Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (34 page)

Carolyn was on edge by the end of July 1998. Besides the bank record of her secret account, she kept anything remotely personal and private at her office. Bob was driving her crazy, virtually stalking her. If she went out for lunch or pizza with her women friends, he would suddenly show up unannounced. “He seemed to know her every move,” one of her coworkers said. “How awful to have to live like that.”

Bob tried to get home before Carolyn did so he could note the time of her arrival. If she got home first and he saw her van there, he would take off his shoes and socks and tiptoe barefoot into the house to see if he could catch her with a lover. When she talked to friends on the phone, both parties could hear a click that signified someone had picked up an extension. Bob made sure to pick up the mail before Carolyn did, and he went through it carefully. He listened to all their voice mail messages and monitored her Internet access. He was expert at that but found nothing.

Carolyn didn’t have a lover or one in the wings. But she had made up her mind to be happy, which meant that one day she
would
find someone she could love. She hoped that she could keep in touch with Bob’s family. His father had died shortly before, but she would miss his mother and her sister-in-law. They had been good to her, and she knew they would be shocked and saddened at the divorce. This year’s red geraniums were flourishing near Carolyn’s front porch.

Carolyn wrote down her financial status and studied it to see if she could manage on child support and her share of the family assets. She had made initial visits to two lawyers.

“She was getting herself very well prepared for this,” Denise remembered. “She was ready to leave.”

Although Bob Durall had never harmed Carolyn physically, her situation frightened her friends. Denise and Gary Jannusch owned a rental house, and their renters were moving out in mid-August 1998. It seemed providential. They were happy to rent it to Carolyn and her children. In late July and early August, the children stayed with her parents at their summer retreat on the island, going to camp during the day. If there should be an argument when Carolyn and Bob parted, the kids wouldn’t have to witness it.

The only thing that troubled Denise was that she and her family were going to be in Lake Chelan for the week of August 3 to August 8. It was about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Renton, and they would be far away on Thursday, August 6, when, as Denise knew, Carolyn planned to ask Bob for a divorce.

Although he had to know his marriage was moribund, Bob Durall’s friends and coworkers saw no sign of stress in him. He had always had unexplained absences from work, but since he was a supervisor he didn’t have to explain where he was. Of course, his job demanded that he be extremely proficient with computers, and he had access to the most complex and up-to-date ones available at the King County Housing Authority. He had an office with a door he could shut, and those who worked for him were used to finding him hunched over in front of a screen, tracking information vital to the department’s records. He was the one who checked on other employees at the Housing Authority to be sure their computer skills were up to par and that they were performing well. He made sure that no one spent too much time on their personal interests on the department’s computers.

But there was nobody who checked Bob Durall’s computer.

On Thursday, August 6, 1998, Carolyn’s friends at work could tell that she was distracted and a little depressed. She finally confided in several friends and told them what Denise already knew. She had made a decision: she was definitely going to ask Bob for a divorce that evening. She wasn’t sure how he would respond, but she would never expose their children to an emotional scene. At the very least, there was bound to be an argument. This was the best time to do it.

“I’m going to tell him tonight,” she told several coworkers who were her closest friends.

“Oh, Carolyn,” one of the women cried, alarmed. “No! You mustn’t be alone when you tell him. We’ll all go out to dinner with you. You can tell him, but at least we’ll be close by.”

She shook her head. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I can handle it.” She said that her neighbors weren’t that far away and, besides, Bob wasn’t physically violent. He was suspicious and jealous—even obsessive about some things—and he always had to have his own way, but she didn’t fear him. “He’d never hurt me,” she said firmly. “He may cry, but I know he wouldn’t hurt me.”

Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to him to have an audience when she broke the news to him. Divorce wasn’t a spectator sport.

As Carolyn left her office that night, she was wearing a periwinkle-blue silk pants suit.

“She walked past my desk,” one woman recalled, “smiling her beautiful smile. She said to me, ‘Wish me luck. Tonight’s the night.’ I told her I would keep her in my prayers, and then I said good-bye to her. It was the last time I ever saw her…”

When several of her friends asked her to reconsider facing Bob alone, Carolyn turned back to them, trying to reassure them. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Before she reached the parking lot and her 1990 maroon Ford Aerostar van, she turned around a second time and went back to calm her coworkers’ fears. They will never forget what she said.

“If I’m not here tomorrow morning,” Carolyn said quietly, “just remember that my whole life is in my desk.”

Her van was barely out of the parking lot when the phone rang. It was Denise, calling from Lake Chelan. She had been worried about Carolyn all week. “When I talked to her on Monday,” Denise said, “I said, ‘Keep your chin up and you can do it. You’ll be fine, and it’s going to work out okay.’ It was a good conversation. She told me twice, ‘Have a good vacation.’

“It was seven minutes after three when I called the office on Thursday afternoon, and Kim Arriza answered. She said Carolyn had just left, that she was very nervous and worried.”

Kim told Denise that Carolyn intended to go ahead with her plan that night and was going to talk to Bob Durall as soon as she got home. Again, Denise felt that she should be there, close enough for Carolyn to come to the Jannusches’ after she told Bob.

“We had given her our security code, though,” Denise said, “so she could go to our house if she needed to.

“But Thursday night I had a bad dream about Carolyn, and I woke up needing to talk to her. It was a nightmare full of blood and she was in danger.”

