More than 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson set pen to paper to write “The Conduct of Life,” a series of essays paired with poems, and based on lectures he had given. The goal of “The Conduct of Life” was to provide a lesson in how we, as humans, should live our lives and philosophies we should abide by.
One of the better known quotes from the book, a rumination on the concept of luck, reads as follows:
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
The quote is many times paraphrased as “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances. Real men believe in cause and effect.” In this day and age, we understand the sentiment in the context of success. We know better than to wait on the lottery to bring us wealth. We know to keep our heads down, keep working hard, until we reap the rewards of our effort. Put more simply, we often make our own luck.
However, every one of us has experienced one of those moments that makes you say “Oh My God,” and ponder our own luck. When a thunderstorm rolls in on a stormy summer night, lightning lights up the sky and heavy winds hiss like an angry serpent across the roof over our head, we hope that we will get lucky. And when that bitter wind blows a heavy tree through our neighbor’s roof to become a fixture in their bedroom and not ours, we count ourselves lucky.
When we see a fatal car accident on the nightly news, at an intersection we passed through not ten minutes earlier, we think “That could have been me,” and we give thanks for our good fortune.
We consider it good luck.
Unfortunately for our neighbor, asleep in his bed and about to experience his final, permanent slumber, or a pedestrian about to cross a familiar intersection in that one fateful moment, it is bad luck. Sure, someone could say, “He should have taken down that tree before it got dangerous,” or “She should have taken more time to look both ways,” but only the most cynical, negative souls among us would seek out a reason to blame a person for going about their everyday life, only to meet an untimely end.
Anna Marie Hlavka
In July of 1979, Anna Hlavka was barely 20 years old. She graduated from Sunset High School in Beaverton only two years earlier and spent some time in Canada, in British Columbia, where she had family, before returning to Oregon.
From her Portland apartment in the Tudor Arms on the corner of NW Couch Street and 18th, Anna could walk to and from work at the McDonalds less than a block away. On Tuesday, July 24th, 1979, Anna returned alone to her apartment, and it was there her 18-year-old sister found her.
From KATU2, Portland:
[Soundclip: David Jackson, Channel 2 News]
Anna Marie Hlavka lived here in the Tudor Arms Apartments on Northwest 18th Street in Portland. She was a 1977 graduate of Sunset High School and had lived in Oregon for several months now after moving back to the Northwest from Canada.
Few people knew the young woman well. She was shy and lived in the apartment with her 18 year old sister Roseanna. The apartment manager Mrs. Irma Dykmann told me that Anna was a model tenant, if anything the least likely person imaginable as a murder victim.
She shared her apartment on occasion with her boyfriend. He had been fishing at the time of the murder last night.
Ms. Hlavka’s apartment was only one block behind the McDonald’s restaurant on West Burnside and 18th. She had worked there for several weeks. I spoke with the manager of the restaurant who agreed that the young woman was a lovely, quiet and polite employee. He had only known her for a few days but had gotten a positive impression.
Police are baffled by this case. There are no clues so far and the medical examiner’s office is currently performing an autopsy. Fingerprints are being taken but that may not lead to much, many people have been in the apartment in the last few months. Police are conducting an intensive investigation because there are so few clues. It appears to be to work in a single unknown attacker and so far there has been no indication of sexual abuse. The search for her killer is continuing. In Northwest Portland, this is David Jackson reporting for Channel 2 News.
Anna Marie Hlavka, like most 20 year olds, was only getting going in life, but her time was cut short. The report from Channel 2 came a day after her murder, when very little was known. To this day, we do not know much more about the circumstances of her murder except that there was no sign of forced entry, and Anna had been sexually assaulted before being strangled with the electrical cord from her clock radio.
Portland Police would come up virtually empty in the search for Anna Hlavka’s murderer, and it would be decades before a killer from clear across the country, a predator known as “The Animal,” became their prime suspect.
Lake Hawkins, Texas
Texas is often depicted in TV and the movies in the same way–as an expansive, arid spot on the southern plains, with oil rigs see-sawing endlessly and armadillos trying to make it across lonely highways alive. It was the same impression I’d always had until I moved there in 2000. I quickly discovered East Texas is not at all what you see in the movies.
