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had filled out a fifteen-page application to the FBI, just as he had
told everyone, and it was dated February 19, six days before he killed
Lori. But he had never submitted it. Of course Walt Buckley knew that
the FBI wouldn't hire him. He had no college degree in accounting. He
hadn't been going to college for two years. Buckley continued his
confession, describing the house of cards that had just grown higher and
higher until it was bound to tumble. It may have been on the last night
of her life that Lori Buckley finally discovered Walt had dropped out of
school. There would be no degree for Walt, she would not be able to stop
teaching, and there would be no babies. Worst of all, she discovered
that the man she trusted implicitly had been lying to her for years.
Buckley said Lori had been angry at him that Tuesday night when she
walked into the living room and found him "wasting his time watching
television." That's how it had started, at least in Walt Buckley's
memory. The argument had been over television. He had fallen asleep on
the couch watching the set, and she had turned it off and called him a
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"rotten whore." When he had fallen asleep, Lori had been sewing. He
wasn't sure what made her so angry. How long she had known the truth was
debatable. It must have been a sickening shock for her to discover that
all her plans had evaporated. They were behind in their bills and she
wondered where all the money had gone. She had bragged to everyone about
how well Walt was doing in college, she had even been planning a party
for his graduation. Walt said that Lori had been furious with him angry
enough to threaten to leave their home at three in the morning and go to
her mother's house. When he walked into their bedroom, she had been
slipping on her shirt. "When she told me she was going to her mom's
house, I picked up the quart bottle and hit her until it broke."
"What kind of bottle?" Byrnes asked.
"I hit her with a Tab or Safeway Diet Coke bottle."
He wasn't sure just what kind of bottle it was. He said he recalled only
that it was a clear quart bottle. "I don't remember if the bottle broke
the first time I hit her or not." He did remember that Lori had been
sitting on the bed, and the bottle had been on the dresser. "She was mad
and wanted me to stop watching TV and go back to school. I didn't want
to disappoint her. I got mad and hit her. I put pillows over her to stop
the bleeding. Blood was everywhere." Buckley said he had carried Lori
and the stained bedclothes out to the car and headed out of town. But he
was sure he heard her moan when they were driving on Cherry Avenue. He
said he stopped in a parking lot, but when he checked her, she was dead.
He knew he couldn't go home, so he had headed toward the forest in Polk
County. He had planned to leave both Lori's body and the bedding deep
among the fir trees. "I couldn't leave her there," he said regretfully.
Instead, he said he had dumped all the bedding and some bags with the
broken bottles near Buell, Oregon. But he couldn't bring himself to
leave his wife's body there or in the river. Buckley said he couldn't
face what he'd done and that he had taken a bottle and tried to kill
himself. But he didn't have the nerve. And so he had driven farther and
staged an automobile accident, deliberately driving his car off the road
and over the embankment. The windshield had not broken in the accident,
so Buckley said he had broken it himself. Then he had lifted his wife's
body and positioned it near the car.
After that, he had crawled up to the road. He admitted he had told the
troopers that he had fallen asleep at the wheel. "Had you been drinking
taking drugs?" Jim Byrnes asked.
Buckley shook his head. "I only had one drink all day. I've never taken
speed or barbiturates." He had no excuse for killing his wife, not
really. He said he had no medical problems, and he had never suffered
from blackoutshe just knew there had been an argument. Jim Byrnes
arrested Buckley at 8:25 P.M a guard was The Highway Accident placed
outside his hospital room for the night until he could be returned to
the Marion County Jail. Part of the puzzle was solved. Lori Buckley's
killer was under arrest, but the investigation wasn't over. The question
of why Walt Buckley had struck out at Lori so violently bothered the
detectives. Dave Kominek attended Lori's autopsy. State Medical Examiner
Dr. William Brady and Dr. Joseph Much, the Marion County Medical
Examiner, performed the postmortem exam. Lori Buckley had suffered a
number of deep, gouging wounds to her scalp, forehead, neck, nose, and
shoulders and left upper back. There were no wounds below her breasts
except for defense wounds on her hands and arms where she had tried
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valiantly to fend off the cutting edges of the broken bottle. Lori would
have been left terribly scarred from these wounds and she would have
lost a great deal of blood, but, according to Dr. Brady, she would not
have died. None of the bottle wounds were fatal. Death had come from
suffocation or asphyxiation, but not from manual strangulation. The
hyoid bone at the very back of her throat was not cracked and there were
no finger or ligature marks on her throat. It was more likely that
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