When I began writing fact-detective stories, I promised myself that I would always remember I was writing about the loss of human beings, that I was never to forget that. I hoped that the work I did might somehow save other victims, might warn them of the danger. I never wanted to become tough, to seek out the sensational and the gory, and I never have. I have joined the Committee of Friends and Families of Missing Persons and Victims of Violent Crimes, at the invitation of the group. I have met many parents of victims, cried with them, and yet I have somehow felt guilty—because I make my living from other people’s tragedies. When I told the Committee how I felt, they put their arms around me and said, “No. Keep on writing. Let the public know how it is for us. Let them know how we hurt, and how we try to save other parents’ children by working for new legislation that requires mandatory sentencing and the death penalty for killers.”
They are far stronger than I could ever be.
And so, I kept on, trying to find the answer to the awful puzzle, believing that the killer, when he was found, would prove to be a man with a record of violence, a man who should never have been allowed to walk the streets, someone who must surely have shown signs of a deranged mind in the past, someone who had been let out of prison too soon.
9
I HAPPENED TO BE SITTING in Captain Herb Swindler’s office one afternoon in late June of 1974 when Joni Lenz and her father came into the Homicide Unit. Herb had a montage of the victims’ pictures on his wall. He kept them there as a reminder that the investigation must continue with no letup in intensity. Joni had volunteered to come in and look at the other girls’ pictures, to see if she recognized any of them, even though their names were completely unfamiliar to her.
“Joni,” Herb said gently. “Look at these girls. Have you ever seen any of them? Maybe you’ve been in a club together, worked together, had a class or something with them.”
With her father standing protectively beside her, the victim of the January 4 bludgeoning studied the photographs. The slender girl was still recovering from the brain damage she’d suffered, and she spoke with a hesitancy, a vagueness, but she was trying very hard to help. She moved closer to the wall, studied each photo carefully, and then she shook her head.
“N-n-n-o-o,” she stuttered. “I never saw them. I didn’t know them. I can’t remember—a lot of things I can’t remember, but I know I never knew the girls.”
“Thank you, Joni,” Herb said. “We appreciate your coming in.”
It had been a long shot, the slight possibility that the one living victim would prove to be a link. Herb glanced at me, and shook his head as Joni Lenz limped out of the room. If she had known any of the others, so much of her memory of the past year had been battered out of her brain cells.
Now, in the early summer of 1974, the reading public knew of the pattern of missing girls. It was no longer a matter that concerned only detectives and the principals involved. And the public was terrified. Hitchhiking among young women dropped sharply, and women from fifteen to sixty-five jumped at shadows.
Stories began, the kind of stories that can never be traced directly to the source. I heard variations on the same theme a dozen times. But they always came from a friend of a friend of a friend of someone whose cousin, or sister, or wife had been involved.
Sometimes the attacks were said to have happened in a shopping mall, sometimes in a restaurant, and sometimes a theater. It went like this: “This man and his wife (or sister, daughter, etc.) went to Southcenter Mall to shop, and she went back to their car to get something. Well, she didn’t come back for a long time, and he got worried and went looking for her. He got there just in time to see some guy carrying her away. The husband yelled, and the guy dropped her. He’d given her some kind of shot that made her pass out. It was really lucky that he got there in time, because, you know, with everything that’s been happening, it was probably that killer.”
The first few times I heard versions of the “true” story, I attempted to trace it back to its origin, but I found it was impossible to do so. I doubt that any of the incidents ever happened at all. It was the reaction of the public, mass hysteria. If the girls who were gone could disappear the way they had, then anyone could, and there seemed to be no way to prevent it.
The pressure on law enforcement, of course, was tremendous. On July 3, more than a hundred representatives from departments all over Washington and Oregon met in Olympia at Evergreen State College for a daylong brainstorming conference. Perhaps if they pooled their information, they might find the common denominator that would break the seemingly inscrutable mysteries.
I was invited to attend, and felt a kind of eerie oppressiveness as I walked along the fir-shrouded paths to the conference. Donna Manson had walked here four months before, headed for the same building. Now, the rains had given way to bright sunshine and the birds called from the trees above me, but the feeling of dread was still there.
Sitting among the investigators from the Seattle Police Department, the King County Police Department, the Washington State Patrol, the U.S. Army’s C.I.D., the University of Washington Police, the Central Washington Security Force, the Tacoma Police Department, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, the Multnomah (Oregon) County Sheriff’s department, the Oregon State Police, and dozens of smaller police departments, I found it almost impossible to believe that all these men, with scores upon scores of years of training and experience, could not find out more about the suspect they sought.
It was not from lack of trying. Every single department involved wanted him, and they were willing to explore any avenue—no matter how bizarre—to accomplish an arrest, a good arrest that would stick.
Sheriff Don Redmond of Thurston County summed up the feeling in his opening remarks, “We want to show parents we really care. We want to find their children. The people of the State of Washington are going to have to give us a hand. So many times people could volunteer information. We need the eyes and ears of the people out there.”
