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managing all right, even though he knew she would never really get over
losing her only son. In the early months of 1976, Olive thought about
how Mike had sold his car so he could go to Hawaii and comfort Morris
when Jerilee divorced him. When was that? It seemed to her that a dozen
years had passed, but she realized it had been less than two years ago.
That was hard to believe when so much had happened. Olive arranged to
buy Morris's Volkswagen from his estate. She wanted Mike Blankenbaker to
have it, it would make up for his giving up his first car for Morris,
and it would be something of his big brother's that he could cherish.
Jerilee Blankenbaker-Moore-Blankenbaker, in some ways a double-widow
now, kept working at the bank. If she moved through her days in a blur
of shock, no one could fault her. She was brilliant on the job, it was a
way to shut the world out for a while. Her children were small and they
needed her, her own family was supportive, and so the months rolled by.
She was very lonely at first, adrift really. She had been married since
she was eighteen years old, albeit to two men, but she had never been
truly "single" during the past dozen years. One marriage had moved so
seamlessly into the next that she had never learned to live alone. There
was there had to bea distance between Morris's family and Jerilee.
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Although no one ever said it aloud, the thought was always there: If
Jerilee had not fallen in love with Gabby and gone off with him, if he
had not become obsessed with her, Morris's family believed that Morris
would be alive. They had no proof. Even the police had no proof. But it
was just common sense. Except for the normal problems everyone has from
time to time, all of their lives had moved along so smoothly until Gabby
Moore moved in with Morris and Jerilee. In time, maybe they could work
out their differences with Jerilee, but it was hard for Olive to look at
her and not think of losing Morris. Olive didn't know exactly what had
happened, but she vowed she would find out before she died. And Olive
had learned that she probably would die soon. At sixty-five, she had
been diagnosed with lung cancer. Wasn't that just her kind of luck? She
didn't even smoke. Sometimes Olive wondered why she had had to take so
many heavy hits in her life. She had lost her only husband, her only
child, the best friend-and-boss she had ever had, and now it looked as
if she were going to be one of the small percentage of nonsmokers to die
of lung cancer. Yet there was a strength in Olive Blankenbaker that few
women have. Maybe it was rage, and maybe it was only an ability to
accept the unthinkable and go on. She planned her little garden for
spring and was pleased that her cat was going to have kittens. Olive
loved life and she was not going to give up easily. She knew what the
odds werethe doctors had told her but it didn't matter that much to her
any longer. "I just figured I wasn't going to live to be an old woman,"
she said quietly. Olive was determined, however, to stay alive long
enough to attend the trial of Morris's murderer whoever that turned out
to be. Vern Henderson wasn't telling her anything specific, he just kept
reassuring her that he was working on the case, and for her not to
worry. "I didn't sit around and cry," Olive said. "I went back to work.
As it turned out, I worked for years after Morris was killed. If I
hadn't had my work, I don't know what I would have done because when I
wasn't busy, I sat around and thought about Morris. I went back to work
as a court reporter in federal court cases. They brought a lot of them
down from Spokane, and I was kept busy." Olive was completely unaware
that Jerilee had begun to date again.
Had she known, she would have been shocked, even though she expected
that one day, in the future, Jerilee would remarry since she was only
thirty. Olive certainly did not consider that her ex-daughter-in-law
would even think of another marriage anytime soon. While the Yakima
Herald-Republic was barely mentioning the Blankenbaker-Moore murders
anymore, there had been a great deal going on below the surface.
District Attorney Jeff Sullivan, Sergeant Bob Brimmer, and Detective
Vern Henderson had been working feverishly to build the strongest case
possible against the man they now believed to be the shooter in at least
one of the murders. And that was the man who had borrowed the death gun
shortly before each of the killings: Angelo "Turfy" Pleasant. Brimmer,
Henderson, and Jeff Sullivan were about to make a move.
With the visit from Loretta Scott and her linking of the. 22 to her
cousin, Sullivan agreed that they had probable cause now to arrest Turfy
Pleasant. On February 27, 1976, Sullivan issued a warrant charging Turfy
with aiding and abetting first-degree murder, and for commiting
second-degree murder. The warrant was sent up to the Ellensburg Police
Department with a request to arrest Turfy Pleasant and to inform Yakima
County detectives when he was in custody. It didn't take long. Turfy
wasn't hiding. He was going to class during the week, and he was coming
home to be with his friends on weekends. It was that same Friday, in the
late afternoon, when word came that Turfy Pleasant had been arrested and
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