Mortal Danger (17 page)

And then she had a worse thought: Maybe John hadn’t just walked in on a murder in progress; maybe John had been the real killer, and this had been part of his “training” with Thaw. Maybe Thaw had walked in on
him
? Or perhaps it had been an accident or John had been forced to commit murder by the man he idolized.

John was dead, and she could never ask him what had happened in Florida. But Kate herself had seen murder in his eyes, and he had demonstrated that it had been in his heart as he’d shot Turi and Randall.

Every day of his life after that night in Florida, he lived in hiding to lesser and greater degrees. Although he never opened up to her, Kate wondered if he confided in the psychiatrists he consulted with. He always boasted after those sessions that he knew so much more than they did that they weren’t capable of helping him. Once, he went to see a
female therapist, and he told Kate that he’d told the woman his “secret.”

“She didn’t show up for their next appointment,” Kate recalled. “He wondered if he’d scared her away by dumping everything out on their first meeting.”

Kate never really knew who John Branden was deep inside.

Probably no one did.

After John’s final crimes appeared in the media—first in the Northwest, and, later, nationally—Kate was stunned to learn that even people who were close to her hadn’t understood the true danger she’d lived with for more than eighteen years.

“The day after I told my sister, Connie, that John was dead and how he had died, she called me and said, ‘I owe you an apology.’ I asked her why, and she said, ‘I never thought that John would actually kill you. I thought he was too much of a wimp.’”

Her own sister hadn’t totally believed her, even though Kate had tried her best to open up to Connie, to let her see the fear hiding inside her. If her sister hadn’t understood, why would anyone else have understood?

And then, a month or so later, a retired American Airlines pilot whom Kate had known in San Diego and who currently lived on Orcas Island approached her with another apology. “Kate, a lot of people thought you were just being overly dramatic when they heard your story. I guess we were wrong.”

Suddenly she understood why too many women won’t
talk about abuse or even grasp the fact that they are living in an abusive situation. No one will believe them, so what’s the point of trying to escape? After her story became public, Kate heard from a number of women who had been living with domestic violence, although they admitted they’d always been afraid to talk about it. Studies show that most women attempt to leave eight times before they succeed in breaking patterns of abuse, fear, and guilt.

“Even worse is the attitude of women who have said to me, ‘I just don’t understand why the woman stays,’” Kate said ruefully. “Their tone suggests that
they
would never stay in such a situation. To them, I say, ‘Don’t judge me if you haven’t walked in my shoes.’ When you are a woman who gives her heart totally and makes a true commitment to a relationship—to honor that commitment and to remain loyal through good times and bad—it’s almost impossible to believe that the situation will become too bad for you to fix.

“And there’s also the dream factor. Most relationships are built on having common dreams and goals. I thought John and I shared that—helping people and making a positive impact on the world. I know Turi believed that, too. Letting go of that dream was excruciatingly painful. Sometimes it still is. Accepting that the dream is dead is an exceptionally hard thing to do. Accepting that
you can’t fix it
is harder.”

November 17, 2007,
was a Saturday, less than a week before Thanksgiving, and a day that promised to be full of rain. But that was to be expected in western Washington State in November, just as daylight barely lasts seven hours. In the summer, though, the sun shines and it’s light out for eighteen hours. Most natives cheerfully accept the trade-off.

Graham is a very small town at the end of a multilane highway, and it sits in the shadow of towering and breathtaking Mt. Rainier. It’s horse country. Acres of meadows are fenced in so horses have freedom to run for miles. The hamlet also has easy access to a number of pristine wilderness areas. Like the last case, this, too, took place in Pierce County, but it has a far different ambience from Tacoma or even Gig Harbor. Many of those who live in Graham commute to Seattle and Tacoma to work, but they look forward to coming home to the smell of freshly cut grass and alfalfa.

The building boom of the new century has spread to Graham, and in 2007, there were several five-acre parcels of land for sale on one side of 70th Avenue East at 305th, a
gravel road. There were also new houses in various stages of completion, most of them unoccupied. A few houses along the road had families living in them, and there were also a number of trailers—some luxury double-wide mobile homes and some aged travel trailers, with shacklike structures built around them.

Local ordinances had not yet laid down all kinds of restrictions about land use and building permits. Basically, it was live and let live in this friendly town where almost everyone
did
know everyone else. There were some local taverns and, for those who didn’t drink, grocery stores and the post office where they could catch up on the news.

One thing was certain. No one in Graham, Washington, knew that there was a savage killer living among them.

The call to 911 at the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department dispatch center came in from a man named Jeff Freitas, who owned some prime acreage in Graham. He had halfway planned to take his neighbor, Brian Mauck, hunting that morning, but when he went by his house at 5:00 a.m., all the lights were out, and he figured Brian and his wife, Bev, were sleeping.

