By Serial Killer Magazine
Jack Owen Spillman III read about forensic science in order to avoid it. He told cellmates what precautions he took. He talked about gloves, about hair, about the things that get people caught. He thought of himself as a hunter and he had been studying the field for years.
What caught him was a ski mask in a rubbish bin, and before that, a piece of paperwork nobody had connected to anything.
Rita Huffman was forty-eight and sold cars in East Wenatchee, Washington. Her daughter Amanda, who everyone called Mandy, was fifteen. On a night in April 1995 both were killed in their own home. Rita was stabbed repeatedly in the chest and neck and had defensive wounds on her hands. Amanda was beaten with a blunt instrument. Both bodies were mutilated afterwards and both were posed. A watch broken in the struggle put the attack at about half past eleven at night.
They had not known him. He had been watching the house for a long time, and it was the girl he had been watching. Her mother was in the way.
The investigation had no physical evidence tying anyone to the scene. What it had was a stack of incident reports from that night, and somewhere in them was a note that officers had stopped a man in the small hours, not far from the house, on a matter that had nothing to do with anything. The man was Spillman. He had a record going back to 1982 - indecent exposure, theft, malicious mischief, assault, rape - and two years earlier he and another man had been arrested at Kent over a sexual assault on a woman they met in a bar. She reported it. The charges were dropped.
Detectives had no grounds to hold him, so they let him go and watched him instead. For most of a week they followed him around East Wenatchee.
He threw away a ski mask. They recovered it, and there was blood around the holes cut for the mouth and eyes. It matched the victims.
That was the case. Everything he had read about forensic caution came down to putting a mask in a bin while he was being followed.
In custody he confirmed something investigators had already begun to suspect. Penny Davis was nine and lived at Tonasket, sixty miles north. She had been killed in 1994 and the case had gone nowhere. Spillman gave them very little, but he gave them enough to charge him with it.
When she was exhumed, the position she had been buried in matched the way Amanda Huffman had been left on her mother’s bed.
He pleaded guilty in 1996 to three counts of aggravated first degree murder rather than face a capital trial. Judge Carol Wardell gave him life without the possibility of parole for the Huffmans and added forty-five and a half years for Penny Davis. Charges of first degree rape, robbery and burglary were outstanding at the time and were never tried.
A cellmate named Mark Miller told the authorities what Spillman had said to him, and it went into the court record. He wanted to be the world’s greatest serial killer. He had told people he was a werewolf and hunted the way an animal hunts. His own sisters had noticed the wolf ornaments and pictures accumulating around him and thought it odd before they knew anything at all.
The forensic work that convicted him went past the mask - animal hair, bite marks - which is why the case turns up in textbooks on technique rather than only in true crime collections. A man who had studied the discipline in order to beat it ended up as a worked example in it.
He is fifty-six and has been at the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla since 1996.
One thing about this case is worth saying plainly, because it is the part that recurs. The evidence that convicted him was recovered by officers who were simply watching a man they could not arrest. The thing that pointed them at him in the first place was a routine stop, already written down, already in the file, waiting for somebody to read it against a different case.