Murder On A Whim -- Why Kill A Complete Stranger? Even The Suspect Doesn't Know

CUTLINE D: JIM SYLTE, BELOW, SAYS HE NEEDS TO BE FAR FROM SEATTLE AND THE MEMORIES OF THAT DAY IN 1982 WHEN HE WAS CERTAIN HE'D BE KILLED BY A MAN HE BARELY KNEW. HE OWES HIS LIFE TO A SISTER WHO CAME INTO THE ROOM AND BRANDISHED A POKER AT HIS ASSAILANT.

CUTLINE E: PHILLIP HILLMAN, IN A PHOTO OF THE EARLY 1970S, WHEN HE WAS AN INFANTRYMAN IN VIETNAM.

CUTLINE F: RANDEE S. FOX / SEATTLE TIMES: RICHARD DUNCAN'S LAST JOURNEY (NOT AVAILABLE IN ELECTRONIC VERSION)

It is perhaps one of the most feared and least-understood crimes, the ultimate senseless act: killing a stranger who just happened to be in a particular place at a particular time. Today The Seattle Times begins a two-part exploration of the events and emotions, the ironies and incongruities behind such a case.

DARRINGTON, Snohomish County - Tangled alder branches, crushed ferns and campfire ashes are the only signs to mark the makeshift grave where Richard Duncan, a shotgun blast through his heart, another through his neck, had lain for more than a week.

It was here in early May, on this remote dirt road in the backwoods of Snohomish County, that Duncan was slain, apparently for no other reason than he just happened to stop for two stranded campers.

Two months later, Phillip Van Hillman, 36, sits in the Snohomish County Jail charged with Duncan's murder. Although he has entered a plea of not guilty, police, brandishing an eyewitness account

from Hillman's wife, Sharon, say there is little doubt that Hillman pulled the trigger.

But beyond the cold, factual details of the crime, disturbing questions remain.

Why would someone kill a passer-by who seemed simply to be a good Samaritan?

Perhaps more puzzling still, why would someone who seemed to have everything - charm, intelligence, money, friends, family - kill at all?

Why was this man, who had killed and tried to kill before, not still in prison for those crimes?

And what kind of person would, as Sharon Hillman told police, return to the murder scene to pray over the victim's body?

Although he stops short of admitting the crime, Hillman himself says he has agonized over answers that never seem to come.

``I wish they could open up my head and find a tumor or something,'' he says. ``If I had a cancer, at least I could say why.''

Hillman is due in court this week in preparation for his scheduled trial in September. Prosecutors say Duncan, a 31-year-old Duvall realtor, apparently stopped along the Mountain Loop Highway to help Hillman and his wife, who had been camping nearby and had driven their pickup truck into a ditch.

Sharon Hillman later told authorities that Duncan followed her to the spot where the truck was stuck, but Hillman was nowhere in sight. As she walked ahead of Duncan to return to the road, she heard two shotgun blasts.

Backtracking, she saw Duncan lying face down in the dirt and Hillman, shotgun in hand, walking toward her.

``He's done, he's done,'' Hillman told his wife when she suggested taking Duncan to a hospital. His jaw was tight, his eyes cruel and empty, she told police.

She also said Hillman began drinking that morning, knocking back both whiskey and beer.

Police and court accounts reveal that Hillman has followed the path of explosive violence before: He confessed to the 1974 murder of Newton Thomas, an elderly man who was camping just three miles from where Duncan was killed. And he admitted that in 1982 he repeatedly stabbed James Sylte, a Seattle acquaintance, for no apparent reason.

Hillman was still on parole for that attack

when Duncan was murdered.

That Hillman was out of prison - illegally

drinking and carrying a shotgun - is perhaps the hardest thing for Duncan's widow, Karen Duncan, to accept.

``The whole thing is totally bizarre,'' she says. ``Given the laws we have, the criminal has more rights than the victim.''

Mark Oliviero, a Darrington police officer who helped retrieve Duncan's body, kicks the underbrush where he lay and reflects: ``It is sad to come to a scene where a life ended. Not just his, but friends and family. Who knows how long down the road people will be affected?''

Hillman's family members, including his sisters and his wife, are still reeling from the shock of this latest tragedy.

``He was my husband and I loved him very much,'' says Sharon Hillman, who turned him in. ``At that moment, my whole life changed.''

And while Hillman is now in jail, the pain and questioning have not ended for Duncan's family and friends. Why did it have to be Richard Duncan on that road last May?

