dead body of Officer Timothy Q. Brenton. There were two vente Starbucks cups in the cupholders between the driver and passenger seats. They were spattered with blood.
I asked who the driver of the car had been.
“He had a student officer,” I was told. An officer who had recently graduated from the police academy and was in field training; assigned to a field-training officer who trained and evaluated them in the real world.
She was in the back of a nearby medic unit.
I went there and got in. She was obviously shaken. She had been grazed by bullets fired from a car that had pulled alongside their patrol car. After the shooting, she got out and returned fire. She didn’t know if she’d struck the vehicle the suspect was in.
She had, we later determined.
What followed were six days of eighteen-to-twenty-hour workdays until a tip led us to the shooter, an odd duck with no criminal history but a hatred for the police, back before it was the norm.
I asked detectives in my office to go to his Tukwila apartment to sit on it while I wrote a warrant. Once there, the suspect confronted them, tried to shoot one of them, and was himself shot in the return of gunfire.
He survived, though he became a paraplegic.
Five years of trial preparation and nearly eight months of trial resulted in a conviction.
Shortly after he arrived in prison, he was found dead in his cell—an apparent suicide by overdose.
Halloween will never be the same for me.

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I walked into my office at the Special Assault Unit (otherwise known as Sex Crimes) at the Seattle Police Department one morning in 1993.

A police report lay on my desk, my name written in the upper right corner, indicating that this case was assigned to me.

The report alleged that a young woman working at a downtown hotel had been raped by another hotel employee, a maintenance worker.

I called the number listed for the victim.  A young woman answered.  It was evident from our conversation she was developmentally delayed.

“Can you come into my office?” I asked her.

She said she could, and we made arrangements for her to come in later that afternoon.

She showed up, accompanied by a person she introduced as her case worker.

Her name was Lynette.

I spoke to her for several minutes, talking about everything except her assault, trying to make her as comfortable as I could before we got into the difficult conversation.

She was very forthcoming.  I thought she had the mental capacity of about a ten-year-old.

Finally, I transitioned into the assault.

She told me everything and wasn’t reticent about describing what happened.

The suspect, Jose, was a Mexican National and had fled, most likely to Mexico.

When I had all the information I needed, I handed her my business card with my direct line.

“Call me whenever you want to,” I told her.

After she left, I did everything I needed to do to have Jose charged with the rape and have an arrest warrant entered into NCIC, the nationwide police computer system.

A couple of days later, my desk phone rang. It was Lynette.

“Hi Detective Steiger,” she said.

“Call me Cloyd.”

She wanted to talk about her assault.  I listened to what she had to say.

She explained that her family was Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“When I told my mom what happened,” she said, “she hit me.”

“Lynnette, this wasn’t your fault,” I said.  “Don’t let anyone make you feel bad about it.”

Like Zenith Morningstar, whose tale I told in an earlier post, Lynette called me almost every day.  And much like Zenith, she only kept me on the phone for about five minutes.

These conversations went on for months.  At first, they were about the case, but Lynette asked me about my personal life. I told her that I had three sons and what was going on in their lives, so she always asked me about them.

In 1994 I was transferred to Homicide.  Lynette called one day, and I told her about the transfer. I gave her my new phone number.

The calls continued for several months; then, she stopped calling.

A couple of years later, I was called to an officer-involved shooting in the middle of the night.

A man tried to break into his estranged girlfriend’s house.  She had a restraining order against him and called the police.

Officers arrived, and a foot chase ensued, culminating in a shooting.  The suspect was killed.

Though I was called to the scene, it wasn’t my case. Dick Gagnon was the assigned detective.

Around ten in the morning, he came up to me.

“I have to go speak with the suspect’s family. Will you go with me?”

“Sure,” I said, knowing this wouldn’t be easy.

We arrived at the Central Area home. The house was filled with about fifteen people, their eyes like lasers, glaring at us when we went in.

Dick had just begun speaking when a sound came from a back room.

“EEEEE!”

Lynette appeared, ran up to me, and wrapped her arms around me.

“This is my friend I was telling you about!” she said to the people gathered.

The tension leaking out of the room was palpable.

After we spoke to the people gathered and left, Gagnon looked at me.

“Man,” he said.  “Am I glad I brought you with me.”

 

 

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A few days ago news came out that someone thought they had identified the Zodiac Killer.  I have several friends who know much more about that case than I do, and they agree that this is likely, not true.

Talk of the Zodiac brought back a memory.

In the late 90s, I was working Homicide for the Seattle Police Department.  I was at my desk when one of the Administrative Assistants buzzed me on the intercom.

“I have a lady on the phone who would like to speak with someone about serial killers.  Can you speak with her?”

“Sure,” I said.  A moment later, my phone line rang.

I answered.

On the other end of the line was what sounded like an older woman, perhaps in her eighties. She introduced herself as Zenith Morningstar, a name right out of an Elmore Leonard novel.

“Hi Zenith,” I said, introducing myself.  “What can I do for you?”

She asked me several general questions about serial killers, and I answered as best I could.

“What do you know about the Zodiac Killer?” she asked.

“Honestly,” I told her. “Not too much.”

I knew several murders from the Bay area to Southern California were said to have been committed by him. He’d allegedly sent cryptic messages to the police investigating, but not much more.

She seemed like a very nice lady and thanked me for the information.

The next day, I received another call from Zenith.

“I think my boyfriend is the Zodiac Killer,” she said.

“Why do you think so?”

She listed several reasons, none of which were that impressive to me.  I was polite and told her it was unlikely her boyfriend was the Zodiac Killer.

That started a bevy of calls.  Zenith called me almost every day.  Fortunately, she only kept me on the phone for five minutes or so.  She continually referred to me as Detective Steiger.

“Call me Cloyd,” I told her.

During these daily calls, she would try to explain again why she thought her boyfriend was guilty.

He had no ties to that area, and there was no evidence to substantiate her claims.

She sometimes just called to chat.  I was nice to her, recognizing the actual motive in her calls.  She was lonely.  I could spend five minutes or so a day speaking with her. She told me she lived in an apartment above the Pike Place Market and all the comings and goings in her life.

She would occasionally stop by the Homicide office to give me a Christmas card or a book on the Zodiac Killer.

Finally, several months into our calls, she had some news:  Her boyfriend had passed away.

“I’m so sorry, Zenith,” I told her.  At least you don’t have to worry about him being the Zodiac Killer.”

She continued to call for several months. Finally, she had some news:

“He’s back,” she said.

“Who’s back?”

“My boyfriend.  He’s returned as a dog.”

I spent several minutes telling her how unlikely it was for her boyfriend to return as a dog incarnate.  She insisted it was true.

She continued to call for several more months until the calls just stopped.  I thought she had probably passed away.

I didn’t hear anything for about ten years.

A month before I retired, I came into my office one morning.  The message light was flashing on my phone.  I played the message. The call had come in about three in the morning.

“Hi, Cloyd,” Zenith’s voice said, much more feeble than it had been. “I’ve been thinking about you and just wanted to say hi and thanks for listening to me.”

There was no caller ID, and she left no callback number.

 

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Here’s another podcast I did with Adam Rodriguez.

(108) #16 Cloyd Steiger Homicide Detective RET – YouTube

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