Mortal Danger (37 page)

“Gold ladder used to hold earrings,” he read.

“It’s here.”

“Ring made of birthstones—”

“That’s here, too,” Gunderson said. “And there’s a payroll stub from the bakery, from a check made out to Traia Carr.”

Both investigators were stunned.

“Until that moment,” Rick Taylor recalled, “we weren’t sure at all that anyone in that house was connected to Traia Carr’s murder. We were leaning the other way—we really felt it was probably someone else entirely, probably an older man who was fixated on her.”

They wanted very much to continue their search, but search warrants are strictly defined to protect the rights of citizens. Their current warrant didn’t list any of Traia’s belongings. If they continued to search now, any evidence discovered that was linked to her murder might well be deemed “fruit of the poisoned tree”—evidence found without a search warrant—and be thrown out of court.

Frustrated, but knowing it was the only legal way, they immediately stopped their search of the Berrios property and set about getting a search warrant seeking evidence in Traia Carr’s homicide. They certainly had probable cause now to believe that someone living in Gabrielle Berrios’s house might be the killer.

While they awaited word that a new search warrant had been granted, the three investigators talked to possible wit
nesses in the house about the theft of Tom Scott’s property.

As the detectives were pulling scorched and partially burned checks out of a burn barrel, Luis Berrios Jr. came strolling up the alley behind his home. He had a wary expression on his face as Dick Taylor looked up and said, “Hi.”

Luis didn’t say anything.

“You’re under arrest for possession of stolen property,” Taylor said and advised him of his Miranda rights.

He didn’t mention Traia Carr’s murder, and Luis visibly relaxed, taking a deep breath. The detectives had seen that same relieved look on the afternoon of July 5—after they’d told Luis they were investigating the juvenile fight at the party in Everett. When they came out to question him the day after Traia vanished, Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor had been completely unaware of Traia’s disappearance.

Several young men in their late teens had been living next door to Traia Carr, and Luis Jr. was known to Jarl Gunderson as, at most, a penny-ante crook. He wasn’t very big at five foot eight, but he weighed 165 pounds, and that made him considerably taller and heavier than Traia. Still, she’d been forty years older than he was, old enough to be his grandmother. He was hardly a likely candidate as her rapist-murderer, but he might know something that he was afraid to tell.

Luis didn’t seem concerned about the theft charges. He answered questions about Tom Scott’s missing property, but his responses were vague. They took him into the house and sat down at the dining room table.

“We don’t want any conversation,” Taylor said, and Luis looked confused. But as the minutes passed, he grew anxious again. If they’d come to talk to him about a burglary, why weren’t they asking him more questions?

Once they were informed that a second search warrant had been signed by a judge, Taylor, Whitman, and Gunderson led Gabrielle Berrios out to the washhouse in the backyard. She was stunned when they showed the search warrant that now allowed them to look around her property for items of Traia Carr’s that were still missing.

“We have reason to believe that someone living in your house is aware of what happened to Mrs. Carr—”

“We
all
know what happened to the poor lady,” Gabrielle interrupted, crossing herself. “She was murdered.”

“No,” Jarl Gunderson said. “We think someone who lives in your house may have
guilty
knowledge about her abduction and her death. We need to talk with Luis Jr.”

She stared back at him, uncomprehending. And then a shadow crossed her face as she understood. “That’s all right,” Gabrielle said. “I can see why you might want to. He knows just about everything that goes on here—but he doesn’t always tell me.”

A uniformed officer led Luis Jr. out to the washhouse, and he was interviewed in the presence of his mother, after he was once more advised of his rights—this time in the case of Traia’s murder.

Luis Jr. finally admitted that he had some of his neighbor’s things. “But I only had them because some Arab gave them to me at a party the night of July Fourth.”

It seemed to be a contrived story, but there were a large
number of Middle Eastern students attending Everett Community College at the time.

Gunderson left the interview to speak with people Luis said were at that party. He learned that Luis had been there, all right, but witnesses said he arrived after midnight—not earlier in the evening, as he said.