``A lot of stars lined up on that day,'' says Andy Weiss, a friend and former business partner, reaching for an answer. ``Life is very unfair.''

That may be true, but it's an answer no more satisfying to Phillip Hillman than to those who mourn Duncan.

``It's real hard living when you don't know why,'' says Hillman, balancing himself on a small stool behind thick glass in a visiting cubicle of the Snohomish County Jail.

Even when he's talking about the tangled insides of his brain, the heavily muscled 36-year-old displays a grin that could melt the coldest heart. With his big brown eyes and classic good looks, he's the picture of the boy next door.

But it's only a picture. Inside, Hillman acknowledges, there's something terribly wrong with him, something that's been wrong for a long time, something he doesn't understand.

``There's a part of my mind I don't know and don't control,'' he says in a steady voice. ``I've known it for a long time.''

Sometimes he thinks it has something to do with the jungle in Vietnam, where he served as an infantryman.

His job there was to ambush supply trails, waiting silently with weapon in hand until ``the enemy'' came along. ``We just murdered people,'' he says without emotion.

He remembers the fear - and the adrenalin. ``It's quite a rush to the body,'' he says. He claims to understand the impulse of some Vietnam vets who have committed armed robberies although they had good jobs. ``When you get back from Vietnam,'' he says, ``you'll never get that high again. It's addictive.''

When he killed Newton Thomas, just 15 months out of the service, Hillman was in the woods with a gun, wearing his fatigues.

And it's not lost on Hillman that the circumstances of the crime for which he is now accused also closely resembled those in the jungles of Vietnam - the woods, the trail, the ambush, a body covered with branches.

``That's how we did it: ambushed trails and dug shallow graves to bury the dead,'' he says.

Like many Vietnam vets, when he returned he received no counseling for post-traumatic stress, as they call it now. ``We were in the bush one day, three days later in Oakland,'' he says.

With some bitterness, he also talks about the lack of treatment during the nearly 15 years he spent in prison.

Many who know him, though, say his troubles started long before Vietnam or prison, and Hillman says he can't disagree. Though wealthy and socially prominent, his parents drank heavily and his childhood was difficult, according to friends and family.

Whatever the cause, Hillman says he only knows that what lurks inside of him comes out when he drinks.

``I drink because there's something wrong and I don't know what it is and I don't know how to express it, so I drink. It's not like every time I drink I turn into a monster. . . . I'd say one out of 10 times. And it's never, ever with family and friends; it's always with strangers.''

This is a man who is sweet and loving to children, to those closest to him, a family member insists.

``He's not like Charles Campbell,'' she says fiercely, comparing him to the man who left an Everett work-release job to kill the woman who had earlier testified against him, along with her daughter and neighbor.

``Maybe it's easy for me to say . . . but he's not like Campbell, who went out and did it purposefully, for revenge.''

For most people, though, the idea of such random violence is especially frightening and mystifying.

Even Hillman says he's shocked. ``If I could say something like he attacked me or was trying to rape Sharon,'' he says, ``but I can't.'' There was no purpose to his actions or to the selection of his victims, he says. ``I can't even say I don't like them.''

Hillman says he's not blaming his mistakes on alcohol, Vietnam, prison or childhood trauma. ``I'm not in here pleading insanity,'' he says. ``I knew right from wrong.''

He thinks about the victims and their families. ``I feel really bad for all of them, because there's no reason for it,'' he says. ``I know they've gone through extreme pain. It's not like (the victims) were killed in a car wreck or something - they don't know why.''

``There's a lot of shame and guilt. I've always wanted to be a good person - and I'm not.''

A chaplain visiting the jail recently stopped to talk to him because he seemed dejected, but the clergyman's insistence that God had forgiven him, Hillman says, only made him angry.

``I had to get up and walk away and go to my room because it sounded so bull----,'' he says. ``It made me mad that God could feel so little about dead people.''

Of course he's not ready for God to forgive him, Hillman says. ``I'm not ready to forgive myself.''

Duncan's friends and family aren't ready to forgive him, either.

Their anger and bitterness is never far from the surface when they talk about Duncan's gentle nature and the horrible irony of his murder.

Though she says she is still too emotional to talk about him much, Karen Duncan does say her husband ``wasn't the kind of person who even looks aggressive.''

No one would have considered him a threat, she says. ``That's the hardest thing for me: this didn't need to happen.''

Friends say they aren't surprised that Duncan would have stopped to help Hillman and his wife. Rich Duncan, they say, was the ultimate problem-solver. If someone needed advice on anything from buying a computer to fixing a fence, Duncan knew who to call to get the best deal.

