Why was suspected killer John Wayne Thomson loose so long?
Saturday, October 28, 2006 11:45 PM PDT
By Tony Lystra
Printable version
E-mail this articleIt seemed routine enough at first. On July 12, a Lewis County Sheriff's deputy stopped in the Toledo area to investigate a stolen property case.
He encountered a group of people who said they planned to buy a chain saw from a man named "John." The deputy also discovered a car, registered to James Ehrgott, 73, of Spokane.
At the time, the deputy didn't know that James Ehrgott was dead, that the car was stolen, and that "John," the man who would later be accused of Ehrgott's murder, had been convicted of rape three times and was now hiding not far away in the bushes.
In the weeks that followed, John Wayne Thomson managed to slip past police in three states, driving from Spokane through Lewis and Cowlitz counties to Southern California. Along the way, he is thought to have killed three people, including Longview resident Lori Hamm.
But with multiple police agencies working night and day to find him, how did Thomson manage to escape the Northwest? And how did he travel more than 1,000 miles in a stolen car before he was nabbed on Aug. 7, not by the police, but by two newspaper employees in Victorville, Calif.?
Most importantly, could the deaths of some of Thomson's alleged victims have been prevented?
Investigators in both Lewis and Cowlitz counties said they stand by their work in the Thomson manhunt. And, in a statement, Kelso's Jerry Hamm, Lori Hamm's father, said that he and his wife, Marcia, "believe that the Longview Police handled our daughter's case with professionalism. They were up front with information to us and the immediate family. As it turned out, the murder took place within five hours of the last time we saw our daughter."
Still, authorities said they've asked themselves tough questions about the case.
"I wonder how he got away," said Det. Sgt. Pat Smith, who is in charge of the Lewis County Sheriff's investigation unit. "Part of you is going, 'Shoot, how could we have missed him?' "
A Daily News review of the investigation shows that two days before Lori Hamm went missing on July 16, Lewis County authorities had already learned that Thomson was a violent sex offender, was carrying a stolen gun and had been driving Ehrgott's car. Spokane police feared at that time that Erhrgott was dead.
The review also shows that police alerted law enforcement agencies in Washington, Oregon and California of major developments in the case, often within hours of their discoveries.
However, for their own reasons, authorities kept that information from the public, or at least delayed its release. Longview police didn't link Thomson to Hamm's disappearance until Wednesday, July 19. And, because police did not go public with the information until the following day, The Daily News did not publish its first story about the Hamm case until Friday, July 21 -- four days after Hamm's family reported her missing.
The course of events left a serial rapist and suspected killer of two roaming Longview and Kelso for days without the public's knowledge. Thomson remained in Cowlitz and Lewis counties for at least a week after police connected Thomson to Ehrgott's car and for at least three days after he is thought to have killed Hamm.
A philosophical divide
The case is a classic example of the clash of interests between police, the public and the press in the midst of a rapidly evolving murder investigation.
During a manhunt, police say, they want to keep their suspect guessing, leave him unsure of what authorities know and what they might be looking for.
"If I thought I could get away with it, I wouldn't even mention that there was a homicide," said Det. Sgt. Ken Wade, who oversees the Washington State Patrol's Criminal Investigations Division in Spokane.
The press, meanwhile, wants to publish as much information as possible, an instinct borne of a belief that people are better off the more they know.
And then there is the public, which simply wants suspects caught and to know what safety precautions they should take while dangerous people remain at large.
Balancing all of these interests is no small feat.
"There isn't any book out there that tells you, 'This is how you're supposed to do it,' " said Jerry Murphy, the director of homeland security at the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
"I've seen a lot of departments withhold information and then they get criticized for withholding it," said Murphy, who authored a lengthy review of the Beltway Sniper investigation. "I've seen them release information and then get criticized for creating unnecessary fear."
At the very least, if police don't disclose key developments in a high-profile case, the press should ask why, said Keith Woods, the dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute, a national journalism research organization.
"The public is in the dark about how both of us operate -- the police and the media," Woods said. "We have to understand that the public's stake in this is that things go as well as they could in an investigation like this."
