Gig Harbor couple wakes up to woman with ‘so much blood’ who allegedly escaped kidnapper

GIG HARBOR, Wash. — A Gig Harbor couple opened their door Saturday morning to find a bleeding woman in desperate need of help. They immediately jumped into action.

The couple was still in bed when a woman, claiming she was kidnapped, frantically rang their doorbell.

“We woke up to this,” said Gary Marcello, his finger pushing incessantly on the doorbell. “About 10 in the morning.”

It was the rude wake-up call Gary and Robin Marcello got.

“Came out, by the time I got out here, there was nobody here,” Gary said. “And I walked out to like where you’re at. I looked to my left and there’s a young lady there. Turned around and her face had blood all over it. And it was ‘get in the house.’ We brought her in. My wife took over from there.”

And that is when the 27-year-old woman told a fantastical story: that she had been kidnapped by their neighbor, beaten, and held against her will.

“Gary brought her inside and closed the door to just kind of protect us for a minute,” Robin said. “And she just kept saying ‘he’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna kill me.’”

She told them she had escaped barefoot to run to their house about a quarter mile away. And she was bleeding, a lot.

“There was so much blood, I couldn’t really tell where exactly it was coming from,” Robin said. “It was coming from her head and her ears.”

They called 911.

“She was heavily injured,” said Gig Harbor Police Chief Kelly Busey. “She’d had lacerations to her head. And she was panicked.”

Busey said she directed them to the house they later learned belonged to 66-year-old David Paul Ruffier. He was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“As she tried to flee the house, he tried to prevent her from doing that,” said Busey. “And hit her several times with a piece of furniture, a chair leg, or something like that.”

“And then she went into shock and fell to the floor,” Robin remembered.

The Marcellos said nothing like this had ever happened to them before. But they couldn’t imagine not helping.

“We hope that anybody who has something like that happen, that they do the same thing,” said Robin.

In fact, Robin said she took a Community Emergency Response Team or CERT course 15 years ago.

She said it all came back.

And we do have a bit of good news about the victim. She has been released from the hospital.

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