``Rich was like a great big teddy bear,'' says Tom Pensky, an old friend Duncan met through real estate. ``He was always into helping people.''

Though Duncan had a very private side, family and friends say, he was gregarious and full of zest for life - a man who was obsessed with success and challenges, who loved cars and cheeseburgers, traveling and looking for property.

He had a passion for electronic gadgetry - so much so, says one friend, that he had a call-waiting feature on his car phone.

While he was ambitious, he eschewed city life for the small-town camaraderie of Duvall and home on nearby Lake Margaret. Friends says he hoped one day to retire to rural Eastern Oregon, an area he fell in love with as a teen-ager for its solitude and open spaces.

``Rich didn't have roots,'' says Weiss, his former business partner. ``He loved dirt. It's what we sold, developed, lived for. He was looking for dirt when he died.''

That may explain why Duncan was traveling the remote Mountain Loop Highway May 2, ignoring a warning that the road was impassable because of snow. Other questions remain unexplained: Why there were big gaps in the timing of his movements that day; why he failed to answer repeated calls on his electronic pager; why, overweight and in poor physical shape, he climbed a hill to look at Hillman's truck.

For friends who scoured the area for him, hope turned to despair when Duncan's red Mustang, a car he pampered, appeared abandonded in a Darrington grocery-store lot May 4.

``When I heard Rich was separated from his car, I knew he was dead,'' says Weiss. ``He was too greedy a guy to leave that behind. When his car was gone, obviously it was over.''

Phillip Hillman in jail, in need of a shave, in a worn blue jailsuit and facing the rest of his life in prison - it's not what people predicted for the only son of a brilliant engineer and a beautiful woman who made their home in some of Seattle's finest neighborhoods.

Money, brains, beauty: The Hillman family seemed to have it all.

Phillip's dad, Malcolm - called Mac by everyone - came from a prestigious family. C. Kirk Hillman, Phillip's grandfather, was an electrical engineer who began his own successful machinery-manufacturing company and was active in civic circles.

Guns and war were familiar and respected images in the Hillman family.

Grandpa was a big-game hunter of some note; Phillip's uncles were decorated war heroes, and Mac flew with the Air Force.

Phillip was allowed to own a gun earlier than most boys his age, and some of his happiest memories were of times out in the woods, shooting BBs at logs.

Mac expected a lot from his son, and little Phil tried hard but didn't always live up to the high expectations.

But if his grades weren't always the best, he soon learned how to charm his elders, captivating parents in Laurelhurst and Hawthorne Hills, where he grew up.

``All the parents adored him,'' recalls John Biddle, whose parents, together with Phil's, owned a summer cabin on Hood Canal.

``He was the most charming, likable, handsome young man,'' says Vivian Litsey, whose son Tom was one of Phil's friends. Her husband used to take young Phil hunting in Eastern Washington, attention that Phil seemed to soak up.

``He was very respectful, beautiful manners,'' Litsey says. ``We were very, very fond of Phil.''

In high school, Phil sent flowers to a girlfriend's parents on their wedding anniversary, the same date as his father's birthday.

He wasn't particularly big, but he was very strong; a good football player. Although he wasn't a good student, nobody doubted that Phil Hillman had the brains to do whatever he wanted. He was quick and witty, and friends described

him as a natural leader.

``He wanted everybody to follow his lead, and he had that personality, he had the right ideas,'' says Ralph Sweet, one of Phil's closest friends from childhood until high school. ``He's a very bright guy, and people gave him a lot of respect because of his strength and his mind.''

It didn't hurt that there was always plenty of money. Phil drove his mother's '67 Camaro, a cool yellow convertible, and girls seemed to find him irresistible.

He was ``very, very popular,'' says Tom Litsey. But at an early age, Litsey adds, it became clear that Phil Hillman also could be ``very, very violent.''

``He did all kinds of wild things,'' recalls Jill Seidel, who became friends with Phil in grade school. He'd burn up toy plastic soldiers on the sidewalk, she says. ``He had a sadistic side to him.''

Even friends winced when they saw Phil catching snakes, branding them with hot charcoal and throwing them into the canal, trying to sink them with rocks. Others remember the time he shot a duck and cut its head off.

As Phil grew older, the fights seemed to grow more serious, especially when alcohol was involved.