"This isn't a bunch of arrogant folks making decisions in a newsroom or in a police department unmindful of the public," he said. "But sometimes in situations like this, the legitimate interests of well-intentioned people conflict."
July 13-July 16
Before Hamm went missing in Longview, Lewis County investigators had been discovering a rash of disturbing information about Thomson.
Authorities there learned that Thomson is a three-time sex offender with "some violent history," said Det. Sgt. Pat Smith, of the Lewis County Sheriff's Office. They also learned that James Ehrgott of Spokane was missing, that Thomson probably had something to do with it, and that Thomson was thought to be carrying a stolen handgun.
Lewis County reported the discovery of Ehrgott's car to the Spokane Police Department on July 12.
The following day, July 14, a Lewis County deputy returned to the Toledo-area to learn more about Thomson. Witnesses there said Thomson had, in fact, been nearby when a deputy first showed up two days earlier and had scrambled off into the woods.
Thomson had told the witnesses that the car he was driving was "hot" and that he was "hot." Witnesses also said Thomson had a gun and that he was last seen the day before, July 13, leaving on a bike.
Lewis County searched the area using a dog. Authorities found a backpack and a handgun case matching the description of the one belonging to Thomson's ex-girlfriend in Spokane.
Lewis County also dispatched a teletype to police agencies along the Interstate 5 corridor, asking for help in finding Thomson. The notice said that Thomson was "possibly armed and dangerous" and was also a "person of interest for a missing elderly male from Spokane."
On either Friday, July 14 or Saturday, July 15 -- Smith said he couldn't remember when exactly -- Lewis County also updated Spokane police, saying Thomson is a sex offender and that he was believed to have a gun.
Det. Sgt. Joe Peterson, of the Spokane Police Department's major crime unit, said it was clear early on that Ehrgott "had met with some foul play."
"As soon as I saw the report, it wasn't good," he said. "We were saying over here immediately ... that we felt we were investigating a homicide."
Throughout the weekend of July 15 and 16, Smith said, Lewis County investigators contacted Thomson's family in Lewis County and anyone else who might know him, hoping someone would know where he was.
July 17-July 21
While Lewis County continued to track Thomson, Longview police were still unsure of who they were looking for in the earliest days of the Hamm investigation.
Hamm was last seen leaving church on July 16. Her parents reported her missing on Monday, July 17. By Wednesday, July 19, police had recovered her cell phone.
Also on Wednesday, police learned that a guy named "John" had been bragging about killing people and had been seen driving a blue Ford Focus, which matched the description of Hamm's car.
"John," police learned, frequented the Maltese tavern in Kelso and had been hanging out at an Alabama Street car shop in Longview.
Around noon that day, Amber Davis, of Kelso, reported that a man named "John" had stolen her gold Honda Civic. He had been in a hurry to get out of the state, she said, but she didn't know why.
Davis said Thomson was interested in buying her car and that she ended up driving him around town. She also told police that, as she and Thomson approached the Alabama Street auto shop, Thomson spotted officers there, ducked low in the passenger seat, and told her to keep driving.
Police had been led to the garage by a series of tips. It would be the second time since the murders began that Thomson dodged authorities, who were still unsure who or what, exactly, they were looking for.
At that stage, Longview Det. Sgt. Jim Duscha said during an interview last week, "He could have driven right up and been there and we wouldn't have known who he was."
"I'm sure there's a little bit of frustration. He was so close yet so far out of reach. There wasn't much we could do about it."
In a recent interview, Davis told The Daily News that the buzz around her neighborhood was that Lewis County was looking for Thomson, but nobody knew why, exactly.
"We thought it was just something on a drug charge or a simple warrant," she said.
Still, on July 19, Davis told Longview investigators that Lewis County deputies were hunting for this mysterious "John."
A Longview officer told Davis, also on July 19 that he "did not know what she was talking about," according to a police report.
Longview police contacted Lewis County the same day. Despite the bulletin Lewis County officials had sent on July 14 and the fact that Thomson is a Longview native with relatives in the area, this would be the first time Longview and Lewis County officials would talk about Thomson.
At 3:45 p.m., also on Wednesday, July 19, a little more than three hours after Davis' car was stolen, the Longview Police Department issued a teletype message to agencies in Washington, Oregon and California, asking officers to keep an eye out for Thomson, the Civic and Hamm, whose body had not yet been discovered.