When Freitas returned from hunting at eleven that Saturday morning, he saw that one of the front panels of his friends’ front door was knocked out. This wasn’t particularly alarming, as he knew that the newly married couple sometimes forgot their house keys and resorted to removing the door section so they could reach in and turn the locks from the inside. Most of the neighbors knew that.
Brian kept intending to get extra keys and fix the door solidly, but other things got in the way.

When Jeff Freitas got to his modern double-wide mobile home nearby, he decided to call Brian and Beverly just to be sure everything was okay. Their habits were fairly predictable, and he usually saw them around their new gray and white ranch-style home with the three-car garage by this time of the morning. And the temperature outside was cold enough that he would have thought Brian would have fixed the door panel right after they got into the house.

There was no answer to his phone call. He tried both Brian and Bev’s cell phones, and no one answered those either.

The Maucks’ two vehicles were parked in their driveway, and this wasn’t a neighborhood where people walked to the store. Why didn’t they answer the phone?

Jeff Freitas told his wife and brother-in-law that he was going to walk down to the Maucks’ house to check on them. Maybe their cell phones’ batteries were dead, and the land line
could
have gone out, too. But the thought of the missing door panel kept bothering Freitas.

As he came up to the front door, he could hear a television playing loudly inside. He suddenly felt a dark sense of foreboding. He forced himself to kneel down and look through the space where the door panel should have been.

He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, but it appeared that Brian—or maybe Bev—might have fallen asleep on the media room floor, and someone had covered them with a blanket or spread. He wasn’t sure why they’d
fallen asleep or what had happened. Probably they’d been out the night before; they usually went out on Friday nights, and maybe they had been tired enough to drift off in front of the TV.

Still, Freitas somehow knew the real explanation wasn’t going to be good; he just tried to delay finding out why his nerves were jangling. As his eyes adjusted, he saw what might be spilled wine or catsup—his mind darted frantically so he wouldn’t have to face the obvious source—or
blood
on the carpet.

Freitas was a logger, forty-two years old, six foot one, and 240 pounds. He was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, but he didn’t want to go into the house. He backed away and called 911.

Pierce County Deputies Kent Mundell and Laura Wilson were dispatched at about two in the afternoon and met Detectives Brian Lund and Tom Catey from the Criminal Investigation Division, who arrived soon after. They checked the outside of the house and found no signs of a break-in. Actually, the front door still had a dead bolt in place, so whoever had kicked the door panel could conceivably have done so to reach inside and lock the door, rather than unlocking it. The door section still lay just inside.

Catey peeked through the door, just as Jeff Freitas had. He saw a blue fleece blanket and two blue and white flannel sheets spread out on the floor of the entrance hall and dining area, and he recognized that the dried red liquid at the edges of the bedding was almost certainly blood. In the great room just beyond there were two brown recliners and a matching couch, all placed so that viewers could see the
large-screen television set. He thought he could make out a human form lying on the floor of that room, but most of it was blocked from his view by one of the recliners.

Deputy Laura Wilson walked rapidly around the perimeter of the house, checking for anything that seemed out of place and for other obvious points of entry. She came back shaking her head; she’d found nothing amiss outside the house.

Jeff Freitas had a key to the Maucks’ residence, and he gave it to the Pierce County deputies.

It was time to go inside. As Lund and Catey entered the home to assess the scene, they stepped over a woman’s black shoe that rested incongruously on the threshold. They saw more blood—this time blood spatter that had flown onto the walls from the floor of the dining room, leaving a large blank spot that was quite possibly the “phantom image” of a killer. The blood droplets appeared to be high velocity, as if they had come from a gunshot wound. In that case, the shooter and his clothing had probably trapped the blood spatter before it hit the wall.

Catey and Lund were apprehensive about what they would find farther inside. They saw bare hands and feet, and realized there were probably two bodies in the great room, both covered with blankets. Closer now, they could see a man’s lower body clothed in jeans and with bare feet, and it looked as if a woman lay horizontally on top of his shoulders. Only her feet and one arm protruded from a blanket covering, but the two bodies formed the crude pattern of a cross.

The two deputies decided not disturb the scene. Instead, they would wait for Detective Sergeant Ben Benson, who
would be in charge of this criminal investigation, before going further. He was on his way with forensic investigator Adam Anderson. Lieutenant Brent Bomkamp and Detectives Darren Moss and Jason Tate were on the property now. They spoke in hushed tones.

This was a crime that would shock even longtime law enforcement veterans, with some of the most totally unexpected twists and turns, and it had occurred in such a quiet and bucolic area. It was going to take some intense detective work to discern why it had happened and who had hated the victims enough to kill them.

During his more than two decades with the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, Ben Benson has worked everything from patrol to undercover drug investigation, and now he was a detective sergeant in CID who had seen his share of homicides. But none like this.

