John Fredrick Anderson – The Fly-in killer

Chaos in Duluth

On July 10, 1965, the quiet community of Duluth, Washington, 11 miles north of Vancouver was about to be thrown into chaos. At the corner of 219th Street and 10th Avenue, a dusty intersection at the edge of town, 60-year-old Howard Morford was attending a client named Edgar Waser, 23, in his barbershop. Waiting his turn on a chair behind them was 14-year-old Dennis Jones. Out of nowhere, a black and green cab smashed into the side of the building, shattering the window in a loud bang and a cloud of dust. The driver, 20-year-old John Anderson, climbed through the broken window, brandishing a .22 revolver. Howard was yelling about his wall when Anderson, without saying a word, started shooting right to left. Dennis was hit first and collapsed on the floor, followed by Edgar, who was shot in the stomach. Trying to protect the two, the barber became his last victim of the day. Anderson emptied his .22 on Morford, then started pacing inside the barbershop. He could hear the police taking position right outside. He was surrounded. But to fully understand how he got into this mess, requires a 24-hour rewind.

Escape Plan

On the morning of July 9, 1965, John Anderson rented a Cessna 150 from Wright Flying Service at Hawthorne Airport near Los Angeles. He told them he was taking the plane to Riverside to practice Thursday and Friday, then go to Ontario for his pilot’s license flight check. His instructor had been telling him for weeks that he was ready to take the test. Maybe some other time. He was expected to return the plane on July 10.

Before leaving, he packed two guns, a .22 revolver and a .32 automatic, then took off, with no intention of coming back to return the plane. He was leaving Los Angeles for good. It was a one-way ticket to his new life, leaving behind his family, jobs, his apartment and his old unnaturally boring self. Anderson briefly landed in Marysville, California for gas, then continued north.

Realizing he didn’t have much light left and flying across the desert would’ve required at least some of it, he decided to stop overnight in Ventura for the night, before landing the next day at Troutdale Airport in Oregon, near Portland. After what he described as a bad lunch, Anderson got back into his two-seater airplane and kept going. Short on gas, he had to land on Pearson Air Park in Vancouver, Washington. He tied down the plane and started talking with the airport manager, Howard Poe. They chatted for a while about flying and about what planes Poe enjoyed flying, then the manager drove him to the Travelodge. It was $7 for a small room, and Anderson signed with his real name, and a bogus address from San Diego he just made up.

He sold his camera for $100 when he left Los Angeles, just before departing, and spent nearly all of it on gas, food, and lodging along the way. By the morning of July 10 he only had $12 left, and the plane was running on fumes.

His first murder

His California driver’s license was suspended for speeding, which had put him out of business as a commercial photographer. His equipment, lighting gear, and cameras were locked in a full-size foot locker he could not move without a car. He needed a plan. He needed money.

That morning he left the Travelodge, had breakfast at a cafe on Main Street, then called a cab from a payphone at the corner of 7th and Broadway. The plan was to sell his .22 revolver at one of the pawnshops in town and get out of there. The cab took him to the Trading Post, which did not buy guns normally, and then to Main Street Sporting Goods, but they refused to buy from him because he was not yet 21.

Pissed off, he hopped back into the cab. The driver was a Vancouver woman named Genevieve Jennings, 52, the wife of the owner of the Deluxe Cab Company, driving a green and black 1958 Ford. Along the road back toward the airport, Anderson told her to drive out back off the road. In a later interview he explained what the plan was: “I thought about the taxi because there was an area in which I thought about using the gun. In the back of my mind, I considered the fact that the cab driver, to tell you the truth, I thought first about hitting her with it, and then I went on to shoot. Primarily, I was interested in scaring her though.”

When they came to a gate north of the airport, Jennings sped up and tried to ram the cab into an abandoned Beechcraft Bonanza parked on the field. The idea was to draw attention to her cab. Anderson shot her low on the right side, and she tried to accelerate harder, opening the door to jump out of the car. He fired a second shot, then pushed her the rest of the way out, rolling her on the pavement. Anderson then slid behind the wheel, drove around the abandoned Beechcraft, and left through the gate. He did not go back for his own plane.

People at the airport called the police and a hunt for the missing cab was on. Genevieve Jennings would die nine hours later at St. Joseph Hospital.

The Manhunt and the Barbershop

Anderson drove north, pulled off into what appeared to be a park near a railroad track, and searched the cab. He found a cash box with about $100 and $12 in bills in Genevieve’s purse. He threw her purse into a ravine and just sat there trying to decide what to do. He considered heading to Yakima, getting lost, obtaining new identification, and starting over somewhere under a different name. But first, he had to get rid of the car, so he started driving towards Vancouver again to ditch the cab and check into a motel to wait it out.

