Mortal Danger (31 page)

Her name was Sara Beth Lundquist, and she was the kind of teenager that any parents would be proud of: innocent, a little naïve, concerned for other people, a lover of animals, and as freshly beautiful as an apple blossom that had just unfolded.

Sara Beth was at the center of one of the more baffling unsolved cases in Seattle’s criminal history. I’ve kept her photographs at the top of my “unsolved” file, hoping that one day there would be an end to her story, and that end would have to be the arrest of someone yet unknown.

Sometime in the summer of 2007, I was signing books at a huge Costco store, and a man stopped by to say he hoped for the same thing I did, for a long-dormant case to be solved.

“Which case is that?” I asked.

He began to say the name of his niece, but he didn’t even have to finish his sentence. It was Sara Beth. She had
been on my mind too, and I always remembered her in the summer. Her family had waited so long with no answers. I told her uncle that I hoped one day to write the end of her story.

Sara Beth’s story began shortly after midnight on Sunday, July 2, 1978, and no one could have foreseen how long it would take justice to arrive for her.

In 1978, the Fourth of July came on a Tuesday, and a lot of people were taking a four-day weekend, finding excuses not to come to work on Monday. As often happens in the Northwest on Independence Day, the weather looked as though it would fail to cooperate and the weekend before the big day was marked by gray clouds and drizzle. Those who had planned picnics started to look for alternative locations and kids who had a stash of illegal fireworks worried that they would get too soggy to light.

Sara Beth lived in the Ballard neighborhood in the northwest part of Seattle, a proud and venerable community where there are more Scandinavians per square block than anyplace else in Washington. Many of its residents make their livings commercial fishing, heading up to the dangerous waters of Alaska. Boating is probably the main avocation in Ballard. During rush hour, the Ballard Locks are jammed with motorboats and sailboats traveling between landlocked Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west. On days when the wind is right, the brightly hued spinnaker sails of private boats dance like butterflies on the waters of Elliott Bay.

Ballard has always been a family community, with
homey-looking bungalows, a local theater that features serials and second-run movies, parades and festivals on both American and Norse holidays—a good place to raise youngsters and a part of the city with a relatively low crime rate.

Sara Beth Lundquist grew up there. At fifteen, she wasn’t very different from her peers. She got good grades at Ingraham High School where she was a sophomore—when she studied—but she could be distracted by so many more fun things to do. She worked part-time as an aide in a convalescent home, and her soft heart hurt to see so many elderly people whose families had left them there, alone, and never came to visit. She tried to spend extra time with them.

Sara Beth lived with her mother, Lynne, and her sister, Melissa, in a home divided by divorce. Her ten-year-old brother, Lee, lived much of the time with their father, Robert. The children were close to one another, and Sara Beth saw her father often. She actually
liked
her little brother and often let him tag along when she was with her friends, even though five years was a big age gap.

Sara Beth liked to cook, especially experimental dishes. She made her own Christmas gifts, and was sewing some pretty aprons. She loved her mother and told her so often. Sometimes, Lynne would find notes on her pillow that Sara Beth had left for her, saying, “I love you.”

She was as natural an ice-skater as if she’d been born and raised in Sweden or Norway. She played the piano and taught Sunday school.

And she loved to laugh and to make her family laugh. Sara Beth was at that crystalline point between being a
child and a woman; she was past the early pubescent years when mothers and daughters sometimes lock horns, and she hadn’t yet reached the pseudosophistication of an older teen.

And yet Sara Beth was different from a lot of teenagers. She was extraordinarily beautiful. She had even features, very large blue eyes fringed with incredibly thick, dark lashes, and a perfect rosebud complexion. She was slender and exquisitely proportioned.

She seemed unaware of how pretty she was. When she wore makeup, she looked older than fifteen and could have passed for eighteen or twenty.

Tragically, she would never grow any older than fifteen. Someone stalked Sara Beth Lundquist in the shadows of a rainy July night. Maybe he had been stalking her for a long time and waiting for his chance to take her away from where she was safe. Perhaps he’d just spotted her and become obsessed with the idea of hurting her or taking sexual advantage of her.