Once, after a dance at Roosevelt High School, a big fight broke out. Joe Spencer remembers Phil's reaction: ``He came out, with a gleam in his eyes, took off his jacket, went running down the hill and dove into the crowd,'' which by that time was fighting with broken bottles, chains and car jacks. ``He went looking for it.''

What his friends remember more than the fights themselves was Phil's demeanor.

``He was real good at teasing,'' says Seidel. ``But all of a sudden he would cross the line and it would be violent. He could do evil things with a smile on his face.''

But Phil never turned that side toward women, friends and family members say.

``A woman could say anything to him, but men had to know where to draw the line or they'd get beat up,'' says Seidel.

Still, Phil always seemed to face the music if he got caught.

One irate mother who gave him a tongue-lashing for drinking and driving with her daughter was surprised by his response. ``He listened; he didn't make excuses,'' the mother recalls. ``He didn't resent me talking to him like that.''

Even in those years, though, most of his friends suspected something was wrong.

``When Phil drank McNaughton's whiskey, he'd go a little crazy; he'd just lose it,'' recalls Tony Marino, who hung around with Phil in that era.

Sober, Phil was as ``rational as hell,'' a classic overachiever, Sweet says. ``But when he'd drink, he'd get bizarre. He had a Zeus fixation. He thought that nothing could harm him at all.''

Some friends, the ones who knew his parents, had theories as to what was going on with him. In some ways, it didn't seem too complicated, says Tom Litsey, a close friend until high school. ``He lashed out instead of trying to deal with the pain. He was from a real painful household.''

Like any family where alcohol plays a major role, the Hillmans were adept at hiding what went on behind the walls of their expensive home.

Even though Malcolm and Nadene Hillman are both dead, Phil Hillman and his two sisters still find it difficult to be open about their family history.

``It is not a `story' to us. We lived it,'' says the oldest sister. ``It is very real, and very painful to all the people involved.''

According to court and prison records, Phil's was a childhood filled with episodes of drunkenness and violence. When Nadene filed for divorce in 1967, she cited her husband's ``cruel treatment and personal indignities'' and his ``habitual drunkenness.''

Family friends say Nadene Hillman, a heavy drinker herself, went downhill rapidly after her husband remarried in the early '80s. After he died in 1986, she wound up in a nursing home and in the hospital. A heavy smoker also, she died last year of emphysema at the age of 62.

``It is true that our childhood was VERY dysfunctional,'' says the eldest sister, who asks that her name not be used. ``Both our parents battled the disease of alcoholism. They were also wonderful and funny and very loving human beings.

``Only those who know and love Phil will ever understand the hell he has gone through in his life, and the hell he is going through now.''

During most of Phil's childhood, Mac was in and out of alcoholism-treatment centers around the country, and Nadene also drank heavily. Over the years, they divorced and remarried and divorced again.

When they were together, Mac would beat up his wife when he was drunk, and family acquaintances recall Nadene showing up at parties with facial bruises and a black eye.

And while Mac didn't raise a hand against the children, he wounded Phil in other ways, belittling him with sarcastic comments when he didn't measure up. ``There were no attaboys,'' Hillman remembers today.

In later years, his father wrote warm, supportive letters to the parole board and to Phil, but for the most part it wasn't much of a relationship until the last years of his father's life, when they began to know each other.

Mac died in 1986, while Hillman was in prison, and it was simply too little, too late.

Mac and Nadene had known their son was troubled. When he flunked the fifth grade, they sent him to boarding school and to a psychiatrist for several years, efforts Hillman sees now as wasted or worse.

``We had a nice home,'' Hillman recalls. ``My dad was successful and stuff. But they were never like a family. I remember being jealous of my friends. I'd go there and they'd have a neat family.''

Little by little, rage and frustration grew inside. Finally, one night in 1970, 17-year-old Phil made a desperate attempt to leave what had become for him an unbearable life.

Many in Phil's old Hawthorne Hills neighborhood still remember the thud-thud-thud of the helicopter flying overhead that night, searchlights scouring the streets for the young man, blood soaking into his shirt, who had shot himself in the stomach.

Events leading up to Phil's shocking act began some months before, when his mother and sister left for Europe, leaving Phil alone with Mac.

His father was drinking heavily, and Phil couldn't handle it. He had dropped out of school and had decided to join the Army, but his parents refused to sign.

Phil took his .22 and went out in the front yard. The shot echoed through the neighborhood.

``It was a desperate thing,'' Hillman recalls. ``I was really depressed. I just didn't like the world the way it was. . . . I was tired of coming home to them passed out.''