Picture a landscape dominated by collective features known as the Piney Woods, a forested region of pines, hickory and oak trees, a green mossy undergrowth fed by ample moisture, and bayou features near lakes and rivers where magnolias grow in the acid soil.
There’s no firm consensus on where East Texas begins, but when you find yourself in a swampy, green, humid landscape, more like Louisiana than Texas, you know where you are.
When I lived in Smith County, I found it hot, humid and beautiful, although when I commented on the humidity, I was most often answered with “Where you from?” because to the locals, it’s simply another day. They don’t talk about it.
And that’s not all they don’t talk about. As we once watched the sun set over a lake near Tyler, a friend of mine said, “We better go. We don’t want to be out here after dark,” because although the events of the summer of 1986 have faded from memory for many, it was a tale she remembered. It’s not the kind of thing you talk about in polite company, because usually everything is perfectly fine. You have nothing to be afraid of. But in 1986, the coin toss between good luck and bad came up tails for three young people, killed by a man who would eventually spark what was then the largest manhunt ever in Texas.
Suzanne Harrison, Bryan Boone, and Gena Turner
Lake Hawkins is in Wood County, at roughly a midpoint between two of the larger cities in the region, Tyler and Longview, Texas, and it’s exactly the kind of place where you’d go to park your RV, walk your dog, or hang out with friends and drink a beer.
Suzanne Harrison, Bryan Boone and Gena Turner were 18, 19, and 20 years old respectively on May 4th, 1986, a Sunday, and none of them made it home that night. The next day, Suzanne Harrison’s body was found on Barnwell Mountain in neighboring Upshur County, north of Gilmer. She had been strangled and sexually assaulted and had three traumatic blows to the head from a blunt object.
The authorities solicited for tips and area residents offered rewards for information on the murder of the beloeved teenager and her two missing friends, and the tips rolled in. On Sunday night at about the same time Suzanne, Bryan and Gena went missing, a couple reported a man tried to rob them at gunpoint near Lake Hawkins. He demanded money, but they were able to convince the man that they didn’t have any. He took a single beer from them and allowed them to drive away. The couple reported the incident to police and gave a description of his vehicle–a blue and white Ford Bronco. Upon further investigation, law enforcement discovered Bryan Boone’s pickup truck only a half mile from the spot where the couple reported the unknown man had tried to rob them.
About 3:30 pm on Tuesday police jailed a man when a Hainesville resident reported spotting a Blue and White Bronco that matched the description of the vehicles used by the man in the Lake Hawkins robbery. The police called the couple to the Wood County Correctional Center about a half-hour later and they positively identified the Bronco and picked their attempted robber out of a photo lineup.
His name was Jerry Walter McFadden, and he had a rap sheet for sexual assault.
McFadden was a big, bearded, unkempt man, described by journalist Jacque Hilburn-Simmons as a scruffy man with wild-hair and Satanic tattoos. To me, he looked something like Dog the Bounty Hunter without the money or fashion sense. The authorities, in keeping with established protocol, questioned McFadden only about his attempt to rob the couple at Hawkins Lake initially, but as evidence mounted, the case for McFadden as the killer and kidnapper of the Hawkins trio grew more damning.
About 11:15 am the following Saturday, Sheriff’s deputies found two unidentified bodies in a ditch right off FM1649, three miles north of Ore City. They were later identified as Bryan Boone and Gena Turner. Both had been shot in the head.
McFadden was bound over for trial and held at the County jail, which in those days was on the fifth floor of the Courthouse in Gilmer. The jail had a maximum capacity of 18, and from his cell, McFadden could overlook the town square and the parking lot.
McFadden’s former jailer, Rosalie Williams Turner, gave an interview about McFadden to the Tyler Morning Telegraph in 2016.
“McFadden was very cooperative, he wasn’t belligerent, he didn’t speak until spoken to,” she said.
Although McFadden seemed docile, the jail employees knew better than to let their guard down. Like most men accused of crimes like Jerry McFadden’s, he had a problem with authority.
In early July, McFadden had been incarcerated less than two months and was already getting itchy. On July 9th, when McFadden asked to use the phone, nobody was available to escort him, and he was kept waiting for hours. Rosalie showed up for her afternoon shift to discover McFadden was seething with anger.