While driving back through Battleground, an officer spotted the missing cab and gave chase. The pursuit exceeded 100 miles an hour. Reserve deputies Basnett and Teters spotted the cab at 1:25 PM near Daybreak Bridge on County Road 30. They lost visual contact, searched side roads, and spotted it again in Battleground at approximately 2:15 PM. In a little wide spot called Duluth, eleven miles north of Vancouver, Anderson came to what he thought was a curve but was a perpendicular intersection. He was attempting a power slide around it when the automatic transmission shifted down and he smashed into the barbershop.

He grabbed both guns from the floor and went through what was left of the barbershop window. Officers arrived at the barbershop at 2:25 PM, and for approximately eight minutes Anderson hid inside, trying to decide what to do. He took one more shot with his .32 at an officer who came around the back, but he did not have the opportunity to aim. They were all pointing guns at him.

It was over. At 2:33 PM he tried to throw his gun through the window to signal surrender, but he threw it too high and it hit the ceiling. He then walked out, put his hands atop his head, and gave himself up.

Howard Morford was found a few yards away and was declared dead at the scene. Dennis and Edgar survived.

The Killer Named

While being cuffed, an officer told him he ought to be proud of himself. Mrs. Jennings’ husband had reportedly told officers he would kill Anderson if he saw him. “About this time, I was ready to agree with him,” Anderson said in a later interview.

The newspapers were writing about the 20-year-old murderer, and the Associated Press started digging into his past. John Fredrick Anderson was born on May 6, 1945. He was the son of Air Force Major Billy Anderson and Dorothy Grace Milam, and was raised in Riverside, California. His father was retired, and his mother worked as a secretary at Magnolia Center Church of Christ in Riverside. With an IQ measured at 138, he did great in school, enrolling at Riverside City College. By the time of his arrest he had about six months of flight time.

His family’s conservative military and religious influence had less of an impact on him. By 1964, at age 19, he was attending school while working part time for the Riverside Press-Enterprise, as a salesman in a camera shop, and as a free-lance commercial photographer all at once. At the paper, he once flew solo across a flood scene and, guiding the plane’s wheel with his knees, snapped off a series of photographs of the flooded terrain below. His boss was impressed. Fred Bauman, the manager of the paper’s photography department, called him “an excellent photographer” and “the hardest-working guy I ever knew.”

In mid April 1965, he quit the newspaper job and moved to Los Angeles to attend Pepperdine College full time. Anderson was a sophomore, living in room 704 of Lovine Hall on campus. His grades were pretty uneven. He failed three of the four courses in his first semester, pulled a 3.5 average in his second, and described the rest as mediocre.

His gun collection included a .22 revolver, a .32 automatic, and a .357 Magnum, but he could not carry them around anymore since he had his license suspended for speeding. He bought a bicycle, but a full-size foot locker of equipment was impossible to move without a car.

The Problem That Started Everything

He went first to a hearing at the Riverside DMV. The hearing officer indicated he would recommend one year of probation, issued Anderson a temporary driver’s license, and told him a new license would follow in the mail. Two weeks later, the notice arrived: the license was suspended for 30 days, after which a new license would be issued with nine months of probation. For three months, Anderson could not make a living. He went to the Inglewood DMV to ask about a hardship exemption, and the official’s response, as Anderson later described it was: “You can go to hell, I’m busy.” Anderson then went to the Los Angeles DMV downtown, but that official was just as unhelpful, though he was more polite about it. That’s when he decided to sell his camera for $100 and rent a plane.

When the Associated Press reached his father about his arrest and the fact that he was held in the Clark County jail, Billy Anderson described the youth as a “gentle, well-behaved boy.” He had no idea his son flew to Washington. He thought John was still attending his all-year courses at Pepperdine.

Even Howard Poe, the flying service operator who chatted with Anderson for hours the Friday before the shootings, said he thought the young man was just a braggart. “Braggarts usually don’t shoot anyone.”

Anderson seemed genuinely remorseful. “The only real thing I feel is remorse for having started this whole thing,” he said. He asked the detectives to discourage his parents from coming to Vancouver. He and his parents had never been real close, though they were getting along better since he moved away from home. Anderson was on the verge of tears. He joked with detectives for a while, then admitted that jokes were the only way he could keep his composure. Then he said: “Which I am about to lose.”

The Verdict

A Portland psychiatrist, Dr. Wendell Hutchens, was called in to examine Anderson prior to his original sentencing. His conclusion was blunt: “He has no sense of value to his own life and therefore relates no value to any other human life.”

