No Regrets and Other True Cases
Following the autopsy, Roy Gleason gave information to local newspapers describing the clothing found with the victim, and her very general description. They were looking for a missing girl whose dental records might be compared with the teeth of their victim. Without the help of the public, there would be no place else to go with the case. The scant information that the detective team had managed to put together about the victim was broadcast to the thirteen western states—and then more widely—through NCIC (National Crime Information Center) computers. Bellevue police were soon inundated with responses. As there always are, there were hundreds of teenage girls missing in the United States. They received queries from as far away as New York State, as well as from California, Oregon, and other counties in Washington State.
Frantic parents whose teenage daughters had run away, or been taken away, had filed missing reports on girls who, at least on the surface, resembled the unknown victim. None of them matched Bellevue’s unknown victim.
On the morning of December 10, a call came in from the mother of a teenage daughter named Nancy Dillon.* The family lived in the Bellevue area.
“I’ve read the article in the paper,” she began, “and I think you should talk to my daughter. Nancy has a friend, a girl named Teresa Sterling. Teresa was a runaway from Georgia. We haven’t seen her for a couple of months.”
The Bellevue detectives were about to get a tremendous boost from some rebellious teenagers, a group who often resent the police. Roy Gleason assured Nancy that she and any of her friends who were willing to talk to him could be assured that his main—and only—concern was a homicide investigation. For the time he worked to find the answers about why a teenager had ended up dead in the woods, he would not ask witnesses about their drug or alcohol use, shoplifting, truancy, running away, or any other offenses. He had to gain the trust of his informants, or he might as well quit. And he was not about to do that. He had a feeling that the dead girl was Teresa Sterling, but he couldn’t prove it by himself.
Nancy Dillon was most cooperative. She said she had been worried about Teresa Sterling after she seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth without telling anyone she was leaving.
“Tell me a little about Teresa,” Gleason began. “Try to go back and fill me in on her lifestyle, her friends.”
The story that came out was tragic, but not unfamiliar. Teresa Caroline Sterling had been born on December 14. As her friend described her to Gleason, he realized that in four more days, Teresa would have celebrated her sixteenth birthday.
Nancy said that Teresa had come from a large family, and that she was the youngest of five children. “She grew up in some little town outside Atlanta, Georgia. She was kind of ‘country.’”
“What did she look like?” Gleason asked.
“She was a tomboy—a skinny little kid with a lot of freckles, but she was pretty, too. She looked kind of like Jodie Foster, the movie star. She wasn’t very interested in school, but the only trouble she ever got into was kid stuff—just mischief.”
“When did you meet Teresa?” Gleason asked.
“Well, they moved from Georgia two years ago,” Nancy said. “Teresa’s dad worked for some kind of freight company for an airline and he got transferred to Salt Lake City first. Then, that same year, they moved to Bellevue. That was in July. They rented a house out by Crossroads. That’s when I met her.”
Gleason learned that Teresa had been enrolled in the eighth grade at Odle Junior High School. Faced with two moves in one year and having to start again in two schools where she didn’t know anyone, Teresa had felt lost at first. Life for teenagers in Bellevue was very different from what it was in the little town in Georgia where she had lived her whole life. Most households in Bellevue had a higher standard of living, and street drugs were plentiful. Even in junior high, a large number of students had experimented with them.
“I know Teresa tried marijuana,” Nancy told Gleason. “And she probably tried other drugs, too.”
Teresa was becoming a young woman during her years in Bellevue. She was caught somewhere between the win-someness of childhood and the promise of maturity. She still wrote to teachers she’d liked back in Georgia, but she wasn’t as interested in sports as she had been. Her school-work suffered when she began to run away from home.
“I really don’t know why she ran,” Nancy said. “All of her friends could see that she was getting in the habit of leaving her house, staying a few days with us or with other friends, and then she’d go home. Her parents really tried to keep her home, but no matter what they did, she would run away. Last March, her family finally moved back to Georgia. They just packed up, and they all went back to Fayetteville—everyone but Teresa’s older sister.”
Nancy felt that Teresa’s parents had hoped to get her away from the lifestyle in the group she ran with in Bellevue, and that, once back home, she would settle down. But it was too late for Teresa. “She didn’t want to live in Fayetteville any longer. She wrote to me and said she wanted to live in Bellevue, and be free to come and go when she wanted. She came back here about the middle of June,” Nancy recalled. “I’m not sure just how she got here. Sometimes, she said she hitchhiked, and sometimes she said she flew or took a bus. But she just showed up here again just before the end of school.”
“Where did she live?”
“With different people. She just stayed with different people.”
Nancy Dillon said that she herself had gone to California on vacation during the summer, and that Teresa had planned to join her down there.
“But she never showed up. And when I came back, I didn’t see her either. My mother called in about Teresa because she read that description of the cotton, hooded shirt found next to the girl’s body,” Nancy said with a tremble in her voice. “I gave Teresa a shirt a lot like that about a year ago. It was yellow with white trimming and it had a zippered pocket.”
