Mortal Danger (29 page)

Weeks passed with no sign of Laura Baylis. And then, on October 14, her whereabouts were finally, tragically, discovered.

Alva Marsh,* who owned several properties in the neighborhood, stopped to check on a vacant house he
owned in the 6300 block of Beacon Avenue. The run-down residence was located only a mile from the 7-Eleven where Laura Baylis vanished.

Marsh had been inside the house a few times in recent weeks and he’d noticed a strange, repugnant odor he couldn’t identify. On this October day, he had decided to search for the source of the nauseating smell.

And he had come upon a body in a closet beneath the stairs leading to the basement. It appeared to be that of a woman. She was wearing blue jeans.

Shocked, Marsh ran up the stairs and headed for the nearest phone to call police.

It was shortly after noon when homicide detectives Duane Homan and Mike Tando, and their sergeant, Craig Vandeputte, were summoned on a “questionable death” call. When they viewed the victim and noted the clothing she wore, they recognized that it was identical to the garments worn by the missing girl in the case Lieutenant Holter and Detectives Trettevik and Stewart were working in the Robbery Unit. Accordingly, they asked that Trettevik and Stewart respond to the scene.

It was a warm Indian summer day with no hint of rain as the crew of investigators moved through the vacant house. Alva Marsh said that the house had been boarded up for at least two years but that he had had problems with people breaking in and vandalizing. He had been about to begin cleaning up the premises and the yard when he discovered the body.

The house was a three-story frame structure, full of clutter. The entrance to the basement was on the south side of the house, accessible by four steps from the yard. All
the basement windows were boarded up and intact, but the hasp on the basement door lock had been pried from the frame. There was no artificial light at all in the cellar and the detectives brought in auxiliary lighting to augment the thin gray rays that leaked through the boarded windows.

Now they could see streaks of blood on the outside of the closet door. The woman’s body sat slumped over just inside. The young woman had been dead for some time; she still wore the clothes Jack Atkins had told them she wore as he walked her to her bus on Sunday: blue jeans, a blue shirt, and a blue ski jacket with a red lining. Her jeans were pulled down below her buttocks and her other clothing yanked over her head. She appeared to have been stabbed, but the decomposing body would require an autopsy to try to verify time and cause of death.

They walked up the steps to search the upper floors of the abandoned house, almost feeling the presence of ghostly spirits from its past and, now, from its present.

There was some graffiti sprayed on walls and other clutter that indicated someone had been using the old house as a hangout. They also found spots where someone had tried to torch the house. It had been a failed attempt; the little piles of paper and boards were scorched, but then any flames had dissipated.

The empty house should have gone up in a major conflagration. It was full of the debris of what looked like fifty years or more. Former tenants or owners—or maybe trespassers—had left a lot behind: broken furniture, yellowed newspapers, food wrappers, garbage.

But none of the trash littering the upper floors appeared to have any immediate connection to the dead woman. In
some areas, the floors were two or three feet deep with detritus; to sift through it all thoroughly would take weeks—even months.

Deputies from the medical examiner’s office removed the body from its lonely, cluttered tomb and transported it downtown to await autopsy. Detectives placed police locks on the doors as they ended the first day’s probe into what now could be called a homicide.

Although it seemed that the body found was surely that of Laura Baylis, dental records would be necessary to make absolute identification. And those would have to come all the way from England.

Early the next morning, Detectives Duane Homan, Mike Tando, and Larry Stewart returned to the vacant house to continue processing it. This time, they were accompanied by Jean Battista, a fingerprint expert. They dusted every inch of the basement for latent prints but found none. The basement walls were too rough to hold fingerprints, and nothing useful for evidence turned up.

Criminalist Battista did recover two hairs that didn’t match the blond hair of the victim. One was short, black, and curly.

The three detectives were inclined to believe that the victim had been killed somewhere else and brought to the basement closet within a few hours of her death. Lividity is a purplish-red striation pattern formed in newly deceased bodies. When the heart stops pumping, blood no longer circulates and sinks to the lowest level of the body, where it eventually etches a series of permanent bright stripes—
unless
it is moved before lividity is set.

