LAST DANCE, LAST CHANCE - and Other True Cases

  The sandy clay soil dipped in spots, leaving hollows, ditches, and rutted trails that were now filled with leftover rainwater from a Friday night storm. He leaped over a water hazard, and, as he did so, glanced down to be sure he’d cleared a ditch. His heart constricted and his breath caught in his throat as he wondered if his mind was playing tricks on him. Late as he was, he had to turn back and look more carefully.

  When he did, he was sorry he had. There was a woman lying there motionless, facedown, in the ditch. It looked as if she was naked beneath the sweater-jacket that had been tossed carelessly over her pale white flesh.

  All thoughts of catching the next bus vanished as the man ran to the nearest house and pounded on the door. He asked if he could use the phone. There was no 911 in 1948; indeed, one man per shift—Harmon Ensley on this First Watch from four until noon—handled all the emergency calls that came into the Seattle Police Department, as well as the ADT bank alarms. It seems impossible now, but it worked just fine then. Ensley could direct patrol cars into a crime scene as deftly as any air traffic controller and keep up a constant patter as he did so.

  In those days, there was a captain overseeing the Homicide and Robbery Unit, and all the homicide detectives were designated lieutenants. “We didn’t get any extra pay,” Austin Seth recalls, “but we had the rank. It gave us a little more persuasive power if we needed it.”

  On the morning of July 10, patrol officers from the north end’s Wallingford precinct were the first to reach the scene. The spot where the woman lay was only a half block off a well-traveled boulevard, Sand Point Way, but it still seemed isolated. Officers Henry Redick and J.B. Small were followed by the commander of the precinct, Captain Art Chaffee.

  The witness who led them to the ditch hadn’t known if the woman was alive or dead when he called, but the Wallingford officers could see that she was dead; her face was under a few inches of muddy water. She would have drowned if she’d been unconscious when she was thrown or fell there. Maybe someone had held her head down, or perhaps she was already dead.

  They didn’t disturb the body, waiting for homicide detectives to arrive from headquarters in downtown Seattle. It wasn’t long before the weed-filled field was alive with police cars and plainclothes vehicles. Sergeant I.A. O’Mera and Lieutenants Austin Seth and his partner, Don Sprinkle, made the 10-mile trip in no time. King County Coroner John Brill came along, too. He would be the one to officially declare the victim dead, but he wouldn’t remove the body until a search for possible evidence had been finished.

  In the 1940s, detectives still wore fedoras, suits, white shirts, and ties. The group of men who gathered around the body resembled an outtake from a film noir movie.

  Sprinkle and Seth were close friends as well as partners, and Seth would never in his life have a better partner. Austin Seth was 33 years old, six feet three, with thick dark hair; Don Sprinkle was a year younger, several inches shorter than Seth, with reddish-blond hair. He was a snappy dresser; his hat was woven of straw with an extra-wide brim and a cloth band in a tropical print. Seth was far more conservative. The two homicide detectives worked together so well that often they didn’t even have to speak to know what the other was thinking.

  Now, they tossed their suit jackets in their car and rolled up their sleeves. They dug a ditch in the dirt road next to the ditch so that the water would drain from the depression where the body lay.

  They didn’t know yet how she had died, but it wasn’t likely that she had been hit by a car on the narrow dirt road—not when she now lay naked, except for the sweater with its ornate gold buttons. There were traces of blood on the sweater. Her long thick auburn hair floated in the muddy water, obscuring most of her face. But when they turned the body, already stiffening with rigor mortis, they had no doubt at all that the young woman had been murdered. More than murdered—if such a thing were possible. She had been beaten savagely. Her right eye was swollen and as purple as a ripe plum, her nose was broken, and her head and face were covered with multiple bruises and abrasions. A black strap of some kind protruded from her mouth.

  Although Brill could not tell the actual manner of death, he said it was likely that she had been manually strangled. Deep black bruising on the front of her neck made that a strong possibility.

