Police wonder what else killer knows

Bradley Steckman appeared weary as he shuffled away from the Kootenai County Courthouse on Tuesday afternoon, his gait affected by shackles at his ankles, wrists and waist. Steckman, in a sense, was also bearing a chain of death, having confessed in recent years to two murders that had stymied police in Washington and Idaho for years.

Now police would love to find out if Steckman knows anything about a third unsolved murder in Kootenai County and the fates of two women and a child who have not been seen or heard from since 1999.

As he shuffled away from court, the 36-year-old former Clarkston man had just been sentenced to life in prison — with parole possible after 15 years — as part of a plea agreement that revealed a Post Falls woman, found floating in a backyard hot tub in 1998, was electrocuted and drowned in a scheme to snag a $500,000 payoff on an insurance policy.

Steckman is already serving 18 years in Washington after pleading guilty to the suffocation of an 89-year-old Pullman woman killed during a 1996 jewel heist in her home. It took Pullman police four years before they could connect Steckman, once called the “gentleman robber,” to the murder of Dorothy Martin.

It took nearly five years to link Steckman to the 1998 death of Barbara Loesch. The demise of the 53-year-old Loesch, found floating in a backyard hot tub, had been ruled an accidental death even though every police officer who viewed the scene had a strong hunch otherwise, Lt. Greg McLean of the Post Falls police said Tuesday. There was a TV in the hot tub, but the TV was unplugged.

“People on the scene that day … we were not comfortable with the layout of the crime scene from day one,” McLean said. “Post Falls does not get a lot of homicides, but this one was screaming. The more we looked, and the more we deciphered, the more it was not adding up. That’s why we never let up on it.”

There was also the unsolved 1995 death of Barbara Loesch’s husband Gary, shot in the head as he delivered newspapers by car around Post Falls. Despite a $5,000 reward offered by The Spokesman-Review, no one has ever been arrested in connection with Gary Loesch’s death.

Kootenai County sheriff’s detective, Sgt. Brad Maskell, has reopened the investigation into the Gary Loesch killing, but the investigation has been in limbo as prosecutors and Steckman hammered out a plea bargain in the Barbara Loesch death.

Prosecutors agreed to the plea bargain — in which Steckman’s Idaho sentence runs concurrently with his Washington sentence — because “The state had nothing to solve Mrs. Loesch’s homicide,” without Steckman coming forward to confess while he was in a Spokane-area prison, Lansing Haynes, chief deputy prosecutor, said. “The status of the investigation was no leads, no nothing until Mr. Steckman got hold of the Post Falls Police Department.”

Steckman told police he lured Barbara Loesch into the hot tub to watch television, that he stuck a pencil in the back of the set to bypass the electrocution safeguards and had asked an accomplice to salt the hot tub with sea salt to improve the conductivity of the water.

Now, McLean said he is searching for Tina Loesch, beneficiary of her mother’s $500,000 insurance policy. Tina Loesch and her companion Skye Hanson have not been seen for five years. McLean believes Tina Loesch is dead. He wonders if the same fate has befallen her son, Christopher, who would be about 13-years-old now, he said. The Post Falls detective is scouring national data bases for missing and exploited children to try and find some trace of Christopher. He has placed Tina Loesch’s dental records on a national crime computer hoping that “if there is a Jane Doe somewhere out there, it may be matched as her,” McLean said.

Court documents show Steckman has said he received $1,000 for the killing of Dorothy Martin and was promised $10,000 to kill Barbara Loesch.

“Brad never did see the $10,000. I think that’s why he cooperated,” McLean said.

“I think he felt it was probably in his best interest to come forward and tell his side. I think he realized we and the county were not going to give up.”

In recent months, Steckman has, according to Kootenai County Jail staffers, “emphatically refused” two requests to be interviewed.