In an effort to defuse the situation, Rosalie called the Sergeant at Arms, Kenneth Mayfield, to escort McFadden to the phone, and that’s when things went south.
“I noticed the officer was walking in front of McFadden. At that point, I knew something wasn’t right… we’d been taught not to walk in front of inmates.“
In her interview with the Tyler Morning Telegraph, Rosalie Williams Turner described witnessing what happened next as though in slow motion.
“I saw McFadden raise up his right arm… He had a metal object and he started hitting the officer on the head.“
McFadden had pried loose a piece of metal window frame in his cell and used it to bludgeon Mayfield. The officer went down hard, and before long, McFadden had handcuffed and locked the Sergeant at Arms and another female jailer, Stacy Mullinix, in his cell. He took Rosalie captive and discovered the injured officer had breached protocol by leaving his weapon in an unlocked gun safe. McFadden had a cop’s gun.
In short order, McFadden had led Rosie, as he called her, to the parking lot and commandeered her car, a Datsun 280 Z. However, he quickly discovered he didn’t know how to drive the car, because it was what they call in Texas a “standard”–what some people in other parts of the country call a stickshift. The car didn’t have an automatic transmission.
McFadden tried to back the car out of the parking spot, but couldn’t accomplish the task. The sports car bucked and jerked. Frustrated, McFadden shouted, frantic.
“What the hell is wrong with your car?” he said.
McFadden’s getaway might have been over before he got out of the parking lot. In desperation, he pulled Rosalie into his lap…
“Get over here,” he said.
Rosalie’s captor instructed her to get the car moving, and once the car was out of the parking space and headed down the road, he shoved his jailer back into the passenger’s seat and took off for familiar territory at breakneck speed. Rosalie would later tell the Tyler Morning Telegraph that on the drive, McFadden repeatedly denied his crimes.
“They are trying to give me the needle for something I didn’t do. I didn’t commit those crimes they are accusing me of!“
The authorities were in hot pursuit, and Rosalie would later say she could hear a helicopter searching for them.
“They’re looking for us,” he said.
McFadden crashed the car into some trees and took off on foot with Rosalie in tow. He eventually found an abandoned boxcar near Big Sandy, Texas, a town he was familiar with since he once lived there, and his mom worked at a gas station in town. McFadden, barefoot and bloodied, forced Rosalie into the boxcar, both of them wiped out from their flight.
The heat in the unventilated boxcar was overpowering and Rosalie dozed off. When she awoke, it was dark and she was queasy and parched from thirst. She began to panic, and McFadden tried to calm her down, to no avail. She asked for water, and surprisingly, McFadden agreed to get her some.
He left the boxcar to look for water but a neighborhood dog, surely a very good boy, saw him and attacked, barking furiously and biting at McFadden.
Rosie knew this was her chance. She ran for a nearby house as McFadden struggled with the dog, but when she knocked, pounded on the door, nobody answered. Frantic, she opened the unlocked door and barged right into the living room where a young boy had been watching a TV report about the manhunt. It would later be reported he yelled something to the effect of “Mom, Dad, the lady on TV is in our house!”
The couple alerted the authorities. Rosie was safe, but by the time the police reached the boxcar, McFadden was gone–he was still on the loose.
The search for McFadden is commonly referred to as the largest ever in Texas and is sometimes still referred to as “The Big Sandy Manhunt.” In journalist Jacque Hilburn-Simmons’ piece, she describes the search as involving 50 different law enforcement agencies involving as many as 1,200 law enforcement officials, a number equal to the total population of Big Sandy.
McFadden holed up in an abandoned house and the search stretched on, throughout the night, an entire day, and into the darkness again. Law enforcement suspected McFadden had not fled, but was hiding in Big Sandy, and when an officer spotted movement, a shadowy figure behind the darkened window of an unoccupied home, they moved in.
By this time, McFadden was absolutely out of gas… he’d been on the run from jail for m ore than 48 hours, he had no shoes or pants, and he was bloody, hungry and beaten. When the police made entry into the abandoned home, McFadden immediately called out to them.
