Mortal Danger (35 page)

Mike Ciesynski managed to hide his distaste for the prisoner as he told Williams that explanation wouldn’t wash. “Sara Beth Lundquist wasn’t a prostitute. She was a young girl in high school, a virgin.

“Are you familiar with the Ballard area?” he asked next.

“No.”

The detectives knew that was a lie. Ciesynski had checked Williams’s work record, along with job applications. He listed Foss Shipyard as a former employer. Foss Tugs and Foss Shipyard were located on the waterfront in Ballard.

“Sara Beth was found at Bill’s Tire Store. You said you worked for Seattle Disposal, too. That’s at Thirty-four hundred Phinney North,
exactly
one mile from Bill’s.”

“Okay,” Williams said, annoyed. “You want me to say I killed her. I killed her. I picked her up on Pike Street, drove to the tire store, and dumped her. Is that what you want? I don’t need another homicide beef.”

It was, in a sense, a confession, but it probably wouldn’t hold up. Clarence Williams was being sarcastic. Ciesynski and Weklych left, with a promise to be back. They would bring along the DNA results and let Williams read them for himself.

On March 16, Mike Ciesynski returned to the Monroe complex. He handed a copy of the DNA report to Williams. He scanned it and then said, “You’re asking me to remember something that happened thirty years ago.” He shrugged once more and said, “What can I say?”

He didn’t say anything. When Ciesynski saw that Williams had shut down again, he concluded the interview. Handing him a card, he said, “Give me a call if you ever decide to talk.”

Four days later, Frankie Aldalotti finally called the cold case detective. He was no longer a suspect, but Ciesynski was interested in talking with him anyway. He might have some bit of information that would add to the strength of murder charges against Williams.

He didn’t. Frankie said that Sara Beth had really been Benny’s friend. “I didn’t know her very well, and I never dated her or was interested in dating her. We didn’t have any type of relationship and I don’t know anything about her background.”

Mike Ciesynski was confident that they were close to bringing murder charges against Clarence Williams, close enough that he felt safe in letting Lynne Carlson know that. He called and updated her.

To be absolutely, totally armed with DNA evidence, Ciesynski sent Sara Beth’s panties to a private lab, Forensic Sciences Associates. Technicians there confirmed the match. There was a tiny area of spermatozoa on the back of the panties. It had emerged from a male with a specific analysis of the amelogenin gene.

“The calculated genotype frequencies,” the report read in a language few understand, “indicate that it is unlikely that more than one human has ever possessed this genotype array.”

The buccal (cheek) swab that Ciesynski had taken from Clarence Williams was identical in genotype array.

There were possibly other witnesses who would tie up the case. So many of those involved in 1978 had passed away. Dr. Eisele, the original forensic pathologist who had done the autopsy on Sara Beth, had died, along with several homicide detectives. But Mike Ciesynski had found Minda Craig, Sara Beth’s best friend, who remembered that Saturday night in 1978 as if it were yesterday. Her sadness over the loss of her friend had never faded, and she said she would be glad to testify.

He didn’t expect, however, to find Lorraine Olsen, the neighbor who heard Sara Beth scream that night. She’d been past middle age then.

But Lorraine Olsen was alive and in a wheelchair, being cared for by her son who had found Sara Beth’s shoes and purse, and she was over eighty.

“But I think she can testify,” her son assured Ciesynski. “I think she will want to do that.”

During the summer of 2007, Clarence Williams was one of four hundred convicts who’d been moved to the Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minnesota, because of overpopulation in correctional facilities in Washington.

Mike Ciesynski flew to Minnesota on October 23. Prison guards at the facility led him to an empty mess hall, a huge room. Other than some men cleaning the serving counter forty feet away, and a guard at the door, he was alone with Clarence Williams.

He found Clarence Williams disgruntled because he believed that the cold case detective had orchestrated the Minnesota transfer. He had not. It would have been more convenient for the investigation to have had Williams remain in Monroe, only thirty miles from Seattle Police headquarters.

Read his rights once more, Williams signed it and asked wearily, “What now?”

“You’re going to be transferred back to the King County Jail in Seattle.”