Sara Beth’s best friend was Minda Craig,* also fifteen. They’d known each other since kindergarten, and they’d been best friends for a year. They had plans for Saturday night, July 1. They were going to see
Damien: Omen II
, about a thirteen-year-old devil child purported to be the Antichrist, and they looked forward to being a little frightened.

Sara Beth was excited about getting out. Three weeks earlier, she’d been diagnosed with mononucleosis, a common teenage illness. At first, she felt quite sick, and later she’d been prevented from working at her job at the convalescent center where she’d been a therapy aide for nine
months. Finally her doctor had declared her “no longer contagious.” She looked forward to returning to work. Her elderly friends there had missed her as much as she’d missed them.

The movie was one of her first social outings for weeks.

The two teenagers took a bus to downtown Seattle a little before nine in the evening. Minda rode down the hill from her house, and Sara Beth got on at 24th NW and North 85th Street. “I remember the driver was new,” Minda recalled, “a really nice black woman who showed us how to get to the Coliseum Theatre.”

As she’d promised, Sara Beth called her mother right after the movie to let her know they were okay and would probably be on the midnight bus to Ballard.

Outside the theater, some teenage boys “hassled” the girls, dancing around them, blocking their paths, and asking for their names and phone numbers. They were annoying, but they weren’t frightening, and they didn’t follow Sara Beth and Minda onto the bus. But they did make them too late, so it was a little bit after 11:30 when the girls caught the next bus back to Ballard.

Depending on how many stops it made, they would be in their home neighborhood around a quarter after midnight.

The Seattle Transit bus got to Sara’s stop at 24th NW at 12:20, and she hopped down the steps, waving to her friend. Sometimes they called each other after they got home, but if not, they would be on the phone together the next day—as they always were.

Reassured by Sara Beth’s call saying she would be on
the midnight bus, her mother had drifted off to sleep. She was very tired and thought she would hear Sara Beth come in; her daughter was always good about curfews and getting home when she said she would. And she had only to walk through a family neighborhood to get to her house.

On Sunday morning, the phone rang and Lynne Carlson went to Sara Beth’s room to tell her she had a call. She was surprised to see that she wasn’t there. At first, she wondered why Sara Beth would have gotten up so early and had already made her bed.

Then it dawned on her:
Sara Beth hadn’t come home the night before….

She immediately checked with Minda to see if Sara Beth had stayed overnight at her house, but Minda told her that Sara Beth had gotten off the bus alone at her regular stop and started walking in the direction of her home.

The next call Lynne Carlson made was to the Seattle Police to report her daughter missing. On that Sunday morning, there was still a possibility that Sara Beth had changed her mind and stayed overnight with another girlfriend. Patrol officer LaVerne Husby, who came to take Lynne’s report, asked about the possibility that Sara Beth had run away, but she was adamant that Sara Beth would
never
do that.

More frightening was a scenario where Sara Beth had been hit by a car, fallen, or been involved in some other kind of accident and was in the hospital. But a check with Seattle hospitals indicated there were no young “Jane Does” who had come in during the night.

A half hour passed, but it seemed like a day, and Lynne Carlson felt cold fear with every passing moment. Each
time the phone rang shrilly, she prayed it would be Sara Beth with an explanation about where she was.

On Leary Avenue Northwest, three miles from where Sara Beth lived, a crew of family members were spending the holiday weekend helping Bill of Bill’s Tire Exchange finish transforming a deserted gas station into his new business. The weather had held the day before when they painted the exterior of the station, but now rain had started to fall. They were preparing to finish the paint job on the interior.

It was shortly after noon when Bill’s teenage nephew opened the men’s room door to get some tools they had stored there. Or rather, he
tried
to open the door. Something was blocking it from inside. Puzzled, he looked down and saw a small hand with perfectly polished nails. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, and he backed away and called his uncle.

