Mortal Danger (36 page)

Traia Carr had a small safe, which had been pried open. Oddly, the detectives found three hundred dollars in cash still inside. But the money was hidden from view.

“Someone who wasn’t familiar with this safe could have missed this,” Bruce Whitman said.

“My mother has a special ring,” Traia’s daughter said. “She keeps it in this safe. It was made especially for her—with the birthstones of all her grandchildren. There isn’t another one just like it. But it’s gone….”

“What about clothing?” Dick Taylor asked. “Can you look more closely and tell us if anything—anything at all—is missing?”

She carefully searched her mother’s neat closet, shaking her head. “Nothing’s gone—but wait! Her purple robe isn’t here. That’s her favorite.”

It didn’t look good. No woman disappears voluntarily wearing only her bathrobe.

Traia’s daughter had noticed recently that her mother was inordinately cautious about whom she let into her house.

“She keeps her doors locked—all the time. And she has this chain on it. Even if she’s expecting someone, she always checks through the peephole before she’ll open the door. She would never let a stranger in.”

“Is she afraid of anyone?” Jarl Gunderson asked. “Has she mentioned anyone to you—by name?”

The young woman shook her head. “No, no one. But that’s like her; she never wants to worry me. She might tell one of her friends if she’s scared of someone. But she was in such a happy mood yesterday at our picnic. She didn’t seem worried about anything.”

But perhaps she had been. Searching the outside of her house, they found crushed flowers beneath several of her windows and footprints in the dirt outside her bedroom window. Someone—perhaps a voyeur, perhaps somebody looking for a way to get in—had obviously stood close to her windows, watching her when she didn’t know it.

The detectives realized that if someone
had
abducted Traia Carr, it almost had to be someone she knew—and trusted—or she never would have let him in in the first place. Her daughter didn’t think she was afraid of anyone, but she admitted her mother wouldn’t want to scare her.

Still, Traia was gone. And so was her car and many of her belongings.

A door-to-door canvass of all the houses in the 3rd Street neighborhood produced negative results. One neighbor said he’d heard loud voices on the night of July 4, but he paid them little attention. With so many teenagers living at the Berrios residence, loud music, shouts, and laughter—even screams—were more usual than unusual.

Like most small-town cops, Jarl Gunderson knew almost everyone in Marysville. He knew that Traia’s divorce had been friendly and that she and her ex-husband were on good terms. And he knew that Traia had a good reputation; the men she chose to date were primarily those she had known for a long time. Some of them were a good deal younger than she was, but there was no crime in that. She was attractive enough to appeal to men in their forties.

Gunderson talked with one of her bakery coworkers who seemed to be close to her.

“Was there anyone who frightened Traia?”

“No, I wouldn’t say exactly
afraid
,” she mused. “But she told me about this one guy she’d had trouble with. He was at her house, and he was kind of ‘liquored up’ and I guess…well, he made a pass at her that she didn’t appreciate. She said she pushed him out the door and locked it. She said she wasn’t going to let him come over anymore.”

The witness didn’t know the man’s name.

“Was he angry?” Gunderson asked. “Did he ever try to see her again?”

“Not that she ever mentioned. Traia was pretty firm with him.”

Traia Carr’s Pontiac sedan was found first. A Marysville police sergeant discovered it at 1:30 a.m. on Thursday,
July 6. It was barely half a mile from her house, parked on 3rd Avenue.

When they found her car, the investigators knew that their fears for her safety were accurate. The upholstery on the back of the driver’s seat was literally drenched in blood, which had now dried completely.

DNA matches were unheard of at the time, but the Western Washington Crime Lab would be able to compare blood type, enzymes, and RH factors if they could find any samples or records of Traia’s blood values.

After daylight dawned, Dick Taylor and Bruce Whitman processed the Pontiac for evidence. They found more blood in varying quantities on the hood, throughout the interior, and on the doors. There was so
much
blood that, if it had all come from one person, they sincerely doubted that that person could still be alive.

Once again, they surmised that the killer—or attempted killer—probably lived close by. He could have easily dumped Traia’s car and walked to one of the many houses that spread out from both sides of 3rd Street.

