Mortal Danger (32 page)

Even though they knew it might be futile, patrol officers began a door-to-door canvass of businesses in the neighborhood while Marsha Jackson dusted the outside of the restroom door for latent prints, lifting several. They might be vital, or they could have been left by any of a dozen workmen on the site.

Then they completely removed the door itself after lifting out the pins.

The girl’s body was now revealed in its entirety. They took photographs and measurements, and bagged what might be useful physical evidence and marked it with their initials and the date.

As much as forensic science has moved forward in the last hundred years, there is one axiom that never changes. It’s been handed down to those processing a crime scene from the famed French criminalist Dr. Emile Locard: “The criminal always leaves something of himself at the scene of his crime—something perhaps too infinitesimal to be perceived by the naked eye—and he always takes something of the crime scene away with him.”

This rule of thumb surely held true in the grimy washroom of the remodeled gas station. They just had to identify what had been left and what had been taken away. Tando and Cameron slipped more than three dozen bits of evidence into glassine bags and vials and marked them for lab technicians.

The officers doing the door-to-door canvass found that a nearby tavern had been open until just after 2:00 a.m., but it was now closed. If the apartment above it was rented, nobody answered the door. A woman who lived nearby said that her dog always barked at unusual sounds. “But he didn’t bark at all last night,” she said, “and I’m the only one who lives around here—all the rest of it is shops and businesses.”

She lived eighty yards from the gas station–tire shop. She was the only private resident around, and she admitted
she sometimes got jittery when all the businesses closed and the workers went home.

“I would have noticed if anyone screamed in the night,” she said emphatically.

Medical examiner Dr. John Eisele arrived and knelt beside the dead girl. He commented that rigor mortis was fully established in the body, which indicated the victim had died sometime during the night—at least twelve hours before she was found.

“I can tell you the time of death more closely after we begin the post,” he commented. “The cause of death is apparently deep stab wounds—too many for me to count here—but that can also be more precisely defined at autopsy.”

If rape had been the motivation for the murderous attack, it might not have been accomplished; the girl’s jeans were in place, and her shirt, though opened several buttons in the front, was still tucked into the waistband. Her shoes were gone, and the detectives found no sign of a purse or wallet near the body.

Robbery? Hardly likely. Teenage girls don’t carry that much money, and the victim still wore relatively inexpensive jewelry. Revenge? Jealousy? Maybe. They didn’t know the victim at all at this point, or what her world had been like.

But they would. Like all exceptional detectives, the six investigators who worked quietly throughout the rainy, gloomy Sunday would come to know Sara Beth Lundquist as well as they knew anyone in life.

After Sara Beth’s body was removed. Marsha Jackson
dusted the inside of the room for fingerprints. She succeeded in raising several more latents from the smooth wall surfaces.

There was still doubt that the dead girl was Sara Beth Lundquist, and they needed her fingerprints, too, for comparison.

The puzzle of Sara Beth’s missing shoes and purse was solved at 3:00 p.m. when word came that a widow living in the area of 19th NW and 83rd—very close to Sara Beth’s home—had found a pair of clog shoes and a purse. Someone had tossed them in her driveway and in the alley behind her house. The purse still held Sara Beth’s ID.

Detective Don Strunk left at once to talk with Mrs. Lorraine Olsen.

“Something woke me up last night,” Mrs. Olsen told him. “I don’t know what time it was, but I heard a woman’s scream. Just one. Nothing more, no car, nothing. I listened awhile and it was quiet. I wondered if I’d been dreaming, and I finally went back to sleep.

“In the morning, I went out to move my car, and I found the shoes and purse. “I called one of the numbers inside and I got Mrs. Lundquist. Then I took the purse and shoes over to her.”

For Sara Beth’s mother, the sight of her daughter’s shoes and purse was chilling. They had been found along the route that Sara Beth would have taken after she got off the bus. At that point, she was just a few short blocks from home.

Strunk talked with Minda Craig. He had to tell her that her best friend was dead, murdered. Tears sprang into Min
da’s eyes and ran down her face. Strunk waited while she tried to deal with the terrible news.

