Murder of the Goldmark Family

On December 24, 1985, David Lewis Rice entered the Seattle home of attorney Charles Goldmark by posing as a taxi driver delivering a package. Rice tied up Charles, his wife Annie, and their sons, 12-year-old Derek and 10-year-old Colin, chloroformed them, robbed them, and then bludgeoned and stabbed all four with a steam iron and kitchen knife. Annie died at the scene; Colin died four days later, Charles after 16 days, and Derek after 37 days, all at Harborview Medical Center. Guests arriving for a planned visit discovered the attack after receiving no answer at the door and later hearing moaning from inside the house; they obtained a spare key from neighbors and found the family before police and firefighters arrived.

Rice's motive stemmed from a belief, developed through his involvement with an antisemitic, anti-communist study group called the Duck Club led by retired Army Colonel Gordon "Jack" Mohr, that Charles Goldmark was a regional director of the American Communist Party. This belief traced back to a 1962 political smear campaign against Charles's father, state representative John Goldmark, in which local newspapers and figures including Albert F. Canwell accused the family of Communist sympathies, citing Charles's attendance at Reed College and his mother Sally's youthful membership in the Communist Party USA. The Goldmarks successfully sued for libel, though the judgment was later overturned. Neither John nor Sally Goldmark was alive at the time of the 1985 murders, and the victim family was not Jewish or Communist as Rice believed.

Rice was identified after a Duck Club acquaintance, with whom Rice was staying, found a written confession in a guestbook and alerted police. Rice was arrested on December 26, 1985, attempted to poison himself with liquid nicotine during the pursuit, and later gave a taped confession describing his preparations and the killings after speaking with an attorney.

At trial, Rice raised an insanity defense; three examining physicians diagnosed him with a paranoid delusional disorder. He was convicted on June 5, 1986, of aggravated murder for all four deaths and sentenced to death five days later. That conviction and sentence were later overturned on the grounds that his trial attorney had provided constitutionally inadequate representation by failing to adequately present evidence of Rice's psychotic symptoms. In 1998, Rice pleaded guilty in exchange for avoiding the death penalty and is serving a life sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary.

In the aftermath, the Goldmark Foundation was established in 1986, distributing more than $200,000 to local causes, and in 1992 a plaque was placed at a Seattle overlook renamed in the family's memory.