On October 4th, 1965, Anderson appeared before Clark County Superior Court Judge Eugene Cushing and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Howard Morford. Prosecutor DeWitt Jones said he simply did not feel a jury would return a first-degree murder conviction calling for the death penalty of a 20-year-old, so Cushing sentenced Anderson to life in prison, ordering him confined to hard labor “for the rest of your natural life.”

The murder charge for Genevieve Violet Jennings was held back deliberately, to be used as a hole card if Anderson was ever considered for parole. It would have to be tried or dismissed before he could ever be released. The court was told this would assure Anderson a long term in prison.

The state Board of Prison Terms and Paroles set his minimum sentence at 35 years, reducible with good time. Then-chairman George Parks told The Columbian: “Actually, in this case, there is no absolute minimum. He will be reviewed by the board every year, and the minimum can be reduced or increased at any time.”

The Model Prisoner

Anderson proved to be a model prisoner. His evaluations year after year were, without exception, positive. In 1974, nine years into his sentence, he was brought back to Clark County to resolve the pending Jennings charge. A new prosecutor, a new judge, and nine years passed from the original crime.

Anderson pleaded guilty to an amended charge of second-degree murder in Jennings’ death, and prosecutor Jim Carty recommended a life sentence. Judge John Skimas handed it out, but ordered it to run concurrent with, not consecutive to the first life term. It was basically a slap on the wrist. Anderson had already served most of it. The average length of stay for second-degree murder in Washington State was nine years.

Judge Skimas later recalled that he was unhappy with the situation. “It certainly was not a matter of a new judge and a new prosecutor forgetting what had happened,” he told The Columbian. “I was very unhappy with the situation. But I didn’t have much choice.”

He said the case appeared on his docket without advance notice, and a bargain was already worked out between the prosecutor and Anderson’s attorney. He called for a recess to consult the parole board, but they told him it wouldn’t make any real difference whether the sentence was consecutive or concurrent. He would only have to serve one additional day. So Skimas made it concurrent.

One year later, John Anderson was released. He only served 10 years for the deaths of Howard Morford and Genevieve Jennings.

The last prison evaluation report, read aloud by William Henry, then-chairman of the state Board of Prison Terms and Paroles, said: “John Anderson’s overall institution adjustment was again this year, as it was the past nine years, beyond reproach. Discussing John’s case with the education department and minimum security personnel, I have yet to run across a negative remark either about his behavior or job performance. In reviewing his prior progress reports it appears he is continually moving forward, constantly gaining insight and at this point in time is mature enough that his parole prognosis would be deemed excellent.”

Nobody apparently remembered the words of Dr. Wendell Hutchens.

Bob and Larry

Parole records show Anderson obtaining employment as a car salesman at several dealerships in the Northwest and one in Aberdeen, reporting a salary of $2,000 a month. In reality he was almost broke, living out of the back of his camper truck on the car lot with his two pet dogs. He was eventually let go and an overworked state parole system could not keep adequate tabs on him.

While living in Grays Harbor, Anderson deceived the parole office and violated the law by acquiring firearms. He owned a .45 automatic registered in his own name and he became the secretary-treasurer of the local gun club. The former president of the club said he was unaware of Anderson’s criminal past, though Anderson was suspected at one point of stealing money from the club treasury. The ex-president also recalled that Anderson’s favorite weapon at the harbor shooting range was the .45 automatic. An important detail that would make sense a while later.

While in Aberdeen, Anderson reconnected with two of his buddies, Bob and Larry. Robert Ross Stratton was a Kansas-born, big-boned ex-bartender, 6-foot-1, 205 pounds, balding and gray-haired, with a criminal record going back to armed robbery at age 18. He used to be the owner of a Seattle tavern. Larry White was a former amateur actor and a drifter heavily into drugs and crime. All three men, White, Stratton, and Anderson, met after getting out of prison and bunked at the same halfway house in Seattle. They stayed in touch. Stratton, in particular, would stop by on his way from the Olympia area to see Anderson in Aberdeen.

Murder for Hire

On February 9, 1979, Stratton stopped to see Anderson on his way to Ocean Shores, and on his way back, on February 11, he stopped again. The gap between the visits was not random. On February 10, Jesus Hernandez, a 38-year-old Army sergeant, was shot in the back of the head in the parking lot of a West Side restaurant in Olympia as he and his wife Joyce left the building. He fell in a pool of blood.

Paramedics who arrived initially found no bullet hole and thought the man fell and struck his head. The wound was discovered in the emergency room, and Hernandez died a short time later.

