Kiss Me, Kill Me and Other True Cases

  “Then we heard a woman’s voice crying ‘Oh, no. No. No!’ I went to the bathroom and put my ear to the wall. But then I heard water running and we figured it was just a little family fight and that everything was all right. Sometime later—I can’t say for sure how long—we heard their front door being slammed.”

  “Did you look out?”

  “No, we had no reason to,” Brosnick said. “We really believed everything was okay with them. If only we had—”

  Clearly, the neighbors felt terrible that they hadn’t run next door, but it was too late now.

  • • •

  Detective MacPherson approached the bereaved husband, who was calm but pale, and asked him gently if he could give a statement. Tom Bowman said he would cooperate any way he could. He explained that he had gone to work at two P.M., and taken a break at four for fifteen minutes. During that time, he was inside the plant, talking to the inspector in his section. His lunch break had been from 7:30 to 8:00 and he had watched fellow workers play cards. He had punched out at 11:12 P.M.

  “If only I hadn’t worked overtime,” the anguished man murmured. “I should have been home with Sandy.”

  “From what we’ve learned so far, I don’t think it would have made any difference,” MacPherson reassured him. “Is there anyone you know who might be capable of this? Anyone have a grudge against you?”

  Bowman considered that. “The only one I can think of is a guy named ‘Nino.*’ That’s not his real name—just a nickname. But about five months ago, when we were just married, we lived in another apartment for a short time. Well, he dropped in on us one night unexpectedly. Just a few days after that, somebody broke into our apartment and burglarized the place. We always thought it was Nino, but we couldn’t prove it.

  “Sandy was frightened to stay there after that. That’s why we moved here—so she’d be safe.”

  Tom dropped his head into his hands. Then he took a deep breath to steady his emotions. “I don’t have any idea where to find Nino,” he said.

  “You told your neighbors that your wife was raped,” MacPherson said slowly. “But you say you ran for help as soon as you found her. What made you conclude that so quickly?”

  Bowman said the fact that Sandy’s panties and pantyhose were tossed on the floor had just led him to assume that.

  MacPherson made a note of it. It was probably nothing, but he would ask the pathologist who did the autopsy to validate if Sandy had, indeed, been sexually assaulted.

  3

  Working in the chilly wee hours of a December morning, MacPherson and Parkes contacted Sandy’s aunt, whom she had planned to visit earlier in the day. They learned that she had gone shopping as she planned and then dropped in at her aunt’s house. “But she didn’t stay long,” the shocked woman said. “She wanted to be home early so that she would be there when Tom got off work.”

  As the investigators continued to question Tom Bowman, they learned of another family with whom Sandy had close ties. Sandy had gone steady with a Ballard boy named Lee Wilkins for over a year before she broke off with him and became engaged to Tom. But she had remained on good terms with Lee Wilkins and his family. In fact, Mrs. Wilkins had been a kind of substitute mother figure for Sandy after her own mother moved to California.

  It was 4:30 A.M. when detectives knocked on the door of the Wilkins home. Once again, they had to tell people who loved Sandy that she had been murdered.

  Fighting to keep his composure, Lee Wilkins protested that that couldn’t be true. “But I saw her at 6:30 tonight,” he said. “She was fine. She wanted to go grocery shopping and the bags were heavy for her, so she asked me to go along and carry them and take them upstairs for her.”

  “And you did?”

  “Sure, I carried them upstairs, put them down in the kitchen, and then left right away.”

  “Then where did you go?”

  “I went over to a friend’s house. There were several of us there. They can tell you I was with them.”

  Lee’s mother, who was crying, too, spoke up, “There’s a young married man living down the street. I don’t quite know how to say this, but he’s just funny, strange and kind of unstable. I think he knew Sandy before she was married. I know she’s mentioned that he’s been in their apartment.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “It’s Rob Kinslow.*”

  • • •

  Back at the Bowman’s apartment, deputy medical examiners wheeled a gurney with a body bag containing Sandy Bowman’s corpse from her bedroom. Tom Bowman averted his eyes. He was still trying to cooperate with detectives, although he didn’t know that homicide investigators almost always look first at the spouse or the lover of a victim as a possible suspect. They studied him carefully, trying to evaluate his emotional response. He appeared to be in shock and sincere in his grief.

