Jaaskela and Mike exited the van. “By the time we turned around, Richard was gone,” said an irked Jaaskela. “He hadn’t said anything to me or Mike about going anywhere, but he sure was in a hurry.” Clark ditched his friends outside the Buzz Inn between 1:30 and 1:45 A.M., leaving them to walk home.
Such behavior was uncharacteristic for Clark, according to Jaaskela. “But the whole night he wasn’t like himself at all. He was way different—distant, quiet—not at all like he usually is. As a rule, he’s real jabber-jaws. You can’t get Richard to shut up. Ya know, yak yak yak. All the time, flappin’ his jaws.”
Saturday night, April 1, Richard Mathew Clark was markedly different. “Dead quiet. Like he wasn’t there. Weird.” Looking back on his former friend’s demeanor, Jaaskela was most troubled by Clark’s complete silence on the topic of Roxanne Doll.
“He said nothing about the missing child, Roxanne Doll,” recalled Jaaskela. “He said nothing of having been camping with Roxanne’s father, or that he even knew the girl and the family. He never said nothing about the little girl being missing or anything. He didn’t tell me that he had gone camping the previous night with a friend named Tim, or nothing.”
Clark’s silence, especially regarding the missing Roxanne Doll, preyed heavily on Jaaskela’s mind. “Everybody knew that little girl was missing—it was on the news and everybody was talking about it. And Richard, who knew the girl and the family and all that, didn’t say a single word about it all the time we were together.
“Why wouldn’t he say something to me about some little girl being missing, unless he had something to hide from me?” asked Jaaskela. “You would think he would say something about it right away to his friends. Hell, maybe I might have seen her, or maybe somebody else seen her.
“He never indicated that he went camping up with the little girl’s father, Tim,” said an exasperated Jaaskela. “We were together four hours and he never said a word to me about nothin’. In fact, he seemed real quiet and, you know, seemed distant that night. Didn’t seem the same Richard. It seemed like he was out in left field waiting for a ball that wasn’t coming. Seemed like he felt a little guilty. He was just like he was there, but he wasn’t.”
Following his drug and drink interaction on April 1 with the uncharacteristically distant Richard Clark, Jaaskela discovered an unwelcome memento of their time together—peculiar reddish brown stains all over the back of his pants.
“I noticed that on the back of my ass there was a big mud stain. There were mud stains from about the middle of my back leg right up to the back of my pocket. There was nowhere I was that I could get mud all over my ass like that,” he insisted. “I wasn’t sittin’ nowhere in mud, all time sittin’ in booths, chairs or, you know, I wasn’t sittin’ outside in the mud. I put them pants on clean that day, that morning. I think the stain came from Richard Clark’s van. Ya know, when I sat in the back on top of the tarp or the tent, or whatever it was that smelled bad, on that Saturday night, April first.”
April 2, 1995
Detectives and other police personnel returned to the Iffrig residence at 9:00 A.M. to resume investigation. A half hour later, Detective Herndon’s pager went off. It was Richard Clark.
“Clark had been instructed by his aunt and his father to call me as soon as possible,” Herndon said. “Clark told me that he was at his aunt’s house and would wait there for me.
“The first thing I noticed when I met him,” said Herndon, “was that Clark had my name and pager number written on his hand. I asked him why he didn’t come to the residence like he was asked to, and he told me that he did not stop because he was low on gas and could not make it out to the house. Then I asked him why he didn’t page me. Clark responded he did not want to hassle with the police. I asked him if I could search his van, and he said it was okay with him, so I took a good look. I didn’t see anything obvious that would belong to Roxanne.”
Herndon said years later, “I admit that I had tunnel vision in that search. I wasn’t looking for trace evidence. I was looking for something more substantial—shoes, clothes, toys—something that belonged to Roxanne. And I didn’t find anything of that nature. I saw two black puppies. There was a small portion of feces on a mattress that was located in the back of the van. The van was also loaded with sleeping bags and camping equipment, which apparently belonged to both Clark and Iffrig.”
In recounting his activities the night of March 31 and on April 1, Richard Clark said that the only time he left the Casey residence during the “party” was when Pat Casey and he went out to Casey’s garage and looked at an airplane that Casey had disassembled.
“Me, Tim, Shawn, and Pat partied until approximately seven-thirty in the morning,” Clark said. “But Shawn’s kid woke up and it was time for us to leave. Tim and I walked back to Tim’s house and I sat on the couch while he said good-bye to his wife and collected his camping gear. Gail Doll’s eight-year-old son, Nicholas, came out of his room and sat on the couch with me,” said Clark. “The door to the girls’ room was shut and Nick was the only kid I seen. Tim and I left and drove to the north Everett area looking for Neila D’alexander, Tim’s mom, who was going to go camping with the rest of us.”
“Richard Clark told us,” recalled Herndon, “that he and Tim Iffrig had planned a camping trip the following morning and that he was to pick up his brother Jimmy Miller, who was now out on the reservation; Jimmy’s girlfriend, Lisa, and Vicki Smith, who was Richard’s aunt. They were also supposed to pick up Tim Iffrig’s mother, Neila. According to Richard, they could not find Neila D’alexander, so they drove to the Indian reservation, where they picked up Vicki Smith, Jimmy Miller, and Lisa Rader, who is Jimmy’s girlfriend. After waiting around at Vicki Smith’s for several hours, all drove to the Everett area in Richard’s van, where they picked up Vicki Smith’s check at Carol Clark’s house on Lombard. They then drove to U.S. Bank on Hewitt and cashed the check. After stopping at Rocky’s Gas and Grocery for beer and gas, Richard drove to the campsite.”
Herndon admitted years later, “I was suspicious of Richard Clark. Everyone was a suspect, and we hadn’t eliminated others, of course. But I had strong suspicions of Clark, and not just because he didn’t show up at the Doll residence like he was supposed to, or just because he didn’t page me. When I ran a check on him, I found out about the incident with Feather Rahier back in 1988. Now that fact wasn’t evidence against him in any way. It also wasn’t any indication that he was involved in the disappearance of Roxanne Doll. It just gave me what you might call stimulus for reasonable suspicion.”
Herndon asked Clark if he would be willing to take a polygraph test concerning the disappearance of Roxanne Doll. “Yeah,” said Clark, “but I promised to help my friend Andy do some landscaping in the Marysville area later this afternoon, but I can do it tomorrow.”
“I asked him how I could contact him if the polygraph examiner was available later in the afternoon, and he didn’t hesitate to tell me that I could contact his aunt Vicki or his father in Marysville, who lives nearby. They could get him a message about the polygraph test.”
A quick conversation with the polygraph test administrator revealed that April 3 actually would be more convenient, since the examiner was going to speak to the parents first. At 11:00 A.M., the detectives returned to the Doll-Iffrig residence, and Kiser took extensive photos, including the interior and exterior of the home. Herndon also took VHS video recordings of the residence and surrounding area.
“If you look at the videotape,” said Herndon, “you’ll see one part where the camera comes around into the girls’ room and Roxanne’s sister is holding a doll that’s almost the same size that she is, and it has lifelike hair. It would be very easy to mistake that doll’s head in