1861
People began settling the area around 1861.
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Clearview is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Snohomish County, Washington, about half an hour north of Seattle. It was laid out on timberland that had belonged to Isaac Cathcart, platted in 1913 and renamed Clearview in 1931 for its view of the mountains. In April 1982 it became the setting for three murders committed by a man who had been in trouble with the law since childhood.
His father was an ex-Marine turned truck driver and a severe alcoholic; his mother worked as a clerk at Sears. He spent two years at the Green Hill Reformatory for boys for theft, and by his own account was using methamphetamine at twelve, heroin at thirteen and LSD more than two hundred times. On 29 October 1970 his father took him to the Edmonds police for stealing the family car, and while at the station he was overheard telephoning someone and telling them to shoot his father. On 3 July 1971 his mother reported him as a runaway, telling police she had given up hope for him and would not have reported him at all but for a court date. The next day he burgled his grandparents' home and stole several guns to sell for a trip to California. He was sent back to Green Hill in July 1971 on auto theft and placed on probation for second-degree burglary. He married in August 1973; on 14 October 1973 he beat his wife and threatened to kill her dog, her mother and her sister. She was pregnant and refused to complain. On 28 June 1974, angry that his three-month-old daughter was crying, he twice threw a butcher knife at her. The marriage ended in divorce on 22 August 1974, with his wife taking full custody.
On 11 December 1974 Renee Wickland, twenty-two, was washing windows outside her home near Clearview with her infant daughter Shanna on the lawn. A tall man ran at her through the yard; she grabbed the baby and ran inside, but he forced the door before she could close it. He took Shanna from her arms, held a knife to the baby's throat and told her to take her clothes off or he would kill the child and mean it. He forced oral sex on her.
Two days later he took a job at Pizza Haven under a false name and left at the end of his first shift with $1,700. On 2 January 1976, armed with a sawn-off shotgun, he burgled an empty house in eastern Washington; the caretaker saw him in a nearby bar afterwards and called the police. Renee testified, as did her neighbour Barbara Hendrickson, who had seen him leaving the house.
The attack ruined Renee's marriage. She and her husband Jack separated but remained friends, and she brought up Shanna alone, working as a beautician and as an accountant for beauty parlours. He reached minimum custody on 14 August 1981, was moved to an honour farm in September and to the Monroe Work Release Facility as a cook in October. On Christmas Day 1981 and again on 4 January 1982 he left work release and raped his ex-wife.
On 24 February 1982 he was transferred to a work release programme in Everett and hired as a landscaper; he committed four infractions in his first thirty days. At some point Jack, Renee's former husband, answered his apartment door on Christmas night to a stranger carrying a wrapped present who wished him a merry Christmas, knocked him out, tied him to a chair, poured petrol over him and set him on fire. Jack survived with severe burns after months in hospital, wearing a rubber suit, and was later killed when his car wrapped round a telephone pole on the way home from his parents.
On 14 April 1982 Renee was at home ill. He drank a six-pack there and her butcher knife disappeared. Neighbours saw a tall man and a car matching his near the Wickland house through the afternoon. He beat, tortured and sexually mutilated her, cut her throat almost through, and waited. When Shanna came home he attacked her in the living room, dragged her into the bedroom to look at her mother's body and cut her throat so deeply that no blood sample could later be taken. He then made himself a snack and sat at the kitchen table. Barbara Hendrickson arrived at 4.20 p.m. to take Renee's temperature and make Shanna some Jell-O; he cut her throat almost severing her head. He refused a urine sample and became disruptive, and Everett police were called. He was patted down and found to be carrying a tyre receipt, a pair of earrings, a dollar bill, a guitar pick, cigarettes and a mace container; a friend identified the earrings as Renee's. The next day police found an earring in his car, seized beer bottles and cans, obtained a search warrant and took evidence from his car and room. A glass in Renee's kitchen carried his bloody finger and palm print. Another work release resident led police to the boat launch where he had dumped a bracelet, three earrings, two necklaces, a piece of pottery and a brass object from the house.
The foreman, Jim Hill, said afterwards that the man had left a trail of evidence a blind man could follow.
In 1990 he sued to have the hangman's identity made public; the judge kept it secret because the hangman was believed to be the only qualified one in the country and would not act otherwise. On 28 May 1994 he refused the fish dinner he had requested as his last meal, was found with a four-inch sharpened metal blade in his cell, refused to leave it, was pepper-sprayed and handcuffed, strapped to a board and carried to the gallows, and took ninety seconds to be hooded. He was pronounced dead six minutes after the trap door opened. Washington had carried out only one judicial hanging before him, in the 1960s.
The house where Renee died was later demolished and its address changed. Renee is buried at Highland Home Cemetery in Jamestown, Stutsman County, North Dakota.