TACOMA — Lisa Moore can’t go to the store without wondering if she’ll run into the two people who helped dump her brother’s body in a ditch.
Her brother, Randy Ferguson, was found dead in 2006, shoved in the trunk of a car and pushed over an embankment near Gig Harbor after being shot in his South Hill home.
And although Randy’s wife, Angela Ferguson, received nearly 27 years in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree murder, Randy’s two adult stepchildren who helped their mother transport and dispose of his body never saw the inside of a jail cell.
They escaped a felony charge because of a state law that protects people who render criminal assistance to a family member.
Now Moore is pushing the state Legislature to change that law. A bill she helped draft would make it so that only children under 18 receive leniency if they assist a relative with a murder.
She’s dubbed it “Randy’s Law,” in honor of her 45-year-old brother, whom family members described as a life-sized teddy bear who loved his family and the Seattle Seahawks.
“We know what these kids did,” said Moore, who lives in Puyallup. “As far as our family’s concerned, they should be in prison with their mother.”
Under current law, most people would be charged with a class C felony if they helped someone commit or conceal a murder. They could be punished with up to five years in prison.
But if someone assists a relative, he or she will be charged only with a gross misdemeanor, which is punishable by a maximum sentence of one year.
Claude and Lisa Marie Walz, Randy’s stepchildren, agreed to a plea bargain in November 2007. It resulted in a suspended sentence for first-degree rendering criminal assistance and 10 days on a county work crew.
Claude did his time on the crew; Lisa Marie didn’t. She cited medical reasons and chose 80 hours of community service instead. More than a year later, she hasn’t completed it.
Prosecutors said Claude Walz, who was 19 at the time of the crime, helped load Randy Ferguson’s body into the trunk of a car, while Lisa Marie Walz, who was 21, helped her mother pour bleach over Randy’s body and push the vehicle down an embankment off Point Fosdick Drive NW near Gig Harbor. Lisa Marie Walz then gave her mother a ride home to Puyallup.
Moore said both Walzes still live in the Puyallup area. She said she sometimes worries she’ll be out with her niece, Randy’s daughter, and run into them.
Moore adopted Alison, now 6, after Randy’s death.
“It’s not something we’ll ever get over,” Moore said. “We constantly feel like we have to duck and weave.”
Curtis Wright, a Pierce County homicide detective who worked on the case, said he was appalled that neither of Ferguson’s stepchildren were charged with a greater crime.
“Basically in this case, it was the equivalent to shoplifting,” Wright said. “It’s ridiculous. When you take somebody that’s deceased and put them in a trunk, drive them all over the county, then put them in a ditch and get rid of evidence, it just seems like that should be a felony.”
Ed Murphy, the Pierce County deputy prosecutor who charged Angela Ferguson with murder, said he doesn’t see any sense in it, either. He didn’t handle Claude or Lisa Marie Walz’s cases because they were tried in the lower-level court.
Such cases come up rarely, Murphy said, but that doesn’t matter.
“From my perspective, everyone should be treated the same,” he said. “If there was some sort of coercion because of them being a relative, you could take that into consideration.”
State Rep. Al O’Brien, D-Mountlake Terrace, said he’s yet to hear a good reason why current law was written the way it is. He said he’s sponsoring the bill because he thinks the law should protect only minors who assist relatives with murder.
“If somebody is an active participant in the committal of a crime, they should be prosecuted even if they are a family member,” said O’Brien, a retired Seattle police sergeant. “Everybody involved should be held responsible.”
He said he’s pushing to get the bill a hearing before the House Committee on Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, on which he serves as vice chairman.
But he said it could be hard for the bill, HB 1203, to gain traction because many legislators don’t understand the loophole that worked to the advantage of the Walzes.
“Most legislators don’t have a concept of how the criminal justice system works,” O’Brien said. “Their background is something else.”
Moore said she knows the legislative process could take several years. She introduced a version of the bill last year that didn’t get a committee hearing.
But she said it’s something she’ll continue to push to prevent accomplices in other murders from walking free.
“I’ll do it as long as it takes because I believe in it,” Moore said. “We can’t do anything about what happened in Randy’s case, but we can protect other families from having to go through what we went through.”
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