Gleason asked her to sketch the shirt that she had given to Teresa Sterling. When she handed the sketch to him, he saw that it was exactly like the victim’s clothing. He pulled out some photos of the clothes found at the crime scene, and held them out for Nancy Dillon to look at.
She gasped. “That’s the shirt—the one I gave to Teresa. I bought it in California. Does that mean that it’s Teresa?”
“We’ll have to check some more,” Gleason told the upset youngster. “But, yes...it may be that it was Teresa’s body found in the woods.”
When Bob Littlejohn—the first patrolman at the body site—heard that they had a tentative ID on the skeletonized body, he was as shocked as Nancy Dillon was. He knew Teresa Sterling, too. He had spent a lot of time trying to counsel the Sterlings about their problems with Teresa.
The Sterlings had been afraid that Teresa was smoking marijuana, and possibly using LSD. They had been at their wits’ end trying to stop her from running away. Littlejohn had talked with Teresa—to no avail—before her family moved back to Georgia.
“I remember when she ran away from Fayetteville last June 8,” Littlejohn recalled. “The family asked me to do a ‘locate and determine welfare’ on Teresa because they thought she was headed here. They didn’t have much hope of getting her to go back home. But they wanted to know that she was safe.”
Littlejohn had found Teresa back in Bellevue, and he’d talked to her. Then he called her parents and said that she was all right. He’d tried to keep tabs on her, although she moved around so much that it wasn’t easy. Her parents hadn’t reported her as a runaway; they had just asked for information, and he had no cause to pick her up unless she broke the law. When Bob Littlejohn responded to the call about the skull in the woods, the picture of Teresa Sterling’s piquant little face hadn’t even crossed his mind.
The physical similarity, the identical blouse, the fact that Teresa Sterling had not been seen by her good friend for months, all pointed to the likelihood that it was her body. Littlejohn was saddened to realize now why there had been no runaway or missing report put out
on her. Her parents had simply given up trying to corral her; they had tried everything, and then they had hoped and prayed that tough love might work. Short of locking her up, they hadn’t been able to keep her at home, but hoped finally that maybe she would come home if she got hungry or lonely enough. Littlejohn had spent many off-duty hours trying to help Teresa, too. But no one had been able to convince her to go back to the parents who loved her.
Roy Gleason had the onerous task of notifying Teresa Sterling’s stepmother that he was investigating the homicide of a young girl. “There is a possibility that the victim might be your daughter,” he said gently. “We have to identify her. Would you have the names of dentists who might have cared for Teresa while you lived in the Bellevue area?”
The shocked woman said that Teresa had seen two dentists in Bellevue—one of whom had put in a gold crown. The dentist who had done the crown work gave detectives her dental records, which they carried to the medical examiner’s office. The crown looked to be identical to the tooth in question. To be absolutely sure, the investigators contacted forensic odontologist Dr. Bruce Rothwell of the Mason Clinic in Seattle.
Dr. Rothwell looked at the chart and at the gold crown work. “There’s no question,” he said. “They are identical. Your victim is Teresa Sterling.”
It was a start. Now, three days after the body’s discovery, they knew the name of their victim, and something of her lifestyle. But they still had vast areas to fill in. Teresa had left Georgia alive and well on June 8, and made it safely to Bellevue. What they had to do now was to attempt to trace Teresa’s movements between June 12 and December 7. Six months.
They knew that she had undoubtedly been alive for a good part of the summer, but they still could not narrow down the time period when she probably was killed. All they had to go on was the fact that she’d failed to meet Nancy Dillon in California—but that could have been simply because she’d changed her mind. She was a capricious girl who went anywhere the wind blew.
Nancy was able to help out more. She looked at her calendar and said she could isolate the few days when she had expected to see Teresa.
“Teresa had a boyfriend named Jeff,* and they promised to call me at my grandmother’s house in California around July 4—just as soon as they were close. But I didn’t hear from them. I even called my mother and asked her if she knew where Teresa was—but no one had seen her. I didn’t get back to Bellevue until the end of August. Teresa was still gone. I thought maybe Teresa and Jeff did make it to California, but they didn’t call me. I figured they might still be still down there.
“Teresa could have stayed at my house,” Nancy continued. “We offered her a place to stay when she showed up on June 12—but she refused. She just planned to stay around with different people. She didn’t like to be tied down to anyone.”
Once the search for Teresa’s friends began, the detectives were deluged with calls from people who wanted to help—both teenagers and their parents. Gossip moved through the teenage community as if it was being passed on by jungle drums. Most of them had kept secrets from their own parents and their friends’ parents, but this was different. Teresa was dead. Murdered. That made them all feel vulnerable. They wondered if her killer was still walking among them.
Teresa had been a party girl, attending every “kegger” and beach party she heard about. During the previous summer, she had worked only one day. She had lived a kind of hand-to-mouth existence, dependent on “the kindness of strangers” and her wits. She borrowed clothes from friends, and ate her meals wherever she was at the moment.
