Did the Drag Queen Have a Lust for Killing?

Carleton Lawrence Snyder belonged to the stage. He wasn't an actor, but the excitement of just being a part of the theater dominated his professional and personal life. Some say that it possessed his very soul, but, if it truly did, he never minded one bit. He loved every minute he con­tributed to his chosen profession.

A set designer, scene painter and stagehand, 61-year-old Snyder played a major role in creating the sets for Shakespearean plays, operas, Broadway musicals, classical concerts, and ballets, even backgrounds for rock groups, pop­ular singers, and country and western bands. Regarded as remarkably artistic by his peers, Snyder was also a marvel of efficiency. Given the most difficult and demanding task, he always deliv­ered. There just wasn't a set too big or too challenging for his abilities.

His work schedule at Oregon's Port­land Civic Auditorium was irregular compared to most other peoples'. Whether he worked or not depended on whether an event was scheduled at the auditorium. If none was scheduled on any given day, he could usually count on having that day off, as long as all the sets had been built.

Snyder was working on Thursday, September 18, 1986, for the Oak Ridge Boys concert. He'd spent most of the evening designing a set for an upcoming event, occasionally tapping his feet to the country beat, and helping out with various show tasks that night.

At a few minutes past 11:00 p.m., he began preparing for the work that lay ahead later that night — work that could be completed only after the show was over. The Oak Ridge Boys were just fin­ishing their encore, so he knew it wouldn't be much longer before he had to drop what he was doing and attend to the stage.

After years in the business, he in­stinctively knew when an act was nearly finished. This act would be no excep­tion; the Oak Ridge Boys were clearly on their final song. He'd made plans to meet some relatives after work, and co­workers noticed that he was in hurry to get started.

After the last guitar twangs and vocal harmonies faded away and the singers left the building, Snyder and several other stagehands quickly dismantled the set and cleared the stage in preparation for a very different show, the opera La Boheme, that would pack the house the following week.

The opera, Snyder knew, was a story about people coping with death; what he didn't know was that his own death was very near.

After getting off work that evening it is believed that Snyder stopped briefly at his apartment, located in downtown Portland not far from the Civil Audi­torium. Accustomed to keeping the late hours required by his job, he left some­time after midnight to keep the ren­dezvous with his relatives in another part of town...

A few hours later, as daybreak fast approached, suburbia began waking up. The rush-hour commuters were soon driving off to work. With each vehicle trying hard to beat the other for use of the roads into Portland, it didn't take long for the thoroughfares to become jammed.

One motorist, who routinely took the lesser-used roads hoping to avoid much of the heavy traffic, was clipping along Southwest Hall Boulevard toward the city of Tigard at a pretty fair speed when his headlights suddenly picked up the figure lying on the roadside.

He had just passed the intersection of Southwest 91st Avenue, a dead end, and Hall Boulevard in the unincorporated community of Metzger, which borders the cities of Beaverton and Tigard, when he saw it. Thinking — perhaps even hop­ing — that it couldn't be a person, he drove on. Before he had driven more than a couple blocks, however, his con­science kicked in and he slowed down. If he had really seen a person lying on the roadside, he couldn't just drive off without first determining what had hap­pened and offering whatever assistance he could.

A few blocks farther down the road he found a safe place to turn around. Once again he approached the frighten­ing figure. This time he carefully pulled onto the shoulder and stopped.

"Hey, fella, are you hurt?" the com­muter called out in a loud voice. The man remained motionless. Squinting didn't help the driver see much better in the pre-dawn darkness, so he crossed the road to get a closer look. As he ap­proached the unmoving figure, a terrible cold dread crept over his entire body.