In that case, detectives and medical examiners see
two
“stainings.” There will be the first lighter pink shading and then the final lividity stripes, marking a new position. That part of a body that rests on a hard surface is blanched white. Once lividity is complete, the body can be moved without any change in the pink to purplish markings.

Due to the paucity of blood where her body had lain and the pattern of lividity on her body, the detectives agreed that the victim had been killed somewhere else. They also felt that whoever carried the body in had not gone beyond the basement area. This was probably going to be the only area in the house that would give up any physical clues.

Back in the Homicide Unit, they placed a call to Laura Baylis’s parents in England and told them gently that the body of a young woman had been found. “We’re not positive yet,” Duane Homan said, “but we have reason to believe that we’ve found Laura.”

Bessie Baylis said she hadn’t been able to locate any of Laura’s medical or dental records. “But I’ll keep searching,” she said, with tears in her voice.

Robbery detectives Jerry Trettevik and Larry Stewart attended the postmortem examination of the unidentified victim. The dead girl had succumbed to nineteen stab wounds of the neck and torso. It was far too late to estimate measurements of the murder weapon or to determine if she had been sexually assaulted, although the way her clothing had been disarrayed certainly suggested rape or a rape attempt.

Stewart and Trettevik retained the girl’s clothing for evidence. They watched as the forensic surgeon removed her fingertip skin, which slipped off as easily as gloves from her desiccated hands. There was a good chance that
criminalists from the crime lab could rehydrate the skin, at least enough to obtain usable prints.

The detectives were almost positive that the dead woman was Laura Baylis; everything matched, right down to the two gold necklaces her boyfriend had described. But Laura Baylis’s parents were having difficulty finding records that could validate that this was Laura. Her dentist had died and his records disposed of. They had nothing with her fingerprints on it. English law doesn’t require that babies’ footprints be taken at birth. All of the best ways of identifying a nameless body at the time were unavailable to the investigators.

In the Western Washington Crime Lab, ID technician Marsha Jackson was finally able to obtain fingerprints from the victim by “plumping” the fingertip tissue with liquid. She then matched these prints to a single print on an identification card Laura had once obtained in Kansas City. The name on the card was Julie Costello, but the photograph it bore was of Laura Baylis. She had been an attractive young woman who might well have inspired fantasies in the mind of someone who was emotionally disturbed. In fact, she looked a lot like Genie Francis of the popular soap opera
General Hospital.

Anyone who had seen Laura would probably remember her. Customers of the all-night market did, and they wanted to help catch her killer, but no one had any more information about Sunday night, September 24.

Now the detective team knew for sure that they had found Laura, but her killer had a three-week head start. All they had was a black, curly hair and the picture of the man
in the billed cap and fatigue jacket taken by the surveillance camera.

On October 16, they received a vital lead through an anonymous phone call. A woman, who refused to give her name, called Larry Stewart to say that she had seen the picture of the man they sought.

“I saw it in the newspaper, and I think it’s a guy named Clarence who lives in the Sixty-one hundred block of Beacon Avenue. If it isn’t him, it’s a dead ringer for him. He moved into that house early this year with his wife or his girlfriend.”

Before Stewart could question her further, she hung up.

Stewart and Jerry Trettevik checked Seattle City Light records for the block and found that one billing in the area was to a Clarence E. Williams, who was employed at Todd’s Shipyard. They ran Williams’s name through police computers and got a hit. Clarence Williams was described as a black male, thirty-three, five foot eleven, weighing 215 pounds.

He had been on parole after serving prison time for convictions on burglaries, carrying a concealed weapon, and narcotics charges. But he hadn’t been supervised directly by a parole officer for two years. That would mean he’d kept out of trouble during his active parole and didn’t have to report to anyone currently.

Obtaining Williams’s mug shot, the two detectives met with Lieutenant Holter, and they all agreed that he was a close look-alike to the man they sought. He did not wear glasses, however, and his driver’s license didn’t stipulate corrective lenses.