There was no purse in Traia’s car, nor her missing purple robe. The two detectives couldn’t find anything that might have belonged to the person whose gun or knife had caused all the bloodshed.

And they still didn’t know where Traia Carr was.

They lifted a number of latent fingerprints that might prove to be invaluable
if
they found a suspect whose prints could be compared to these unknown prints. In 1978, AFIS didn’t exist. The FBI didn’t keep single fingerprints three decades ago—except those that belonged to felons on the Ten Most Wanted list.

Forensic science has advanced a great deal since the seventies, when computers weren’t yet standard household equipment. Looking back, 1978 CSI techniques seem archaic now.

There was just one man whom Traia Carr was extremely close to, and he lived in her neighborhood. That was Tom Scott, the ex-lover who had recently come back to her. His apartment was several blocks up the street from her house.

Jarl Gunderson, Dick Taylor, and Bruce Whitman studied Scott as they questioned him. He appeared to be very distraught and grief-stricken over Traia’s disappearance. They believed his emotions were real and not manufactured tears meant to take suspicion off of him. But they also knew that sociopaths were quite capable of feigning grief when it served their purposes.

“I’ll do anything in my power,” Scott said, sobbing, “to find out what happened to Traia. I just keep praying she’s still alive, waiting for us to find her.”

The three investigators didn’t believe that she was still alive, but they didn’t comment on it; Scott was upset enough as it was.

“Try to think,” Bruce Whitman urged. “Think of anything unusual that may have happened in the past few months—anything, even if it didn’t seem important at the time, that might have caused Ms. Carr to be afraid or nervous.”

But Tom Scott said the only thing he could think of was actually a crime where
he
was the victim.

“I was over at Traia’s house for the evening, and somebody ripped off stuff from my truck—they took some
tools, fishing gear, and some blank checks. I was mad. I figured it was probably somebody from the house next door. There’s a bunch of teenage kids over there, and it seemed like it was the kind of thing kids would pull. I wanted to go over there and confront them, but Traia begged me not to. She said she had a good relationship with the family, and the kids had never bothered her. She thought I might stir up trouble if I accused them. So I didn’t.”

Gunderson nodded. “We’ve been working on that,” he said. Later, he told Whitman and Taylor that he felt Scott’s suspicions were probably true.

“Those missing checks are popping up around town, and the makers have been traced to the Berrios house next door. Luis Jr.’s name is on some of them, but there are also some from other kids his mother lets live there.”

The Marysville Police Department was very close, Gunderson said, to filling charges against the forgers when Traia Carr disappeared. Still, he doubted that there was a connection.

They tended to agree. Why would anyone from the Berrios house hurt Traia? She hadn’t approached them about the theft from Tom Scott’s truck, and she’d convinced him not to accuse them, either. She had bent over backwards to keep a peaceful relationship with her next-door neighbors. And the forgers had no idea yet that they were about to be arrested.

No. Abducting the pretty divorcée made no sense at all. Surely, even as attractive as Traia was, she was much too old to tantalize teenage boys—and much too circumspect even to consider doing so.

Five days passed, and there were no calls or letters from Traia. Her relatives and her lover were desperate for news of her as the hottest weather of the year burned grass brown, and Traia’s trees dropped pears, peaches, and early apples on the ground, where they rotted. Ordinarily, she would have been canning and freezing the produce for the winter ahead.

The Marysville and Snohomish County detectives were convinced now that they were probably working on a murder case. They had eliminated almost everyone in Traia’s world as suspects. Tom Scott had a solid alibi for the vital time period when his sweetheart vanished, and he was doing everything he could to help them.

He had loved Traia—that was clear—and he was deeply saddened as day after day passed and there was no word from her or
about
her.

The amorous suitor who made unwanted sexual advances to Traia when he was drunk had been far away from Marysville on July 4. The detectives verified that.

If Traia had received obscene phone calls, she hadn’t mentioned it to her friends or to Tom Scott. She had been afraid at night—but of whom?

They had worked their way through Traia’s world. Except for someone unknown who had frightened her, there was no one else who would conceivably have wanted to hurt her.