Redmond’s department, located in Washington’s capital city, was still searching for the killer of Katherine Merry Devine and the whereabouts of Donna Manson. Now, they had another homicide of a teenager to contend with. Brenda Baker had been fifteen years old, a hitchhiker like Kathy and Donna, and she’d run away from home on May 25. On June 17, her badly decomposed body was found at the edge of Millersylvania State Park. It was too late to determine cause of death or to make a quick identification. At first, it was thought that it might have been the body of Georgeann Hawkins. Dental charts proved, however, that it was Brenda Baker. The Baker girl’s body was found several miles away from McKenny Park, where Kathy Devine had been found. Both sites were the same distance from I-5, the freeway that runs between Seattle and Olympia.
Looking at the cases of the missing girls side by side, some striking similarities could not be ignored. It was as if the man who’d taken them away had chosen a certain type he wanted and picked his quarry with care:
Each had long hair, parted in the middle.
Each was Caucasian, fair-complexioned.
Each was of much more than average intelligence.
Each was slender, attractive, highly talented.
Each had vanished within a week of midterm or final exams at local colleges.
Each came from a stable, loving family.
Each disappearance took place during the hours of darkness.
Each girl was single.
Each girl had been wearing slacks or jeans when she disappeared.
In each case, detectives had not one piece of physical evidence that might have been left by the abductor.
Construction work was going on on each campus where the girls were missing.
And, in two instances—Susan Rancourt in Ellensburg, and Georgeann Hawkins in Seattle—a man wearing a cast, on his arm or leg had been seen close to where they had vanished.
They were all young girls. None of them could be consid
ered a mature woman.
It was weird, perverted, insane, and, for the detectives trying to get a fix on the man, akin to working their way through a maze, starting up each new path only to find it blocked. The victims certainly did not appear to have been selected by random choice, and they wondered about that.
They even wondered if it might not be more than one man they were seeking. A cult choosing maidens to be sacrificed in deadly rituals? During that spring of 1974, a rash of reports had come in from northwestern states on the mutilation of cattle, found in fields with only their sexual organs missing. All this smacked of devil worship. The natural (or unnatural) progression of such mutilations would be human sacrifice.
For the detectives gathered at Evergreen State College, all men whose work and lifestyles made them think in rational, concrete terms, the occult was a foreign concept. I believe in the efficacy of ESP, but I was most certainly not conversant with astrology beyond reading the daily syndicated columns, I had had, however, a phone call a few days before that Olympia conference and a meeting with a woman who was an astrologer.
My friend, who uses the initials “R.L.” when she charts astrology, is a woman who had worked at the Crisis Clinic while I did. In her late thirties, she was in her senior year at the University of Washington as a history major. I had not heard from her in some time when she’d called in late June.
“Ann, you’re close to the police,” she began. “I’ve found something that I think they should know about. Could we talk?”
I met with R.L. in her North End apartment, and she led me to her office, where the desk, floors, and furniture were buried in charts with strange symbols. She had been trying to find a pattern—an astrological pattern—in the case of the missing girls.
“I’ve come across something. Look at these,” she said.
I was completely at a loss. I could make out my sign, Libra’s scales, but the rest was only so much scribbling to me. I told her so.
“O.K. I’ll give you a crash course. You probably know about the sun signs. There are twelve, and they last approximately a month each year. That’s what people mean when they say ‘I’m an Aquarian, or a Scorpio, etcetera.’ But the moon passes through each of these signs every month.”
She showed me an Ephemeris (an astrological almanac) and I could see that the phases of the moon signs seemed to last about forty-eight hours each month.
“All right, I understand that much. But I can’t see what it has to do with the cases,” I argued.
“There’s a pattern. Lynda Healy was taken when the moon was going through a Taurus phase. From that point on, the girls vanished alternately in Pisces and Scorpio moon phases. The chances against that happening—the odds—are almost impossible.”
“You think someone is deliberately abducting those girls, maybe killing them, because he knows the moon is going through a certain sign? I can’t comprehend that.”
“I don’t know if he knows anything about astrology,” she said. “He might not even be aware of the forces of the moon.”
She pulled out a sealed envelope. “I want you to give this to someone who’s in charge. It’s not to be opened until after the weekend of July 13 to 15.”
“Come on! They’d laugh me out of their offices.”
“What else do they have to go on? I’ve seen this pattern. I’ve worked it out several times, and there it is. If I could tell you who, or where, or when it’s going to happen again, I would—but I can’t do that. It’s happened once when the moon was in Taurus, and then a half dozen times back and forth between Pisces and Scorpio. I think he’s going to go back to Taurus and start a new cycle.”
“All right,” I finally said. “I’ll take the envelope, but I won’t promise I’ll give it to anyone. I don’t know who I could give it to.”
“You’ll find someone,” she said firmly. I had that envelope in my purse as I attended the law enforcement conference at Evergreen. I was still undecided about mentioning it, or the predictions of R.L.
Herb Swindler took over the lectern after the lunch break. He threw out a startling question and drew some guffaws from his fellow lawmen.
