Anacortes: The City Of Unsolved Murders -- As Its Combative Chief Steps Down, The City's Police Force Hopes To Restore Credibility And Trust With The Community

ANACORTES - The Chamber of Commerce says this is an All-American city, but some locals know it as the town where you could get away with murder.

Carrie Nibarger, daughter of an ex-assistant fire chief, tells the not-so-funny community joke: "You can kill anybody in Anacortes and get away with it, but have two beers and they'll nail you. The police are good at DWIs."

"What is really sad," adds Lori Symonds, "is that people in Anacortes would just as soon call a neighbor or a friend as call the police."

Nibarger and Symonds don't trust the local police because, between them, they knew three women who were murdered.

Add a 79-year-old man with organized-crime connections who was stabbed to death in 1981, and Anacortes had four unsolved homicides in the 1980s - a lot for a town with a population of barely 12,000. (Nearby Mount Vernon, half again as large, had one unsolved killing in that period.)

All the slayings occurred during the tenure of Tony Lippe, the town's police chief for 14 years.

The combative Lippe seems to have been badly miscast for the job. His prickly personality kept him at constant odds with the city administration and his own officers. And under his leadership, the Police Department showed a remarkable talent for investigatory blunders:

-- Lippe assumed the organized-crime figure, found lying on his back with seven stab wounds in the chest, had died of natural causes until the coroner opened his bathrobe and found the wounds. By that time, relatives had swarmed through the man's apartment, smudging the crime scene with their fingerprints.

-- A friend pointed out a patch of blood on a missing woman's bed but says police dismissed the stain as a remnant of menstruation.

-- Even when the cops got their killer they sometimes pulled amateurish stunts. A woman who beat her husband to death was allowed to retrieve a shovel - always a possible murder weapon - after police had roped off the scene. She said it was an item "dear to her," the police report stated.

Each homicide was difficult, but not unsolvable had police done a proper job at the time. Under new leadership, the department is now reopening the four homicide cases in the belief that at least some of them can be solved.

That will come as a relief to Nibarger. She knows one of the suspects, who still resides in Skagit County. He lived a few doors from her when a daughter of the woman she believes he murdered was staying with her. They timed their visits to the grocery store to avoid meeting him.

Since Anacortes police officers are not idiots - and several have college degrees - town gossips began to explain their incompetence by saying they were on the take, protecting murderous drug lords.

Some of the rumors can be traced to internal bickering that began before Lippe arrived and continues today.

Eighteen years ago, an Anacortes officer saw a high-ranking member of the department talking with the target of a drug probe. When the sting operation failed, some patrolmen wondered if the officer had tipped the guy off. Ever since, the department has been distracted by mistrust.

The combination of bungled homicide investigations and incessant internal feuding has been a heavy burden for this normally peaceful town, best known to outsiders for the traffic jam at the ferry dock serving the San Juan Islands.

Last June, the city took a major step toward what it hopes will be reform by hiring a former FBI agent, Pat Beatie, to head the police and fire departments. Beatie was so concerned about the rumors that police were on the take that he called in the FBI to investigate the department for corruption.

But other than a possible indictment of Assistant Chief Dave Mead, who is being investigated for allegedly dipping into a drug-buy fund, it appears the FBI isn't finding much.

As Mayor Doyle Geer tells it, the city loves its lore: "The rule around here is that if you haven't heard a rumor by 10 o'clock you are supposed to make one up."

Veteran Anacortes defense attorney Steve Skelton says the popular myth that the cops are in cahoots with the drug cartel has a major flaw: "Corruption in the Anacortes Police Department would require organization, and I haven't seen any of that over the years."

A DYSFUNCTIONAL DEPARTMENT

Major crimes often leave small communities strapped for expertise and personnel.

Former Bellevue Police Chief Donald Van Blaricom says clever killers could foil the elected coroners and town marshals in a lot of rural Washington towns. But the Anacortes Police Department had a special problem: It was like a dysfunctional family.