What the public wasn't told
Yet, it wasn't until the next day, Thursday, July 20, three days after Hamm was reported missing, that Longview Police said anything to the public about the investigation.
Despite repeated requests from reporters, the newspaper didn't receive a photo of Thomson until Monday, July 24. Before then, people wouldn't know Thomson if they saw him. Longview Police Chief Alex Perez later apologized for the delay in providing Thomson's photo.
And Longview police never told the public that Thomson had been convicted of rape three times. (That information was not published until Monday, July 24, after a Daily News reporter discovered an old case file on the Internet.)
In addition, when Longview police did announce that Hamm was missing and that Thomson might be involved, investigators told the public to watch out for Hamm's blue Ford Focus -- even though they suspected Thomson had stolen Davis' gold Honda Civic.
Police also knew the Civic had black paint on the driver's side front fender, not an easy thing for the public to miss. Yet, investigators kept that information secret.
During the earliest days of the Hamm investigation, Duscha said, detectives were trying to grasp the seriousness of the case.
People are reported missing all the time, authorities said. Sometimes they're just late. Sometimes they disappear on purpose and want to stay that way.
By Thursday, July 20, Duscha said, investigators had determined that "this was unusual enough that it was time to let the press know and see if somebody had additional information for us."
The Daily News published a short story about the case, its first report on the matter, on Friday, July 21, five days after Hamm's disappearance. The story mentioned that police were looking for Thomson, who had been seen driving Hamm's car, and that he was a person of interest in the case.
Duscha said the department did not disclose Thomson's history of sex crimes because investigators determined that Thomson hadn't randomly targeted his rape victims; he attacked only acquaintances, and so authorities decided the risk to the public was minimal.
However, a Department of Corrections document obtained by The Daily News says that, in 1982, Thomson snatched a 37-year-old woman, whom he did not know, off a Kelso street as she carried groceries to her apartment.
When a reporter showed Duscha the document, he said, "I didn't know anything about that one."
"You want to get all the information you can get, sure," he said. But "this isn't a perfect world and it doesn't always work out that way."
He noted that multiple law enforcement agencies were involved in the case and said, "We have to respect the wishes of other agencies as far as how much information is released."
Duscha declined to say whether those agencies specifically requested that information about Thomson's past sex crimes be withheld from the public.
"It's a judgment call," he said. "How much information do you want to release? We don't want the public going into complete panic."
But some law enforcement and other experts, who emphasized that they were not intimately familiar with the case, suggested that perhaps police should have disclosed more information about Thomson's criminal history.
"The guy's killing people, right?" said Woods, of the journalism think thank The Poynter Institute. "Which part of that is not supposed to scare me to begin with?"
Tom Corzine, the deputy director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, said he didn't want to second-guess the police department's tactics. But he also said, "My sense of it would be that you would get the information out if possible."
Regarding the Honda that Thomson allegedly stole, Duscha said police didn't tell the public about the incident at first because, "we were trying to keep Mr. Thomson bottled up in the Longview-Kelso area."
If "too much information gets out ... they can flee, which we were trying to avoid."
In addition, Duscha said police never disclosed that the Honda had a black fender because "we didn't want him alerted to the point where he dumped the car and then we didn't know what he was in."
Duscha also said he is unsure when Thomson took off for California. But a report says Thomson was spotted in Riverside, Calif., around July 23. That suggests he may have left Longview not long after stealing Davis' Honda on Wednesday, July 19 -- just as police were learning how grave a situation they faced.
The Daily News published a story about the missing Honda on Saturday, July 22 -- almost a week after Hamm's disappearance and three days after Thomson had allegedly stolen the car.
Despite all of the bulletins, Thomson managed to stay one step ahead of police throughout the investigation. He is thought have killed a third time, murdering Charles Hedlund in San Bernardino County, Calif., and is now awaiting trial there.
Asked how Thomson slipped from Longview to Southern California without being stopped by the police, Duscha said, "I think he was very lucky."
free spirit wrote on Feb 7, 2008 1:19 AM:
Past Month's Most Commented Stories