  Worst of all, her killer had slashed at her breasts and pubic area with a razor-sharp instrument, mutilating her body in a way that suggested she had encountered an acutely disturbed sexual psychopath.

  “I think these will prove to be wounds that were administered after death,” Brill said. “But we’ll have to see what Doc Wilson says after he does the autopsy.”

  The victim’s body was removed and taken to the King County morgue, located in the basement of the County City Building. Hopefully, a postmortem examination would give the investigators an accurate picture of her time of death.

  Precious little physical evidence was found at the body site. They found one sturdy woman’s oxford shoe, the kind that nurses wear—although this one was brown—and a pair of panties. The chances were good that the actual murder had occurred someplace else and the killer had brought the body here to dispose of it.

  The soil was very sandy, and Seth noticed fresh tire tracks not far from the ditch. The imprints were sharp; clearly, no other vehicle had driven over them. Max Allison, head of the crime lab, headed out to take a plaster of paris impression, known as a moulage cast, of the tread pattern. If they found tires to compare with the pattern, they might just have a positive piece of evidence.

  The neighborhood was mostly residential, with neat little homes just across the street from the open field where the victim had been left. Their lawns sloped down to the street and were all carefully landscaped. A few blocks farther along, the houses became virtual mansions, with gated entries. Another major presence in the area was the Sand Point Naval Air Station, where hundreds of pilots and officers were assigned. The killer could have come from the naval base, from the neighborhood, or from someplace far away.

  Austin Seth and Don Sprinkle followed the coroner’s ambulance as it headed downtown; as the principal detectives assigned to this case, they would observe the autopsy. However, they had gone only a few blocks when the police radio announced that a stolen car, a brand-new gray Lincoln sedan, had been located at 36thAvenue West and West Bertona in the Magnolia district. The officer responding to the early morning report had found that the front seat and one of the doors were stained heavily with blood.

  Seth and Sprinkle headed to Magnolia Bluff, a trip of several miles. Seattle is a city with large bodies of water on either side. The body had been found close to Lake Washington, on the east side of the city, and Magnolia Bluff was on the west side, overlooking Elliot Bay. The latter had several characteristics that were similar to the Sand Point region. The address where the car was found was only a few blocks from the Fort Lawton Army base. During World War II (and later the Korean War), thousands of troops passed through Fort Lawton headed for the Far East.

  Seth and Sprinkle would probably have to sift through thousands of soldiers, sailors, and marines to find their killer. They hoped that wouldn’t happen. For now, they were very curious about the car found on Magnolia Bluff, its keys still in the ignition.

  “That Lincoln turned out to belong to a doctor,” Seth recalls. “He’d parked it in the Olympic Hotel garage, and when he went to get it at seven the night before, it was gone. He reported it immediately to our department.”

  Seth and Sprinkle walked around the luxury car. It didn’t have any exterior damage, and its white sidewall tires were perfectly clean. The interior was another story. The upholstery on the driver’s side of the front seat was stained with dried blood; one spot had come from pooling blood, and the other looked like transferred blood. There were also flecks of castoff blood on the dashboard. They would have come from a weapon being raised again and again. On the upswing, the velocity of the movement would have flung droplets onto the dashboard, their “tails” showing the
direction of the killer’s swing.

  The clutch, brake, and accelerator pedals were covered with sandy residue, and the floorboards had a good amount of sand and tiny pebbles, similar to the dirt found at the body site.

  The physician himself, of course, became a suspect. He had reported the car stolen around 7 P.M. the night before. They didn’t know yet when the murdered woman had died, but the autopsy was about to start, and they would have a better idea soon.

  Max Allison arrived to process the car, dusting for fingerprints and taking dirt samples and tire impressions. There was enough blood to check for type—although it would be decades before DNA would assist police probes.

