So You Spent the Day at the Beach Topless Again Picture

The I-5 Killer

With the 428th pick in the 1974 NFL typhoon, the Green Bay Packers selected. . . one of the most violent killers in U.S. history. No one is proverb football led Randall Woodfield downward his nighttime path—but did information technology perhaps deter him from information technology, at least for a while?

BY Fifty. JON WERTHEIM

Due eastven as crime scenes become, this one was sensationally gruesome. Shari Hull, age 20, lay splayed naked on the floor, blood pooling near her matted hair, brain matter seeping from her skull and spackling the rug. She was surrounded by her discarded wearing apparel. Gradually her moans and her deep, labored breathing diminished until her body was drained of life.

Some fourth dimension around nine o'clock on the evening of Jan. 18, 1981, Hull had been nearing the end of her Sunday-dark shift, cleaning the TransAmerica role edifice in the key Oregon town of Keizer. She was preparing to leave when she was grabbed by a man who'd somehow managed to enter the building. He was strikingly handsome, maybe six feet tall, blest with a torrent of thick, curly brown hair and eyes to friction match. He was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Corralling Hull with ane mitt and holding a gun in the other, he walked her down a hall. Soon he saw some other cleaner, 20-year-quondam Lisa Garcia.

The aggressor took both women into a dorsum room and ordered them to the floor. After sexually assaulting them, he shot them each in the back of the head. This, information technology would later on exist revealed, was mostly in keeping with his K.O.: some sexual act followed by a .32 bullet to the rear of the skull. Simply while Hull died of her gunshot wounds, Garcia survived past feigning her expiry, lying motionless on the floor with slugs lodged in the back of her skull. Every bit soon as her attacker left, she chosen the police. En route, one officeholder noticed a thickly built human fitting the assailant's description continuing at an intersection—just this was more than than a mile from the attack; it would have taken a hell of an athlete to make it that far so quickly on foot. So the policeman drove on.

Blended witness sketches, circa 1980 (Robert Brook)

For weeks afterward Garcia worked with detectives to crack the case. Piffling did she know, this assail was i of many allegedly carried out by the same man; she was helping track 1 of the most notorious serial murderers in U.South. history. Nicknamed the I-5 Killer, he had threaded a trail of almost unspeakable brutality up and downward the upper left corner of America, killing in California, Oregon and perhaps Washington. His orgy of violence started in the mid-1970s; by the time he'd gotten to Hull and Garcia, he'd already clustered a sizable necrology. Many more murders would follow.

Based on Deoxyribonucleic acid evidence and advancing criminal offence lab techniques, the I-v Killer'due south body count has climbed through the years. Cold case detectives have conservatively put that number at a dozen, though a few journalists and armchair detectives believe he'due south responsible for equally many as 44 deaths. And that doesn't include a string of more than 100 other crimes, generally robberies and rapes, that conduct his hallmarks.

The I-5 Killer's 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. Just he had his way with them so snuffed out their lives because he could.

And so there's this minor detail, which Garcia shared with detectives and which surfaced once more and once again across the I-5 Killer'southward crimes: He wore what appeared to exist a strip of athletic record over the bridge of his nose, in the style of a football histrion at the time. Which stood to reason. Considering not long before turning into one of America'south almost depraved and remorseless series killers, Randall Woodfield had been drafted by the Green Bay Packers.

The new motorcoach had to have been torn. He wanted to pump upward the Portland State plan he had but taken over, and placing a guy in the NFL would become a long manner toward that. But he too knew that if he oversold a actor, he'd lose credibility. So on that fall day in 1973, every bit Ron Stratten sat in the bleachers of Multnomah Stadium—now Providence Park, home to MLS's Timbers—he chose his words advisedly.

An NFL scout had come to see Randall Woodfield, the Vikings' leading receiver. He had been impressed with Woodfield'southward easily and athleticism. But when he asked Stratten for farther assessment, the omnibus wavered. "Randy runs decent routes," Stratten said with enthusiasm, "and he'southward good to the outside." He spoke positively nigh the speed that enabled Woodfield to run high hurdles for the school'south track team. But he also mentioned Woodfield'south glaring deficiency: He didn't like getting striking. Not by the safety. Not by the linebacker. Not by anyone.

