Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (38 page)

It was the first week in September, and Carolyn was still missing. Scores of people showed up for grid searches in an ever-widening circle around Renton. Jodie Kelly and Tari Sheffer planned the quadrants to be searched meticulously so that all sectors were covered and none gone over twice. They used a flag system to mark areas that had already been searched and a grid chart. They were headed away from Renton now, moving toward the foothills of Snoqualmie Pass.

Linda Gunderson and Denise Jannusch and their husbands still remember that terrible period from the night Carolyn disappeared to after Labor Day, 1998. Family life for all of the searchers virtually stopped. All that mattered was finding Carolyn or, as they now dreaded, her body. Most of their children were too young to understand the grim reality that overshadowed everyone’s summer.

“We all lost months, years even,” one friend said. “Our lives were totally caught up in the tragedy for such a long time.”

The Renton detectives respected those who searched so diligently and realized that they might well be the ones to find Carolyn. After all, they had found her van, and they were even more determined now. “If you do,” the investigators warned, “don’t touch anything. Just call us.”

The detectives learned more that added to their belief that Carolyn Durall was dead. They found that Bob had asked a dry cleaner how to remove bloodstains, saying, “My son had a nosebleed.” Their sweep of the house had netted a gallon of solution designed to eliminate all traces of human fluids.

Bob was seen in a Fred Meyer store the day before Carolyn vanished. He was buying, of all things, several belts, men’s belts. Why? That question was answered on September 9, after Carolyn had been missing for four weeks and five days. John Henry Browne talked with his client and impressed on Bob Durall that he should reveal where his wife’s body was. It would be a kindness to her family and her friends, who needed to know where she was and to give her a decent burial. If Durall should agree to lead detectives to where he had left Carolyn, Browne, his associate, Tim Dole, and the prosecutors, Patty Eakes and Jeff Baird, had agreed to certain stipulations, if not an outright plea bargain: (1) he would receive some sentencing “consideration” after he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder; (2) the State would not reveal at trial that Durall had led investigators to Carolyn’s body; (3) the State would not, however, reduce the charges to second-degree murder; and (4) if Bob Durall should take the stand in his own defense and deny that he had killed his wife, he would be impeached by the prosecution and the agreement not to mention that he had led the investigators to her body would be null and void.

He accepted that plea agreement. On that Monday in September, a caravan of cars followed the police unit in which Bob Durall rode with detectives and his lawyers. They took the I-90 freeway on its climb east through the foothills until they came to Forest Service Road 9031, ten miles west of the Snoqualmie Pass summit. There they turned down the heavily forested road, drove slowly for two miles, passing several turnouts (where people had illegally left bags of refuse). Finally, Durall told them to stop.

Carolyn was there, buried in a shallow grave beneath a pile of rocks. Using a litter connected to ropes, the search party carefully lifted her remains from the sylvan burial place.

Her body had been doubled over, cinched tight with several belts, and encased in a number of plastic garbage sacks.

The postmortem examination of Carolyn Durall’s body by the King County Medical Examiner’s office verified that she had died of homicidal violence, blunt-force damage. Her skull had been shattered in several places by a heavy, dense object dropped on, or swung at, her head. It had to have been made of metal or hard wood. A fist or arm could not have done so much damage. More likely, the weapon was something like a baseball bat.

She was almost certainly unconscious immediately after the first blow. She might have continued to breathe for a short time. She had not suffered, very small comfort to those who loved Carolyn.

For all of Bob Durall’s precise planning and internet searches on how to commit a perfect murder, it appeared that he had in fact flown into a violent rage, probably when Carolyn asked him for a divorce, and used the closest weapon at hand.

It was too late to determine whether Carolyn Durall had been drugged before she was attacked; there was little blood left in her body and she had lain in the woods for so many weeks. No poisons were identified in toxicology screens. The medical examiner was not surprised at those results because blood breaks down during decomposition.

There was no more searching. On September 16, a week later, a memorial service for Carolyn was held at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in Medina, Washington, a church not far from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter where she had worked and where she had told friends of her dream to be free to live her life in peace. The theme of her services was a butterfly; she had always loved butterflies, and a picture of a beautiful Monarch was on the cover of the program. The minister reminded the mourners that Carolyn was no longer caged, but “as free now as a butterfly.”

After the services, Morgan Stanley hosted a reception in honor of Carolyn. Her neighbors and friends held a final get-together in the Renton Highlands where she had once loved her home and doted on her children. They planted a flowering pink cherry tree in the park where the neighborhood kids played, they had a potluck dinner with dishes made from Carolyn’s recipes, and, as the sun set, held a candlelit ceremony. They released white balloons, tying chocolates to the ribbons, Carolyn’s favorite.

Her children’s cat went to live with them at their grandparents house. Daisy, her parakeet, was adopted by the Jannusches. (Daisy lived until 2004.) Her friends cleaned her house and packed up her things. In a way it was over, but it was a long way from being truly over.

Robert Durall went through a succession of attorneys, most of them the very top criminal defense lawyers in Seattle. One of them declared him “the most difficult client I’ve ever had.”

Durall wanted to run his own defense and to ignore any agreements previously made between his lawyers and the prosecutors. He intended to take the stand at his trial. He would not plead guilty to having anything whatsoever to do with Carolyn’s murder. The public did not know yet that he was the person who led police to her body.

In jail he grew a beard, perhaps to make up for his jail-forbidden hairpiece. He had quite a few visitors, and his mother was often there to comfort and support him. She refused to believe that the son she cherished could have committed a crime like murder. At her urging, some of the men who had been neighbors or coworkers visited him out of friendship and the possibility that he had not been himself when he killed Carolyn. Some, however, frankly admitted that they went to the jail hoping he would say something that would help convict him.

