Joe Purcell looked for evidence in the upstairs bathroom where the corpse of the second man still lay in the tub full of bloody water, water that was quite cool now. As Purcell knelt to examine something, he thought he heard the sound of water splashing behind him. Of course, that could not be. A prickling ran up his spine, and he turned slowly around to see what had to be impossible.
The body in the tub had just sat up.
There is such a thing as bodies reflexively moving as dead muscles contract during rigor mortis, but this couldn’t be caused by that. The guy was sitting straight up.
The dead man wasn’t dead at all. He had bled quite a bit from where he’d slashed his neck and wrists in a suicide attempt, more than enough to turn the water in the tub crimson, and, as blood chemistry tests later showed, he had also taken an overdose of sedatives, enough he evidently believed would kill him. But he had not cut himself deeply enough to bleed to death nor taken enough pills to suppress his lungs’ ability to draw breath. As the hours passed after the murders were discovered, the temperature of the water in the tub cooled enough to wake him from his drugged sleep.
It would be a long time before Joe Purcell, having experienced the sight of a body that almost literally rose from the dead, would be able to turn his back on a corpse. Indeed, he was never again able to work a homicide crime scene without a sense of trepidation.
Who were the three people who had come together so violently?
Records showed that the house was owned by Debra Sweiger, 36, a registered nurse. She was also the head of a corporation. In the past few years, she had turned her knowledge of nursing into an extremely successful enterprise, enough to buy this house, the fabulous wardrobe in her closets, and the sports car in her garage.
In the mid-eighties, there was a severe shortage of highly skilled nurses in America, partially brought about by their low salaries, long hours, and the lack of respect accorded them. Despite the lack of financial rewards, nurses were also expected to take on huge responsibilities for the welfare of their patients. For a decade or more, registered nurses had complained about the inequities in their careers. It came to a head in the eighties. Many of them simply quit their profession and found something that paid them a living wage.
The lack of top nurses that affected patient care the most were those RNs who were particulary skilled in the ER, ICUs (intensive care units) and in CCUs (coronary care units). No one could blame them for giving up on nursing when their requests for salary raises were ignored. The nurses who remained were in high demand.
Debra Sweiger was one of those highly trained nurses. So was her friend Joyce Breakey.* Debra and Joyce put their heads together, and came up with the idea for a referral service where they would link the top echelon of nurses to medical facilities willing to pay them what they were worth. Cascade Nursing Services was an idea whose time had come, and the women incorporated in 1987.
Joyce and Debra each had her own skills: Joyce was the hands-on person in the actual business; Debra gravitated more to public relations. In the early days of their business, they had only ten to twelve nurses to place in jobs, and the demand was great for “super nurses.” Debra and Joyce took shift assignments themselves. They worked really hard, but they had faith that the day would come when all they had to do was run Cascade.
And it did. Debra brought in business and was the one who lobbied to state senators in Olympia to establish that Cascade’s policies on taxes and unemployment compensation met existing statutes. A friend recalled, “Debra really enjoyed the schmoozing and dealing with things in the political arena. The whole ‘who’s who’ was really important to her. She was a socializing machine, and she was very good at it.”
Debra was married twice at a young age and she had two children, who didn’t live with her full time. At 35, she was a divorcée making up for the years when she had too much responsibility and missed out on having fun. A man who was married to one of Debra’s clients recalled his impression of her. “Debra was like a young college student who went off to school and had never experienced drinking and went to every sorority and frat party around. She was definitely a fun-loving person and enjoyed herself.”
Debra was a slender blonde, very attractive. Originally from the South, she still spoke with a charming honeyed accent. She was about five feet ten inches tall and would have been hard to ignore, even if her looks hadn’t been so dramatic. She was usually the center of attention wherever she was. She dressed impeccably and a friend recalled that she had “big hair” and “great clothes: party dresses.” No one ever saw her looking less than perfect.
“Debra was professional, self-confident, a flirtatious woman with a lot of nerve and energy,” one platonic male acquaintance said. “She was boisterous and not afraid of embarrassment; she spoke loudly at a restaurant telling an inappropriate joke. Others might look on in disbelief, but it was all in good fun. Lots of fun, in fact.”
Not surprisingly, Debra Sweiger attracted men. It wasn’t unusual for her to have at least “three serious dates” with three different men in a week’s time.
As their corporation thrived, the State maintained that nurses could not be classified as professionals while Cascade paid them as independent contractors. That was the whole point of Cascade’s existence: highly capable nurses who were tired of being treated as nonprofessionals and being paid low wages had found their niche with Debra and Joyce and were loath to give it up. Washington State wanted to reclassify Cascade’s nurses as Cascade employees. A lawsuit was filed, and, after a long struggle, Cascade won. They wouldn’t have to pay business taxes, social security withholding taxes, and other fees the IRS and the state charged employers. The nurses, working as independent professional contractors, would be their own bosses, a big step upward for their bargaining powers in wage demands.
Joyce and Debra enjoyed a newfound sense of power, power for women and power for nurses. To celebrate, they bought matching Jaguars. They hosted lavish black-tie parties for their contractor-nurses, and they lived far more carefree lifestyles than they had known in the days when they were simply nurses with tired feet and never enough money.
The two women upgraded their computer system, and their office procedures became even better organized. They prepared to start branches of their business in other cities. A Kansas City franchise was their first goal.