"There were two factions in the Police Department - those that supported the chief and those that hated the chief. And they were constantly at war," said Van Blaricom, who was paid $10,000 as a consultant to write a study of the Anacortes department last year. "That is it in a nutshell."

Chief Lippe despised his sergeants and called them incompetent. They saw him as a petty tyrant. Officers talked openly of rebelling, and their disaffection spread to City Hall.

One city manager, three mayors and nearly every member of the City Council tried in one way or the other to get rid of Lippe. But he wouldn't budge, and an attempted firing proved abortive because of civil-service rules.

During the Lippe years, while Anacortes increased 31 percent in population and 50 percent in area, the City Council agreed to add only two officers, bringing the force to 17. And when council members trimmed his budget and tried to cut his salary, Lippe accused them of coddling criminals, or worse.

Forced by personnel shortages to work 12-hour shifts without a backup in early morning, patrolman John Taylor says he felt like a hostage.

"We were operating like `Welcome to Mayberry,' " he said, referring to a TV comedy about a small-town police force.

When the city hired Beatie to run the police and fire departments, it was an undisguised attempt to run Lippe out of office. This time it seems to have worked.

Lippe went on sick leave as soon as Beatie arrived, citing high blood pressure brought on by stress. He asked for and got disability leave, a first step toward retirement that is expected in January. And in a parting shot, he filed a $10 million claim against Anacortes, saying the city defamed him by suggesting there may have been corruption in the department during his tenure.

"I CALL IT INTEGRITY"

Now living comfortably in his hillside view home, earning about $5,500 a month from his continuing police pay and his retirement benefits as an ex-Marine, Lippe says it was not his management style that stifled the police.

"I call it integrity. I won't look the other way," he said.

He conceded his contribution to the department's disarray: "That's obvious; I have to be one of the ingredients."

Myron Anthony Lippe's tenure was troubled almost from the start. He was hired in 1978, not by the city manager or mayor, but by the Anacortes Civil Service Commission, an appointed committee consisting of a chemical-plant maintenance supervisor, a retired school principal and a personnel manager from one of the nearby oil refineries.

Based entirely on the top score in a written and oral test, as the law required at the time, the commission selected Lippe over six other finalists.

"I had absolutely no input on that whatsoever," said then-Mayor Knute Figenshow. "Yet he reported to me through the city manager. It was the goofiest system."

Lippe had been a patrolman in the Lynnwood Police Department and the chief in the small South King County town of Pacific. By reputation, he was intelligent, proud and honest.

Lippe arrived as one city manager was leaving, dogged by a controversy over a land deal. City Hall was in turmoil. Into the fray stepped an ex-Marine sergeant who, by his own account, is anti-social, brusque and occasionally tactless. Lippe also admits to a temper: "I've got a lot of things maybe I'm angry about."

Now 59 and on his fifth marriage, Lippe says he may be "a hard person to live with." He also acknowledges some paranoia. "You start looking over your shoulder when everybody is trying to get you."

Born in Shanghai, China, to a father who was a big-band leader, Lippe spent some brutal childhood years in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines during World War II. He joined the Marines as a teenager and during 20 years in uniform served in Korea and Vietnam.

Last March, the Skagit Valley Herald newspaper in Mount Vernon quoted Lippe as saying he was awarded three Purple Hearts for wounds, and a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for heroism. A Marine Corps spokesman told The Seattle Times that Lippe served in two wars, but there is no record of the medals. Lippe said the Herald reporter must have misunderstood him, or his mother, about the Silver and Bronze stars, but that he got the Purple Hearts in Korea. The Herald reporter says Lippe claimed all the medals.

Lippe says his troubles began in July 1980 when former Mayor Figenshow was angered by an officer's DWI arrest of his wife. And, in fact, records show that at the time, City Attorney Steve Mansfield wrote a memo to his file that read, "Knute (Figenshow) said that the `policy' (on drunken-driving tickets) would be changed even if it were necessary to get a new city manager and police chief."