If a stranger had come to her door, she would never have let him in.

“Traia’s feisty,” one of her relatives told the investigative team. “She could handle troublemakers in the tavern; she’d eighty-six them if they didn’t shape up. But she val
ued her life, and she wouldn’t have taken any chances with it. Once she saw a stranger in the peephole of her door, she wouldn’t let him in. I know that.”

At 4:30 in the afternoon on Wednesday, July 12, Traia Carr had been missing for a full week. A logger was finishing work for the day off an isolated dirt road on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, which is very close to Marysville. Working alone, he was cutting and yarding—pulling fallen fir trees out of the woods.

He’d been in the area for a few days, and he’d caught occasional whiffs of a nauseating odor. He recognized it as decaying flesh. That wasn’t unusual in the deep woods, and he figured some animal had died close by and was decomposing rapidly.

He hooked a turn (two logs together) and dragged them down along the road. Glancing back, the logger caught a glimpse of “something light.” He hopped off his rig and walked back to see what it was.

Traia Carr had been found.

Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor processed the body site. Without the logger choosing just this area to work in, the missing woman might never have been discovered. The undergrowth was as thick as if they were in a jungle.

The female body before them was completely nude and lying facedown. Despite the decomposition caused by a week’s intense heat, and the fact that the huge fir trees had actually passed over her body—crushing it—the detectives could still see many puncture wounds in her back. And, when they gently turned her over, more knife wounds
marred her breasts. Someone had stabbed her again and again in an almost classic example of a rage killing.

Traia’s purple robe and slippers were gone, although tracking dogs would later turn up a torn piece of purple cloth in the brush not far away.

Dr. E. Bitar, a forensic pathologist, performed the postmortem exam on Traia Carr. The knife thrusts had entered her heart and lungs, causing several fatal wounds. Some were shallow, but the deepest wounds measured five inches. She had been stabbed at least fourteen times—five in her back and nine in her upper front torso.

“See this bruising impression here,” Dr. Bitar pointed out to the detectives. “The weapon used had a guard at the end of the handle. The guard made the bruises. The murder weapon was a knife with a wide curving blade, tapered at the point.”

Because Traia was nude when her body was found, her robe ripped to pieces, Jarl Gunderson, Bruce Whitman, and Dick Taylor agreed that the motive behind her murder could very well be sexual. And Dr. Bitar confirmed that theory. Acid phosphotase turns bright reddish-purple when it comes in contact with semen, and this test on Traia was positive for semen and for sperm (now dead).

The most bizarre and shocking discovery at autopsy, however, was that her killer had packed her vagina with leaves. There was no other way for leaves to have entered her vaginal vault so deeply unless someone had deliberately shoved them there.

But why? Was it a kind of symbolic rape? That wasn’t likely because the killer hadn’t been impotent—he had left semen behind. It could only have been a gesture of contempt.

The three investigators looked harder at the occupants of the house Gabrielle Berrios rented next door to Traia. They were closing in on an arrest for the theft of Tom Scott’s belongings and checks, and Jarl Gunderson needed to obtain a search warrant to find possible evidence in that case.

They didn’t believe that a teenager would have kidnapped Traia Carr and killed her in this grotesque fashion. They would find the answers to check theft first—if they could—and bide their time on the homicide probe. The very proximity of the two houses was a factor that couldn’t be discounted. Nor could the juvenile records of many of the residents in the sprawling Berrios home.

They got their search warrant, and the items it listed were Tom Scott’s tools, fishing gear, and blank checks. They entered the Berrios residence and found it cluttered and messy, not unusual for a place where numerous teenagers lived.

Bruce Whitman searched upstairs. He observed a number of knives in the small bedroom of one of the boarders, but none of them matched the description of the murder weapon.

Jarl Gunderson’s search area was a washhouse located on the back of the property. He was looking for the blank checks that hadn’t yet turned up. When he reached into a cardboard box, he came up with a small jewelry chest. He
showed it to Taylor, who pulled a list out of his pocket; it was an itemized tally of Traia’s missing jewelry that her daughter had given him that morning.