Nadene committed Mac to another alcohol treatment hospital. When he got out, he signed papers to allow Phil to join the service. Phil wanted to join the Marines, but they wouldn't take him because he had a record for property destruction and drinking.

On Sept. 1, 1971, he entered the Army.

He and a close friend were working on a fantasy, Hillman recalls.

``We thought we'd go to Vietnam, we'd be heroes like our fathers were. And then we'd get married and live happily ever after,'' he says, a smile playing across his face.

In some ways, Vietnam was just what Phil Hillman wanted: Lots of action, kudos for being a tough guy, and ultimate thrills. He was good at his job, he says.

But coming back, after a little more than eight months, was another matter: Addicted to heroin, depressed at the prevailing anti-war sentiment, Hillman landed in Madigan Army Hospital in Tacoma after several suicide attempts.

After he was discharged from the service the next spring, he lived with a relative, who remembers his screams as he awoke with nightmares.

He tried working as a produce clerk at a grocery; he tried classes at a community college.

Hillman had always worked off his energy in the woods, and the White Chuck Campground near the Sauk River had been a favorite hangout for his high-school crowd.

One day in July 1974, he and a friend headed up to the campground, just eight miles south of Darrington on the Mountain Loop Highway. Hillman wearing his fatigues from Vietnam, brought his shotgun.

On Friday night, they sat around drinking beer, doing a little fishing. The shotgun, he explained to other campers, was for shooting grouse. The next day, he shot a young deer and skinned it, nailing the tiny ears and hooves onto nearby trees.

On Monday, they got up late and bought a fifth of whiskey and a half-case of beer. They went swimming, and Hillman dropped his gunbelt into the river, losing all his shells but one. By the late afternoon, all the alcohol was gone.

Newton Thomas fired up his portable camp stove and put on some soup for dinner. The White Chuck Campground was one of his favorite spots.

Although he was 83, he still loved the outdoors and often would leave his San Juan Island home to head for the woods for a weekend of solitude. Over the years Thomas, a bachelor, had shared his love of the woods with dozens of boys he befriended.

Thomas spent what little money he had on the youths, sending one of them to college. For many, he was a second father.

``This guy was a real benefactor for a lot of kids,'' says Jim Davenport, a longtime friend who lives on Bainbridge Island.

No one, not even Phil Hillman, can explain why he walked into Thomas' campsite and, using the only shotgun shell he had left, fired it into Thomas. As Hillman dragged the body into the bushes, another camper, Bob Duggan, grabbed his father's pistol and held it on Hillman for two hours until the police arrived.

Duggan still remembers the way Hillman looked: ``His eyes were the coldest eyes of anything I'd ever seen.''

For seven years afterward, every time Duggan tried to go camping, something he had always loved, he broke out in a cold sweat, shaking and vomiting.

Although at first he insisted he had not killed, Hillman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In many ways, Jan. 24, 1975, was an unremarkable winter day in the Northwest: 40-plus degrees, drizzling, foggy, a light southwest wind. For Phillip Hillman, it was a day to remember - the day he went to prison. He was 20 years old.

It wasn't an easy transition. References to drug use and fighting mar his prison record for the first several years. Prison officials considered him a manipulator who used strong-arm tactics to pressure other inmates, and a major mover in the drug traffic inside the institution. A ``half-hearted suicide attempt'' in 1978 was noted without surprise.

At some point, Hillman began realizing that his infractions were delaying the time when he would be released. He transferred to a barber class, completing the training with high praise and becoming an instructor in the prison at Monroe.

But for two years, with parole very much on his mind, Hillman avoided infractions, completed several alcohol-education classes and, in general, began to impress prison and parole-board officials.

In February 1980, he was transferred to the honor farm at Monroe, but was told he couldn't have any furloughs until the end of the year.

Family troubles were brewing, and one day in May he just walked away.

He didn't go far - just to his mother's house in Seattle. His father, who had remarried and been sober for several years, had gone on a drinking binge after his wife died, and Nadene had tried to help him. After a few hours with his family, Hillman called the prison to tell them he would be back soon. Later that evening, Nadene took her son back to prison - after a stop for pizza.

In the restaurant, he ran into a prison official who, after Hillman explained the situation, invited him and his mother into the bar for a couple of drinks before going back to the prison.

Because he had turned himself in, had committed no crimes or violence, and was considered to be a model prisoner, Hillman wasn't prosecuted for the escape, but lost some good-time credit that would have helped get him out earlier.