“I never asked to come here in the first place.” Williams didn’t ask why he was being sent back. He undoubtedly knew why.

Ciesynski outlined the similar stabbing pattern—and number of wounds—found on both Laura Baylis and Sara Beth Lundquist.

Williams sighed and shrugged, his usual reaction. “I’ve got nothing to say about that. I didn’t stab that other girl.”

All unconsciously, he had admitted for the very first time to stabbing Laura Baylis.

It was obvious, though, that he wouldn’t admit to anything else. Ciesynski stood up and said, “See you in Seattle.”

Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Kristin Richardson, who heads the Cold Case Division of the King County Prosecutor’s Office, oversaw filing charges against Clarence Williams, now sixty-two. He was charged with rape, kidnapping, and first-degree murder in Sara Beth’s death. He was extradited from Minnesota to face the charges in Seattle, and he was arraigned on November 20, 2007.

His court-appointed attorney was taken off guard when Williams attempted to take an Alford plea without consulting him. The Alford meant that Williams would tell the judge that he would not admit guilt, but that he believed he would be found guilty if he went to trial.

His attorney hastily intervened and the judge agreed to accept “no plea” until there was agreement between Williams and his lawyer.

He formally entered an Alford plea on December 3.

Sara Beth’s family watched from the gallery as the tall, muscled man who had killed her stood within feet of them. They felt some relief to know that he had been locked behind bars during all the years they wondered who he was. At least he hadn’t killed anyone else after Laura Baylis’s murder. Nor would he ever be free to kill again.

Six days before Christmas 2007, those who loved Sara
Beth told Clarence Edward Williams what he had done when he ended the life of a girl he “couldn’t remember.”

She would never go to college, never fall in love and get married, never have children or grandchildren—never have a chance to live out the seventy-plus years that she might have expected. All the Christmases, Easters, birthdays that should have been ahead, washed away like letters carved into a sandy beach.

Kristin Richardson read the letter that Lynne Carlson had written, while Williams sat without expression or acknowledgment: “‘There will be no language to describe the depths of my grief…no words to describe my pain in seeing my other children suffer. You took the life of a sweet and innocent child, but you can never take her spirit or her laughter, or her precious love, from me.’”

Clarence Williams declined to make a statement before he was sentenced. To paraphrase him,
“What could he say?”

On December 17, 2007, Clarence Williams was sentenced to 361 months to life in prison, to run consecutively to the eight years he still had to serve for Laura Baylis’s murder. It was, for a sixty-two-year-old man, a life sentence.

Clarence Williams came to Seattle from Milwaukee and lived there four years. Mike Ciesynski is still looking at other long-dormant homicides that occurred in the Seattle area during that time frame. And he has alerted Milwaukee authorities that if they consider Williams a possible suspect, they may find answers to
their
unsolved cases in the sixties and seventies.

For Sara Beth Lundquist and for Laura Baylis, there is, at long last, a bleak justice. The man who abducted and murdered them will never walk free again. And yet he lives and breathes, eats, sleeps, watches television, exercises, may have friends and family.

And they do not. Although Laura and Sara Beth never met, they share a sisterhood. I suspect that each of them would have fought to save the other if there had been two of them facing a violent sexual predator.

But neither of them had a chance.

This is an alarming story because most of us feel safe when we arrive home and bolt the doors to the outside world, and, even if we live alone, home is supposed to be a safe harbor. As we saw in the Mauck case, that isn’t always true.

My own “security system” begins with three very large Bernese mountain dogs who are devoted to me and are very suspicious of strangers. I have an alarm system, too, but their low growl and angry barking is the earliest warning. Not to mention my “attack cat,” Bunnie, who thinks he is a dog and is tougher than any canine.

I’ll admit that I want to frighten readers just a little as I tell my most memorable true crimes—but only to make you all wary and prepared with an almost automatic plan of what to do if someone stalks you or attacks you. Those who survive sudden attacks are invariably those who react within seconds. Rapists and killers don’t want to attract attention; their favorite targets are would-be victims who are stunned into passivity and silence until it is too late to save themselves.