  Tom identified the purse in the living room as his wife’s but he looked at the contents and said that Sandy’s wallet and any money that might have been in it were missing.

  Wayne Dorman and Don Strunk bagged a lot of evidence from the apartment: the black leather purse, a woman’s shoe with a broken buckle, a writing tablet, a white flowered bra, a torn towel, panties and dark pantyhose, two short pieces of drapery cord, the wooden-handled butcher knife, the pair of black-handled scissors, the Pall Mall cigarette, the adhesive mask, dark red scrapings (of blood that had dropped from at least three feet above the bedroom rug), two small seeds—possibly marijuana—from the bathroom floor, one latent print from the medicine cabinet, two latent prints from doorknobs, scrapings from beneath Sandy Bowman’s nails, and the bloodstained bedclothes.

  All of this was placed at once in the Evidence Room of the Seattle Police Department.

  At 6:00 A.M., the Bowman apartment was locked with police locks and secured against entry.

  • • •

  One hour later, King County Medical Examiner Dr. Gale Wilson performed a postmortem examination on Sandy Bowman. (Wilson had been a mainstay as a King County coroner and then as medical examiner for decades. When he testified in murder cases, he invariably took a small black book from his vest pocket and read the latest information on the number of autopsies he had performed. In 1968, he had more than 35,000!)

  As Wilson studied the 16-year-old girl on his examining table, he saw that someone or some thing had spurred her killer into insane frenzy. There were close to sixty puncture wounds in her body, forty-five in front and twelve that had pierced her back.

  Out of these five dozen wounds, Wilson estimated that thirty-seven to thirty-nine would have been rapidly fatal. There was no sign of strangulation in the strap muscles of Sandy’s neck, the delicate hyoid bone at the back of her tongue, wasn’t fractured, and her eyes, where blood vessels invariably burst when a person is suffocated or strangled, were clear.

  Sandy’s left lower jaw bore a deep bruise three by five centimeters in size, probably caused by a powerful human fist and sufficient, Dr. Wilson stated, to knock her unconscious. Some of the fifty-seven knife wounds had been made before death, but most of them had occurred after. It was quite possible that she had been unconscious from the blunt force to her head when the stabbing began.

  One would hope so.

  Surprisingly, none of the penetration wounds had been inflicted by either the scissors or the knife found in the bedroom where Sandy died. Detectives had thought they would turn out to be “weapons of opportunity”: they belonged to the Bowmans, and the killer could have grabbed them as he began to attack Sandy. Apparently, he had brought his own knife with him.

  The knife found in the garbage can behind the Kon-Tiki Apartments didn’t match the specifications of the lethal blade either.

  Sandy had had recent sexual intercourse. Dr. Wilson took a swab of the semen in her vaginal vault. Tests available in 1968 would be able to establish if there were motile (live) sperm in the ejaculate, and possibly the blood type of the man who had put it there. She was a newlywed; it was likely she had made love wi
th her husband earlier in the day of her death. Her undergarments had been ripped off. It was entirely possible that someone wanted the investigators to believe her death was motivated by a sexual attack, when the motive was something completely different. It was even possible that her killer was a female—although she would have had to have been a very powerful woman or one who had used a heavy object to strike Sandy that hard in the chin.

  • • •

  Detective Al Schrader joined the investigators on the Bowman case on the morning of December 18. He checked first on Rob Kinslow, the man mentioned by Lee Wilkins’s mother. Kinslow was cleared almost at once. He had been working a 3:30 P.M. to 11:30 P.M. shift at the Boeing airplane company’s plant in Everett, some twenty-five miles north of the death scene. Schrader verified that by talking to Kinslow’s supervisors. They were positive that Kinslow had been on the job for the entire shift.