“Here’s the gun … it’s me.“
The predator had become the prey, and he was ready to give up. “Who?” they asked, and “The Animal” answered.
“McFadden,” he said.
Jerry Walter McFadden was arrested, again. The manhunt was over. In an ironic twist, the officers who went to school with Suzanne Harrison and had dedicated themselves to hunting Jerry McFadden now had to protect the killer. The people of East Texas were celebrating his recapture and were ready to take matters into their own hands… they would do him harm if they caught up with him. 52 hours after his jailbreak, Jerry McFadden was once again behind bars.
The End for Jerry McFadden
The following month, in August of 1986, Jerry McFadden was sentenced to life in prison for his kidnapping of Rosalie Williams Turner an d escape. By July of 1987, he had been convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of young Suzanne Harrison.
I wouldn’t be telling you the complete tale if I didn’t mention that McFadden’s representation tried every trick in the book to appeal his death sentence. Appeals for Habeas relief and claims that the judge issued incomplete or incorrect directions to the jury at sentencing. None of it worked.
Jerry McFadden was executed in Huntsville, Texas in 1999.
There are still those who would have you believe that McFadden’s guilt wasn’t certain; that the man with a record of prior sexual assaults, identified by witnesses in a robbery, was a scapegoat, and that all those substantiating facts… the location of Bryan Boone’s truck and the description of McFadden’s Bronco, were all trumped-up nonsense.
And those people might have been able to make a convincing-if-implausible argument for about 20 years after McFadden’s execution in 1999.
But, let’s go back to that unsolved murder from Portland in 1979. The cruel, heinous killing of 20-year-old Anna Marie Hlavka. In 2019, the Portland Police held a press conference to announce a major break in her murder. You know where this is going, right?
The Press Conference
[soundclip: Detective Meredith Hopper, Cold Case Detective, Portland Homicide]
Good morning my name is Meredith Hopper and I’m a detective with the Portland Police Bureau’s cold case homicide unit, and I’m here today to talk about the resolution of the homicide case of Anna Marie Hlavka.
Anna was murdered on July 24th, 1979. Anna lived in Northwest Portland in the area of 18th and Couch. Anna actually worked at the McDonald’s that was located about 19th and Burnside.
Anna returned from work after her shift at McDonald’s about 4 o’clock in the afternoon. She was alone in the apartment and her sister Roseanne unfortunately discovered her deceased several hours later. The original detectives, one of which is with us today, Detective Carrie Taylor, worked this case for many months and years trying to develop leads. Initially there were quite a few leads that they developed. They collected fingerprints, blood evidence, they did polygraph tests and so forth trying to discover her killer. Ultimately though, the case went cold.
In 2009 one of our retired detective volunteers, retired Detective Dennis Baker submitted a bunch of physical evidence to be analyzed by the Oregon State Police Crime lab.
Luckily for us doctor Dr Janelle Moore discovered an unknown DNA profile which we believed to be the suspect. In 2012 I was assigned to investigate this case. I investigated for approximately 6 years. I aggressively pursued suspects. We submitted about eight different DNA profiles, all of which I was certain was going to be the suspect, and every time Dr. Moore would tell me “Nope, that’s not the one.”
So actually Detective McGuire, my partner on this case, and I talked with the Hlavka family in 2016. It’s something unusual that we did, and I wanted to assure them that we were not gonna forget Anna Marie. Up to that point we had no one else to develop any DNA evidence from, but I assured her that we would continue to pursue different technology that was hopefully going to come available in the future.
In the spring of 2018, California law enforcement arrested the Golden State Killer. My colleagues and I are always interested in Cold Case homicides that are solved, so we were researching the way they did it. And the way they did it was through forensic genetic genealogy. Essentially the DNA profile they have from crime scenes, they were given to Parabon Nanolabs, they did the analysis and their forensic genetic genealogist made the connection through family trees of who the killer was. At cold case we were very excited by this, but like all things, old evidence tends to degrade so we weren’t sure if our evidence would be eligible for that type of testing. I contacted Dr. Moore, she put her in touch with the Parabon lab staff and they determined it would be a good fit for this type of testing.