The woman who was watched surreptitiously and
stalked in the following case would never have suspected
who
the phantom in her world was, and that was when she lost her advantage. Without really noticing the date when this investigation occurred, I was a little shocked to realize that I had inadvertently chosen a crime that had taken place on the very same July 4th four-day holiday in 1978 when Sara Beth Lundquist vanished. The victims had no connection at all, save the date that each encountered a different sadistic sociopath.

Strange. I have no idea why I happened to go back to that weekend thirty years ago. I picked these cases because they fit a pattern—and didn’t look at the date. This case—and Sara Beth’s murder—happened years ago, but similar crimes still occur somewhere in America every day.

I hope “Not Safe at Home” will make my readers more cautious and enable them to file an instinctual response deep in their thought processes until it’s so solidly implanted that it becomes like a tattoo on the brain.

Traia Carr found
herself at a crossroads in her life when she was in her fifties. She’d never expected her marriage to end in divorce. After all, they’d been together for thirty years, and it seemed they would celebrate their golden wedding anniversary together. But life can change suddenly and take sharp turns when we least expect it. Even though the divorce was amicable and she and her ex kept in touch often, it wasn’t the same. Traia had never lived all alone in her life.

Traia had managed to cope with those changes. She adjusted to life as a single woman, and the pain that had been as sharp as glass shards a few years earlier slowly softened. She was an attractive woman who appeared to be in her early forties, not her late fifties. After a while she started to date, and she had many invitations.

Her home was a neat bungalow on Third Street in Marysville, Washington. Marysville is a small town just five miles north of Everett, the Snohomish County seat. Traia’s hometown was adjacent to I-5, the interstate freeway that runs from California to Vancouver. Most travelers know it as a good place to stop for lunch or supper, but
they know little else about Marysville: a workingman’s town where ostentation is rare. Most homes are like Traia’s, with wood siding or shingles. You don’t find mansions in Marysville.

From the freeway, those who bother to look out their windows at the landscape from Everett to Marysville can see rivers and ponds—wider and deeper in the rainy months—lumber mills, and sprawling commercial farms growing trees, pumpkins, and all manner of produce. There are mountains and forests and Indian reservations near Marysville. Sometimes the area seems engaged in a tug-of-war between burgeoning civilization and what Snohomish County once was when its only residents were Native Americans.

Traia Carr tended to a large yard full of mature fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and bright flowers. She found a job as a clerk in a small bakery, a job she truly enjoyed. She wasn’t worried about finances, though. She had a regular income from payments on the sale of a tavern she and her ex-husband had owned and operated for decades, and she also received Social Security checks, her share of her former husband’s benefits.

She had numerous friends and as active a social life as she chose to participate in. Yet Traia had had her share of heartache. She found one man she truly cared for, and they dated almost daily for a year after he separated from his wife. And then one day, he simply stopped calling her. She eventually learned that he had gone back to his wife to try to make their marriage work. He hadn’t had the nerve to tell Traia, so she waited for the phone to ring, agonizing, wondering what had happened to him.

Traia was inconsolable for a long time. She wondered how he could move out of his apartment and disappear without telling her what was wrong, or explaining his plans to her. She shed the tears that all women suffering from unrequited love do, but gradually she regained her sense of proportion and began to date other men—but only casually.

In the spring of 1978, it looked as though Traia was going to have her happy ending after all. Her lover told her that his reconciliation with his wife hadn’t succeeded. He wanted to come back to Traia, and she welcomed him with open arms.

Disappointments in love may cut cruelly for young women who have never had their hearts broken before, but a woman approaching sixty has the added sense that romance might never come again for her. Traia felt that way, and she’d loved Tom Scott* more than any other man she’d ever known. And now he was back in her life.

Her ex-husband, grown children, friends, and coworkers at the bakery noticed a profound change in Traia. She smiled a lot, and she hummed softly as she worked. She knew that she and Tom might have only ten or twenty years left to be together, but that didn’t matter; Traia would cherish every day of that time.

And yet Traia had a niggling premonition. It had nothing to do with Tom. It was more a sense of doom that she couldn’t put into words. Finally, she told a close friend, “I don’t know why—and it probably sounds silly—but I just have this terrible feeling that something is going to happen to me—”

“What do you mean?” her friend asked. “What could happen?”