  Kinslow might have struck people as odd, but he could not have been the person who murdered Sandy Bowman.

  “Nino,” the Bowman’s surprise visitor who they suspected of robbing them, was found to be Martin Simms.* He did have a record for auto theft and robbery in Seattle police files. Through informants, detectives traced him to his sister’s residence, where he was living.

  But Nino, too, had a solid alibi: he had been with friends all during the afternoon and evening of December 17. Questioned separately, all of his associates verified his account of that day.

  Al Schrader then pored over records of assaults in the Seattle area whose M.O. resembled the Bowman slaying. He found one man who had been involved in several attacks on teenage girls in the Ballard area. They had been bound and stabbed although, luckily, the victims had all survived. Their attacker had been found to be psychotic and committed to the Western Washington State (Mental) Hospital in Steilacoom. And Schrader found he remained incarcerated under maximum security and could not have been in Seattle.

  One statement “Nino” Simms had made stuck in the detectives’ minds. Although Lee Wilkins had appeared genuinely shocked when informed of Sandy Bowman’s death, Nino said he had heard that Lee had never forgiven Sandy for breaking up with him. He described one incident at a north end bowling alley. Sandy had announced to a group of friends that she was expecting a baby and Wilkins had become enraged. He had called Sandy a “bitch” and threatened to kill her. When he talked with several young people who had been at the bowling alley, Schrader found that Wilkins had indeed made these threats. However, his efforts to question Wilkins were thwarted by a lawyer hired by the boy’s father. Wilkins promised repeatedly that he would come to the Homicide Unit for an interview, but he failed to show up for his appointment.

  Schrader tried to impress upon the Wilkins family that it was vital for Lee to answer questions about Sandy—if only to clear his name.

  Then an interesting phone call came into headquarters. Sandy Bowman had never lacked for friends; she had dozens of them, but only one particularly close friend: Bobbi Roselle.* Now, Bobbi’s mother, Mrs. Grace Roselle,* was on the phone. A man the Roselles knew only slightly had come to their home very early the morning after Sandy was murdered. He appeared to be extremely agitated.

  “His name is Jim something,” Bobbi’s mother said. “It’s something like Lofbrau or Leffler. No, wait—it’s Leffberg. He’s a wild-looking man. Made me nervous to have him here. You should check him out.”

  4

  Jim Leffberg had been slightly acquainted with Sandy’s mother, Dorothy, before she moved to California. Grace Roselle and Sandy’s mother both described him as a kind of “hanger-on” person who attached himself to people he barely knew.

  “Anyway,” Grace Roselle said, “he just didn’t seem right that morning. The girls don’t like him—I know that for sure. He made a pass at my daughter, Bobbi, once. They’ve always called him ‘the dirty old man.’ Well, anyway, he was here bright and early this morning asking all kinds of questions. He talked in a peculiar, disjointed way—kind of rambling on and on.

  “He kept asking, ‘Do they have any clues?’ and ‘Was she stabbed in the back?’ ‘Did they find the knife?’ His eyes kept rolling back in his head and he held his head funny. Then he’d say things like his daughter had been born on Sandy’s birthday. None of it made much sense. And there were his clothes too. They were all covered with red, and he kept apologizing for getting red on my carpet from his shoes.”

  The detective was instantly alert. “Red? What do you mean by that. What did it look like?”

  “Well, it looked like blood. But he said he’d been painting a house and it was stains from his work,” Grace Roselle said.

  Schrader checked Jim Leffberg’s name against Seattle and King County police records. (It was long before police had computers for more thorough exploration.) He came up with a number of entries for Leffberg. The middle-aged man had been involved with the law on numerous occasions on charges ranging from minor offenses to grand larceny. Detectives contacted his parole officer, who told them Leffberg had shown tendencies toward sexual crimes of violence, and his folder noted that.

  The Seattle police investigators expected that they would have a hard time locating Leffberg, but they needn’t have worried. As Al Schrader and Detective Donna Brazel finished interviewing Bobbi Roselle and her parents, Leffberg approached their house and told the detectives that he had some important information for them.