“Try to remember everything you can about last night,” he asked gently. “Was there anyone you might have noticed who was watching Sara, bothering her, anything that she might have been afraid of?”

Minda shook her head.

“Did anyone get off the bus at the same stop she did?”

“No, she was the only one. There was a young guy on the bus who talked to us, but he got off about two blocks later. He couldn’t have doubled back and caught up with Sara because she would have been almost home by then.”

“Did anyone get off at your stop?”

“I can’t remember anyone.”

Minda said she had gone home and right to bed. She had no idea what might have happened to Sara Beth after she’d walked out of the streetlight’s glow near the bus stop.

“Did Sara have any enemies? Anyone who didn’t like her?” Minda, still in shock, shook her head. “No. Oh, no—she’s very popular at school. She was nice to everyone.”

“Did she date?”

“Different boys, but nothing serious. She wasn’t going steady or anything. I think lots of guys like her, though.”

At a quarter to five, the detectives cleared the scene and returned to homicide headquarters to review what they knew of the case so far. Someone had to have grabbed Sara Beth Lundquist shortly after she got off the bus. Her shoes and purse were found in the driveway and the alley behind Lorraine Olsen’s house, and she had heard a cry for help.

“I think that’s where he—they, maybe—abducted her,” Cameron said. “Mrs. Olsen didn’t hear a car, but he probably had one. It was three miles to where he left her in the tire shop. But I think he killed her somewhere else, possibly in a car, because there wasn’t enough blood where we found her.”

The question was: Had someone known that Sara Beth would be on that bus, someone who waited for her until she was alone and virtually helpless? Or had a stranger seen her that evening, hopped on the bus without either Minda or Sara Beth noticing him, and exited through the back door? Minda could be confused when she said Sara Beth was the only one who got off the bus. Two teenagers busy talking about the movie they’d just seen, and talking with the young man on the bus, could have failed to be aware of someone who didn’t want to be noticed.

And there was always the chance that she had encountered evil in the few blocks she had to walk to get home. A chance meeting with a monster? It happened, and it was the hardest kind of case to solve.

Don Cameron sent a request to patrolmen working out of the North Station about the murder and asked them to look for vehicles that had bloodstains on the upholstery or even on the exterior, or drivers with bloodstained clothes.

“Even if it seems far-fetched, look for any evidence or anyone who acts suspicious that might tie in with this girl’s murder,” he noted. “If the killer’s weird, he might still be wearing the same clothes. And look for any vehicle fires. They may be arson. He could have torched his car to hide any residue of this homicide.”

He ended his memo by asking that it not be broadcast
over police radio (where citizens with scanners could pick it up) but that it be relayed only at roll calls when shifts changed.

Detectives contacted Metro Transit to ask for the name of the driver of the bus the girls had taken the night before. Homicide partners Wayne Dorman and Dick Reed talked with the bus driver.

The man searched his memory. “There were a lot of people on the bus coming from downtown, that time on a Saturday night,” he said. “I can remember two sets of teenage girls. One set of ’em were both wearing blue. I think one girl got off at Eighty-fifth and Twenty-fourth.”

“Anybody get off with her?”

“Maybe. I seem to recall a good-looking young fellow—maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, rides the run a lot, very friendly, six feet, slender, longish brown hair. He talked with the girls and he might have got off with the first one. I can’t be sure.

“The other girl rode on up the hill and I think she got off the same time as a middle-aged white guy.”

Odd. Minda Craig was positive that Sara Beth got off the bus alone. Detectives figured she would be more likely than the busy bus driver to notice a man getting off with her friend.

Minda examined the purse recovered in Lorraine Olsen’s driveway and verified that it was Sara Beth’s. “It’s got six dollars in it, and that’s how much she had when we left the movie.”

As far as she could tell, the contents hadn’t been disturbed since the last time she’d seen Sara Beth open the purse.

Dick Reed and Wayne Dorman asked Minda about Sara Beth’s boyfriends. She said the victim had mostly dated a foreign student at the University of Washington, the son of a very wealthy Iranian family.

“He told Sara Beth that they owned a lot of oil fields or something,” Minda said. “I think he was pretty rich, but he didn’t make a big deal of it.”