“I really don’t know. It seems to me as if my children are spending so much more time with me, and they’re being so good to me—almost as if I won’t be around much longer.”

“Traia, shame on you,” her friend said. “I don’t think you can accept being happy. You’re looking for something to be worried about, and you don’t need to. You’re healthy, Tom loves you, and you have all the time in the world.”

Traia Carr nodded nervously. The only other worry she had was a direct contradiction to her fear of dying young. She sometimes wondered what would happen to her if the payments on the tavern ran out before she was eligible for her own Social Security checks. That was five years away. She lived comfortably on her bakery salary and the tavern payments, but she couldn’t make it if she lost either monthly stipend.

She loved Tom Scott, but he had walked away from her once, and she had yet to be convinced that he wouldn’t do it again. She knew she would regain her complete trust in him, but she was still apprehensive. So many older women without men were one or two paychecks away from losing their homes. She’d seen it happen to friends.

Basically, however, Traia was happy. Tom was kind and supportive emotionally, and she realized her fears for the future were only ephemeral—nothing she couldn’t deal with in the light of day. She knew she would deal with what she had to, if indeed, her anxieties ever came true.

What Traia didn’t mention to anyone was something she couldn’t explain: When night fell, she often felt as if someone was watching her. That sounded paranoid, but
she had the definite sense that someone might be just outside her windows, somewhere out there in the blackness. When she tried to peer out, she saw only her own reflection. She kept her shades and curtains drawn at night.

July 4, 1978, was a good day, one she’d looked forward to. To celebrate the holiday, Traia and a woman friend went to a picnic at Traia’s daughter’s home, and they had a wonderful time. It was shortly before seven that evening when Traia drove her friend home. Invited in, Traia and her friend had two drinks apiece as they discussed the day’s festivities and the great potluck lunch they’d enjoyed.

It was a little after 8:30 when Traia left for her own house, which was only about ten minutes away. Both women were tired, a little sunburned, but relaxed.

Traia was due at the bakery to work the day shift on the morning of July 5.

The workweek started that Wednesday, and a steady stream of customers stopped by the bakery. The owner was kept busy boxing and bagging orders, and putting bargain prices on some “day-old” items that were left over from the holiday closure. She kept glancing at the door, wondering where Traia was; she really needed her. Traia was never late, and she always called in if she was ill or wasn’t able to come to work.

But there was no word at all from her.

When the owner got a break, she called Traia at her home, but the phone rang and rang and no one answered. Her boss stood with her hand on the phone and a puzzled
look on her face. That just wasn’t like Traia Carr. When she called someone to come in to take Traia’s place, both women were concerned.

“Traia would have called us,” the other bakery clerk said. “I wonder if she’s fallen or something?”

“I don’t know, but I think we’d better check on her. I’ll call her daughter, and if she hasn’t heard from Traia, I’ll call her ex-husband. If they don’t know where she is, we’re going to lock the store and go over there. Maybe she’s been taken ill and she needs help—but she can’t get to her phone.”

Ominously, neither Traia’s former husband nor her daughter had heard from her since the July 4th picnic the day before. They suggested that the Marysville Police be called. Officer Herm Mounts agreed to meet Traia’s boss and fellow employee at her home on Third Street.

From the outside, Traia Carr’s house looked normal enough—except for the fact that her car, a 1970 Pontiac, was not in its usual spot. It wasn’t anyplace on her property. Her front door was locked, but her daughter produced a key.

Inside the house, nothing was normal. Traia was a meticulous housekeeper. She never left dishes to soak, she hung up her clothes immediately after taking them off, and her floors sparkled with fresh wax.

Now her frightened daughter and her coworkers looked around her house with dismay. The clothes she’d worn to the picnic the day before had been tossed inside out on the living room couch. They appeared to have been removed hurriedly.

“My mother wouldn’t have left her clothes that way,” Traia’s daughter exclaimed.

“Maybe she was in a hurry to go somewhere,” officer Mounts suggested.

“No, you don’t know my mother,” her daughter insisted. “She just wouldn’t have. She
always
hangs everything up. And I’ve never known her to undress in the living room.”