  Jim Leffberg was an interesting character who looked as though he had just hopped off a freight car. He was about five feet eight inches tall and he had a wild bush of dark hair. His clothes were unkempt.

  “Sandy told me that this magazine salesman was bothering her,” he said. “If I was you, I’d go looking for him.”

  Leffberg himself had never seen the magazine salesman and Sandy hadn’t described him or given Leffberg a name. All he knew was that the guy scared her. It sounded like a red herring, rather than a good tip. The man in front of them looked better to them as a suspect.

  Leffberg willingly gave them his address in Kent, a small town fifteen miles south of the Ballard area. He assured them he would be on hand at all times to help in the investigation.

  As the days progressed, every available member of the Homicide Unit pitched into the Bowman investigation. Sandy was like one of their own, the niece of Sergeant Jerry Yates. Both Donna Brazel and Detective Beryl Thompson were assigned to Yates’s unit, and they canvassed every apartment in the Kon-Tiki complex, asking residents if they remembered anything even slightly unusual on the night of December 17—particularly around 7:30 P.M.

  It proved to be a fruitless effort. Many of the residents were unaware that there had been a homicide. Because of the cold and snow, most of the people who lived in the Kon-Tiki had pulled their drapes that night and wouldn’t have seen anyone passing by. A few recalled hearing cars peeling out of the apartment complex’s parking lot.

  A couple of tenants who lived close to the Bowmans knew of them—mainly because Sandy and Tom entertained many of their young friends who were prone to run up and down the stairs of the generally staid apartment house. They didn’t really mind Sandy and Tom, but they had been annoyed by all the pounding feet, shouting, and giggling.

  The Kon-Tiki caretakers said that it was their policy never to give out duplicate keys to anyone other than the actual renters of apartments. There was no way a stranger could get through their doors unless he—or she—was invited in, or broke in. And, of course, the Bowmans’ door showed no damage at all.

  • • •

  Donna Brazel and Beryl Thompson moved on to an almost impossible task: they wanted to contact the scores of teenagers and young adults who had visited the Bowman apartment. Indeed, they did find most of Tom and Sandy’s friends. But not one of them described the Bowmans’ marriage as anything but idyllically happy. Over and over the female detectives heard. “They were very happy, very much in love,” and “Tom treated her so good.”

  Still, a few of Sandy’s girlfriends remembered that she had been
afraid of something. “She never left the apartment without peeking out of the door first,” one said.

  “Do you know what frightened her?” Beryl Thompson asked.

  The teenager shook her head. “She would never say what it was—or who it was—that she was afraid of. We thought maybe she just wasn’t used to being alone at night because she’d always lived home before she and Tom got married.”

  Several of the school friends said that Lee Wilkins had gone steady with Sandy for a long time—since junior high school—and admitted that he had been upset when they broke up, but they felt sure he had forgiven her for marrying Tom Bowman. Despite his occasional outbursts, the former sweethearts had ended up being only good friends by the time of Sandy’s murder. Lee was happily dating someone else.

  One ominous factor, however, began emerging as police personnel enlarged their picture of the Bowman’s habits: although Sandy herself would not touch narcotics, many of the young people who visited her apartment were suspected of experimenting with drugs to some extent. A lot of them smoked marijuana, and Bobbi Roselle was rumored to have tried LSD.

  “Sandy was really a friendly kid,” the teenagers said. “She wasn’t flirtatious, really, because she was so in love with Tom, but she liked to joke around, and she let in almost anyone in our crowd who came over to visit. Her apartment was kind of a meeting place for kids.”

  Detectives wondered if Sandy might have opened her door to someone high on drugs or perhaps been naive enough to admit “a friend of a friend of a friend.” But that warred with the information from her closest friends that she was afraid of something and always cracked the door to see who was there. Sandy had been only two weeks past her sixteenth birthday; she was caught between childhood and being an adult, and it was unlikely that she had been mature enough to use good judgment all the time.