It was later revealed that Joyce Hernandez paid Bob Stratton $10,000 to arrange her husband’s murder. According to her, she wanted out of the marriage because her husband beat her cruelly when drunk, though she also testified he was “probably the nicest man in the world when he was sober.”

There was a moment when Joyce wanted to cancel the whole deal. But Stratton reportedly told her it was too late to back out because he already paid a trigger man $3,000. Police and court officials concluded that Anderson did the actual shooting, even though they could not prove it. “He was never charged because Stratton was the only link, and he wasn’t talking,” said Ed Schaller, former Thurston County chief deputy prosecutor. “But Anderson was the guy. That was our theory.”

The Yorktown Massacre

Shortly after the Hernandez murder, Stratton and Anderson moved into a house in Federal Way with a longtime acquaintance of Stratton and a woman friend.

In November 1979, Anderson was officially released from supervised parole.

During December 1979, the group conducted a series of armed robberies across Seattle and Renton. One of them, at the Casa Lupita restaurant in Seattle, left behind a shell casing from Anderson’s .45, personally reloaded and tipped with fingernail polish, a method he used to mark the bullet’s charge. The same distinctive casings would later appear at the scenes of other crime scenes.

Meanwhile, Joyce Hernandez began dating Jim Hall, a bartender at the Colony Room cocktail lounge of the Yorktown Restaurant in Lakewood. She stupidly confided in Hall about Stratton and the death of her husband, and this made its way back to Stratton. According to Hernandez’s later testimony, Stratton told her that Anderson would come to the Yorktown to shoot up the bar and kill Hall, to prevent the story of the Hernandez murder from spreading any further.

On December 18, 1979, Hernandez and her mother went to the Yorktown to visit Hall. The restaurant, at 8011 Steilacoom Blvd. Southwest in Lakewood, was a popular stopping place for the employees of Western State Hospital nearby, and The Colony Room lounge was about half full. Shortly after 10 o’clock, Hall left the bar to join Hernandez and her mother at a table near the back, a move that detectives later concluded saved his life.

Seconds after Hall left the bar, a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol burst through a fire exit door at the rear of the lounge. He took three steps in, grasped the heavy pistol with both hands in front of him, aimed in the direction of a table near the door, where five people were seated, and fired four shots. He then turned toward the bar, where Hall would’ve been standing, and fired three more shots, aiming directly at patrons each time he pulled the trigger.

It was over in less than 30 seconds.

Three men were killed: Donald Williams, 41; Robert Casses, 51; and Steven Allen, 37. All three worked at Western State Hospital or previously worked there, but their common employment was only a coincidence. None of them had anything to do with the suspects or their alleged motive for the shooting.

Three others were wounded. Glenn Vancil, 58, was permanently paralyzed when he was shot through the neck and wrist. Bobby Knight, 40, was shot in the bridge of the nose, and Dale McCombs, 55, was wounded in the arm.

The Final Capture

That night, the shooter, Anderson, along with Stratton and the getaway driver, Larry White, returned to the Federal Way house. He was carrying the black vinyl bag he used in robberies, and was very agitated, upset, tense. He turned on a scanner radio and listened to police communications.

The next day, White testified, he overheard a conversation between Anderson and Stratton in the kitchen: “Bob told John that he really impressed her. He talked to someone about it, and he impressed her, frightened her.” A few days later, White asked Stratton why it happened, why did John do this. He said “it was a demonstration to prove a point.” Stratton also told him that “John stood there and popped them off like he was on a shooting range.”

In another conversation, White testified, Stratton told him that he and a woman named Phyllis and Anderson went to the Yorktown early in the day of the shooting. They went to have lunch so Anderson could case the layout of the place. Stratton additionally told White that Anderson was paranoid about White having knowledge of what he did, and was afraid White would be put in a position of telling on him. He kinda wanted to get rid of him, but Stratton talked him out of it.

The day after the shooting, according to Joyce Hernandez’s later trial testimony, Stratton told her that he hoped she had learned a lesson and that he couldn’t “annihilate the whole town of Tacoma to keep your big mouth shut.”

But the effect on Hernandez was exactly the opposite of what Stratton intended. She feared for her life and eventually sought a plea-bargaining arrangement for her own protection.

On December 21, 1979, three more robberies took place in Seattle and Bellevue, and another one on January 9, 1980, in South Seattle.