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

"He was the nicest, well-nigh gentlemanly kid I ever knew. Years afterward, a reporter from a San Francisco newspaper called me and asked, 'Exercise you know a Randall Woodfield? Did you know he'southward 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'southward head coach, a twelvemonth earlier, it had marked a rarity. Though scarcely acknowledged at the time, he was just the second African-American in the modern era to hold that position at a predominantly white school. Stratten was but 29, less than a decade removed from playing at Oregon. And as a one-time linebacker, he was quick to observe receivers who resisted cutting across the middle of the field. "It's a point 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 only that Woodfield was, in the cliché, coachable. Maybe more than whatever other player on the team, he seemed to seek out the staff for companionship and counsel. "He was ever bopping by our offices before heading to class," recalls Stratten. "It was like he merely wanted to hang out with us."

Teammates' and coaches' memories of Woodfield vary wildly. Some think him as unassuming and serenity, if a fleck 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-blue, off-the-wall statements." Stoudamire's blood brother, Charles (both are uncles of 1995–96 NBA Rookie of the Yr Damon Stoudamire), was a halfback on that squad; he recalls Woodfield for his vanity. "[Randall] was always training himself. That even carried over to the way he played. He seemed like he was more interested in looking cute out there than getting the job done." True every bit that may have been, the pride Woodfield took in his appearance was justified. He was half-dozen feet, with negligible trunk fatty, well-divers muscles and a sly grin framed past what today might be called a pornstache. To trade in understatement, he did non struggle to notice female person companionship. "He was a suave, sophisticated fella," says Jon Carey, a PSU quarterback in '72. "Confident in himself, but not to the point of being cocky."

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 quondam teammate who spoke on the status of anonymity recalls, "It seemed real important to him that he come across equally someone who would do the right matter—almost like it was keeping him together."

Armed with the resources—and facing the public relations pressures—of a modern-twenty-four hours NFL team, the Packers would take conducted a detailed groundwork check on Woodfield. And the proverbial red flags would have flapped wildly. Raised mostly in the picturesque Oregon mid-declension town of Otter Stone, Woodfield grew up in a fiercely eye-form home. His male parent had a steady managerial chore at the phone visitor 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 be the portrait of normal. But in loftier school he was caught standing on a bridge and exposing himself to females. His parents sent him to a therapist, who, by all accounts, was not overly concerned past a teenager's exploring his sexuality. Co-ordinate to police force officials, Newport Loftier's coaches knew near the state of affairs but, wanting to protect their star, chalked it upwardly to an adolescent's lapse in impulse control. Police say that when Woodfield turned 18, his juvenile record was expunged.)

"He was a fiddling foreign—perchance stranger than we thought. You just had a bad feeling about the guy, like there was something underneath his mask."

—PSU teammate who asked non to be named

Later, at Treasure Valley (Ore.) Community College, where Woodfield played football for one season before transferring, he was arrested for allegedly ransacking an ex-girlfriend's home. (With little bear witness, he was constitute 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 learn of those arrests until years later on. "If I had known," he says, "I would accept said something [to interested NFL teams] for sure."

As it was, having done niggling in the way of intel, Greenish Bay remained interested in Woodfield. In the first round of the 1974 NFL draft the Packers selected Richmond running back Barty Smith, who would get on to start 42 games in seven seasons. The side by side day they used their 15th-circular pick on Dave Wannstedt, a natural-built-in leader who never played a downwardly but who went on to become an NFL head motorbus. Two rounds later on, with the 428th choice, Green Bay took Woodfield.

Packers media guide (Taylor Ballantyne)

These may not have been the dynastic Packers who won the offset two Super Bowls, in the 1960s, but this was however a celebrated franchise. Woodfield was offered a one-year contract to serve every bit a "skilled football thespian" for $sixteen,000. The deal came laden with bonuses: an extra $two,000 if he caught 25 passes that fall, $iii,000 if he caught 30. "Here's what you need to keep in mind" near those figures, says Bob Harlan, who as banana GM handled the team's contracts that year (and whose son Kevin, now a prominent broadcaster, was a Packers ball boy back then): "When Bart Starr fabricated $100,000, people idea he was overpaid."

