Free Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers by Ann Rule Page A

already talked to a detective who was once Tappan’s patrol partner. Although he and Tappan had ridden as partners together for two years, the man was troubled. He told Dick Reed that Stan had been extremely apprehensive about Nick Kyreacos. “He said Nick threatened both him and Branko Ellich—and then Ellich was ambushed and shot. He said he was really afraid of Nick.”
    Apparently, Stan Tappan had seemed so afraid that he met his old partner in the police garage on November 13 and told him that Kyreacos was hanging around his off-duty job at the mortgage company, and he needed a gun more powerful than a .38.
    “I loaned him a gun that used to belong to my brother—a .45. He said he’d give it back to me.”
    Frank Lee was the Seattle Police Department’s ballistics expert. He attempted to find the history of the .45, but found it was virtually untraceable. All he could be sure of was that it was a government model 1911 semiautomatic pistol. The bullet casings found at the scene had been manufactured in 1931 and 1967. The .45 was clearly used as what police call a “drop gun,” a weapon that can be deliberately left at a shooting scene to confuse an investigation. It cannot be traced either by manufacture or ownership.
    Seattle police regulations at the time forbade personnel from carrying a weapon more powerful than a .38.
    King County Medical Examiner Patrick Besant-Matthews performed the six-hour postmortem examination of Nick Kyreacos’s body. Besant-Matthews once shocked a courtroom during a homicide trial when he explained that he had honed his knowledge of the damage done by different caliber guns by actually shooting at corpses, as well as pigs.
    However he had learned, he was expert at identifying the etiology of gunshot wounds. Kyreacos had been shot many times. He had a through-and-through wound in his left forearm, a wound to the front of his chest caused by a bullet that entered near the left nipple, coursed through the third rib, and ended in his right lung.
    “That was fired from above,” Besant-Matthews commented, “and it would have been rapidly fatal unless he had immediate care.”
    The forehead wound had been instantly fatal, and Kyreacos could not have spoken a word after that. There was no question that both of the fatal wounds had been caused by the .45.
    But Stan Tappan had said that the .45 belonged to Kyreacos—not to him. Dick Reed and Don Strunk visited Tappan again in his hospital room. He was glad to see them, but he looked a little disconcerted when their sergeant, Ivan Beeson, walked into the room behind them. The faces of all three were grim and they didn’t respond to his welcoming smile.
    The homicide investigators dreaded what they had to do next.
    “Stan,” Dick Reed said, “I hate to do this but I have to tell you that Kyreacos had a tape recorder on him. The whole shooting is on tape. We’ve listened to it.”
    It was clear from the look on Stan Tappan’s face that he’d been caught completely off guard. He was, if anything, more shocked than his fellow detectives had been when they listened to Kyreacos’s tape. He said nothing as he digested this information. Up until this moment, it had been his word against that of a man with a long reputation of breaking the law. Tappan had been a hero, a good cop who had suffered grievous wounds in a gun battle with a punk.
    “You’re under arrest, Stan,” Reed said. “The charge is murder in the first degree. You have the right to—”
    “I know. I know. I know that by heart.”
    Reed finished the Miranda warning anyway, and then put a handcuff on Tappan’s uninjured right hand. He was transported at once to the infirmary at the King County jail in the upper floors of the courthouse. He was right across the street from his old office in the Burglary Unit of police headquarters, but his whole world had changed.
    Dick Reed and several other homicide detectives went out for stiff drinks after their shift ended, but