It seemed to be a shoo-in.
Months passed, but the Washington State Patrol forensic lab had a long backup of testing to do on more recent cases. It was September 18, 2006, when Mike Ciesynski finally received a phone call from William Stubbs, a forensic scientist employed there.
“We have a match,” he said.
Ciesynski held his breath. He expected it to be Frankie Aldalotti.
But it was no shoo-in. Frankie Aldalotti might have been an undesirable boyfriend, but he was not the man who had ejaculated on Sara Beth’s clothing and on her person.
It was a major disappointment for the cold case detective. Everything had seemed to fit perfectly. Stubbs said that he had been able to obtain a DNA typing profile from one of the anal swabs at the medical examiner’s office. “We searched it against CODIS [Combined DNA Index System] and it matches the DNA of a Clarence E. Williams. Now we need a reference sample from Williams.”
At that point, Mike Ciesynski didn’t know who Clarence Williams was, but he located the old case file and read about Laura Baylis’s murder. She had been abducted and killed thirteen weeks after Sara Beth died. He ticked off the similarities between Laura and Sara Beth’s homicides.
Ciesynski read that a witness in the Baylis case, Mercina Adderly, had told detectives that Clarence Williams had talked about “wanting to hurt someone” sometime “in the summer” of 1978. Ciesynski wondered if that was before Sara Beth’s murder or before Laura Baylis’s murder.
According to the Washington State Corrections Department, Clarence Williams was currently housed in a prison in Monroe. Mike Ciesynski made plans to pay Williams a visit, but first he compared the two cases, detail by detail. There were, indeed, similarities:
Both were attractive young females.
They had both been stabbed multiple times, almost equally divided between their breasts and their upper backs. Laura had suffered nineteen stab wounds. Sara Beth had sustained twenty-one. The patterns and number of stabs were almost ritualistic.
Each had been attacked on a weekend.
Both were Caucasian.
Both appeared to have been seized in one place, killed in another, and left in a closet-sized space, with little blood evident.
Initially, there appeared to have been no conclusive signs of sexual attack in either murder.
There were, of course, other variables that didn’t match. Laura was a world traveler, used to taking care of herself, and Sara Beth a naïve girl in her midteens. The MO of the crimes matched—but the neighborhoods where the young women were abducted were more than twenty miles apart. The distance from Ballard to Beacon Hill was significant. Ballard was in northwest Seattle, while Beacon Hill was in the southeast. One of the most convincing ways to link a single killer to a pattern is finding that he picks the same type of victim, uses the same MO, and operates within a specific area.
But not always. Gary Ridgway, the “Green River Killer,” usually stayed near Sea-Tac Airport or the Aurora strip to find his victims, and disposed of them in rugged, wild areas inside a haphazard “circle” around Seattle. But Harvey Carignan, the “Want-Ad Killer,” killed women from Alaska to Minnesota, marking their body sites with red crayon circles on a map. Serial killers came in two categories: cross-country travelers trolling for victims and those attached to one area.
Maybe there was a good reason that Sara Beth’s killer had strayed outside his “comfort zone.”
Ciesynski called the Monroe Correctional Complex. He wanted to be sure that Williams was still there. He was. Corrections investigator Bob Hoover e-mailed a photo of him as he looked twenty-eight years after Laura died. He was the same man who appeared in the lineup photos viewed by people who had come into the 7-Eleven on Beacon Hill the night Laura disappeared. But now he was an old man, grizzled with gray beard stubble.
The cold case probe moved ahead rapidly. There was a real sense of urgency; Clarence Williams would be up for parole in fewer than eight years, when he was seventy-one. At that age, and after almost forty years behind bars, there was a good chance the Washington State Parole Board would release him.
Reading over Laura’s and Sara Beth’s files, Ciesynski was convinced that Clarence Williams would still be dangerous—probably murderously dangerous. Mike Ciesynski agrees with other experts on serial murder; as long as they are physically able and free, serial killers continue to take lives, and it doesn’t matter how old they are.