  * * *

  The postmortem was just beginning when Seth and Sprinkle arrived at the morgue. The young woman was five feet, five inches tall and weighed 120 pounds. She appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties. Her red hair was luxuriant, and she had a redhead’s complexion with a profusion of freckles. It was impossible to tell whether she had been pretty, but she had a perfect figure, although it was marred now by the ugly perversion of her killer. There were more than two dozen thin cuts on her right breast, and both breasts had been laid open with deep horizontal slashes. The same weapon had been used to make a deep cut in her pubic area and then trailed up around her belly button and back down.

  “What was the weapon?” Austin Seth asked.

  “This beer bottle,” Dr. Gale Wilson said as he showed the two detectives the broken bottle that had been removed from beneath the body. The bottom had been smashed as bar-fighters do. “He held it by the neck and used the sharp edges to cut her.”

  “I think he strangled her with her own bra,” Wilson said. The bra had been cruelly jammed deeply into the victim’s throat, leaving only a thin black satin shoulder strap visible in the corner of her mouth.

  “At least this all happened after she was dead,” Wilson said. “She was strangled first, and she was raped. I can’t say if that happened before or after she died.”

  Forty years later, the semen left behind by the killer would be a vital clue. But, again, DNA testing was as unlikely in 1948 as a spaceship landing in downtown Seattle.

  “Time of death?” Don Sprinkle asked, knowing that it wouldn’t be as specific as fictional pathologists’ opinions.

  “Probably between 2 and 3 A.M., give or take an hour either way,” Dr. Wilson said.

  That let the physician with the new Lincoln off the hook. He hadn’t seen his car since the evening before the victim died. It wasn’t very likely he would report his car missing and then go out and commit a murder. Besides, he had an impeccable reputation.

  Dr. Gale Wilson was something of a legend in King County. He kept a small black notebook in his suit pocket and noted every autopsy he performed. When he testified in court, he always began by giving the latest tally. By the time he retired, he had done more than 40,000 autopsies.

  However, this autopsy was far more troubling than most. This was the work of a sadistic sociopath. Although about 3 percent of all males and 1 percent of females are deemed to be sociopaths, only a tiny, tiny percentage of those people are diagnosed as sadistic. Sadists enjoy hurting people.

  The person who had done this terrible damage to the victim before them had to be caught as soon as possible. Because of the rape, they were looking for a male. Whoever he was, if he had done it once, he would do it again, and Don Sprinkle and Austin Seth vowed that they were not going to allow that to happen.

  Patrol officers and detectives who had spread out to search the entire neighborhood near Sand Point Way discovered women’s clothing that had been tossed onto the median strip of the boulevard for two or three miles. They gathered the items up carefully and put them into evidence bags. There were slacks, a white blouse, panties, and stockings. All appeared to match the size of the dead woman.

  The sweater that had been thrown over the woman in the ditch was drying on a rack in the homicide unit. When the detectives examined it more closely, they saw a name tag sewn inside the collar. It read “Velda Woodcock.”

  Sergeant O’Mera asked detectives H. W. Vosper and Stan Bowerman to check the Seattle phone book for the name Woodcock. They found sixteen Woodcock listings and began to dial them one by one. The tenth call went to a Mrs. Leona Woodcock, who lived on 43rd Avenue N.E. That address was fairly close to where the victim’s body had been found.

  A woman with a young voice answered, and when Vosper asked for Velda Woodcock, she surprised him.

  “I’m Velda Woodcock,” she said.

  Vosper identified himself, and Velda immediately asked, “Is it about my sister? My sister, Donna, didn’t come home last night. Was she in an accident? My mother and I have been so worried.”

  Vosper didn’t want to give her the terrible news over the phone. He said that his sergeant was on the way to her house to talk with her. But noting the address, Sergeant O’Mera immediately called Captain Chaffee, who could get there a lot quicker.

  At the Woodcock home, Chaffee met Velda, who was only eighteen, and her mother. Both of them were shaking with apprehension.

  “We’re not certain that the woman we’re inquiring about is your sister,” Chaffee said. “Could you describe her to me—maybe tell me a little bit about her?”

  “Has something happened to her?” Velda asked nervously.