It didn't take long, though, for Lippe to create his own problems.

In February 1981, when Anthony Palumbo was found dead on the floor of his Anacortes apartment by a visiting relative, Lippe was the first officer on the scene and, along with the medics, assumed Palumbo had died of natural causes. The chief - a friend of Palumbo's half-brother - says he figured the blood, actually oozing from the knife wounds under the 79-year-old man's bathrobe, was from a voice box that doctors had installed in his larynx.

Records show Lippe permitted five relatives and a family friend to wander through the apartment, disturbing "Lord knows what evidence," said Anacortes Sgt. Chris Taylor. He also allowed a relative to drive off with the dead man's car.

Because Palumbo had an extensive prison record, plus a connection to the Genovese organized-crime family, the Washington State Patrol sent an investigator to New Jersey to check out some leads. Today, though, as Taylor prepares to re-investigate the case, he wonders if detectives overlooked a local man who could have done the deed. "It's a solvable crime, and I'll solve it," Taylor said.

Nine days before Palumbo was murdered, a hairdresser named Carolee Christina Van Luven disappeared from her Anacortes home while her daughters, 11 and 14, slept.

The next day, her friend, Nibarger, told detectives that Van Luven wouldn't leave behind her children, car, purse, clothing and cigarettes, and she says she pointed to a bloodstain on the woman's bed.

She discounted the policeman's assumption that it was her "time of the month," since she knew it wasn't. Investigators made no mention of the blood in follow-up reports, and in a recent interview Officer Rod Dodge said he didn't recall the blood. Dodge said the place was cleaned up before officers arrived, but the police report at the time said officers found Van Luven's clothing "on the bedroom floor."

In any case, Nibarger did tidy up the place - and cleaned up the blood that might have been evidence - but she wishes police had treated the home more like a crime scene.

Officers later confirmed reports that Van Luven had been threatened by a former boyfriend the night of her disappearance. They also found that then-reserve police Officer Dean Maxwell had stopped the boyfriend driving drunk around 3 a.m. but had sent him home without arrest, noting he was a friend.

"The left rear taillight lens was broken out," the officer's report said of the man's car. "And the lens had long strings of grass and dirt hanging out."

Under questioning, the former boyfriend admitted being angry and visiting Van Luven about the time she disappeared. He told police that after he left he drove around for awhile before pulling into a roadside park, near the water, to lift the hood of his overheated car.

Six weeks later, Van Luven's body washed up on the shore of a nearby island. Her body was so decomposed the coronor could not determine the cause of death.

In 1984, a woman told Anacortes police that Van Luven's ex-boyfriend had admitted to her that he killed the woman, but there is no sign in the file that the department did much follow up. The woman said officers did not re-contact her.

"I'm really choked up about all this crap," the ex-boyfriend said, when interviewed for this story. "I had nothing to do with it. It is pretty amazing that a lot of murders occur in that town, and nothing gets solved."

Although his department consulted outside experts on both killings, Lippe hampered the probes by prohibiting patrol officers, some with specialized training, from assisting in felony investigations. But Detective Wayne Korterud said the whole department was inexperienced at the time, and had not done a murder investigation.

CRITICAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW

In November 1981, after the Palumbo and Van Luven killings and more internal strife, then-City Manager Robert Olander gave Lippe a very critical performance review. The chief fired back a memo accusing the council of revenge by undercutting the department. In April 1982, the department suffered another rift when one officer arrested a fellow patrolman for smoking marijuana.

Then in June, the body of another local woman, Arleen Hanson, was found on a downtown beach. When the suspect was acquitted six months later, many in town felt the police and prosecutor had presented a poor case. It didn't help that the man later pleaded guilty of rape in San Juan County.

Lippe's relations with City Hall continued to deteriorate - not surprising considering that he displayed his gun during contentious budget hearings (he said it was a joke), ordered patrol officers to stay out of his neighborhood after one of them shined a searchlight on his house, and insulted council members. Then-Mayor Jim Rice asked Lippe to resign in December 1982 and fired him in January. But the civil-service commission reinstated the chief, ruling that the list of charges warranted no more than a 60-day suspension without pay.

