Anyone who was innovative or adventurous or any well-known eccentric living in the Greater Seattle area eventually found himself spotlighted on “Larry at Large”: A family that was building an igloo; an elderly mother and her grown son who regularly crashed high-society parties, filling purse and pockets with buffet items and souvenirs; bizarre would-be politicians who jousted with city fathers; attention-seekers who dyed their hair purple or pink; they were all ideal subjects who could count on getting a call from Larry Sturholm. He never seemed to run out of feature stories, and no matter how grim the hard news was, you could count on Sturholm to end the broadcasts with something that made you smile.
Larry had a good, solid Scandinavian-American face and a head of thick brown hair. He was very nearsighted and usually wore horn-rimmed glasses. He was a friendly guy, and most Seattleites spoke about him as a favorite acquaintance, even if they didn’t know him personally.
Back in the late fifties and early sixties, Larry Sturholm went to high school in Sweet Home, Oregon, an idyllic American town with a population of about 8,000. My brother, Luke Fiorante, taught at Sweet Home High School and was the football coach, too. It was a small school in a small town, and most of the citizens were enthusiastic supporters of the games and track meets.
During the summers of 1961 and 1962, Luke worked as director of parks and recreation and ran Sweet Home’s recreation program in the fields in back of the high school. His assistant was Larry Sturholm, who was then 17 or 18. It was a good summer job for both of them. Far from any large cities, kids in Sweet Home depend on the town’s park department to provide sports and activities during the long, sleepy summer months.
Together, Luke and Larry invented a device that was really an early version of what is used today for T-ball, fashioning the apparatus from a brake drum, a metal pole, and a thick rope to hold the ball while the little boys swung at it. Larry was in charge of midget league baseball. Never much of an athlete in high school, he was always patient and cheerful with the kids in his charge.
Soon, his adventures took him far away from Sweet Home. In the late sixties, Larry Sturholm was in the United States Air Force, and his duty assignment with a TUSLOG unit sent him to one of the most isolated bases of all, near Samsun, Turkey, on the Black Sea. Although the troops’ accommodations were spartan, the weather was relentlessly challenging, and the food was often iffy at best, the men there were grateful that they hadn’t been sent to Vietnam. TUSLOG was a surveillance post, a spy base, and the duties and assignments of the army and air force servicemen stationed there were kept secret from most of the world. The personnel stationed at Samsun weren’t particularly popular with most Turkish citizens, but they did form solid friendships with one another. Their entertainment consisted mainly of watching yet another replay of movies they had seen a dozen times before or wrestling with one of their camp’s two pet bears. (The whole base mourned when an overeager MP fatally shot the smaller bear, unaware that the bears were so tame they were allowed out of their cages at will.)
Larry Sturholm’s wild sense of humor saved his buddies from depression and sheer boredom from the tedium that marked TUSLOG. He joined several other servicemen to run AFRTS, the camp’s radio station. Larry wrote scripts for two hilarious satires of radio dramas. “As the Stomach Turns” and “Down Our Street and UP Your Alley” kept the camp laughing. “Most of the writing for these was done by Larry,” an old buddy recalls, “with some totally crazy brainstorming sessions including the whole team. Larry’s unique sense of humor simply fed the insanity of the other men.”
The radio staff airmen had “a conspiratorial mind set,” the long-ago buddy says, “that may have been because we were stationed on a spy base. We even questioned the ‘reality’ of the moon landing, wondering if it had been staged in a studio somewhere. A favorite pastime was starting insane rumors and then sitting back as they spread like wildfire around the base.”
It was there on a lonely base in Turkey where Sturholm first experimented with combining humor and news, and it became his forte.
When he was finally back in the United States, Larry married his girlfriend, Judy, and moved into professional radio and television jobs.
Sturholm was an entrepreneur and a visionary; he always had some creative project going, usually having to do with writing or producing in television or radio.
In 1979, a former college friend of mine was preparing to publish a book written by Larry Sturholm, and he asked me if I would edit it. It was titled All for Nothing, and it was a remarkably well-researched true story of Ray and Roy D’Autremont, twin brothers born in Oregon as the twentieth century dawned. On October 11, 1923, they made headline news all across America, although not in the way they envisioned.
The twins, 23, enlisted their younger brother, Hugh, in their meticulously choreographed plan to carry out what newspapers of that era termed “the last great train robbery in America.”
Ray D’Autremont had already served time in a Washington state prison for his union activity. He said later, “Thousands of women and children were starving and dying. Thousands more—honest working men—were receiving less than half of what they should.”
Though the charismatic twin brothers bragged about their goal of outwitting the boss barons who were living high on the hog, they didn’t actually want to help the poor. For them, charity began at home. Seeking adventure and wealth, they went to Chicago, where they figured they could become gangsters and enjoy the perks of the Roaring Twenties.
But the brothers from Southern Oregon weren’t exactly welcomed into the gangsters’ world. They were viewed as country hicks who didn’t fit into the big city. They came back west, and it was then that Ray came up with his idea to rob a Southern Pacific train.