But anyone can put on a pair of glasses with clear glass lenses.

They checked with Todd’s Shipyard and learned that Clarence Williams was employed there as a sandblaster, working the night shift beginning at 4:00 p.m. Ordinarily, he would finish work about 3:00 or 4:00 a.m.

Stewart and Trettevik drove to Williams’s residence. There was no response to their knocks, except for a snarling Doberman pinscher who lunged at the window with teeth bared. They looked up and down the street and failed to see any cars parked nearby that matched Williams’s known vehicles.

When the Second Watch detective crew arrived for work at 3:45 that afternoon, they went to Todd’s Shipyard and showed the photo taken by the hidden camera to employees in the personnel office. They all agreed that it closely resembled Clarence Williams.

But when they were asked if he was working at the moment, the personnel clerk checked and said that Williams hadn’t appeared for his shift.

It was October 18 when robbery Detective Jerry Trettevik and homicide Detective Hank Gruber met with Clarence Williams face-to-face at the shipyard. When he walked into the personnel office, they were both struck by his startling resemblance to the pictures they had memorized. Williams even wore an olive green fatigue jacket, its collar rolled just like the jacket collar in the security photos.

At the moment, Williams wore an orange hard hat and carried clear safety glasses. The glasses were not at all similar to those in the photo, however. Clarence Williams’s
facial hair was almost identical to that of the man they sought.

Williams seemed nervous, but he readily answered the detectives’ questions. He said he lived alone, as he’d separated from his wife on September 1. “I gave her my car and I catch a ride every day with a friend—Mercina Adderly.*”

“You ever been in that house where they found Laura Baylis’s body?” Gruber asked Williams.

“Never. I saw those pictures in the papers and I knew right away that I look like him,” Clarence said anxiously. “I’ve been in trouble in my life, I’ll admit, but never for nothing violent.”

Williams said that his own wife had called him after seeing the picture in the paper and asked him flat out if he’d killed the girl.

“I had a hard time convincing her that it wasn’t me.”

Williams wasn’t enthusiastic about taking a lie detector test, because he didn’t trust them. But he finally agreed to face a polygraph.

The whole interview was unsettling. Stewart and Gruber were staring at a man who looked exactly like the man in the photographs, who even wore a jacket identical to that man’s—and yet he continued to insist that he knew nothing at all about Laura Baylis.

Was it possible that he
wasn’t
lying? Clarence Williams was soft-spoken and polite and said he had no idea why he looked so much like the suspect they sought. He was as puzzled as everyone else.

A number of tipsters wanted to get information to the investigators, but they were either frightened or didn’t
want to get involved. Homicide Detective Wayne Dorman received the next anonymous phone call.

“I been seeing that picture on the TV and in the papers,” a voice that could be either male or female said. “I know it’s Clarence Williams, and I know for a fact he’s been in that house where they found that girl. He ripped that house off three times. I might call back and tell you my name after I think about it.”

And then
click
and the line went dead.

Detectives talked to Williams’s neighbors, who said he came and went at all hours, and that his Doberman barked continually.

Todd’s Shipyard’s security officers said that the shipyard kept a box of all kinds of safety glasses on hand at the yard, some of them similar to those in the photo. “Williams would have had access to those glasses.”

Hank Gruber and Jerry Trettevik talked to the suspect’s estranged wife. She was adamant that Clarence
was
the man caught by the camera and that he had a hat and jacket like those in the picture.

They already knew that. They’d recognized his clothes, too.

“Look,” she said firmly, “he’s got so many pairs of safety glasses, and some of them are just like that guy in the 7-Eleven store wore.

“I
know
my ex was in the house where they found the body.”

“How is that?” Gruber asked.

“I’ve gone there with him!” she said, much to their surprise. “He was thinking about buying that house and he wanted to show me. He knew his way around it, and we
went through it in the dark. I mean, like he knew every inch of it.”