Woodfield's contract also stipulated that he continue himself in peak condition, avoid consorting with gamblers and wear a coat and tie in public places. He signed most immediately. The coin enabled him to quit his job at a Portland-expanse Burger Chef. Just across that, this was all validation. He was on the verge of playing in the NFL. "Everyone fabricated such a big thing when he was drafted," ane of Woodfield's roommates told The Oregonian. "He put a lot of pressure level on himself to make it big."

That April, Woodfield attended a minicamp in Scottsdale, Ariz., an innovation of Green Bay coach Dan Devine. Every bit special teams autobus Hank Kuhlmann explained beforehand in a letter to players, the minicamp would be "a get-acquainted menses so that in July we can all start working toward our common goal, 'The Championship.' " After, Woodfield returned to Portland galvanized, impressed with the speed of the other players but confident he would make the team.

Per the Packers' request, he spent the next months staying in shape and working on his pass catching. In June the team sent him a commencement-form plane ticket, forth with instructions for an airport limo pickup that would take him to the team's training army camp in De Pere, Wis. Woodfield declined, opting instead to drive out from Oregon. When he arrived, his bio in the Packers' media guide listed him at six feet, 170 pounds and assessed him every bit 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'thousand pretty excited," the immature wideout said. "I'm just actually thankful for the opportunity." Woodfield survived early cuts and reported to friends in Portland that he was acquitting himself well, that he felt every bit if he belonged.

The Packers thought otherwise. They released Woodfield on Aug. nineteen, 1974, before their season began. Woodfield would afterwards contend—non unreasonably—that his prospects were hindered because Light-green Bay was stressing a run game that season. Police force 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 as a press-restriction operator. (We pause to point 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 accept preferred to spend his Sundays at Lambeau, Woodfield reckoned that, playing on Saturdays nearby for the Chiefs, peradventure Packers execs would find him and reconsider their determination.

Teammates from that stop recall Woodfield every bit a "smooth operator," a "ladies man" and a flake strange. Fred Auclair, a teammate and roommate, recalls Woodfield bringing dwelling house a trinket he had acquired at a local Christian bookstore. "How much was that?" Auclair inquired. "Well," said Woodfield, "it wasn't really for sale, then 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."

Equally Woodfield had at Portland State, he ran precise routes and distinguished himself with speed in Manitowoc. In the 1974 Central States Football League championship game he caught a pair of passes for 42 yards, though the Madison Mustangs beat the Chiefs 14–0. The Packers, meanwhile, went 6–8 and, as a team, averaged merely thirteen completions per game.

"Information technology shocked me when he [went to jail]. If there were 100 guys on the squad, he'd exist the 99th guy I'd suspect to do something like that."

—Tim Temple

PSU secondary double-decker in 1973

After the flavor, though, Woodfield was dropped by the Chiefs. No reason was given publicly. There were murmurs, nonetheless, that the team had off-field concerns. (The Chiefs, forth 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 10 cases of indecent exposure across the state. As one Wisconsin law enforcement officeholder recalls, years later, Woodfield "couldn't keep the thing in his pants."

By multiple accounts, Woodfield was devastated by being cut. "Securely injure," was the phrase The Oregonian would later utilise. And, curiously, Woodfield acted as if he knew at that place would exist no more than invitations from other teams. With his ambitions of being a pro football thespian killed off, he drove back to the W Declension. And then the rampage started.

It took some time before Randall Woodfield graduated to murder, but the buildup was steady. Back in Portland, he drifted to the margins. He was three semesters brusque of completing his physical education degree at Portland Country, 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 backward in life.

Woodfield would show upwards at Portland Land on occasion to work out with his sometime team. By so, Stratten had been replaced by Mouse Davis, who would later coach equally an assistant in the NFL and get known as the godfather of the run-and-shoot law-breaking. "[Woodfield] seemed similar a prissy child; he was a good athlete," Davis recalls today. "Simply i of the other players said, 'Coach, don't get too shut with that guy. He'south strange.' That was the terminate of my human relationship with him."