Jarl Gunderson outlined all the evidence—both physical and circumstantial—that indicated Traia Carr’s killer probably lived in his house. He stared hard at Luis. “Luis, I’ve known you for a long time,” he said. “And I know when you’re lying.”

Luis looked at the floor.

“You’re lying now, aren’t you?”

Faced with the information that Gunderson had uncovered, all the bravado went out of Luis Berrios Jr. He heaved a great sigh. “All right,” he said softly. “I did it.”

“What did you do?” Gunderson pressed.

“What you think I did. I killed her.”

The investigators were surprised. They had expected him to tell them about someone else who was Traia’s killer.

Luis Jr. was now ready to fill in the blank spots in their reconstruction of the victim’s last hours. The three detectives listened avidly as he told them he had felt sexually turned on by his fifty-seven-year-old neighbor. He’d kept track of her comings and goings and come to know her habits. Often, he’d peered into her bedroom window as she undressed for bed.

“She never knew I was there,” he said.

“Maybe she did,” Whitman said flatly. “But I doubt she knew it was you.”

Luis continued with his story of what happened the night of July Fourth. His mother and younger brothers and sisters had gone to see the fireworks display, and his friends had all gone out, too.

“I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone about twenty minutes after eight,” he recalled. “We had a fight and I hung up on her.”

Luis said he’d been angry and bored. “I was the only one in our house,” he said. “I saw Traia come home from her picnic and go into her house. I watched while the lights went on. I knew she was probably alone.”

“You kept that close track of her?”

“Yeah. I could tell if she was alone or if her boyfriend or her daughter was over there.”

Luis said that he’d looked around his house for some money “to do something with.” He’d searched through a number of rooms in the big old house.

“That’s when I stumbled across the knife. And I began to think about the neighbor next door—Traia—and about raping her. I went over and circled the house and I peeked into her windows. I could see that she was alone.”

Then Luis had gone around to the front door and knocked. Traia had looked out the peephole and recognized him, and she’d opened her door with a smile.

“I asked her if she’d like to watch the fireworks from my house, and she was happy. She asked me, ‘Yes, that would be nice. Where are they—out in back?’”

For some reason, Traia had begun to shut her door—maybe to remove the chain from its slot, maybe because she wanted to change clothes.

“But I pushed it open,” Luis said. “And I pulled out the
knife and slipped inside. She was shocked and asked me what I was doing and if I wanted money.”

Traia
would
have been shocked: This was the kid next door, from the family she’d done so much for—from bringing day-old doughnuts home from the bakery for the kids to giving them odd jobs when they needed money. She had tried so hard to welcome them to the neighborhood and avoided arguments at all costs. She’d felt kind of sorry for the recent widow with so many kids and so little money.

“So she asked me did I want money,” Luis said. “And I told her I wanted sex.”

She saw that he meant it, but it was, of course, unthinkable. Traia had tried to talk Luis out of having sex with her, and she’d offered him money if he would just leave.

“I told her I meant it when I said we were going to have sex. I held the knife close to her and told her to take her clothes off.”

Trembling, Traia had taken her clothes off and placed them on the couch in the living room.

“I told her to go into the bedroom. She was really scared and she started to cry, but that didn’t change my mind. Then she said her boyfriend was coming over at eleven thirty.”

At that point, Traia Carr may have sealed her doom. She had feared something like this, as she’d sensed someone watching her—always—but she had never been able to explain, even to herself, what it was that terrified her. And she had no idea
who
it was who watched her. She just knew that
someone
was.

“That changes things,” Luis recalled saying to her. “If
your friend is coming over, we’ll have to get out of this house and go somewhere else.”

“No…no,” she said, weeping. “He’s not coming over. I was just saying that, hoping you would go home and forget this.”

“But now I can’t believe you,” Luis had told her, playing sadistic mind games. “I can’t believe anything you’re saying, so you’ll have to come with me.”

Traia had pleaded with him to be allowed to dress first, and Luis had finally agreed to let Traia wear her robe. “She threw that on, and some pink slippers, and she grabbed her purse.”

