sound asleep in a bedroom near the main office. Sixty-six-year-old Carl Henzie was the ski lift operator at the resort and Katie Henzie, also sixty-six, was the cafeteria manager. A pounding on the door woke Katie. She picked up her glasses from the nightstand, put them on and peered groggily at the clock by her bed. It read 12:20 A.M. Getting up, she walked over to the door, thinking it was most likely Sue or Carl Stewart, a couple who were a few years younger but like the Henzies were longtime resident-employees at the resort. Carl Stewart managed the ski rental and his wife, Sue, was the ticket manager. Nevertheless, Katie’s instincts kicked in and she remained cautious.
“Who is there?” Katie leaned toward the door. She was surprised to hear a man’s voice she did not recognize.
“There’s been an accident. I need to call for help. I need to use your phone.” The stranger sounded desperate.
“There was an accident? Where?” Katie pressed her ear closer to the door.
“Up the road…I lost control and my car went over the grade. I’ve got a passenger bleeding to death.” The man’s tone was increasingly agitated, but Katie remained suspicious.
How did he get in? she wondered. The lodge door had been locked for hours. How did he get in without a key? She recalled there were public phones in the lodge that the stranger easily could have used. Why hadn’t he? she thought to herself.
Then the man asked for Mrs. Stewart.
How does he know Sue Stewart? Katie wondered. Something was wrong and did not make sense. She told the man to wait. Turning around, Katie hurried back to the bed where her husband was still fast asleep. She nudged him, saying “Carl” repeatedly until he opened his eyes.
After waking up her husband, Katie told him about the man outside their door. Next, she hurriedly picked up the telephone receiver by their bedside to call Sue Stewart, but the phone line was dead.
The crash of broken glass and the feel of cold air pouring in forced their attention to the other side of the room. A black-gloved hand emerged from between the slats of the bedroom window’s venetian blinds. The Henzies froze. They watched helplessly as the gloved hand reached toward the head rail and pulled the slats off the brackets with such force that the blinds tumbled down with a loud crash. The couple stared at the exposed, busted windowpane, beyond which stood a shadowy figure pointing a shotgun at them.
“Let him in or I’ll shoot your brains out!” the gunman hollered.
Shaken, Katie managed to obey the orders. When she opened the door, two more ski-masked men pushed their way past her, brandishing weapons.6
Ettleman’s gunmen tied Carl up and led his wife down the hall to wake up the other employee couple in the lodge, Carl and Sue Stewart. They ordered Katie to knock on the Stewarts’ door and to ask for Sue Stewart. With a gun pointing at her, the elderly woman reluctantly complied.
“Mrs. Stewart,” Katie called as she knocked on the door. She hoped the formality with which she addressed Sue Stewart would arouse her friend’s suspicion.
“No. Call her Sue,” one of the gunmen whispered in her ear.
Sue Stewart stumbled sleepily out of bed. She opened the door expecting to see Katie Henzie, but instead came face to face with fearsome-looking gunmen. Gripped by terror, she shrieked. Her high-pitched scream woke up her husband, who jumped out of bed to reach for a pistol he kept in the drawer of a nightstand. But before he had a chance to pull out the gun, a powerful punch knocked him to the floor. There he lay, in pain, staring into “the biggest muzzle of a steel blue pistol.”
Two of the gunmen raised Carl Stewart forcefully up on his feet and jerked his hands behind his back. They were about to tie him up when Sue pleaded, “Don’t hurt him. He just got out of the hospital with a bad arm.”
The gunmen paused and locked gazes. Then, without a word, they moved Carl Stewart’s arms to the front of his body and tied up his hands.
One of the masked gunmen spotted a set of keys and a small pile of money on top of the Stewarts’ dresser. The Stewarts looked sorrowfully at each other, expecting to see the last of their funds disappear.
“Don’t worry, we don’t take hard-earned money from working folks like you,” the gunman said as he snatched just the ring of keys. The group headed down the hall and stopped in front of the door by the main office. The gunman handed Sue the set of keys he’d seized earlier from atop the dresser and told her to unlock it. With trembling hands, she managed to find the key and opened the door, thereby saving the thieves time searching for the correct key. The gunman then walked her and the other two hostages to the Henzies’ bedroom to join the tied up Carl Henzie.
Inside the Henzies’ bedroom, one of the gunmen held the four at gunpoint, while another talked on the walkie-talkie. It seemed to the Henzies and the Stewarts that the person he was talking to was outside near the parking lot, serving as a lookout.
Then Ettleman’s other gunman entered the bedroom. He helped take one of the twin bed mattresses in the room and throw it on the floor, while another man pointed his rifle at the ski resort employees. Next, Sue and her husband were tied up and ordered to lie down on the mattress on the floor.
In the midst of this, Katie asked for a glass of water. One of the gunmen quickly disappeared, soon returning and handing her a glass of water to drink. When she finished, she was bound up and, along with her husband, instructed to lie down on top of the twin bed with the mattress still on it. Both she and her husband were covered up to be protected from the raging cold air streaming in through the shattered window. The masked intruders also turned up the thermostat in the room and threw a cover over the Stewarts before moving on to their main objective.
The Dodge Ridge Ski Resort had three safes in the main lodge. The gunmen jimmied open a small safe and used an acetylene torch to cut through a second one. They still had one safe to go, but time was running out. The third safe, which weighed several hundred pounds, was embedded in the floor of an unfinished bathroom. They hauled it out and moved it into the stolen van.
A few times during the night, one of the gunmen came in to check on the couples. On one occasion, because the Henzies and the Stewarts were speaking so loudly amongst themselves, he ordered them to “shut up” and “lay still.”7
Finally, when the masked men’s mission was completed, they prepared to make their escape. The employees were told that one of the gunmen was remaining behind to watch over them while the others took off.
“But we can’t promise that he’ll be as nice to you,” one of the safecrackers warned them.
The Henzies and Stewarts were uncertain about the exact number of gunmen. They were also under the impression that whoever it was who remained behind to watch them left about thirty minutes after the main group took off. It was then that the four victims struggled to free themselves.
The women were first to release themselves, because they were not secured as tightly. They then helped undo their husbands’ hands. Next, they woke up an employee sleeping in a nearby cabin on the property and sent him to get help. He walked six miles to Pinecrest to get to a phone and notify the authorities.8
Dodge Ridge, one of the most successful and popular ski resorts in the state of California, lost $109,000 in the burglary by Ettleman and his crew. In those days, that amount was enough to buy a couple of custom-designed homes for cash in Sacramento. The media, however, reported that $40,000 to $60,000 was stolen. They also omitted the fact that the