Bill knelt to examine the hand. It felt cold and stiff to his touch. As he told detectives later, “There was just no life in it at all. I knew—I’ve seen bodies before—and the way that hand lay, I knew someone was dead in there.”

He called 911, and Officers Warren Lisenby and LaVerne Husby, and Patrol Sergeant G. S. Perkins responded to the stark report of “a body in a service station.”

They had no idea who it might be, although they were inclined to think it was probably a homeless person who’d found a place to get out of the rain. From the description of the body’s hand, it was probably a female, maybe a “bag
lady” who lived outdoors because she had no money for a room or an apartment.

Still, this area wasn’t a neighborhood where many street people hung out.

The three officers peered through the crack in the door. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light inside, they could make out the figure of a young woman. She lay on her back in the six-by-eight room.

The officers immediately put in a call to the Homicide Unit.

All unattended/suspicious deaths are considered homicides first, suicides second, and accidental last. If this young woman had perished through homicidal violence, the patrol officers didn’t want to risk losing any physical evidence.

Detective Sergeant Don Cameron’s team was working the weekend shift, and he and Detective Mike Tando responded with the homicide van.

“All we know now is that she wasn’t here when the painting crew left last night about eight thirty,” Sergeant Perkins told the detectives. “The owner doesn’t know her, and neither do the others here.”

Officer Husby stepped forward. “I think I may know who she is, although I wish I didn’t. I took a missing persons report this morning from a woman who lives at Eighty-fourth and Twentieth, about three miles from here. She was worried sick because her daughter Sara Beth didn’t come home last night.”

“How old is she?” Cameron asked.

“Fifteen. And from what we can see, the girl in the
men’s room is wearing clothes that match the clothes Sara Beth was had on last night almost exactly.”

Cameron and Tando—the only homicide detectives working on a skeleton crew that holiday—reached tentatively through the opening in the restroom door and touched the dead girl’s arm. She was cold and had apparently been dead for many hours.

As they eased the door open, they encountered what looked like a scene from a movie, not the usual ugliness of a homicide scene. Even in death, the girl was beautiful. She wore a silk print blouse, and a jean outfit. A little dried blood marked her face, but her expression was serene and unmarked by fear.

Except for the blood staining her blouse, and the cluttered and inappropriate spot where she lay, she might only have been sleeping, sprawled out with the careless grace of the young. Her chestnut hair fanned out around her head and then was caught in the dried pool of blood beneath her body.

Despite the macho image we see on TV, a good homicide detective never looks at a victim’s body without feeling a pang of regret for the loss of a human life. Still, some cases bother them more than others. This girl—was it Sara Beth?—shouldn’t be dead, murdered, tossed aside in a pile of flaking plaster. She was so young. She should be going back to school in the fall, maybe riding on a homecoming float or wearing her first corsage to a prom.

But homicide detectives don’t make the rules and they can’t change the ending of a tragic story; they can only pick up the raveled strands of mystery that are left behind and try to weave some pattern out of them.

The teenager in front of them appeared to have suffered deep stab wounds to the chest, but they couldn’t tell how many. One of her hands was cut as if she’d tried to defend herself.

Cameron, who had a daughter of his own the same age, put in a call for Dr. John Eisele of the Medical Examiner’s Office and requested that a fingerprint technician be dispatched to the scene. He had to keep concentrating on his job, not on his emotions.

The owner of the building said that the restroom doors hadn’t been locked. All the fixtures had been removed.

“Someone broke the lock a while back, and there seemed no need to replace it right away,” he said. “Nothin’ worth taking.”

The small frame building was located in a commercial area where there was little likelihood that anyone would have been around late on a Saturday night to hear screams for help, if, indeed, there had been any. The detectives’ chances of finding an eyewitness or an ear witness were slight, so they made every effort to glean what they could from the scene itself.

Detective Lieutenant Bob Holter and Detectives Don Strunk and Paul Eblin, along with senior ID technician Marsha Jackson, joined the solemn-faced group at the tire store.