Free A Rage to Kill by Ann Rule Page B

as the elder Cool knew.
    As tactfully as he could, O’Leary asked if Silas had been under psychiatric care. His father said he never had, as far as he knew. “We knew he was a loner,” Cool said, but they had never thought Silas had any real problems.
    His father said that Silas had worked until about 1987 or 1988 for King County in Seattle in the King County Building and Land Use Department. He had an associate degree in civil engineering from Middlesex County College in New Jersey.
    But then Silas’s back had just become too painful for him to work full-time. He had wanted to move back to New Jersey, but his dad said he had talked him out of that. It was arranged for his parents to send him $650 a month until he found something that he could work at. O’Leary learned that Daniel Cool’s sister, who was in her nineties, had also helped Silas out for two decades—ultimately sending him over $30,000 in Certificates of Deposit. Somehow, the years had stretched, and ten years later his parents were still sending Silas monthly checks.
    Steve O’Leary let the old man go to try and deal with the loss of his only child. They would have more talks as the detective tried to form a more complete picture of what Silas Garfield Cool had been like.
    The next phone call into Homicide was from the Medical Examiner’s Office. Herman Liebelt, sixty-nine, had died of his injuries. Like Silas Cool, Liebelt had found his way to Seattle from the East Coast. Beyond that, they were so different. Liebelt, the one-time saxophone-playing bandleader, sailor in the Korean War, purchasing agent, had begun life in Amsterdam, N.Y. His last years were spent reading everything from popular fiction to deep philosophical works. He had lived on the shoe-string that many seniors do, but he’d been a happy man with friends and myriad interests. He had found joy in little things and in new friends, and now he was gone. His painful injuries were too severe for a man nearly seventy to survive.
    In the early afternoon of Saturday, November 28, two men who worked at the Union Gospel Mission in Seattle arrived at the Homicide unit. Bill Wippel and Peter Davis said they had heard the name “Silas Cool” on the news. Finally, someone had recognized him and wanted to talk about how they had known him. They asked to see a picture of the man known as Silas Cool, and Nordlund and O’Leary showed them the booking photo taken in 1994 after a shoplifting arrest.
    They recognized Cool. He was one of those who had come to the mission to eat a meal now and then. “He’s eaten with us several times,” Wippel said. “At least twice this past month. He never caused any trouble, was very neat and clean, and polite to our staff.”
    Still, Wippel and Davis had known Silas Cool only on a very surface level. He must have been hungry; simple arithmetic would substantiate that. His folks sent Cool $650 a month; his rent was $475. That left him $175 a month for food, utilities, clothing, and transportation. They found no record of any Certificates of Deposits in Cool’s name. He had spent it all, maybe on his scores of medications. “Those Union Gospel meals must have helped him out,” O’Leary commented.

    Records at the mission, which had helped thousands of homeless and down-on-their-luck people in Seattle for many years, showed that Silas Cool had filled out meal tickets on October 20 and November 20; he had attended chapel, but he had never spent a night in the mission.
    “I remember him,” Wippel said, “because the guy stood out in the crowd. He was clean-cut, handsome. He didn’t look like a street person. He kept to himself, didn’t talk to anyone. I do know I looked him in the eye and made contact with him, and he smiled. He gave no indication that he was a violent person.”
    The mission staff knew that the people who came to them for food and lodging often guarded their past from prying eyes, and they never pressed. Wippel and Davis knew nothing at all