Carolyn was never late to work,
never.
She was due at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter at 8:30 Friday morning, August 7. After a mostly sleepless night, Denise called at 8:37 to talk to Carolyn, but she wasn’t in the office yet. “I thought, ‘No big deal,’ ” Denise remembered. “Maybe it was a tough night, and I thought I would call back later—but I did leave a voice mail asking Carolyn to call me just as soon as she got to work.”

Denise’s cell phone rang at nine. With a sigh of relief, she answered, but it wasn’t Carolyn; it was the office calling to ask if she had heard from Carolyn. For the first time in anyone’s memory, Carolyn was half an hour late. With anyone else, it might have been different. But not Carolyn.

Denise asked one of the male brokers to check across the street from their office where Carolyn’s parents kept a small condo to stay in when they were in the Seattle area. “See if her van is there, would you?”

He came back on the line. “No van.”

Kim Arriza, who had said good-bye to Carolyn the previous afternoon, lived just up the street from the Duralls. She worked a later shift, so the increasingly worried staff at Morgan Stanley called her and asked her if she’d drive down to Hoquiam Court to see if she could spot the van.

When Kim turned into the Duralls’ driveway, she saw that Bob’s 1997 green Nissan Pathfinder was there, backed up to the garage. There was no sign of Carolyn’s van. Bob came around the house, and Kim noted that he was sweating profusely. He seemed surprised to see her. When she asked him where Carolyn was, he answered, “She left for work.”

But Carolyn hadn’t come to work at all that morning. Her friends and her supervisors were now worried in earnest. When they called her home, the phone rang and rang until voice mail with a standard message picked up.

They called Carolyn’s next-door neighbor, Linda Gunderson, and asked her to check to see if Carolyn’s car was in the driveway.

“Her car’s gone,” Linda said, “and so is Bob’s. It looks as if there’s nobody home.”

Now Linda Gunderson felt a sense of urgency. She hadn’t seen any activity around the house next door that morning, and as far as she knew, they weren’t planning to leave a day early to go to Carolyn’s parents’ island cabin. After she knocked on the door and received no response, she glanced up at the master bedroom’s window. It was shut. She felt a pang of fear. Bob and Carolyn always left that window open, even when they were away. It kept the house from getting stuffy, and it was too high for a burglar to reach unless he scaled the roof.

The whole house was locked up tight. It seemed to be zipped up completely and lifeless.

Carolyn’s coworkers and Linda Gunderson gave up any pretense that everything was all right. They called the Renton Police Department and asked if a patrolman could go to Hoquiam Court and check on the Durall house.

An officer was dispatched to the pale green house shortly after ten to do a “check on the welfare of Carolyn Durall.” No one answered his pounding on the door, either, but that didn’t seem unusual to him on a Friday in summer. He noted there were no cars in the driveway and figured that the family who lived there had probably just decided to leave early for the weekened.

Their worries hardly eased, Carolyn’s coworkers attempted to report her as a missing person, but the Renton officer explained that such a report had to come from someone in her family. Undeterred, they then called Carolyn’s parents on the island. They hadn’t heard from Carolyn, either. The island was accessible only by ferry, and on a summer weekend, there were long lines at either end. They all hoped that Carolyn was waiting in one of those lines.

Carolyn’s parents were very concerned, too. It wasn’t like her to be out of touch with them when her children were staying with them.

Some people go missing for a week or so and nobody thinks much about it. But Carolyn’s friends at Morgan Stanley knew what her plans for the night before had been and that she had fully intended to be at work this morning. As Friday crawled by, they grew increasingly worried.

Bob Durall didn’t go to work at the Seattle Housing Authority on Friday morning, but he wasn’t expected; he was scheduled to attend a class in Fife, a small town near Tacoma. His coworkers, alerted by Carolyn’s office, tried to call him there. They learned that he had called in to say he would be an hour late.

Denise Jannusch, still at Lake Chelan, learned that as she called everyone she could think of. Bob wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t at his office or the computer class. He finally answered the phone at his house in the early afternoon.

“Bob,” she asked, “where’s Carolyn? What is going on?”

He answered a little vaguely, saying she had gone to work.

“She never showed up at work.”

Then Denise asked Bob if he and Carolyn had had a fight the night before.

“Yeah,” he said curtly. “What do you know about that? I hear she told people she was going to have a serious conversation with me. What do you know about that?”

Denise backed off. “I don’t really know. Have you checked her horse’s stall? Maybe she just totally lost it, and she went—like maybe she’s sitting in the corner of Drizzle’s stall.”

Bob Durall didn’t appear to be worried about Carolyn, even when he heard she hadn’t gone to work. Denise could hear no emotion in his voice, but that was like him. She asked him to run upstairs and check to see if Carolyn’s makeup, her shampoo, the solution for her contact lenses, and the special gel she always used on her hair were there. He put down the phone for a few minutes then came back on the line. “Yeah, it’s all there.”

“Okay,” she said firmly, “I want you to go and check the stall and see if she’s there. Call me back at three.”

He did call her back then, but he hadn’t found Carolyn, and he had heard no news at all about her. No one had seen her. Still, he sounded calm, as if there was nothing to worry about.

By now, Bob’s work associates had heard that his wife was missing, and they had also learned that he had called the class he was supposed to attend and said he wouldn’t be able to be there at all. No one knew where he had been all day Friday.

Denise called Bob back at six. He said he still hadn’t heard from Carolyn.

“Bob,” she said, “you should call the police and find out what you should do. Just call the Renton Police Department and tell them your wife is missing and give them the information they ask for. Just report it, and ask them how long it takes before you can officially file a missing report.”

“Okay,” he said in a calm voice. “I’ll do that.”