In February 2007, Mike Ciesynski and Detective Weklych drove to the Monroe Complex armed with a search warrant. Weklych read Clarence Williams his Miranda rights, and he signed the form that showed he understood and was willing to talk with them.
Ciesynski advised Clarence that he was under investigation for the murder of Sara Beth Lundquist. There was little reaction from the suspect. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I didn’t do either of those murders.”
“We’ve matched your DNA to Sara Beth,” Ciesynski said.
Again, Williams shrugged. “I picked up a seventeen-or eighteen-year-old girl on Pike Street and paid her twenty dollars for sex,” he said almost casually. “I dropped her off around the Fremont Bridge. I picked up a lot of prostitutes around Pike Street, and I had regular sex and sometimes oral sex with them. I didn’t use no condom.”
Mike Ciesynski managed to hide his distaste for the prisoner as he told Williams that explanation wouldn’t wash. “Sara Beth Lundquist wasn’t a prostitute. She was a young girl in high school, a virgin.
“Are you familiar with the Ballard area?” he asked next.
“No.”
The detectives knew that was a lie. Ciesynski had checked Williams’s work record, along with job applications. He listed Foss Shipyard as a former employer. Foss Tugs and Foss Shipyard were located on the waterfront in Ballard.
“Sara Beth was found at Bill’s Tire Store. You said you worked for Seattle Disposal, too. That’s at Thirty-four hundred Phinney North, exactly one mile from Bill’s.”
“Okay,” Williams said, annoyed. “You want me to say I killed her. I killed her. I picked her up on Pike Street, drove to the tire store, and dumped her. Is that what you want? I don’t need another homicide beef.”
It was, in a sense, a confession, but it probably wouldn’t hold up. Clarence Williams was being sarcastic. Ciesynski and Weklych left, with a promise to be back. They would bring along the DNA results and let Williams read them for himself.
On March 16, Mike Ciesynski returned to the Monroe complex. He handed a copy of the DNA report to Williams. He scanned it and then said, “You’re asking me to remember something that happened thirty years ago.” He shrugged once more and said, “What can I say?”
He didn’t say anything. When Ciesynski saw that Williams had shut down again, he concluded the interview. Handing him a card, he said, “Give me a call if you ever decide to talk.”
Four days later, Frankie Aldalotti finally called the cold case detective. He was no longer a suspect, but Ciesynski was interested in talking with him anyway. He might have some bit of information that would add to the strength of murder charges against Williams.
He didn’t. Frankie said that Sara Beth had really been Benny’s friend. “I didn’t know her very well, and I never dated her or was interested in dating her. We didn’t have any type of relationship and I don’t know anything about her background.”
Mike Ciesynski was confident that they were close to bringing murder charges against Clarence Williams, close enough that he felt safe in letting Lynne Carlson know that. He called and updated her.
To be absolutely, totally armed with DNA evidence, Ciesynski sent Sara Beth’s panties to a private lab, Forensic Sciences Associates. Technicians there confirmed the match. There was a tiny area of spermatozoa on the back of the panties. It had emerged from a male with a specific analysis of the amelogenin gene.
“The calculated genotype frequencies,” the report read in a language few understand, “indicate that it is unlikely that more than one human has ev
er possessed this genotype array.”
The buccal (cheek) swab that Ciesynski had taken from Clarence Williams was identical in genotype array.
There were possibly other witnesses who would tie up the case. So many of those involved in 1978 had passed away. Dr. Eisele, the original forensic pathologist who had done the autopsy on Sara Beth, had died, along with several homicide detectives. But Mike Ciesynski had found Minda Craig, Sara Beth’s best friend, who remembered that Saturday night in 1978 as if it were yesterday. Her sadness over the loss of her friend had never faded, and she said she would be glad to testify.
He didn’t expect, however, to find Lorraine Olsen, the neighbor who heard Sara Beth scream that night. She’d been past middle age then.
But Lorraine Olsen was alive and in a wheelchair, being cared for by her son who had found Sara Beth’s shoes and purse, and she was over eighty.
