Crime Of Rage Ken Arrasmith’s Version Of Vigilante Justice Is The Subject Of A New True-Crime Book

Don Davis thought he’d struck literary gold when a friend told him about a double murder in Lewiston, Idaho.

As it turns out, he was absolutely right - even if the story didn’t develop the way the Boulder, Colo., writer initially thought it would.

The murders were nothing if not compelling. They involved a former sheriff’s deputy shooting a married couple who had allegedly raped his daughter.

Such a lurid tale is exactly the kind of story that author Davis looks to write about in his trademark true-crime paperbacks.

Davis, who is perhaps best known for his book on Jeffrey Dahmer called “The Milwaukee Murders,” knew from the beginning that the victims themselves possessed a spotty background. In fact, Davis discovered that some Lewiston-area residents believed the victims, Ron and Luella Bingham, deserved an even worse fate than being riddled with bullets.

But what changed was Davis’ attitude toward the accused triggerman, former sheriff’s deputy Ken Arrasmith, whose chief legal tactic - which Davis used to sell his publisher on the story - was to cast himself as just your average avenging father.

“I’m not a martyr, I’m no hero,” Arrasmith would say. “I’m just a dad.”

Despite the spin control, Davis quickly realized that the story was much more complex than it was being portrayed. And, as such, it didn’t fit into the simple, Western-style vigilante saga that he himself had first envisioned.

How quickly did it take for Davis to see the larger story? “About a day,” he now says.

Davis’ book ended up being titled “A Father’s Rage” (St. Martin’s, 340 pages, $5.99). And as an example of the St. Martin’s Press True Crime Library, it boasts a garish cover with brazen subtitles such as “Is He a Hero Dad or a Stone-cold Killer?” and “The Electrifying True Story of the Former Lawman Who Played Both Cop and Executioner.”

Despite such a blatant marketing campaign, though, “A Father’s Rage” actually avoids being your typically exploitative “True Detective”-type book. While not in the league with the best works by, say, Jack Olsen (“Give a Boy a Gun”) and Ann Rule (“The Stranger Beside Me”), Davis’ book nevertheless is a serious attempt to tell the real story behind a sordid crime.

That verdict comes not only from someone who has read the book, but it also is the opinion of the newspaper journalists who provided day-to-day coverage of the Arrasmith trial.

“Davis has provided perhaps the most accurate and insightful coverage of Lewiston’s most famous homicide,” Lewiston Morning Tribune reporter Joan Abrams wrote in her review of the book.

“One thing about that case was there was always a new layer,” says Eric Sorensen, who covered the case for The Spokesman-Review. “Something was going on all the time. And it’s pretty safe to say that he (Davis) got as close as anybody’s ever going to get, as far as it’s ever worth getting.”

The crime in question occurred on May 17, 1995. On that day, Arrasmith walked into a Lewiston auto repair shop and, using a Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol, proceeded to pump the better part of a 30-round magazine into Ron Bingham, who had been lying next to the car on which he’d been working.

“In total,” Davis wrote, “Ron Bingham had 44 wounds - 10 on his right side, 26 on his left, six in the back, one grazing wound on his penis and one in the right buttock. Twenty-four were entrance wounds.”

When he was finished, Arrasmith pulled out a 9mm Ruger handgun bearing a laser-sighting device. He stalked Luella Bingham in the shop’s inner darkness and, when he found her, shot her seven times - six times in the back.

Little about the case is as clear-cut as those simple forensics results.

Eyewitnesses testified that neither of the Binghams was armed, for example. Police, though, would come under fire for not divulging during the trial that they had found two guns in the shop during a routine sweep following the murders.

On that basis, Arrasmith’s lawyers are appealing their client’s conviction, and his attendant life-without-parole sentence, to the Idaho Supreme Court.

In another important twist to the case, there’s ample evidence to believe that Arrasmith had reason to be enraged at the Binghams.

Accused of being sexual predators, the Binghams had been identified by several area women as their attackers. Ron Bingham had served time in prison for rape, which added weight to the accusations of Arrasmith’s daughter - Cynthia, age 15 at the time - who said that not only did the Binghams sexually abuse her, but they’d also plied her with drugs.

On the other hand, Arrasmith was hardly the upstanding guy that his defenders portrayed him as being. Thrice-married, as much as $30,000 behind in child-support payments, connected with known drug dealers and an admitted drug-user himself, Arrasmith was careful not to tarnish his carefully constructed public image.

On a national level, at least, there was little chance that would happen anyway. People magazine, the ABC news show “20/20” and talk shows hosted by the likes of Montel Williams, Phil Donahue, Leeza Gibbons, Geraldo Rivera and Oprah Winfrey all stuck with the cliche.

“Throughout the summer of 1995, the media portrayed a biased picture of Ken Arrasmith, a white knight, riding to rescue his abused daughter,” Davis wrote.

The story played out differently in Lewiston.

“I got there expecting to see banners and posters and protesters and people angry in the bars and the cafes and a general uprising of a populace on behalf of Ken Arrasmith,” Davis now says. “And none of it existed. None of it.

“It only existed whenever they had a specific time of day that a television camera was going to be there.”

It was all a tactical decision, he says, “to taint the jury by using the publicity spin.”

Davis, though, wasn’t easily seduced. At age 56, he’s had plenty of experience dealing with manipulative criminals, defense attorneys and prosecutors.

He worked as a reporter and editor for United Press International for 20 years. When UPI was sold, he went to work as a political reporter/columnist for the San Diego Union.

After quitting to write a novel, he chanced upon the Dahmer book.

“I was in the right place at the right time,” Davis says. “I did it and found out that I was good at it. It was the first book out, and it’s still the best one, to my amazement.”

“A Father’s Rage” is his seventh true-crime book, and he is working on his eighth, a look at Texas housewife Darlie Routier, who last week was sentenced to death for stabbing her two sons, ages 5 and 6.

Does Davis think she’s guilty?

“Don’t know,” he says. “Shaky police work again. It was so bad the prosecution didn’t even put the lead investigator on the stand.”

Davis has no such doubts about Arrasmith, however.

“His story never did hold together,” Davis says. “The man is a drugged-up murderer is what he is.”

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