FROG
HOSPITAL – August 26, 2015 – unsubscribe anytime
Murder
on Highway 20
By
Fred Owens
Eben
Berriault shot and killed naval officer Scott Kinkele on Highway 20 in Skagit
County. It was just past midnight on Friday, July 28, 2000. The prosecutor
termed it a “thrill killing.” Berriault was convicted of first degree murder
and is serving a 55-year sentence at Monroe Prison. This story is based on news accounts of the crime
and my personal contact with Eben Berriault. It is not an objective account. I
have known Eben since he was nine-years-old.
I wrote a letter to
Eben Berriault. He's been in prison for fifteen years. I have not contacted him
since the day he got arrested in 2000. I was at his house the day he got
arrested, but I left before the cops came. Eben is somewhat notorious in
Anacortes where he used to live. He was convicted of the murder of Scott Kinkele
one night on Highway 20..... For that crime he was given a 55-year
sentence..... Serving it in Monroe prison....Eben's mother and his wife and his
two children visit him often and they have told me how he is getting along in
prison.... But today I wrote him a letter. He can write back if he wants too.
Or not..... I've known him since he was a blonde-haired nine-year-old boy
playing and running around.... It's a common thing to hear people say this, but
I never expected him to be spending his life in prison.....Why did he do it? To
be honest, I am ashamed and embarrassed to admit that I know such a man. At the
time of his arrest and conviction I kept my mouth shut and would not stand with
him in court. His crime horrified people. His crime horrified me as well and I
wished I had never known him or his family. But I do know them quite well.
Eben and his brother
Seth and I had talked about going fishing in Seth's new boat. We can go out in
the channel and catch some salmon, I told them -- but instead they decided to
run up to Mount Baker and go poaching a deer. That's when they got drunk and on
the way home from the mountain they shot and killed Scott Kinkele..... Why
didn't they go fishing with me? Nothing would have happened. I was a bit of a
Scoutmaster to Eben and his brother and we would have drunk plenty of beers and
broken a few fish and game regulations but nothing more than that.
Rhonda
McLaughlin wrote to me on FB, “I was approximately
10 minutes ahead of this on my first night back to work after having a baby! I
was heading home from LaConner to Anacortes on 20. I still get chills to this
day when I pass the trees on the highway! So senseless!”
State
Highway 20 runs all across Skagit County, from the Cascade Mountain Pass to the
ferry landing in Anacortes. But it was on that stretch of highway past the
Farmhouse Inn and just short of the bridge, where Eben Berriault murdered Scott
Kinkele and left him for dead.
I
have no understanding of why Eben shot Kinkele in the back, but I do understand
about where it happened. That stretch of the highway has no soul. No soul. No
spirit. No life. It is nowhere. No angels, no fairies, no ancestral ghosts.
Only emptiness. The devil comes to earth in places like that. The devil waits
until his people come to play out their evil purpose. Eben comes. His brother
Seth comes driving drunk. Kinkele comes innocently, after stopping to buy gas.
Did Kinkele know he had an appointment with Eben and his shot gun?
The bridge over Swinomish Channel is named
after Duane Berentson, a prominent local politician. The Farmhouse Inn was
established by Torre Dybfest, a popular man who knew how to feed people and
make good money doing that. The train tracks run parallel to the highway and
out to the refineries, but were hardly ever used in 2000. Across the highway
from the Farmhouse Inn was a seed company cleaning station. Across the Duane
Berentson Bridge is the Swinomish Casino, source of new wealth for the tribe.
It
was on that stretch of the highway between the Farmhouse Inn and the bridge
where the crime took place. Not a bad place, but an empty place – so it seemed
to me. That was my own emotional reaction to the crime in July of 2000 – I was
not surprised it happened there.
You
ask why. Why did Eben do it? Why did he pick that car, with that driver, at
that time, on that stretch of the highway. Why?