Although his minimum term had been set at 20 years, prisoners typically served only a fraction of that and Hillman was no different. Although he was to serve a mandatory five-year sentence for the use of the firearm in his crime, for the most part, the time he served beyond that was at the discretion of corrections officials and the parole board, and depended mostly on his behavior in prison, which was increasingly exemplary.

Hillman had served less than eight years, including time in custody, before he was paroled in February 1982.

``It's not out of line with what happened during those times, and it's not out of line with what's happening now,'' says Dennis Marsh, executive secretary of the state's Indeterminate Sentence Review Board.

For a few months, Hillman was a model parolee. Living in a University District house with two other young men, he began working as a barber near Northgate.

As an employee, he was ``a prince of a guy,'' says his former boss. Not only was he good at cutting hair, ``everybody liked him.'' His parole officer found him to be ``a very pleasant and cooperative individual to supervise,'' with ``extremely conscientious reporting habits'' and a good attitude.

But, unbeknownst to his parole officer, Hillman drank at the bar above the barbershop, and got in fights. Some remember the night that Hillman, drinking with a friend, decided he didn't like what another man in the bar said. Hillman ``beat him up and smashed his head against the wall,'' recalls a man who worked in the building. But the man never pressed charges, and Hillman was still on the outside.

Hillman was pushing his luck, though. One night, walking back from a neighborhood bar, he gave fate another shove.

Jim Sylte today rents a room near Silver Lake in wooded South Snohomish County. He says he needs to be far from Seattle and the memories of that day in 1982 when he was certain he would be killed by a man he barely knew.

Sylte had a nodding acquaintance with Hillman. He lived next to a Seattle tavern that Hillman frequented, and Hillman would stop occasionally and talk to Sylte's sisters.

So it didn't particularly alarm him late one night when Hillman banged on Sylte's basement window and asked to talk. Sylte doesn't remember the conversation, but the two drank beer and smoked marijuana. Then, says Sylte, Hillman suddenly pulled a knife from his belt, grabbed Sylte and plunged the blade into his arm and chest.

The two struggled, one of Sylte's sisters came to his rescue with a fireplace poker and Hillman escaped.

Two weeks later, Hillman told Sylte he wanted to apologize. When a meeting place was arranged, says Sylte, he contacted police and Hillman was quietly arrested.

``When the cops came he looked at me in surprise and sat down,'' recalls Sylte.

``I didn't think I was going to make it. When I heard about (Duncan's) murder, it made me sick to my stomach.''

Before the assault, Hillman was still denying, at least to his parole officer, that he had a problem with alcohol. ``To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Hillman did not need drug or alcohol program as no problem was apparently there,'' wrote Robert G. Campbell, his parole officer, in September 1982.

Nevertheless, he recommended that Hillman go back to prison, after only six months on the outside.

Interviewed by the psychologist for Western State Hospital's mentally ill offender program, Hillman could only say, ``I just got a weird feeling and stabbed him.'' He pleaded guilty to second-degree assault with a deadly weapon and received a nine-year sentence.

Prison officials weren't impressed. ``He seems to have little appreciation for the gravity of the crime that he has committed and little or no insight into what he might do to prevent future problems,'' a prison counselor wrote after Hillman returned to prison. ``I believe he should be considered (a) very dangerous individual who might well profit from studies for the delayed stress syndrome of Vietnam veterans.''

But Hillman soon seemed to show more interest in bettering himself, and the incidents of fighting, drug use and manipulative behavior that littered his progress reports from the first stint in prison slowed to a trickle.

In 1983, while he was in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, he married Sharon. Young, unsophisticated, she'd come to the prison with a girlfriend who was visiting another inmate.

``I had no intentions of falling in love,'' Sharon recalls. ``When I met him, there was this wonderful side to him, full of love and compassion and wanting to do right, full of goals.''

By 1986, according to a prison progress report, Hillman was ``gaining overall maturity . . . and ability to manage his life.''

Hillman himself knew that staying away from alcohol was the key, evaluators noted, that he was a ``Jekyl and Hyde'' personality under the influence.

Inside the controlled atmosphere at Walla Walla, Hillman exhibited no signs of violence, Sharon says. ``He respected me; he was wonderful to me,'' she says. ``I saw a man with so much potential.''

Hillman, too, had begun to see himself as a person with potential. He began to create a new image of himself.

He would be successful, wealthy and buy Sharon nice things; he would help children and those in trouble. He would have friends, respect and admiration; he would be a good citizen.

With a slight smile that has no warmth, Hillman says today that the man he wanted to be seemed a lot like Richard Duncan.