He mentioned to one former associate that he had checked on his pension fund shortly after Carolyn vanished; he didn’t want it to be claimed by anyone else if he was incarcerated. He expected to be acquitted or to receive a short sentence for something he “did not do,” and he wanted to keep his investments and his pension fund protected.

When the news media publicized Bob Durall’s arrest, a few women came forward to talk to detectives about their correspondence with him on Match.com. One said that she had begun writing to him in December 1997, some eight months before Carolyn’s murder. They had met for lunch at a small restaurant a few blocks from the University of Washington. Theirs was not a romantic liaison, but Bob had been somewhat open with her about his feelings. He wasn’t completely honest with her but did discuss the possibility of his “upcoming” divorce. He sounded very bitter about his wife and clearly had no love for her, but she noted tears in his eyes when he said he couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing his children every day. As for his wife? “She would be better off dead,” he had said bluntly.

On August 18, Bob’s lunch date said, he wrote to her about his situation. “I don’t know how to say this,” he wrote, “but Carolyn has vanished. I assume she’s run off somewhere but no trace [so far]. I am worried and confused. Our family could use some prayers.”

There were probably a number of women who did not come forward, women who held their collective breaths that they wouldn’t be linked with Bob Durall in any way and that their correspondence and meetings with him would remain secret.

Durall and whichever attorney was representing him at any given time delayed his trial with a number of pretrial motions. Washington statutes grant defendants the right to a speedy trial, assuring them that their cases will be heard in court within sixty days. The accused, however, have the right to ask for more time. Durall exercised that right at least five times. And he would have five different attorneys who had to start from scratch in reviewing his case.

The defense team attempted to have the evidence seized at the Durall home excluded from his trial, claiming that the investigators had done a sloppy job of drawing up their search warrant.

Denied.

Bob Durall had other objections. He didn’t want a corrections officer from the Regional Justice Center jail to testify about something he overheard Durall saying to himself: “Forgive me for what I have done.”

He held that he had a right to pray without being overheard.

With his bail set high, Bob Durall remained incarcerated awaiting trial because of his own demands. It seemed further and further in the future. He made a close friend behind bars, a man in his cell block who seemed to have little in common with him, indeed nothing beyond their being close in age and in proximity. Clarence Burns* was a 39-year-old transient serving jail time for a third-degree assault and for taking a car without permission. He had no family that cared about him and he’d never had the kind of home that Bob Durall once owned or children he could dote on.

Burns and Durall passed the time by playing pinochle. The two men often appeared to be in intense conversation, with Durall doing most of the talking and Burns nodding in response.

The tragic summer was over, and the rains came to Seattle along with the holiday season. Thanksgiving and Christmas in jail are very pale imitations of happy family gatherings. Carolyn had always loved the baking and decorating of Christmas, and one wonders if her husband ever thought about what he had taken away from his children and, even, from himself.

Instead of reminiscing, he planned what he would do next. He had, according to Clarence Burns, come up with a diabolical scenario that would not only bring about the ultimate revenge for Carolyn’s alleged affair but also lead to his own freedom. Bob Durall knew the name of the man Carolyn was attracted to and seethed to think that
he
was locked up while Dirk Lansing* walked around free. As far as Durall was concerned, Lansing was the one responsible for breaking up his family; his own infidelity and lies were entirely different matters.

Clarence Burns was due to be released in the spring of 1999. Durall had plans for him. Before he broached the subject, he groomed Burns to believe that they were good friends. Burns had no money to buy food, personal-care products, or anything else from the jail commissary, so Durall generously shared his purchases with him. He also arranged for money to be put into Burns’s jail account. Durall said they would go on being friends on the outside once they were both free. If Burns did what he asked, Durall would not only pay him thousands of dollars, he guaranteed that the onetime street person would become much more than a friend; he would be a member of the family. “My kids will call you Uncle Clarence,” Durall said. “You’ll be visiting in our house often.”

Burns had some dangerous assignments to fulfill before he would qualify as a beloved uncle. Once he was let out of jail, he was to track down Dirk Lansing and somehow overcome him, tie him up, and do whatever was necessary to hold him prisoner. Durall wanted Lansing dead and Burns was to eventually kill him, but first he had to force Carolyn’s alleged ex-lover to write a letter admitting that
he
was the one who murdered her.

After the letter was written in Dirk Lansing’s handwriting, Clarence Burns was supposed to kill him. His body and car had to be hidden where no one would ever find them. When that was accomplished, Burns was to make copies of the letter in which the now dead man admitted killing Carolyn and mail them to television stations, newspapers, the King County prosecutors, and to Bob Durall himself.

Since Lansing would never be found, Durall was sure the police would conclude that he had fled, perhaps to another country, to hide. They would believe that Dirk Lansing had felt guilty enough to admit to killing Carolyn, and to send his confession letters all over Seattle. That would lead to Bob’s being let out of jail.

Instead of being a reviled murder suspect, Bob would be seen as a wronged man, a widower left with his motherless children. He would get his children back, his job back, his house back, his whole life back—except, of course, for Carolyn.

The two men had many discussions on how not to leave fingerprints on the letters or the car—should it ever be found—and how Burns could track Lansing down. The method he used to murder his prisoner didn’t much matter to Bob Durall, just so long as it worked.

Clarence Burns had a checkered past, but he had never killed anyone, and he became afraid of his jail buddy as he listened to the cold-blooded plan. It had seemed to be only a fantasy at first; soon he realized that Durall was completely serious. Burns agreed that he would do what Durall wanted, partly because he didn’t want to anger him and partly because he didn’t want to give up the treats from the commissary.