“Anybody have any ideas? Is there some pattern coming down that we haven’t considered? Anybody here know anything about numerology, anybody psychic?”
I figured Herb was kidding, but he wasn’t. He began to write on the blackboard, listing the dates of the girls’ disappearances in an attempt to find a numerological link.
But there seemed to be nothing that could be called a pattern. From Lynda’s disappearance to Donna’s, there had been a forty-two-day interim. from Donna’s to Susan’s— thirty-six days. From Susan’s to Kathy Parks’s—nineteen days. From Kathy’s to Brenda’s—twenty-five days, and from Brenda’s to Georgeann’s—eleven days. The only thing immediately apparent was that the abductions were getting closer and closer together.
“O.K.,” Herb said. “Any other suggestions? I don’t care how crazy it might sound. We’ll kick it around.”
The letter was burning a hole in my purse. I raised my hand.
“I haven’t heard anything about numerology, but my friend, an astrologer, says there’s an astrological pattern.”
There were some eyes raised to the ceiling and some chuckles, but I plunged ahead, explaining what R.L. had told me. “He’s taking the girls away only when the moon is moving through Taurus, Pisces, or Scorpio.”
Swindler smiled. “Your friend thinks this is unusual?”
“She says it defies the laws of probability.”
“Then she can tell us when it might happen again?”
“I’m not sure. She gave me a sealed envelope. You can have it if you like. You’re not to open it until July 15.”
I could sense that my audience was getting restless, that they thought we were wasting time.
I passed the envelope up to Herb, and he weighed it in his hand.
“So she thinks that’s the next time a girl’s going to vanish, does she?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s in that envelope. She wants to test her theory, and she said not to open the letter until then.”
The discussion moved into other areas. I suspected that most of the investigators present thought I was a “crazy reporter,” and I wasn’t too sure myself that it wasn’t really reaching to make a pattern where there was none.
The general consensus of opinion was that it was only one man who was responsible for the girls’ vanishing, and we were trying to figure out what ruse he could use that would put the women at ease enough so that they would drop their natural caution.
Who would most young women trust automatically? What guise could he have assumed that would make them feel he was safe? Since childhood, most of us have been trained to believe we can trust a minister, a priest, a fireman, a doctor, an ambulance attendant, and a policeman. The last thought was one that couldn’t be overlooked, abhorrent as it was to these men who were policemen themselves. A rogue cop, maybe? Or someone in a policeman’s uniform?
The next safe assumption was that most young women would have helped a handicapped person—a blind man, someone taken suddenly ill, someone on crutches or in a cast.
So what do you do? Infiltrate every campus in the Northwest with policemen, tell them to stop every man who’s dressed like a cop, fireman, ambulance attendant, or priest, and every man with a cast? There wasn’t enough manpower in Oregon and Washington law enforcement agencies to even dream of doing that.
In the end, the only thing to do was to warn the public with as much media saturation as possible, to ask for information from citizens, and to keep on working the slightest tip that came in. Surely, the man, or the group, that was seizing the girls would make a slipup. Surely, he would leave some clue that would lead back to him. The officers at that July 3 conference said a prayer that no more girls would have to suffer before that happened.
Tragically, it seemed that the press coverage of the conference served only as a gauntlet thrown down
, a challenge to the man who watched and waited, who felt that he was above the law, too cunning ever to be caught, no matter how blatant he might be.
Lake Sammamish State Park edges the east side of the lake for which it is named. The park, twelve miles east of Seattle, and almost adjacent to Interstate 90, which leads up into Snoqualmie Pass, draws summertime crowds not only from Seattle itself but from nearby Bellevue, the city’s largest suburb. Bellevue is a booming bedroom city of 75,000 people, and the hamlets of Issaquah and North Bend are also close to the state park.
Lake Sammamish State Park is level, a sweep of meadowland dotted in the spring with buttercups, and in summer with field daisies. There are trees, but no dark copses, and a ranger’s residence is on the property. Lifeguards watch the swimmers, and warn pleasure boats away, and picnickers can look to the east and watch the billowing chutes of skydivers who jump from the small planes which circle constantly. When my children were small and we lived in Bellevue, we spent almost every warm summer evening at Lake Sammamish State Park. The kids learned to swim there, and I often went there alone with them during the day. It seemed the safest place in the world.
July 14, 1974, was one of those glorious brilliant days that Washingtonians look forward to during the endless rainy days of winter and early spring. The sky was a clear blue, and temperatures crept up into the eighties before noon, threatening to hit ninety before the day was over. Such days are not commonplace, even in summer in western Washington, and Lake Sammamish State Park was packed to overflowing that Sunday—40,000 people jockeying for a spot to spread their blankets and enjoy the sun.
Besides individual family groups, the Rainier Brewery was holding its annual “beer bust” in the park, and there was a Seattle Police Athletic Association picnic. The asphalt parking lot was jammed early in the day.
A pretty young woman arrived at the park around 11:30 that morning, and was approached by a young man wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans.
“Say, could you help me a minute?” he asked, smiling.