We waited for about three months, they returned some information to us that there was potentially a solvability rate using this technique about maybe from 1 to 10 this one was about a 4. We told ’em to proceed because really at this point, we didn’t have much else to go on and this was the best technology we had at the time. In October of this year we received information from the Parabon staff and we spoke with the actual forensic genealogist that did the work. She talked to us for about an hour, briefed us on the intimate details of forensic genealogy and how she made this connection. The Parabon Nanolabs people and the forensic genealogist group identified the suspect in this murder as Jerry Walter McFadden and I believe he was born 3/28 of 48.
The assembled crowd of Portland reporters and family members knew very little about Jerry McFadden. His memory was largely faded to all but the most informed and the crimes which had made him infamous had occurred across the country, in a local news arena beyond the attention of most of Portland. It was like a bolt out of the blue. Jerr y McFadden had never been on the radar for Anna Hlavka’s murder. Forensic Genealogy solved another case; pointed the finger at another killer.
McFadden was a multiple convicted killer and rapist out of the state of Texas. McFadden was ultimately executed by the state of Texas in October of 1999.
Detective Hopper and Detective McGuire visited McFadden’s relatives in Texas and they willingly gave DNA samples. The findings confirmed what they suspected. Jerry McFadden murdered Anna Marie Hlavka in Portland in 1979, seven years before he kidnapped and killed Suzanne Harrison, Bryan Boone, and Genea Turner.
In the Press Conference, the Portland police would later say they were unable to uncover any details about McFadden’s presence in Portland in 1979, and they asked the public to come forward if they recognized McFadden or had any details about what he had been doing there. Later stories in the press would purport that McFadden had traveled to the Pacific Northwest with an acquaintance in 1979, but I was unable to dig up the details on that.
Bad Luck
We know virtually nothing about how The Animal carried out his attack on Anna Hlavka… did he wait for her in her apartment at the Tudor Arms? Did he see her leaving McDonalds and follow her home? We don’t know. But once again, forensic genealogy (or genetic genealogy if you prefer) has identified a killer in a cold case that would have otherwise remained unsolved. And there can be no doubt that Anna Marie Hlavka had very bad luck when she crossed paths with Jerry McFadden in 1979. Suzanne, Bryan, and Gena, minding their own business at a Texas lake in 1986… they also had the very bad luck of encountering a mad man.
Jerry McFadden, if Texas had not sentenced him to death and meted out punishment to him in 1999, and Portland Police had not identified him through genealogy, would no doubt be in prison today, claiming innocence, and complaining about his bad luck–not knowing how to drive Rosalie Williams Turner’s car. Not being able to find a pair of shoes or pants that fit when he made his escape. Being attacked by a neighborhood dog.
Jerry McFadden would be proclaiming his innocence, playing the victim despite his guilt, but in this case, we know better. DNA tells us so. Jerry McFadden would call it bad luck, but we call it karma.
If you enjoy Tales of True Crime, please review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And lock your doors. I’ll talk to you again in two weeks.
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For transcripts, sources, credits, and some occasional cat pictures, follow me on Twitter at True Crime Troy.
[music]
- An Upsetting Theme by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/3362-an-upsetting-theme
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Rising Tide by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5027-rising-tide
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ - Rising Tide (faster) by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5028-rising-tide-faster-
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Additional Music used via Extended License
Feature image by Donald Tong, Pexels.com
[Sources]
- Jerry Walter McFadden Wikipedia
- A Town in Terror Part, Tyler Morning Telegraph, April 29, 2016
- Anna Marie Hlavka, KATU2 TV/Portland, 1979: Police: DNA, forensic genealogy helps solve 40-year-old homicide of Portland woman
- Crime Spree, Longview-News Journal, May 10, 1986
- ET Officers Continuing Hawkins Investigations, Tyler Morning Telegraph, May 9th, 1986
- Ore City Man Held in Hawkins, Tyler Courier Times, May 7th, 1986
- Bodies may be missing couple, Odessa American, May 11th, 1986
- Jerry Mcfadden, Petitioner-appellant, v. Gary L. Johnson, Director, Texas Department of Criminaljustice, Institutional Division, Respondent-appellee, 166 F.3d 757 (5th Cir. 1999)