“But I think she can testify,” her son assured Ciesynski. “I think she will want to do that.”
During the summer of 2007, Clarence Williams was one of four hundred convicts who’d been moved to the Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minnesota, because of overpopulation in correctional facilities in Washington.
Mike Ciesynski flew to Minnesota on October 23. Prison guards at the facility led him to an empty mess hall, a huge room. Other than some men cleaning the serving counter forty feet away, and a guard at the door, he was alone with Clarence Williams.
He found Clarence Williams disgruntled because he believed that the cold case detective had orchestrated the Minnesota transfer. He had not. It would have been more convenient for the investigation to have had Williams remain in Monroe, only thirty miles from Seattle Police headquarters.
Read his rights once more, Williams signed it and asked wearily, “What now?”
“You’re going to be transferred back to the King County Jail in Seattle.”
“I never asked to come here in the first place.” Williams didn’t ask why he was being sent back. He undoubtedly knew why.
Ciesynski outlined the similar stabbing pattern—and number of wounds—found on both Laura Baylis and Sara Beth Lundquist.
Williams sighed and shrugged, his usual reaction. “I’ve got nothing to say about that. I didn’t stab that other girl.”
All unconsciously, he had admitted for the very first time to stabbing Laura Baylis.
It was obvious, though, that he wouldn’t admit to anything else. Ciesynski stood up and said, “See you in Seattle.”
Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Kristin Richardson, who heads the Cold Case Division of the King County Prosecutor’s Office, oversaw filing charges against Clarence Williams, now sixty-two. He was charged with rape, kidnapping, and first-degree murder in Sara Beth’s death. He was extradited from Minnesota to face the charges in Seattle, and he was arraigned on November 20, 2007.
His court-appointed attorney was taken off guard when Williams attempted to take an Alford plea without consulting him. The Alford meant that Williams would tell the judge that he would not admit guilt, but that he believed he would be found guilty if he went to trial.
His attorney hastily intervened and the judge agreed to accept “no plea” until there was agreement between Williams and his lawyer.
He formally entered an Alford plea on December 3.
Sara Beth’s family watched from the gallery as the tall, muscled man who had killed her stood within feet of them. They felt some relief to know that he had been locked behind bars during all the years they wondered who he was. At least he hadn’t killed anyone else after Laura Baylis’s murder. Nor would he ever be free to kill again.
Six days before Christmas 2007, those who loved Sara Beth told Clarence Edward Williams what he had done when he ended the life of a girl he “couldn’t remember.”
She would never go to college, never fall in love and get married, never have children or grandchildren—never have a chance to live out the seventy-plus years that she might have expected. All the Christmases, Easters, birthdays that should have been ahead, washed away like letters carved into a sandy beach.
Kristin Richardson read the letter that Lynne Carlson had written, while Williams sat without expression or acknowledgment: “‘There will be no language to describe the depths of my grief…no words to describe my pain in seeing my other children suffer. You took the life of a sweet and innocent child, but you can never take her spirit or her laughter, or her precious love, from me.’”
Clarence Williams declined to make a statement before he was sentenced. To paraphrase him, “What could he say?”
On December 17, 2007, Clarence Williams was sentenced to 361 months to life in prison, to run consecutively to the eight years he still had to serve for Laura Baylis’s murder. It was, for a sixty-two-year-old man, a life sentence.
Clarence Williams came to Seattle from Milwaukee and lived there four years. Mike Ciesynski is still looking at other long-dormant homicides that occurred in the Seattle area during that time frame. And he has alerted Milwaukee authorities that if they consider Williams a possible suspect, they may find answers to their unsolved cases in the sixties and seventies.
For Sara Beth Lundquist and for Laura Baylis, there is, at long last, a bleak justice. The man who abducted and murdered them will never walk free again. And yet he lives and breathes, eats, sleeps, watches television, exercises, may have friends and family.
And they do not. Although Laura and Sara Beth never met, they share a sisterhood. I suspect that each of them would have fought to save the other if there had been two of them facing a violent sexual predator.