Randall Woodfield (No. five) (Robert Beck)

In early 1975, Portland police were vexed by a series of attacks on women, carried out by a man—invariably described as athletically congenital and handsome—armed with a knife. Later demanding oral sex he would take a adult female's purse or wallet and run off. On March 5, detectives fix a sting operation. An undercover female officer walked leisurely through a park, and a man wielding a paring knife darted out from backside some bushes demanding money. Officers converged and arrested the assailant, who identified himself as one Randall Woodfield.

Charged with robbery, Woodfield gave an extensive interview to police. He claimed he didn't potable or smoke and that he was committed to the Christian organized religion. He admitted to some impulse-command problems and some "sexual bug." And he confessed to 1 vice: He'd taken steroids to broaden his physique. Maybe, he speculated, that charged his sex drive.

"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 example detective who retired from that job last year. "We've learned that cipher'southward farther from the truth."

Erstwhile PSU teammates threw Woodfield a party to gloat his release from prison, simply some idea it strange when the guest of laurels arrived 21⁄2 hours late to his ain event. Woodfield also got out simply in time to attend his 10‑yr high schoolhouse reunion in Newport. There, he wore his muscles almost as a fashion argument and told stories about his fourth dimension in the Packers' organisation.

"I got to know him; he was a friend. . . . I was surprised when some of this stuff started coming down, but on reflection, I idea:That does sort of add upward."

—Jon Carey

PSU quarterback in 1972

Out of prison house, he cut a contradictory figure. For all his failures—allow get from bartending gigs, jettisoned past girlfriends—they inappreciably seemed to come at the expense of self-confidence. He cruised around Portland in a golden 1974 "Champagne Edition" Volkswagen Protrude and took unmistakable pride in his physique. He was especially fond of sending naked photos of himself to women. In late '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 alphabetic character dorsum: "Congratulations! You have been selected for possible publication in Playgirl'south Guy Next Door feature." Woodfield waited for his photo shoot, and that's when police believe he began to murder.

On Oct. eleven, 1980, Cherie Ayers, an bonny 29-yr-old, was found raped, stabbed and bludgeoned to decease in her Portland apartment. According to the coroner, she died from blunt-force trauma and pocketknife wounds to her neck. Former classmates at Newport Loftier, Ayers and Woodfield had reconnected at the reunion and had then seen each other socially.

Letters from Randall Woodfield to Cherie Ayers (Robert Brook)

Immediately Woodfield was pegged as a doubtable, based mostly on his recent release from prison. When homicide detectives questioned Woodfield, they found his answers "evasive" and "deceptive." Simply he declined to take a polygraph. A blood test did not link Woodfield to the crime, nor did his semen match that found in the victim's torso. In a time predating reliable Dna testing, at that place was no other physical prove.

Apparently emboldened, the i-man law-breaking wave picked upward momentum. Seven weeks later, Darcey Fix, 22, and Doug Altig, 24, were shot to death, execution-style and with a .32 revolver, in Gear up'southward Portland home. Again Woodfield had a connection to the murdered woman: One of his closest friends—a teammate from PSU's track team—had dated Fix. Over again Woodfield was questioned, but police had nothing concrete linking him to the murders.

On Dec. 9, 1980, a man wearing a fake beard held upwards a gas station in Vancouver, Wash., just across the Columbia River from Portland. Iv nights afterwards, in Eugene, Ore., a man wearing a fake beard and a Ring-Aid (or what looked like athletic tape) on his nose raided an ice cream parlor. The side by side night, a drive-in restaurant in nearby Albany, Ore., was robbed by a disguised man. A week after that, in Seattle, a gunman matching the same description pinned downwardly a 25-year-onetime waitress inside a restroom and forced her to masturbate him. Hull and Garcia were sexually assaulted and shot in primal Oregon iv weeks later.

Word began spreading that there was an "I-5 Bandit" marauding upward and downwards the northern half of Interstate 5, a ribbon running parallel to the Pacific for the 1,400 miles betwixt the Mexican and Canadian borders. All of the crimes occurred within two miles of an interstate get out.

The spree accelerated, each law-breaking more twisted and horrific than the last. On Feb. iii, 1981, Donna Eckard, 37, and her 14-yr-old girl, Jannell Jarvis, were establish expressionless in their habitation in Mount Gate, Calif., just off I-5. Each had been shot multiple times in the head. Lab tests would later reveal that the girl had been sodomized. Earlier that same day, an 18-year-old waitress was kidnapped and raped after a holdup fifteen miles to the south, in Redding. The next solar day, a similar crime was reported 100 miles up I-5 in Yreka, Calif.