He believed he had the perfect plan to make them all rich: one of the trains that roared south through the Rogue River Valley in Oregon to cross the Siskiyou Mountains into California was called the Gold Special because it was said to carry huge cargoes of both gold and cash.
Ray heard that there would be half a million dollars in gold on the train on October 11. He assured Roy and Hugh that money could be theirs.
With stolen dynamite, Ray waited at the south end of Tunnel Number 13 while Roy and Hugh jumped on the train. That was easy to do because the train slowed to a crawl as it entered the three-thousand-foot-long tunnel and chugged up to the summit of the mountain. Roy and Hugh leapt down into the engine and ordered the engineer to stop the train. Then the brothers packed the dynamite against one end of the mail car. Their plan was to set it off, grab as much gold and cash as they could, and escape into the forest.
But as Sturholm described it in his book, they used far too much dynamite. It ripped up the steel mail car like a can opener, killed the mail clerk, and set fire to the train. The D’Autremonts could see nothing at all through the black smoke and flames that filled the tunnel, much less steal anything. Much of the cash in the mail car had literally been shredded, and the gold was buried in the wreckage. The train itself was jammed in the tunnel by the mangled mail car, and could move neither forward nor backward. When the brakeman came back to see what had happened, he spooked Ray and Roy, and they shot him dead. Then they shot the engineer and the fireman. They were now not only train robbers but also cold-blooded murderers.
Without so much as a bar of gold, the three D’Autremonts scrambled into the woods, which they knew well. Somehow, despite a huge manhunt, they managed to stay free—if virtually penniless—for four years. Hugh was caught first, turned in by an army buddy who recognized his photo from a wanted poster. Roy and Ray were caught shortly after that in Ohio.
The story of the D’Autremonts had enthralled Larry Sturholm from the first time he heard about them. They had become media celebrities on a par with Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone, Bruno Hauptman or—today’s counterparts—O. J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. The public wanted to believe that they were basically good men who were striking back for the underdogs and wo
rking stiffs in America. And the D’Autremont twins were as good-looking as movie stars, happy to pose for newspaper cameramen.
Sturholm set out to re-create the story that had been lost in time. He discovered that Roy had gone insane in prison and been forced to undergo an experimental frontal lobotomy, which didn’t work. He died in the Oregon State Mental Hospital. Hugh was paroled in 1958 and died soon after of cancer. Ray, the instigator of the botched train robbery fifty years earlier, had his sentence commuted in 1972. Once he sued the railroad that ran trains past the Oregon Penitentiary in Salem, claiming that the sound of the whistles disturbed his sleep and gave him nightmares. His suits were thrown out as frivolous.
The onetime glamour boy of train robberies lived to be eighty-four and was a formidable reSource for Larry Sturholm’s book. Sturholm interviewed the surviving D’Autremont in his old age, and he also obtained amazing photographs taken at the time of the disaster. All for Nothing, his book, told the true story to readers who had never heard of the D’Autremont brothers and to the elderly who recalled the headlines.
In 1979, I had yet to publish a book myself, and I was grateful to be hired to edit the rough draft of All for Nothing. Working on Larry Sturholm’s book bought my family a lot of groceries. I was impressed with his ability as a writer and the way he could create suspense and bring back the scenes and personalities after more than fifty years. He didn’t need any editing in storytelling, so I confined myself to checking his grammar and spelling. His words caught the futility and the tragedy of the desperate men whose foolish crime ended their hopes and dreams and also the lives of their innocent victims. His title, All for Nothing, was right on target.
One day, that title proved to be grimly ironic.
Sturholm wrote another book, this time on the bravery of law-enforcement officers: In the Line of Duty: The Story of Two Brave Men. It detailed the struggle of a Portland, Oregon, police officer who fought brain damage and paralysis after a devastating car crash. Once more, it was a gripping read, and Sturholm told it with sensitivity.
Neither of Larry Sturholm’s books were national best sellers, although they did sell very well in the Northwest, and are still available by order through bookstores. His fans looked forward to more books.
His television viewers hoped to be able to enjoy his sense of humor and genius with new ideas for years to come. He was a natural; he had already won a number of Emmy Awards, and he was only 46.
Larry and Judy Sturholm stayed together in a marriage that other people envied. They were happy, although they never had children. As they both turned 40, they realized that they probably never would. But their lives were full; Larry always had his hand in new projects, producing short subjects, documentaries, and even commercials. And of course he had his KIRO features.
In midsummer, 1989, Larry Sturholm’s fans were disappointed when he announced that he was taking a sabbatical from “Larry at Large” and Seattle and was going to head “into the sunset” on a new adventure, a project in the Cayman Islands. Disappointed, but not surprised. He was a man who constantly tested his limits, looking for new ways to create and entertain and educate.
On the night of July 31, 1989, the end of the five o’clock news ran pretaped footage that Sturholm had prepared for his good-bye to viewers. It showed him on water skis, close up at first, waving good-bye, then his image growing smaller and smaller as he disappeared into a beautiful sunset.
Sturholm and his crew were scheduled to fly that evening to the Cayman Islands. Judy drove her husband to Sea-Tac airport and kissed him good-bye. She didn’t expect to hear from him until his flight and connecting flights touched down. They had been married for twenty-two years. She had never had any reason to doubt his faithfulness.