Apparently, Teresa had stayed a very short time with her own eighteen-year-old sister and then with family friends and often with people she had just met, most of them adults. That left scores of people to be questioned. The investigators found a pair of single male adults who had taken her in for a while, but that was early in the summer. The men apparently had had nothing to do with her death.
She had dated many young men, but the name “Jeff” kept surfacing as her steady boyfriend. Sources who had known her well said that “Jeff” was eighteen-year-old Jeff Bigelow,* who lived with his parents, and who rode a motorcycle.
Police in Redmond, a city just northeast of Bellevue, were able to narrow the time of her disappearance more closely. Their department had a report that indicated one of their officers had contacted both Teresa and Jeff Bigelow around midnight in early August. “One of our patrol officers found them drinking on the beach by Lake Sammamish. We have an FIR (Field Investigation Report) on it. They were both underage,” the Redmond detective said.
And then a hairdresser in Bellevue called the Bellevue detectives and said that he had done Teresa’s hair on August 24. He furnished a copy of his appointment schedule for that Friday that confirmed Teresa had been in his shop. “I recognized the girl’s description,” he told Roy Gleason. “I knew Teresa. On August 24, she came in during the afternoon and she brought along a young guy who carried a motorcycle helmet.”
Valuable tips continued to pile up. Next, the detectives got an assist from Dorcas Resnick,* an elderly woman who lived in the area where Teresa’s body had been found. She called in and asked the detectives to visit her home. Roy Gleason talked to Dorcas and found she had a remarkable memory.
“I walk my dog near the peach orchard every day,” she began. “If you’d like, I’ll walk through the area and show you.”
The woman and Gleason walked through the region, as she pointed out landmarks.
“I began to smell a very strong, foul odor,” she recalled. “I know it was two weeks before the gentleman put up that split-rail fence there. There was a pair of women’s panties lying near the path for about two weeks, and then they were gone. My dog kept wanting to go into the woods where the odor was so bad. I tried to stop her, but a couple of times, she did run in there. Finally, the smell was just so bad that I ended up taking a back way around the woods.”
The site was exactly where Teresa’s skeleton was found months later.
Gleason contacted the fence builder, and learned that the man had put up the fence on September 13. Counting back two weeks, Gleason came up with August 30. That was when Dorcas Resnick had noticed the odor; the decomposition of the body would not have begun to give off a distinctive odor immediately. Gleason conferred with his fellow detectives, and they figured that Teresa had died sometime between the night of August 24 and August 26.
She had had her hair done on the twenty-fourth—probably in preparation for a party. Had anyone seen her after that party? In the days ahead, they found no sightings after that night. It was very likely that Teresa had died on August 24.
The probers had now talked to thirty people who knew Teresa Sterling well. They learned that two of her close friends had run away from home on December 8, just as the news of the body find hit the papers. The two teenagers, Tami Wells* and Bonnie Cross,* were traced to Yakima, Washington, in the company of an adult male. They were picked up by Yakima police, and Detectives Gary Trent and Marv Skeen went over the Cascade Mountain passes to bring the girls back.
It turned out that the girls had not run away because of any guilty knowledge about Teresa’s death; they had left on a whim. However, they were able to corroborate much of the information about Teresa’s perambulations during her last summer. Tami verified that Teresa and Jeff had dated quite steadily all summer. “They were together all the time for about two weeks in August, and then I didn’t see either one of them anymore,” Tami said.
“Do you know where Teresa met Jeff?” Gary Trent asked.
“We were walking over by Crossroads and Jeff and some guy went riding past on motorcycles, but then they stopped—and started talking to us.”
“Do you know where Jeff went after you stopped seeing Teresa?”
“All I know is she kept saying they were going to California together. That’s what I thought they’d done,” Tami said. She had considered Teresa her very good friend, and wondered about her. “She used to call
me at least once a day, and I was really surprised when she suddenly stopped calling me. She didn’t even say good-bye.”
Another seventeen-year-old girl volunteered an opinion. Jill Reid* told Gleason that she had known Teresa and Jeff Bigelow, although she hadn’t been a close friend of either. “When we heard that Teresa had been killed, a bunch of us started talking. We kept asking each other, ‘Could Jeff Bigelow have done it?’”
“Why would you feel that way?” Gleason probed.
“Well, they were together and people saw them all over, and then three months ago, they both just disappeared. Suddenly, we heard that Jeff had gone into the army, and nobody had seen Teresa at all.”
No matter which angle the Bellevue detectives studied, the most rational approach kept bringing them back to eighteen-year-old Jeff Bigelow—Teresa Sterling’s last boyfriend.
One of the most dissonant factors jarring the detectives was that everyone but Jeff Bigelow had called them to offer help or to ask questions. If he had been so close to Teresa, surely he would have heard by now that her body had been found. Surely he would have come forward to help in the investigation. Unless he had something to hide.
Gleason contacted military authorities and learned that Jeff Bigelow had enlisted in the army during the last few days of August, and been sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, the sprawling army base forty-five miles away. It had not been an impromptu enlistment, however; Bigelow had signed up earlier in the summer.