  “We don’t know—” Chaffee said. In this situation it was difficult to know what to say. The woman and the girl in front of him really didn’t want to know the truth, but Velda’s words came rushing out.

  “My sister is 22,” she said, “and she’s really pretty. She has long red hair and blue eyes, and she’s about five feet, five. She’s a really nice person, and she would never want us to worry about her—”

  “Where does she work?”

  “She works hard because she has a lot of ambition,” Velda said. “She’s studying law, so she has to work nights. She works at the Triple XXX Barrel drive-in on Bothell Way. She used to be a receptionist in a doctor’s office, but she didn’t make enough to pay for school, so she took the carhop job. She gets big tips. That’s why she works the night shift. The tips are bigger at night.”

  “What time does she usually get home?”

  “Her shift is over at 3 A.M.,” Velda said, her words tumbling one on top of the other. “She always comes straight home. She doesn’t have a car, but she usually gets a ride with one of the other employees, or maybe with some guy she knows if one of them comes by at closing time. But she didn’t come home last night at all, and she didn’t even call. She always calls.”

  Velda Woodcock was fighting back tears now. “Please tell us. Was she in an accident? Is she in the hospital?”

  There was no way to tell the victim’s mother and sister and not have it hurt. Chaffee took a deep breath and told them that Donna Woodcock was dead. “The woman we found was wearing your sweater—we think that someone killed her,” he said, carefully avoiding the horrific details of the homicide.

  “I loaned her my sweater last night. It gets so cool in the middle of the night,” Velda sobbed. “But are you sure it’s Donna?”

  “The description matches. The victim has long red hair and blue eyes, and she was wearing your sweater. I’m sorry.”

  When Leona and Velda Woodcock had finally steadied themselves from the shock, they said they thought they could answer Chaffee’s questions.

  “Was Donna afraid of anyone?” he asked quietly. “Was there anything in her life that might have led to this? Anyone hanging around her work who scared her?”

  They shook their heads. Donna wasn’t afraid of anyone. She was strong and independent. “My husband died last year,” Leona Woodcock said. “Since then, Donna’s been the only one working. She supported all of us. I have a law degree, but I never practiced because I got married right after law school.”

  Neither of them could imagine that Donna would have gone with someone she didn’t know. “She was too intelligent for that,” her mother said.
“I kept telling her you couldn’t trust people until you know something about them—”

  “Wait,” Velda Woodcock said. “Someone might have been waiting for her to rob her. She took $250 out of her postal savings account yesterday. She needed it to pay for summer quarter tuition. She had it in her purse when she went to work last night. Maybe somebody saw it there when she opened her purse.”

  They hadn’t found a purse. But they had found the scattered clothing along Sand Point Way. Those clothes were taken to the Woodcock home, and Velda identified the slacks as the ones Donna had worn when she left for work the night before.

  Donna’s mother thumbed through a photo album and gave detectives a picture of her daughter. Donna had been a truly beautiful young woman, her red hair swept up into a pompadour in front and hanging in shining waves to her shoulders. Her features were lovely.

  Austin Seth and Don Sprinkle went to the Triple XXX Barrel drive-in on Bothell way, a few miles north of the field where Donna Woodcock was found. The owner was there, but he said he hadn’t been the night before. He gave them the name and address of another carhop who worked the same shift as Donna did.

  The two detectives located the young woman, Sandy Graham*, who had just awakened after working the late, late shift. She was making coffee, but she hadn’t turned the radio on yet. She hadn’t heard anything about the murder victim found near the Sand Point Naval Air Station.

  Sandy Graham was stunned when they told her about Donna’s murder. Tears filled her eyes.

  “Did you see her leave last night—ahhh—this morning?” Austin Seth asked.

  “Let me think…it’s hard to think,” the shocked girl said. “Donna said she had a ride home with a guy named Bruce. We knew him. He used to come into the TripleXXX. He drove up around nine, I remember. He was in a jeep. But when Donna went off duty at a quarter to three, I saw her get into another car.”