By then, word of the I-five Brigand had amplified to the bespeak that women were being warned to practice circumspection. On Valentine's Day 1981, Candee Wilson implored her 18-yr-old daughter, Julie Reitz, to "be careful—at that place's a dangerous person out there." Later that nighttime, 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 chore as a bouncer he had overlooked her false ID and let her into a bar.

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

Pick a country and you likely tin can find a citizen who has killed ritualistically and repeatedly. Consider the phrase run amok, which derives from a Malay give-and-take translated loosely as "to attack with homicidal mania." Believing that amok was caused by an evil spirit, Indonesian culture tolerated these violent outbursts and dealt with the aftereffects with no sick will toward the assailant. The underlying premise: The capacity to kill indiscriminately dwells in all of us; most people simply suppress the urge or avoid the spirit.

Nonetheless, the serial killer occupies a singular role in the bandage of Americana. Here he—and the vast bulk have been male person—has been hyperbolized and fetishized, even romanticized. Serial killers are responsible for only a small fraction of the murders committed in the U.S., just they are some of the most notorious figures in our history and culture. Says Sarah Weinman, who runs the newsletter The Offense Lady, "[Serial killing] is twisted fantasy that has roots in the broad-open American landscape, where it is all too 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's behavioral scientific discipline unit of measurement coined and defined the term serial killer, distinguishing one from a mass murderer (who may kill many at once) or a spree killer (who lacks a so-chosen "cooling off" period between murders). Indeed, the '70s marked the crimson-stained height of series killing in the U.S. In that era in that location were a number of factors working in the assailant's favor, from lax gun laws to the popularity of psychedelic drugs to the sprawling interstate highway system to cheap gas. And from the famine of surveillance engineering to the spotty coordination amidst law precincts, it may never have been easier to avoid getting defenseless.

"He was a pretty tranquility guy—non very talkative; kept to himself. I've got a team photo and he'southward sitting right behind me. I would acceptnever thought he was capable of being [a killer]."

—Rick Risch

Manitowoc Chiefs defensive back in 1974

Woodfield wasn't the but sociopath terrorizing the W Coast around that fourth dimension. Ted Bundy'southward killing orgy in the Northwest is believed to take begun in 1974, his start viii known victims slain in either Oregon or Washington. And roughly concurrent with the I-five Killer, Gary Ridgway had begun committing ritualized murder in Seattle, mostly targeting young women. It would take xx years earlier he was defenseless, simply immediately he was known as the Green River Killer, a nod to the waterway where his get-go v known victims were found.

What accounts for our captivation—warped every bit it might be—with serial killers? Evolutionary biologists have pointed out that equally a species, we are hardwired to run away from predators in a manner that we don't reflexively run abroad from, say, sunbathing or eating bacon or other potential causes of death. And so the serial killer triggers fright and a visceral reaction rooted in the virtually basic human nature.

Others cite the stirring exploration of the darkest corners of humanity. Series killers may commit acts of unadulterated evil, only they are also figures that generate at least a teensy mensurate of titillation, sometimes fifty-fifty affection. (See: Lecter, Hannibal.) "In a perverse way, y'all sometimes end upwards rooting for these guys," says Skip Hollandsworth, a truthful offense author whose latest volume, The Midnight Assassinator, focuses on a series of unsolved murders in 1880s Austin.

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Hollandsworth even sees overlapping elements with football. "The reason we beloved to lookout man wide receivers is because they are and so elusive. They run a particularly designed route, hoping to wriggle free and catch a laissez passer despite a defense stacked confronting them. It's the same reason we are fascinated with serial killers. They come up with a particularly designed killing road, carry out the impale then make their escape, eluding the cops and crime-scene technicians—just to do information technology all once more later on taking a breather."