“Traia?” they called as they walked through the silent house.

There was no answer, only a faint echo of their own voices. They opened all the interior doors, peered into closets, and searched the yard and sheds outside, too. If Traia Carr had been taken ill, it hadn’t been in her home.

She wasn’t anywhere on the property.

On the other hand, there was no sign of a struggle, no blood droplets or streaks, nothing overt that shouted that there had been violence inside this quiet home.

There was still a good possibility that Traia was safe and well but had been called away suddenly. Her car was gone, and that might be a good sign. Maybe she’d even eloped with Tom Scott, or left hurriedly to help a friend in trouble—someone her daughter didn’t know. Parents don’t tell their grown children
everything.

As Herm Mounts and the group left Traia’s home, they noticed a Snohomish County Sheriff’s patrol car parked at the house next door. Two of the county’s major crimes detectives—Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor—had been dispatched to the residence, a large two-story, older home that was currently occupied by a widow with many children. Whitman and Taylor were investigating an incident that
had taken place at a teenager’s party. One of those attending had suffered a superficial knife wound.

Gabrielle Berrios* had been widowed fourteen months before when her husband, Luis Sr.,* died at the age of fifty. Luis Berrios Jr.* was seventeen, one of the oldest of Gabrielle’s children. Now, the two Snohormish County detectives spoke to him about what had taken place the day before. They determined that he hadn’t been involved and he said that he’d never carried a knife.

“But there’s a kid—my mom lets him live here,” Luis said, “and he has a really big collection of knives.”

As Whitman and Taylor left to return to their headquarters in Everett, they commented on what a coincidence it was that
two
local law enforcement agencies had reason to show up at the same time at houses next door to one another. Marysville was hardly a hotbed of crime, with its population of 5,000. The 1600 block of 3rd Street was a residential neighborhood where it was rare for either the Marysville police or the sheriff’s office to be summoned.

At this point Whitman and Taylor knew nothing of Traia Carr’s disappearance—but they soon would.

Longtime Marysville officers knew Traia’s house: They had sad memories of a violent event that had occurred there a decade earlier. In 1968, a Marysville patrolman was killed in the house when he went there to settle a family fight—one of the more dangerous calls police officers deal with. This was long before Traia moved in. Possibly she wasn’t even aware of the sudden death in what later became her home.

As Marysville detectives conferred, they agreed that the situation in that same house didn’t sound good. A de
pendable woman was suddenly gone, her family was distraught because this wasn’t her pattern, and her clothing was left behind, inside out as if someone had ripped the garments from her body. From what her daughter could determine, no other clothing was missing from Traia Carr’s closet.

It all added up to something far more menacing than a woman deciding to take a vacation on a whim. Because the Marysville Police Department had only a dozen sworn officers, who were rarely called upon to investigate circumstances as bizarre as Traia’s vanishing, they asked for assistance from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Department. As it happened, Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor handled all violent crimes in the county—and they certainly knew the neighborhood where Traia lived.

Marysville officer Jarl Gunderson was heading the probe, and he thought the two county detectives with their vast experience and training would be of great help in finding Traia.

At 4:30 on Wednesday afternoon, the trio of investigators returned to Traia Carr’s home. Nothing had changed, and there was still no word from Traia. They moved from room to room, looking at the most minute signs that something chilling had happened here.

A glass of milk, drained of its contents, sat on the kitchen stove. The mattress was slightly off-kilter on the box springs in Traia’s bedroom, and her spread was askew. Several of her wigs were scattered on the floor.

They picked up the phone in her bedroom and found there was no dial tone. Following the cord, they discovered that the line had been cut.

Someone had wanted to keep Traia from calling for help.

Traia’s daughter followed the detectives’ directions as she walked through the house. She looked more carefully than she had earlier. She had been so frightened then that something had happened to her mother. She still was, but she grew calmer.

“I can see now,” she said, “that there are several things missing. Her clock radio is gone, and she has an old antique radio from the thirties. That’s not here.”

She pointed to her mother’s dresser top, where necklaces and brooches were tangled together. “She keeps her dresser as neat as everything else—not like this.”

“Is anything missing?”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to go through her jewelry box and the drawers to be sure.”