Benson, forty-seven, is tall and laconic, and never seems to get rattled. When he was just a high school student, he managed to get an interview with a local law enforcement chief who had been forced to retire in disgrace, a man who hadn’t agreed to talk to any newspaper or television reporters from Seattle or Tacoma. Seventeen-year-old Benson’s scoop, worthy of any metropolitan newspaper, was published in his high school paper. His interrogation skills had only improved in the three decades since. The average criminal was no match for him.

When he was just a rookie, Ben Benson was as mature as detectives twenty years older than he was. He owns a
small plane, and he and his wife, Grace Kingman, a Pierce County deputy prosecutor, spend much of their time off flying over Puget Sound and the islands that dot it, taking photographs of the natural beauty that abounds in Washington State.

Benson is also one of the Sheriff’s Department pilots. In July 2008, while he was flying over a suspected illegal narcotics operation with another pilot and two deputies, their Cessna 206’s engine suddenly stopped. They dropped from 2,200 feet to within 500 feet of the ground in forty-five seconds, and they sent out a Mayday! call.

They looked down and saw they were over a large mall and a freeway, with no safe place to land. More dicey moments passed before Benson switched the fuel tanks back and forth, and the engine came back to life. In the air, in an emergency, he was totally calm—until afterward, when he thought about what
might
have happened.

No, nothing seems to alarm him, but even he was appalled by this scene of horror on a quiet country road.

As Benson arrived at the Maucks’ house with Adam Anderson, Detective Lynelle Anderson drew up an affidavit for a search warrant. Lynelle Anderson had a special talent for organizing scores of details and creating comprehensive affidavits. The investigators had many buildings, trailers, mobile homes, and vehicles to search, and they needed the warrants ASAP.

At shortly after 2:00 p.m., the sun was already beginning to lower in the western sky, so while they waited for the warrant, Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien, also a forensic investigator, took photographs of the exterior of the house,
while Detective Tom Catey made a video recording as he walked around the house and surrounding area, describing what he saw.

Everyone arriving from the Sheriff’s Department was an expert in his or her particular field. The familiar routines they followed helped a little to defuse their revulsion as they first encountered the crime scene.

But only a little.

Ed Troyer, a close friend of Ben Benson’s who once worked with him when they were both road deputies and in the Narcotics Unit, has been the sheriff’s media liaison for several years. Troyer is the first line of media defense, managing to juggle the people’s right to know and the need for secrecy in many investigations. Now, he stationed himself between the investigators and the massive media response as word of a possible multiple murder was picked up from police radio calls.

Neither he nor the investigators knew just how bad the situation was, but Troyer told reporters as much as he could.

Jeff Freitas had said the house was completely dark at 5:00 a.m. when he passed it on his way hunting, but now both exterior lights were on. For some reason, Brian Mauck must have turned them on before it got light about eight. As Tom Catey walked around the outside of the house, he noted that all of the windows were securely locked: At the front door, he saw that someone inside could open the door when the push-button lock was set by turning the knob, but it could not be opened from the outside when the lock was set. If the dead bolt was shoved into its slot—as it was when the police arrived—the door could not be opened.

It would have taken a very, very thin person to enter through the missing panel’s space, which was only twelve inches wide. No, it was more likely that Brian Mauck had heard something on the front porch, flipped on the outside lights, and admitted someone he either believed he could trust or someone pretending to be in distress.

Whoever had come to the Maucks’ door should never, ever have been let in.

The bamboo floor of the dining room, just beyond the front door, was stained scarlet in many spots. These areas had been covered with the blue fleece blanket and matching sheets. Now that Benson was inside, he could see that something heavy had been dragged from the bloodied floor in the dining area, across a section of rug there, and then into the great room, where the television still droned on.

Benson moved into the great room, where he carefully removed the blankets covering the bodies. He found a white male, dressed in a gray T-shirt and jeans, wearing a black belt but no socks or shoes. He was in a prone position; the woman lay on her back, draped crosswise on top of him, over his shoulders. Rigor mortis was apparent; they had been dead for hours.

There was so much blood spatter—probably medium velocity (cast-off blood)—that it stained the walls red in two distinct patterns eight feet above the floor. The south wall had so much blood on it that it was hard to tell what color it had originally been painted.

Criminalists would determine that the killer or killers had swept a broom through the pools of blood on the floor, flinging it up on the wall. The broom had been dropped
carelessly in the kitchen, as if whoever tried to sweep up the blood had realized it was a hopeless task.

Mary Lou Hanson-O’Brien used standard black fingerprint powder to process the exterior of the sliding glass door that opened off the great room and brought up latent prints from the sliding portion and door frame. They might be matched to the couple who lived here, or they might be the one key the investigators needed.

The blue blanket covering the female victim had hidden the fact that she was nude. She might have slept that way, or the killer’s motive could have been a sexual attack. One bullet hole was obvious just above her nose near the corner of her right eye, almost certainly a fatal wound. After she was photographed, she was turned over, and a second wound now was visible in the back of her upper right arm. And then a third, in the back of her neck, just to the left of midline. She had probably been shot as she tried to run away from her killer.