And while nosotros telephone call series killers monsters, often they are all too human. There's something unsettling just as well a fiddling tantalizing in the capacity of everyday people—siblings, classmates, coworkers, teammates—to deport out such chilling acts. "He seemed like such a normal guy" is the inevitable refrain from the shocked neighbor. This was a cardinal theme for Ann Dominion, a prominent true crime writer who in her all-time-selling book The Stranger Beside Me portrays Ted Bundy as a handsome, well-spoken, good-looking police force student . . . who happened to kill at least thirty women. Dominion has conceded, "I tin can remember thinking that if I were younger and single, or if my daughters were older, [Bundy] would exist most the perfect man."

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

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

After Lisa Garcia picked Woodfield's photo out of a lineup, law interrogated him on March 5, 1981. They searched his residence—a room he had been renting from an unsuspecting family in Springfield, Ore.—and constitute telling testify: the aforementioned brand of record that had been used to bind victims . . . a .32 bullet in Woodfield's racquetball bag. . . .

Spent ammo constitute in Woodfield'southward purse (Robert Beck)

Four days later, police charged him with Hull's murder, Garcia's 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' by arrest of woodfield. But that wasn't really the case. As one erstwhile PSU teammate puts it, "You only had a bad feeling almost the guy, like there was something underneath his mask." Says Carey, Woodfield's quarterback, "I was surprised when some of this stuff started coming down, simply on reflection, I thought, That does sort of add upwards."

When Woodfield's trial for the incident with Hull and Garcia began in the summer of 1981, it marked the first murder trial for an earnest, fledgling Marion County prosecutor named Chris Van Dyke (whose famous father, Dick, had recently finished up a run on The Carol Burnett Show). At the time, the prosecutor characterized the defendant as "an arrogant, cold, unemotional individual . . . probably the coldest, most detached defendant I've ever seen." By his ain reckoning, Van Dyke had "armloads of testify, overwhelming evidence." And Woodfield's defense was flimsy, predicated on mistaken identity. At one point the defendant's lawyer went so far equally to propose that Garcia'south identification of Woodfield was influenced by a detective's hypnosis.

When Woodfield eventually took the stand, he spoke softly, with his arms crossed, looking nothing like a star athlete or a handsome lothario. Hither'southward how Rule put it: "Randy Woodfield had been touted in the media as a massively muscled professional athlete. The human being in person seemed strangely macerated, not a superman after all. . . . He looked, if anything, humbled—a predatory brute brought down and caged in mid-binge." Bizarrely, he admitted in court to having endemic a .32 pistol just said that when he'd learned that as a parolee information technology was a violation to own a firearm, he threw the gun into a river.

Randall Woodfield'due south mugshot from the Duniway Park sting in Portland, 1975 (Robert Brook)

Lisa Garcia, meanwhile, was the primal witness, recalling the horrific dark at the office building 5 months earlier. She maintained that the human being she faced in the court was the aforementioned man who, she declared, shot her and killed her coworker. It took the jury 31⁄2 hours to attain its verdict.

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

District attorneys up and downwards the I-5 corridor had a decision to make. Even if they could secure a conviction, what would be the point? Woodfield was already nearly sure to die in prison. Additional trials would drain their offices of time and resource and would put the victims' families through an excruciating ordeal. Even in California—where Woodfield was accused of killing a mother and her daughter, and where the death punishment would take 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 Bureau'south cold case unit of measurement, benefiting from new magnetic bead technology at the Oregon state police law-breaking lab, appear they had matched Woodfield'south DNA to evidence from five victims: Prepare, Jarvis, Eckard, Altig, and Reitz.

In July 2005, on account of similar DNA matches, Weatheroy, the former Portland lieutenant and cold case supervisor, interrogated Woodfield almost his connection to the unsolved crimes. Out of the Oregon State Penitentiary for a twenty-four hours, sitting across from Weatheroy on the 13th floor of the justice edifice 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 become them to let their baby-sit down." Woodfield, though, confessed to nothing.

DNA bear witness which helped convict Randall Woodfield (Robert Beck)

Ultimately, as in other jurisdictions, authorities in Portland's Multnomah Canton decided not to prosecute the murders of Altig, Ayers and Fix. They did, all the same, hold a press conference to make clear: In the unlikely event that Woodfield was ever granted a parole hearing, they would pursue these additional indictments.