Only 4 days later, on January 13, after Stratton severed the phone lines outside the South China Doll Restaurant on Pacific Highway South in South King County, Anderson put on a ski mask and walked into the building. Manager Harry Gee, 49, who always instructed his employees to cooperate during a robbery, instead fought with Anderson and chased him out into the parking lot. Anderson, enraged, came around the car where Gee had taken cover, apparently already wounded by one of Anderson’s bullets, and pumped the rest into him. He jumped into the getaway car and shouted to White: “I hope the sonofabitch is dead.” Harry Gee died of multiple gunshot wounds.

On January 27, White was arrested when he and Anderson switched roles during a robbery at Diamond Lil’s restaurant in Renton, a place people knew Anderson. Even though Anderson didn’t go in, people recognized him as the getaway driver. He and Stratton managed to hide, but White’s luck ran out.

Facing a dozen felony charges, he started talking to investigators. “The main guy may still be there,” he told them. “Whether you’re gonna find the gun or not, I don’t know. I doubt seriously now if you will. With me busted, I’m sure they’d get rid of the piece.”

They didn’t.

Stratton and Anderson were arrested on March 11, 1980, at the Federal Way house. King County detectives used three search warrants over several days. They eventually found Anderson’s black bag, and the .45, hidden inside an industrial-sized vacuum cleaner in the basement.

Final Justice

In July 1980, Anderson was convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of Harry Gee and of twelve armed robberies. He was sentenced to life in prison.

King County Superior Court Judge William Goodloe, aware of the two earlier life sentences, recommended that Anderson never be paroled and addressed him directly from the bench: “I am of the impression that the state of the art in rehabilitation is zero.”

Anderson replied: “I think you are optimistic when you give it a zero.” He said the only one who would ever know when he was rehabilitated would be himself. And then he added: “I don’t have any faith in the parole board.”

In June 1981, Robert Ross Stratton was convicted in Thurston County of first-degree murder for arranging the contract killing of Jesus Hernandez. A jury took just two hours and 20 minutes to reach the verdict after four weeks of testimony. Stratton was sentenced to life in prison as well. Special Prosecutor Edward Schaller named Anderson, a convicted killer he referred to as “The Iceman,” as Stratton’s trigger man in the Hernandez killing. Anderson was not charged in Thurston County.

On December 17, 1981, murder and assault charges for the Yorktown Restaurant shootings were filed against both men in Pierce County, just one day short of the second anniversary of the killings.

Robert Ross Stratton, 45, and John Fredrick Anderson, 34, were each charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of first-degree assault in the December 18, 1979 bloodbath. They could not face the death penalty because the crimes were committed before the state’s new death-penalty statute was enacted.

The two men were tried together in Pierce County Superior Court before Judge Waldo Stone. Before trial, Anderson moved for severance (a separate trial from Stratton), arguing that White’s testimony about Stratton’s statements was admissible only against Stratton, not against him.

The trial court denied the motion. Both defendants listened in silence on the night of May 4th, 1982, as the jury pronounced each guilty of three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of first-degree assault. Four uniformed policemen and two plainclothes officers guarded the courtroom as the verdict was handed down.

After the verdicts were read, the two men were handcuffed and returned to their jail cells.

The jury deliberated for only four hours.

The following day, Pierce County Superior Court jurors condemned both men to life in prison with no hope for parole. Judge Waldo Stone handed down six life sentences each, three for the murders, three for the assaults, all to run consecutively. At the sentencing, two shackled men watched the key being thrown away through a bullet-proof glass that was shielding them from the court and spectators.

Anderson was already serving a life sentence for Harry Gee’s murder, and Stratton was already serving a life sentence for the Hernandez contract killing. The new sentences were ordered to run consecutive to those.

The End

In August 1985, the Washington Court of Appeals overturned Anderson’s Yorktown convictions, ruling that hearsay evidence was improperly admitted during the joint trial. A civil suit was filed on behalf of the estate of Steven Allen, one of the three men killed at the Yorktown, alleging the state was negligent in paroling both Anderson and Stratton in 1975 and in failing to supervise them adequately afterward.

On February 26, 1987, the Washington Supreme Court reversed the appellate ruling and reinstated Anderson’s Yorktown convictions. His consecutive life sentences were permanently sealed.

William Henry, chairman of the state parole board, said that Anderson’s file had been marked, repeatedly, in bold type: NEVER PAROLE. “The parole board goes out of existence in a few years,” Henry said. “Who knows what our system will look like in the future, who will be doing what. But the file is here. Don’t parole, it says. Don’t parole. If he should come back some day, it will be as a very old man.”

He didn’t. None of them did. Robert Ross Stratton died in 2019 at the age of 75, and Anderson died on December 26, 2021, in Connell, Washington, at age 76.