Lippe said Mead, the assistant chief, ran the department more than he did, and the sergeants decided what orders the patrolmen would obey. Officers agree that Mead became a buffer between the explosive chief and his unhappy troops. Mead would deflect Lippe by telling him, "Chief, why don't you go into your office and do chiefly duties and leave the police work to the policemen?"

Rice and Lippe sought a truce, but by the end of 1984 there was another official reprimand, prompted when Lippe dragged a known troublemaker, who was apparently trying to steal his car, into the local Elks Lodge and threatened to shoot him in front of onlookers.

One witness said in a letter to the mayor: "Mr. Lippe's hand was shaking so hard I thought he was going to kill the young man. His eyes were big, he was breathing hard, and he was very nervous and excited and kept telling the kid to shut up and not move or he would blow his head off."

In December 1985, there was another apparent killing. Judith Taylor, an unemployed woman, vanished without trace from her downtown apartment. Despite suspicious noises heard in a nearby apartment, no body was found.

The mayor and Lippe kept bickering. The chief wasn't wearing his uniform enough, and there were suicides in the jail.

In December 1990, Rice reprimanded Lippe for opening a criminal investigation of the city finance director after the two feuded over the police budget.

"I felt rather intimidated at the time," said finance director George Khtaian. "I heard that, like J. Edgar Hoover, he kept files on people." Lippe said the timing was "unfortunate."

After Rice died in 1991, the department held a vote of confidence, which Lippe flunked 18 to 6. In mid-October, Mayor Doyle Geer asked the chief to retire. By December, Lippe was on sick leave, citing hypertensive dizzy spells.

The troubled department's felony referrals to the county prosecutor fell from 74 in 1991 to 29 in 1992, a precipitous drop the prosecutor attributes to turmoil. It didn't help matters when a grants consultant Mayor Geer had hired turned up on a national television broadcast as a murder suspect in Nevada. The man was fired.

This year, the Lippe saga took another twist. Lippe tried to do something right and got in trouble.

Acting on advice from a friend, Lippe asked the state auditor's office to examine the department's cash accounts, including the $15,000 drug-buy fund maintained by assistant chief Mead.

When city officials heard about the audit, the mayor accused him of wasting money (the audit cost $435). City officials so mistrusted Lippe that they suspected him of trickery.

Even when the auditor found no money left in Mead's cabinet, Khtaian speculated that Lippe had hidden the cash to set Mead up, according to an internal memo.

When Khtaian and the auditor visited Mead, who was ill at home with chronic asthma, he showed them a valise containing $7,000 in cash and said an undercover operative had the remaining $8,000.

It might have ended there, but city attorney Mansfield learned from his wife that Mead had borrowed exactly $7,000 from her employer, a local developer, the day before the auditor visited his home, and had cashed the check immediately.

Mansfield met with the mayor and soon thereafter county prosecutor Dave Needy asked the Snohomish County sheriff's office to conduct an independent investigation.

Mead, a 23-year veteran, has applied for disability retirement and has hired a defense attorney.

Beatie arrived in Anacortes in April of this year as member of an audit team requested by Lippe. Then a Chelan County undersheriff, his report cited "distrust, hostility, lack of leadership and lack of teamwork" among the department's problems. It was not much different from past reports, but Lippe accused Beatie of conducting a witch hunt and stealing his job.

A garrulous man who when met in person bears a striking resemblance to former President Bush, Beatie believes in political compromise. Under his brief leadership, the City Council has approved new police hires and he is reorganizing the detective work. Morale has improved.

"People laugh again. They hadn't laughed for a long time," said police dispatcher Carol George.

But Beatie's vow to solve the murders and regain public trust in the Police Department may be a tougher task.

"They are going to have to prove themselves," said Nibarger. "It is not going to just happen."