But neither of them had a chance.
NOT SAFE AT HOME
This is an alarming story because most of us feel safe when we arrive home and bolt the doors to the outside world, and, even if we live alone, home is supposed to be a safe harbor. As we saw in the Mauck case, that isn’t always true.
My own “security system” begins with three very large Bernese mountain dogs who are devoted to me and are very suspicious of strangers. I have an alarm system, too, but their low growl and angry barking is the earliest warning. Not to mention my “attack cat,” Bunnie, who thinks he is a dog and is tougher than any canine.
I’ll admit that I want to frighten readers just a little as I tell my most memorable true crimes—but only to make you all wary and prepared with an almost automatic plan of what to do if someone stalks you or attacks you. Those who survive sudden attacks are invariably those who react within seconds. Rapists and killers don’t want to attract attention; their favorite targets are would-be victims who are stunned into passivity and silence until it is too late to save themselves.
The woman who was watched surreptitiously and stalked in the following case would never have suspected who the phantom in her world was, and that was when she lost her advantage. Without really noticing the date when this investigation occurred, I was a little shocked to realize that I had inadvertently chosen a crime that had taken place on the very same July 4th four-day holiday in 1978 when Sara Beth Lundquist vanished. The victims had no connection at all, save the date that each encountered a different sadistic sociopath.
Strange. I have no idea why I happened to go back to that weekend thirty years ago. I picked these cases because they fit a pattern—and didn’t look at the date. This case—and Sara Beth’s murder—happened years ago, but similar crimes still occur somewhere in America every day.
I hope “Not Safe at Home” will make my readers more cautious and enable them to file an instinctual response deep in their thought processes until it’s so solidly implanted that it becomes like a tattoo on the brain.
Traia Carr found herself at a crossroads in her life when she was in her fifties. She’d never expected her marriage to end in divorce. After all, they’d been together for thirty years, and it seemed they would celebrate their golden wedding anniversary together. But life can change suddenly and take sharp turns when we least expect it. Even though the divorce was
amicable and she and her ex kept in touch often, it wasn’t the same. Traia had never lived all alone in her life.
Traia had managed to cope with those changes. She adjusted to life as a single woman, and the pain that had been as sharp as glass shards a few years earlier slowly softened. She was an attractive woman who appeared to be in her early forties, not her late fifties. After a while she started to date, and she had many invitations.
Her home was a neat bungalow on Third Street in Marysville, Washington. Marysville is a small town just five miles north of Everett, the Snohomish County seat. Traia’s hometown was adjacent to I-5, the interstate freeway that runs from California to Vancouver. Most travelers know it as a good place to stop for lunch or supper, but they know little else about Marysville: a workingman’s town where ostentation is rare. Most homes are like Traia’s, with wood siding or shingles. You don’t find mansions in Marysville.
From the freeway, those who bother to look out their windows at the landscape from Everett to Marysville can see rivers and ponds—wider and deeper in the rainy months—lumber mills, and sprawling commercial farms growing trees, pumpkins, and all manner of produce. There are mountains and forests and Indian reservations near Marysville. Sometimes the area seems engaged in a tug-of-war between burgeoning civilization and what Snohomish County once was when its only residents were Native Americans.
Traia Carr tended to a large yard full of mature fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and bright flowers. She found a job as a clerk in a small bakery, a job she truly enjoyed. She wasn’t worried about finances, though. She had a regular income from payments on the sale of a tavern she and her ex-husband had owned and operated for decades, and she also received Social Security checks, her share of her former husband’s benefits.
She had numerous friends and as active a social life as she chose to participate in. Yet Traia had had her share of heartache. She found one man she truly cared for, and they dated almost daily for a year after he separated from his wife. And then one day, he simply stopped calling her. She eventually learned that he had gone back to his wife to try to make their marriage work. He hadn’t had the nerve to tell Traia, so she waited for the phone to ring, agonizing, wondering what had happened to him.