Story by Adrian Black
Illustration by Maggie Brees
The telephone rang just before 7 a.m. on a Saturday. Detective Bill Kennedy didn’t expect a call from the captain. He damn sure didn’t expect that in less than nine hours, he would find his partner dead.
For Kennedy, it was a day that would rival any story in the film noir tradition of American cinema. The tempestuous black-and-white 1941 film The Maltese Falcon handed audiences a story in which the death of a detective’s partner was central to the plot. It was among the first of many works in a genre preoccupied with the dark underbelly of society. Through the musings of heavy-handed antihero detectives and the antics of toxic femme fatales, these tales of conspiracy, lust, and murder dominated Hollywood for more than 15 years. Yet Kennedy’s loss was no work of fiction. It was April 11, 1975, and his partner, Detective Roy Dirks, had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Traveling on a logging road near the Blue River Reservoir at the base of Oregon’s Cascade Range, Dirks took a wrong turn. He was there to canvass for witnesses in a cocaine-related drowning and instead came across Norman “Snake” Brooks and his girlfriend, Belinda Lederer. Unlike the cosmopolitan femme fatale of classic noir, Lederer was one of at least 18 women who lived in a commune with Brooks. “Brooks was something like Charles Manson,” Kennedy says, who recalls him as a manipulative sociopath.
Dirks encountered Brooks and Lederer on a landing near the reservoir’s dam where they managed to get the jump on him. Lederer shot and killed Dirks, then dumped his body into a gully. As the two fled the scene, the van they were driving blew a tire and the pair took off on foot. They had gotten away.
As Kennedy surveyed the crime scene, he wondered what the hell he’d gotten into. Dirks’ death weighed on him, but he pressed on, remembering that police work was in his blood.
A native of Portland, Oregon, Kennedy had always aspired to follow in the footsteps of his father, brother, and uncle, who had all worked in law enforcement. He moved to Eugene in 1966, and at 21 years old became the youngest deputy in the Lane County Sheriff’s Department (LCSD). After working traffic and narcotics for years, Kennedy earned the rank of detective in 1973 and entered the world of plain clothes and unmarked cars. He recalls one of the first cases he worked with Dirks: “Roy had a tip about some Quaaludes coming into the Eugene airport. We got there. We opened up the suitcase, and there they were,” says Kennedy, who conducted endless stakeouts with Dirks. Kennedy passed the time with diligence, much like the ubiquitous noir detective posted in a vehicle with a toothpick in his mouth and binoculars ready on the dashboard. “It’s fun when you catch the guy, but [sometimes] you can wait 21 hours for that to happen,” he says.
Dirks’s murderers were eventually apprehended,
but Kennedy grew frustrated when Lederer served only ten years for manslaughter and Brooks served a mere five for obstruction of justice. He felt their sentences had been reduced because of weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. “We hadn’t had that many homicides of that nature, especially involving an officer,” Kennedy says. “I wrote a report to the captain and said we needed a program for better expertise in homicide.” In the summer of 1976, Kennedy’s captain sent him for special training in the popular noir setting of Los Angeles to gain experience in high-level investigative techniques.
“I worked robbery/homicide out of Rampart Division,” says Kennedy, who was impressed with their expert forensic procedures. The raucous West LA area Rampart patrolled was known for handling celebrity murders and organized crime—cases the film industry recreated in movies such as the 1950 classic Sunset Blvd., which opens with a Hollywood screenwriter found dead in a swimming pool. LA was a whole new world for Kennedy. “The homicide rate was incredible,” he says. “The autopsy room was busy almost all the time.”
The LA beat taught Kennedy how to handle more work, better and faster. Kennedy learned to index and categorize witnesses and to tackle unsolved homicides, known as cold cases. “The Black Dahlia murder of 1947 is still being reviewed every six months,” he says. Investigators of this LA slaying nicknamed the victim based on The Blue Dahlia, a noir film that had been released only eight months earlier.
In 1981, Kennedy was assigned to investigate serial killer Randy Steven Kraft, who is believed to have murdered as many as 67 people along Interstate 5. Kraft’s first victim that same year, a Washington teen hitchhiking to California named Michael Cluck, was discovered dead near Goshen, Oregon. “Kraft took him to the county dump and beat him with a tire iron,” Kennedy says. “There was so much blood at the scene that an outline had formed around Kraft’s vehicle.”
Kraft’s pattern was to drug transient young men with Valium and kill them during or after a combination of binding, bludgeoning, strangulation, and sexual abuse. Kraft also kept trophies of his victims. For two years, Kennedy devoted himself to searching for clues, phoning authorities in California to compare the killer’s modus operandi (method of operation) with homicides in Oregon, six of which were ultimately linked to Kraft.
“Bill came up in a time when you had to do your own thinking. You barely had forensics. There were no cell phones and computers to track people,” says Marino Underwood, a former co-worker of Kennedy’s in the Lane Interagency Narcotics Team. Kennedy’s hard work ultimately paid off in 1983 when he was permitted to participate in a search of Kraft’s home in Long Beach, California. It was there, in Kraft’s “trophy room,” that Kennedy found hard evidence linking Kraft to Cluck’s murder: “We found a shaving kit. There was a razor and some cologne inside. We peeled off this piece of black tape, and ‘Michael Cluck’ was written in permanent marker,” he says.
When it came time to retire in 1995, Kennedy welcomed the change. After investigating crimes against persons for 29 years at the LCSD, Kennedy had seen enough sinister deeds to just walk away— or so he thought. The itch to confront criminals got the best of him, and two years later, he formed Kennedy & Associates Consulting Investigations and became a private investigator in Eugene.
Had he evaluated his life for cinematic value, Kennedy would have seen himself as a product of his generation. The bulk of Kennedy’s detective work took place in the 1970s, during a time when film noir slumbered among serial network television staples like Colombo, Barnaby Jones, or Kennedy’s favorite, The Rockford Files. Far from donning the fedora and trench coat of recurring noir sleuth Mike Hammer, Kennedy says, “I wore suits; I never wore a hat. That was already over in the 1950s.”
Film noir’s popularity had dissipated by 1958, but like Kennedy, the genre never really retired. By the 1980s, as Randy Kraft stalked the I-5 corridor and Kennedy worked robberies and homicides ad nauseam, Michael Mann’s Thief and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet breathed new life into macabre crime film. By 1997, as Kennedy was beginning anew as a private investigator, acclaimed films like LA Confidential began securing the longevity of expressing the dregs of society in Technicolor. But Kennedy’s new cases have no blockbuster allure. Burdened by decades of crossing police tape, these days he focuses on civil work—witness location, debt collection, and insurance claims.
Despite the new focus of his work, Kennedy volunteers for a private agency working cold cases in his spare time. Like Columbo’s nagging catchphrase, “Just one more thing,” Kennedy can’t let murder be. What often drives him is his past. He still thinks about his old partner Roy Dirks and knows it could just as easily have been him. For Kennedy, the evil men do never ends in 90 minutes.
 

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Kyle McKee