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

liquor didn’t help the sick feeling they had. Arresting a fellow officer is a terrible thing to have to do—but Reed had had no choice.
    Chief of Police George Tielsch dismissed Stan Tappan from the department. His career as a police officer was probably over, even if he should be acquitted of the charges against him.
    In a case that was already complicated enough, the FBI entered for a time. Although it seemed ludicrous, Tappan’s attorneys asserted that his civil rights had been violated. In Washington State, it is illegal to tape-record someone without his or her permission. If indeed Tappan had deliberately shot Nick Kyreacos and Kyreacos had recorded his own murder without informing Tappan that he was being taped, the defense team maintained, the former detective had been deprived of his civil rights.
    Soon enough, that argument was tossed out, although the defense attorneys would bring it up again at trial. For Dick Reed and Don Strunk, the investigation was far from over. They sought anyone who might have been a witness to the shooting, and they looked for the mysterious woman who had twice called Kyreacos at the restaurant, the last time a few hours before he died.
    They didn’t find the woman, but they did find Arthur Glidden,* a young construction worker who had been on his way to attend classes at Seattle Community College shortly after six on the night of November 30. He had stopped for a red light at Pike and Boren streets and he’d glanced idly at two men on the sidewalk. Something about their body language caught his interest.
    “The tall man in the dark raincoat looked like he was holding a gun on the small guy,” Glidden told Reed and Strunk. “And then they disappeared into the alley. I was curious enough that I circled the block twice. The second time around, I heard gunshots. Now, I had to see what had happened and I circled back one more time. This time, I saw the guy in the dark raincoat kind of staggering or weaving out of the alley. I stopped my car then, and went over to some cops who had just arrived.”
    Glidden was haunted by the face of the small man. “He looked right at me when he was being led around the corner. I recognized him lying there on the ground.”
    The witness was something of a gun buff himself, and he said he owned both a .45 and a .38. He was positive that the tall man had been holding a .45, with a six-inch barrel against the short man’s arm.
    There was another eyewitness, an elderly woman who lived on the third floor of the apartment house that abutted the alley. “I was watching the six o’clock news,” she recalled. “I thought the shots were on the news—and then I realized they were outside. I pulled my curtains back a little and peeked out. The man in the black raincoat had the smaller man’s right arm in his left hand. There was some ‘object’ in his right hand too.”
    “Could you see what it was?” Reed asked.
    “I’m not sure. I guess I looked away for a few moments, and then I heard more shots—maybe four or five. When I looked again, I saw the man in the raincoat limping into the parking lot at the mortgage company.”
    As they made their way door to door around the shooting site, the detective team found a number of witnesses who had heard the shots: the woman courier for the message company, the manager of the Cadillac dealership, and medical personnel from the detox center who had rushed out to help the wounded men. But none of them had actually viewed the scene during the few moments when shots were fired. They had only heard the gunfire echo in the alley.
    Stan Tappan was a confirmed womanizer, and, despite his marriage, the investigation turned up a few dozen women who were close to him in one way or another. Some of them had posed for him for nude shots, some worked with him, and some had dated him before his most recent marriage. But Dick Reed and Don Strunk never located the mysterious woman who had lured Nick Kyreacos to his death.