Eben was not angry,
not as I knew him, but he had this emptiness in him, an empty place in his
psyche, a blank space, vacant and
missing.
In 1983 in Wenatchee,
he was 19 years old and hanging out with Chipper and Bear from the STP family.
Chipper and Bear were very dangerous, violent men and why he was drawn to them
and their people I’ll never know. There was a drunken party around a campfire,
then a fight, then guys came at someone with rocks, then rocks and kicks and
the guy died, then they took his wallet and ran off. Eben was there and he was
arrested for that and they got him to testify against the others in exchange
for “only” a five-year sentence for manslaughter. Since he testified against
the others, he was a marked man in prison society and served all five years in
protective custody, which is very restrictive.
Eben was 19 when he
went to prison and he didn’t do it – kill the guy – but he was there and that
was enough and he wasn’t one to complain and say he got a raw deal. As I said,
he never appeared angry, but there was this empty spot in him.
He was in prison out by
Port Angeles and then for the last year of his sentence he was in Monroe
prison. I remember seeing him the day after he got out. His mom came over to
Mount Vernon to visit us on the farm – Eben and his mom, Eva Anderson, his
brother, Jesse Berriault, his other younger brother Seth Anderson, and his two younger
sisters, Ruby and Grace. They all came to see us at the farm and Eben had just
gotten out of prison. He was in a state of electric shock. It was very strange
to me – his extra-pale skin, his over-built muscles from confinement and
weight-lifting, his super tension, like a five-year wound-up spring.
That was 1988. Eben
lived with his family in Anacortes after that. He met and married a wonderful,
sensible, caring woman – a black woman from
Belize. He really got lucky, to meet and marry her, she was a treasure. It seemed
things were going well, on a steady track. They had two children and Eben
worked construction, not steady but often enough, and drinking his beers at
home and not too many beers. It seemed the bad times were all over, and 12
years passed since he got out of prison in 1988 until that night on Highway 20
when he shot and killed Scott Kinkele.
There was no reason
to kill Kinkele. The prosecuting attorney called it a “thrill killing,” but
that is not the right word. I don’t know the right word for what Eben did.
There is no right word. He shot Kinkele and Kinkele died.
Dylann Roof shot and
killed nine African-American church ladies in Charleston, South Carolina. It
was a crime that shocked the nation, but Roof had a reason – he hated black
people.
Eben didn’t hate
anyone. He wasn’t angry, just empty and vacant enough for a bad spirit to enter
him and take over his soul and get him to fire the weapon. That’s the best I can
come up with. Crime – murder -- is that which does not make sense. Justice is
how we make sense out of a crime. It made sense for the court to give Eben a
life sentence in prison, a fifty-five year sentence to be exact. He belongs in
prison.
I excuse him for the
murder in Wenatchee in 1983 when he was 19. The way you clear him of that crime
is to say the guy would have gotten killed in a brawl whether Eben was there or
not there. Eben was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and got a
conviction for manslaughter. I knew those guys from the STP Family, and you come
near them once and you never come near them again because they were very bad
and violent. Eben didn’t do that. He hung around and ended up in prison.
But I don’t clear him
of the murder on Highway 20. It was all his fault. He shot Kinkele for no reason.
Kinkele was a naval officer, a graduate of Annapolis with everything to live
for, but he died, and the woman he was meant to love and marry never met him,
and the loving children he was meant to have were never born. Scott Kinkele was
too young and his loss rippled across the world. His mother died three years
later, of some medical condition to be sure, but truly of grief and anger over
the loss of her son. Eben’s younger brother
Seth was driving the car that night. Seth was sentenced to 38 years at Walla
Walla prison, but six months into his sentence he hung himself in his cell. So
all those people suffered and died because of what Eben did. He belongs in
prison for life.
His family, his wife
and kids, and his mother, have always stood by him and visit him often.
Frog
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friends, so that we can expand the Frog Hospital family.
Thank you very much.
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Fred Owens
1105 Veronica Springs RD
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
