Auction at killer’s lair draws curious

DAVENPORT – The possessions of a brutal killer were sold at public auction Tuesday at a decaying Cold War missile silo where a state tax auditor was shot and dismembered 28 months ago.

An estimated 350 people, most of them driving pickups, converged on the former home of the late Ralph H. Benson and packed away everything from broken-down furniture to rusty tools, glassware, telephone wire and boxes of chain.

An auctioneer’s staccato voice rippled through a stiff wind as the curious and bargain hunters milled about or stood with their hands in their pockets and gawked.

The auction was complete with portable toilets and coffee and cheeseburgers for sale at a trailer towed in for the event.

Some who showed up, simply looking for farm-auction bargains, had no clue they were standing on the site of what had been one of the area’s most unusual crime scenes.

The 64-year-old murderer died Sept. 22 at the Monroe State Reformatory, where he had begun serving a 32-year prison sentence for the June 2002 murder of state Department of Licensing employee Roger Erdman of Spokane.

The state employee was ambushed and shot after he went to Benson’s missile silo, five miles south of Davenport, to audit the long-haul trucker’s books. His logs ultimately showed Benson owed the state $6,000 in delinquent fuel taxes.

A jury convicted Benson of first-degree murder last November after being taken early that month to the silo for a flashlight-and-face-mask inspection of the crime scene.

One of the jurors, Shari Williams, of Odessa, was among those who showed up for Tuesday’s sale.

“I just had to come back and see it again,” said Williams, a hardware store clerk and “true crime” junkie who was joined by friends Wendy Evans and Jayme Haptonstall, who both also live in Lincoln County.

“Creepy,” Haptonstall said of the scene.

Evans said she “got the day off work just to come here. I was kind of hoping Ann Rule was going to be here,” she said, referring to one of her favorite true-crime writers.

Williams left empty-handed, but said she enjoyed showing the crime scene to her two friends.

“I’ve been telling them what this place was like, but you just have to see it to get the feel,” the former juror said.

“It’s sure been cleaned up a lot since we were here,” Williams said, recalling that she wore a white, disposable breathing mask during the jury’s visit to the dark and dank silo.

Its huge, multi-ton door was cranked open, allowing some daylight and fresh air for Tuesday’s sale. Portable floodlights were used to light the bunker.

As the auction began, Williams and her friends went inside the 12,000-square-foot underground bunker, once home to U.S. Air Force crews who stood ready around-the-clock during the 1960s to launch a nuclear-tipped Atlas missile against the Soviet Union. Benson bought the surplus U.S. government property in 1988 for $32,500.

Inside the bunker, Williams pointed out to her friends a concrete pit, about 12-by-15 feet in size, where the jury was shown bloodstains. DNA tests confirmed the bloodstains were Erdman’s.

Investigators theorized the state employee was dismembered in the pit before his body parts were thrown over a county road embankment about 42 miles away, near Cheney. His upper torso, possibly containing a slug, and the .380-caliber murder weapon were never found.

“They were auctioning off stuff right around the pit, so we couldn’t see that real well,” Williams said, “but I pointed it out to them.”

Other portions of the underground bunker, including a flooded former crew quarters and a littered, walled-off bedroom with pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Charlie Chaplin, were off-limits during Tuesday’s sale, carried out by Reinland Auction.

Its employees spent several days organizing Benson’s makeshift, junk-strewn concrete bunker home into a missile silo flea market, with neat rows of boxes and piles of auction items. Furniture was placed near furniture, tools with other tools, metal pipe with metal pipe, and so forth.

A brass elephant went for $7.50. A ceramic pitcher and plate brought $35. A Charlie Russell painting sold for $80, and that may well have been the bargain of the day.

Sandra Willford, of Deer Park, bought a Queen Anne-style cherry wood chair, a supermarket shopping cart and an artificial tree for $7. She had to take everything, even though she had no idea what she will do with the shopping cart.

Dan Berry, the former sheriff of Lincoln County who operates a cafe and bowling alley in Davenport, came looking for plates and glasses.

“I saw a lot of the locals walking away early without buying anything,” he said.

Once items inside were sold, auctioneer Max Reinland and his crew moved outside where other rows of stuff hit the auction block: an old plow, a wooden boat, steel benches, truck bumpers, a 1952 Kaiser Manhattan, a 1941 White truck and two heavy duty military trailers.

“A lot of it is in tough shape, but a lot of it is still usable,” Reinland said. “There are a lot of people here just because they’re curious about the place.”

The auction and sale of the 21-acre missile silo were scheduled before Benson died last month in prison, apparently of natural causes. He was buried Sept. 28 at Evergreen Cemetery in Priest River, Idaho.

His two sons, who live in Arizona, are heirs of Benson’s estate. They are asking $500,000 for the missile silo, listed as a “seven bedroom, two bathroom” facility.

“We’ve had some interest, but no formal offers,” said real estate agent Michael Biehl of Keller-Williams in Spokane.

Biehl, traveling in California on Tuesday, said there were a couple of items he would have liked to bid on. The auction of the personal items could bring an estimated $20,000 to $25,000, he said.