Her phone line was cut, there was no one next door, and it seemed as though the whole town was someplace else, watching the fireworks that lit up the sky and boomed in the dark night. As Luis led Traia out to her car, she must have looked around frantically for someplace to run, for someone to call out to.

But there’d been no help around.

“I drove out behind the Thunderbird Drive-In to the Indian reservation,” Luis said. “Then I parked and told her to get in the backseat.”

And there, in the pitch black of the night on the lonely reservation road, Luis Berrios Jr. had raped Traia Carr, still holding the sharp Buck knife to her flesh so that she dared not struggle or fight him.

When he had finally finished with her, Traia asked, “Can we go now?”

“I told her, ‘Yes. Yes, we can.’”

She believed that the ordeal was over and that she was
going to live, after all. Luis was going to let her drive home. She bent over to turn the key in the ignition.

Luis had been standing by the open driver’s side door. He seemed to be back at the scene of Traia’s death as he continued to describe what happened in the woods on the Indian reservation.

“I knew I had to kill her so she wouldn’t say anything to anyone,” he said. “I stabbed her in the back, all the way in. She was quite surprised. I pulled my knife out and stabbed her again. She fell out of the car onto the ground and started making a funny noise. I panicked, I guess, and I just kept stabbing her. Then she stopped making noise. The knife got caught in her robe, and it made me angry, so I just cut it off her and threw it in the brush.”

His tone was so matter-of-fact that the listening detectives felt a little sick.

Luis Berrios said that he had stuffed leaves into Traia Carr’s vagina.

“Why?”
Jarl Gunderson asked him.

“I figured that would erase any trace of rape. Kind of cover it up—”

And then Luis had gotten into Traia’s car, sitting in her wet blood in the driver’s seat, and driven away.

“What did you do next?” Bruce Whitman asked him.

“I went to Smith Island and I threw her purse out. Then I drove around for a while and went back to her house. I went in and took some things I wanted.”

The seventeen-year-old boy appeared to have no conscience at all. He betrayed no regret or guilt over what he had done to a woman who had been only kind to him. His
choice of what to take from the dead woman’s house was strange: the radios, Traia’s jewelry, and food.

“I took some canned goods and some fresh vegetables. I was kind of thinking of running away, and I thought the food might come in handy.

“I put the box full of her things in the backyard on the ground, and then I took her car up about three blocks, parked it, kept the keys, and walked back home. I put the box of stuff in the washroom, and then I took the knife and put it in the flower bed. I stepped on it until it was buried.”

But Luis was still restless. He regretted that he hadn’t taken the liquor that Traia had. “I went back to her house and took some bottles. I went to the party, drank her liquor, and got so drunk that I passed out. I woke up about four a.m. Then I came home.”

Once Luis Berrios Jr. began to talk, his confession was a geyser of words. Maybe he did have a conscience and needed to get the ugly story out. He led the three detectives to the flower garden where he’d buried the death weapon beneath the petunias. He pointed out a few items in his family’s washhouse that the investigators had failed to find.

Luis led them unerringly to where he’d left Traia’s body, even though it had changed somewhat because of the logging that had occurred since her murder. Then he took them to a sewer lagoon on Smith Island where the blackberry vines had grown ten feet high in the summer heat.

“That’s where I threw her purse—and her slippers.”

There was no question that Luis had killed Traia Carr. The investigators recovered physical evidence in each area he led them to. K-9 Unit’s dog Tracer wriggled through the thick and thorny Himalayan blackberry vines and emerged with her slippers and her purse.

“I took her money, but I left her credit cards in there,” Luis said, almost as if he wanted a pat on the back for being honest.

“Why did you kill her?” Gunderson asked him. “She didn’t fight you—you got what you wanted from her. Why didn’t you let her go home?”

“You know I couldn’t,” Luis said. “She would have reported me to you guys for raping her. I couldn’t risk that.”

He commented that it was kind of funny that she was really afraid he was going to kill her all during her ordeal. “But she was turning the car key at the end, and I could tell she thought she was going to live. She really thought I was going to let her go.