A few hours later the King County Police got their first disjointed call for help from paramedics dispatched from a hospital in Bellevue on the east side of Lake Washington. At the same time, a citizen was reporting a stabbing, with wounded people and possibly even a murder at a house near Issaquah. Issaquah was once a very small town near the foothills of Snoqualmie Pass that burgeoned in the eighties.
A female victim, who had suffered a massive loss of blood, had apparently been declared dead on arrival at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue. Other reporting callers said that there had been some kind of fight or assault at the home in an upscale neighborhood outside of Issaquah.
Deputies were dispatched to meet with the paramedics, and other units were sent to the address given in Issaquah. As they began to sort things out, they realized that the woman, who had died of exsanguination (blood loss incompatible with life), had apparently called her friend and business partner for help, gasping that there was trouble at her house. Unaware that anything more than one of her partner’s increasingly common verbal confrontations with an ex-boyfriend was taking place, the friend sent her husband to the victim’s house, the same house in Issaquah, where deputies were sent.
The woman, a nurse, was alive when her friend’s husband reached her home. But she had been savagely stabbed, and her throat was sliced open deeply from one side to the other. As they headed for the hospital, she somehow managed to grip the edges of her slashed neck, trying to stop the flow of blood from her severed arteries. As a registered nurse, she would have known full well that she had to stop the bleeding and that she needed emergency care immediately. She had indicated to the man who’d come to help her that he must keep driving.
He drove as fast as he could, but even if the paramedics or the emergency room doctors had been right there fighting to save her, she was so terribly wounded that it would have taken a miracle.
The word was that she died in her friend’s husband’s arms before they could get medical help.
Deputies back at her house opened the front door and began a search of the downstairs rooms. From the saturation of blood, they knew that something disastrous had occurred there. During a sweep of the downstairs, they discovered a man wedged between the tub and toilet of the bathroom. There were indications of an immense struggle in the bathroom, and there was no question that he, too, was dead. He had probably attempted to lock himself in the bathroom, then barricaded the door against his attacker. He had been stabbed an estimated 180 times, too many times for a pathologist to get an accurate count. Even for trained and experienced police officers, the interior of this lovely home, the sight of the dead man, and the pools and sprays of blood throughout the house were almost too much to take in. This was shocking, senseless overkill.
They immediately called for backup and also requested that detectives from the Major Crimes Unit respond. Then they set about stringing yellow “Crime Scene: Do Not Cross” tape to guard the scene from contamination.
At the same time, other deputies walked cautiously through the strangely silent house. They had located the deceased man there. A few miles away, paramedics confirmed that they had declared a woman dead. According to the male friend who tried futilely to save her, she had lived in that house and her name was Debra Sweiger. The officers had no idea what her relationship to the dead man was. First word was that this house belonged to her. They didn’t know yet who had done what to whom—or, more ominously—who might still be inside the house.
They searched the downstairs area and determined that there was no one hiding there. They headed up the stairs, their guns in their hands, expecting some madman to leap out at them at any moment. Then, as they opened the bathroom door, they found another man. He was in the tub, submerged in bloodied water. Dead.
This appeared to be a triple homicide or perhaps a double homicide and a suicide. The deputies and their supervisors knew that radio and television reporters monitored police calls, but it was difficult to call in over their police radios without giving details. Inevitably, by the early morning hours of Tuesday, August 1, the rumor that there had been three violent deaths in Issaquah had leaked to the media.
Media cars, their station’s call letters visible on the sides, crept up as close as they could t
o the crime scene, only to be prevented from getting near enough to find out much before they were turned back by deputies stationed to guard the perimeter of the scene.
The Seattle stations KOMO-TV, KING-TV, and KIRO-TV (ABC, NBC, and CBS, respectively) all had their newsrooms on alert, standing by to get the first news of the rumored murders in Issaquah. Phil Sturholm was the news editor for KIRO, and he waited at the television station near the Space Needle in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. From the rumors, the Issaquah situation sounded as though it would be a top-of-the-hour story for the noon news. Bombarded by bad news and tragedies, radio and television newsmen and women learn quickly to grow a thick hide so that they won’t take it all home at the end of a shift, but most of them do feel the pain. Field reporters have to knock on the doors of people still in shock from hearing that they have lost someone they love to violence. Reporters come to learn that life is ephemeral. They also lose some of their own to helicopter crashes and vehicular accidents as they race to where news is happening.
More than those in most occupations, media personnel are well aware that it can happen to them or to someone they love, too. But there was nothing about the first reports emanating from police radio transmissions to make anyone think that this incident was anything more than a huge crime story.
At the perfectly appointed home on the east side of Lake Washington, there was no longer any need to hurry. Although an aura of violence and terror still hung in the air, the King County detectives, led by Joe Purcell—who became the lead detective on this horrific case—worked slowly and methodically inside the murder house. They photographed the quiet rooms and drew sketches and measured so they could re-create the placement of the bodies and possible physical evidence later. They also tried to identify the three people who died the night before.