Mortal Danger (41 page)

Detective Sergeant Ben Benson faced one of the most convoluted cases of his long career as he was assigned to head the probe into a double-homicide investigation.

Ben Benson and Brent Bomkamp thought at first that they had located a fingerprint in blood on an interior door of the Maucks’ home. Bomkamp sawed the section out, but experts in the crime lab reported that it was a portion of a palm print instead. Benson took criminalist Marylou Hanson-O’Brien to swab four subjects’ arms almost to the elbow for identification purposes. They didn’t object, but perhaps they should have.

THIRTY YEARS LATER

Julie Costello aka Laura Baylis led a carefree life on the road, and believed she could handle any situation. Sadly, she was overpowered by an evil presence too big for her to fight. She will always be the young woman in this photo.

7-Eleven all-night clerk Laura Baylis is filmed by the security camera she triggered as she opened the cash register. An unknown male stands to her right.

The camera clicks on mindlessly as Laura bends to scoop money out of the till.

The stranger, wearing a billed cap, protective glasses, and a khaki jacket, appears to hold a knife to Laura Baylis’s back as she puts the money into a bag. These would be the last photos taken of Laura alive.

Clarence Williams (

right
) stands in a police lineup. He is wearing clothes identical to the robber/abductor of Laura Baylis as seen in security camera frames. Even so, he denied that he bore any resemblance to “the stranger.”

Robbery Detective Larry Stewart joined homicide detectives in the investigation into the disappearance of Laura Baylis, and talked to dozens of neighbors and possible witnesses.

Robbery Unit Lieutenant Bob Holter’s crew were the first ones to investigate the 7-Eleven abduction. It didn’t appear to be a homicide in the beginning, and there was an avalanche of murders in Seattle in the summer of 1978. Holter’s men kept running into blank walls.

Seattle Homicide Detective Hank Gruber shook his head in disbelief when Clarence Williams insisted he wasn’t the man in the 7-Eleven photos, even though Gruber glanced from the security camera shots of the man himself—and found them identical.

Mike Tando was a young homicide detective in 1978 when he was assigned to the murder investigation in the death of fifteen-year-old Sara Beth Lundquist. Although he worked around the clock for days, talking to Sara Beth’s friends and relatives and dozens of tipsters, the identity of her killer remained obscure. When it was finally solved, Tando had reached retirement age.

Sara Beth Lundquist got off a bus at midnight and walked into the darkness—forever. Although it took three decades to find her killer in a case long gone cold, she was never forgotten—not by her family, her friends, nor Seattle detectives.