“Where did she meet him?”

“At the I. Faces Disco on Second Avenue. She really liked him, and he treated her great. But he’s gone home on vacation now. He left for Iran five days ago.”

Detectives learned that, in the fairly recent past, Sara Beth had dated other youths, including Ricco Sanchez*—whom she’d also met at the disco—and two brothers, sons of a wealthy family that had a business in the north end: Benny and Frankie Aldalotti.*

According to Minda, Sara Beth was drawn to foreign-looking youths with black hair, dark eyes, and tan complexions.

But Nouri Habid,* the Iranian boy, was the only one she was serious about. She dated the American teenagers on a casual basis, and Minda couldn’t remember any of them being jealous.

Sara Beth wasn’t perfect, and Minda admitted that she smoked a cigarette once in a while and occasionally sipped a drink, although she never finished the whole thing.

“She wouldn’t touch drugs, though,” Minda said. “Not even marijuana. She said it made her sleepy when she tried it once, but she mostly just didn’t believe in it.”

Lynne Carlson said that Sara Beth was very careful to
follow curfew rules set up in their home. “She always called me if she would be even a half an hour late.”

Don Cameron’s team checked juvenile records, but there were no hits on either Sara Beth or Minda. They were good, normal, “straight” kids.

At 8:15 on Monday morning, July 3, Don Cameron, Mike Tando, and ID tech Marsha Jackson attended Sara Beth’s autopsy. Jackson took Sara Beth’s fingerprints so that she could differentiate them from the many latents she had lifted in the tire garage.

Sara Beth was five foot four and a half and weighed 130 pounds. Dr. Eisele found that she had been stabbed through her clothing twenty-one times. Her killer had plunged his knife into her upper back, the midline of the chest, and the top of her head. She had numerous defense wounds: palm cuts and bruised knuckles, as if she had fought her killer. There was one through-and-through wound in the soft tissue of her right forearm.

The cause of her death was exsanguination: bleeding to death. The knife had perforated her aorta, her lungs, her liver, and the pericardial sac surrounding her heart. Her skull had been fractured by the head wounds with resultant bone chipping, and another thrust had sliced bone off the spinal column.

Whoever had done this to her had been full of rage.

Eisele commented that it would have taken a killer with tremendous strength to inflict wounds of such force and depth. He was unable to tell if the murderer had been right-
or left-handed, as he had reversed the blade in successive thrusts.

“One thing I’m sure of,” the ME said. “She wasn’t killed in the restroom. We can account for less than a pint of blood on the floor, less than a pint in her clothing, and another pint in the body cavity. She lost two pints more than that; it’s probably in the killer’s car or at the site of the actual murder.”

“Did she die instantly?” Tando asked.

“Almost. She could have lived for a very short time, but five of her wounds were potentially fatal if she didn’t have immediate medical attention.”

And no one had come to help her as she lay mortally wounded. It was likely that she was already dead when her killer hid her in the dark cubicle.

It was Dr. Eisele’s opinion that Sara Beth had not been raped, or, rather, that her killer had not finished an act of rape. There was no evidence of spermatozoa or semen in her vaginal vault. There was no damage whatsoever to her pelvic area and no bruises on the inside of her thighs.

That was some small comfort to her family.

The investigators wondered if Sara Beth’s attacker had hated her for some obscure reason and killed her in an act of perverted revenge.

But who could have been that angry at a sweet fifteen-year-old girl? It was far more likely that her path had crossed that of a sadist on the prowl.

Detective Mike Tando was given principal responsibility for the case; it was one of the rash of homicides that hit the Seattle Police Department in early July 1978, and they didn’t have enough detectives to put two of them on the
case full-time. The young detective with the wild Afro found himself working twenty-hour days for almost a week, running down the deluge of leads that came in once the story hit the evening TV news and the front pages of Seattle papers.

Tando asked the investigators in the Sex Crimes Unit to go through their files and look for any cases of assault that seemed to mimic the MO of the baffling murder. They did, but they didn’t find many with similarities to the murder of Sara Beth Lundquist.