Jim Lawrence, another detective in Portland's common cold case unit, is intimately familiar with the example of the I-5 Killer. A veteran detective who has interviewed the most hardened criminals, he is struck most by Woodfield's utter lack of accountability or remorse—fifty-fifty decades later, even in the confront of indisputable testify. "If you're talking most somebody moving toward some form of rehabilitation, they had to at some point admit 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 all the same a stone-cold killer."

Psychologists will tell y'all information technology'due south a fool'southward errand, a gross oversimplification, that there'south no sense looking for ane trigger or unmarried event that tin can explain what internal misfire, what faulty circuitry, could have turned a man into a serial killer. And still, at that place's a temptation, well-nigh irresistible, to plumb the psyche and mode an answer to the elemental question we all have of serial killers: Why?

Ann Rule, who passed away concluding year at 83, long ago concluded that Woodfield killed women equally a form of rebellion confronting his disciplinarian female parent and two older sisters. (While in prison, Woodfield sued Rule, unsuccessfully, for $12 one thousand thousand on grounds of libel.) Lawrence, the Portland detective, offers a dissimilar theory: "There had to be something that happened to him sexually in his formative teenage years that caused him to look at sexual practice as power fulfillment as opposed to an area of procreation and of intimacy."

What about the sport Woodfield played so expertly? Football did this has go the quick-and-easy explanation for all sorts of antisocial acts, from slugging a fiancée in a casino lift to running a canis familiaris-fighting ring. A sensationally violent sport breeds sensationally violent behavior. Special rules are conferred on star athletes, plumping senses of entitlement. The peculiar rhythms of the sport—1 intense day followed past six days of recovery and preparation—are out of whack with the rest of guild. Teams (and an image-obsessed league) have mastered the arts of willful blindness and impairment control.

"He was kind of a adept-looking guy, maybe kind of a ladies human being, good physique and the whole matter. . . . I don't recollect annihilation specific about him.What is he upwards to now?"

—Gary Scallon

Manitowoc Chiefs wide receiver in 1974

Asked nearly Woodfield in September, Bill Tobin, a longtime NFL exec who was Green Bay's director of pro scouting in 1974, claimed not to recall Woodfield equally a player, much less know that a sometime typhoon pick of his was a convicted killer. Yet Portland detectives maintain that the Packers quietly cutting Woodfield in part because of off-field concerns. "I know that was a cistron," says Lawrence, "that he was caught exposing himself."

Merely in the instance of Randall Woodfield, it'southward not simply an oversimplification to blame football; information technology's at odds with the facts. If annihilation, football was a temporary source of conservancy, delaying Woodfield's horrific behavior. Survey the time line and it's easy to make the example that football, beyond being a driving motivation for him, was also a distraction from a primal instinct that had, mayhap ever, churned within. Only when football game was no longer part of his life did he take a truly dark turn.

The Portland Police Section's property room sits in an industrial pocket of town, right by the Willamette River. At that place is a section dedicated to the documents pertaining to Woodfield. Hither prevarication copies of decades-old 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 return accost of 1265 Lombardi Avenue, in Green 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 carry the stack of personal letters and mimeographed sheets with him throughout his myriad changes of residence. . . . They were alike to messages from Hollywood to a would-be starlet. They were magic." One time the magic went away, it was replaced by the sinister.

Woodfield is 65 now. Thirty-five years later 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 Department of Corrections denied an interview request on the grounds that information technology "brings notoriety to the inmate—and this is already a high-profile private—and doesn't fall within the rehabilitation and correctional programme of the inmate." Woodfield did non respond to letters or electronic correspondences from SI seeking comment.

This much we know, however: Woodfield is still a football game fan. Prison guards recall that he loves to talk about the sport and nonetheless remembers his playing days, iv decades ago, with striking specificity. Weatheroy, the detective, saw this firsthand. When Woodfield learned that Weatheroy's son was a loftier 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 school career, playing in college, his fourth dimension with Green Bay. . . ." When the conversation turned to weightier topics, yet, Woodfield clammed up, tried to change the subject field and grew afar.

Woodfield did join MySpace in 2006, and his profile was as shut every bit he'south ever come to taking ownership of his by. Information technology also says plenty about how he still cocky-identifies: "I spend the rest 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 but reason I didn't make it is because the skills I had to offer they didn't need at the time."

Additional reporting by Michael Cohen and Kerry Eggers

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