They deserved their success; they had worked tirelessly. Joyce and her husband, Mark,* were like a sister and brother-in-law to Debra. Debra was the one who gloried in being the hostess of their upscale parties and in the social life at the state capital with the movers and the shakers. She did most of the traveling, but she found time to have fun. This was probably the best part of her life.
Those who knew her well believed that Debra dated only casually, but they were concerned because many of the men she met wanted more serious commitments than she did. She had had that. Now she was enjoying a carefree life. While many women in their mid-thirties want to settle down, Debra Sweiger didn’t. That only made her more attractive and more of a challenge to men.
One man fell totally under her spell, becoming besotted with her to the point that he was willing to give up everything he had going for him just to be with her in a committed relationship and, hopefully, in a marriage. His name was Bill Pawlyk, he was 48, and he had a great deal going for him. He had a master’s degree in business, and he was a highly respected business leader in the Tri-Cities area of Washington (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland on the east side of the mountain passes that divide Washington). He was the chairman of the Richland Economic Development Board, a highly placed executive with the Boeing Company’s Computer Services Division, and a high-ranking naval reserve officer who was cleared to command submarines.
Pawlyk had been married a couple of times, unions he described to an acquaintance as “disasters,” and he had a son and a daughter. He didn’t have a single black mark on his professional record or any skirmishes with the law. Originally from New York, he was
tall and good-looking, urbane, and classy in every way. He had money and prestige, and Debra was attracted to him. It was mutual. In one friend’s words, “For him, along comes Debra with her charismatic, fashionable style and her southern accent, and Pawlyk found her very attractive.”
Debra Sweiger took Bill Pawlyk by storm. She enjoyed dating him and the attention he lavished on her. A woman who was jealous of Debra said, “Debra tended to play games with men’s emotions. I think she liked the drama of it all.”
If Debra was behaving like a high school or college girl who enjoyed being the belle of the ball, sought after by many male suitors at the same time, she was also playing a dangerous game. And it began to backfire on her. Almost before Debra realized it, she was in way too deep with Pawlyk. Some said he had proposed marriage to her; at the very least, everyone who knew them agreed that he was madly in love with her.
Debra drew back; she was definitely not looking for marriage, and his possessiveness had become suffocating. Even though they lived almost two hundred miles apart, he made the trip to Issaquah to see her every weekend, far more often than she wanted. He didn’t want her to date anyone but him, and he questioned her constantly about who she saw and what she did when they were apart. The more he clung to her, the more she fought to slow their romance down until, finally, she attempted to break up with him. He could not believe she was serious.
Bill Pawlyk was distraught. Although Debra had not asked him to do it, he had placed her ahead of everything else in his life, and he’d left himself no escape parachute at all. Without her, nothing mattered to him. He was alternately brokenhearted and enraged. His jealousy was almost pathological. He could not bear the thought that she might be with some other man.
It was more than that. Pawlyk’s pride was shattered; he had spent a lifetime building up his reputation as a confident man, a man in charge in his business world, his navy service, and a man used to being treated with respect. Now he felt deceived and cuckolded, an object of derision, if not actually, at least in his own mind.
Love, passion, and overwhelming jealousy know no age, and Bill Pawlyk, nearing 50, was a runaway train, consumed with jealousy.
By this time, Debra Sweiger had met Larry Sturholm. No one is exactly sure how they met, although it was probably when he contacted Debra for a feature story. He was certainly a celebrity in Seattle, a garrulous, clever man who was a lot of fun to be with. Compared to Bill Pawlyk’s gloomy presence, Sturholm was a breath of fresh air for Debra. They shared an interest in exploring new businesses, they talked about intriguing and innovative ideas, and they shared a lot of laughter.
“In my opinion,” one man who knew them both said, “they were emphatically not having an affair, even though it might all have looked terribly bad. They liked to have lunch and talk or party together. He was probably poised for a midlife crisis, and their relationship was definitely headed in the wrong direction, but I don’t think it had progressed to that point.”
But Bill Pawlyk thought it had. He was convinced that Debra was having an affair with Larry Sturholm, and he couldn’t stand the thought of that.
Pawlyk’s breaking point came on July 31, 1989. He didn’t know that Debra Sweiger was going on a trip to the Cayman Islands with Larry Sturholm and his film crew that night, but he was suspicious of everything she did. He wanted to talk out their relationship and somehow convince her to come back to him. But he had slipped over the edge; if she didn’t take him back, he was fully prepared to kill her, a terrible choice that seemed better to him than to let her go to another man.
What happened next was a stunning example of how a whole lifetime—even life itself—can be shattered into minute fragments when someone reacts with rage as violent as a volcanic eruption or a tsunami, unexpected, unheralded, and totally devastating.
When Larry Sturholm arrived at the Sea-Tac airport that Monday night, he didn’t go to the departure gate to await his flight. He carried out one of the few major deceptions of his life. His reason may have been as simple as not wishing to worry his wife. Most wives wouldn’t be thrilled to learn that their husbands were flying off to a romantic spot with a woman as glamorous as Debra Sweiger was. And it’s quite possible that Sturholm had envisioned the trip that lay ahead as more than just a business trip for him and Debra.
At any rate, Larry had not told Judith about his friendship with Debra Sweiger nor that she was going along on the trip to the Cayman Islands. After he said good-bye to his wife, Sturholm rented a car and drove away from the airport, headed for the Issaquah area. He planned to pick Debra up when she got home and take her back to the airport with him.
He didn’t know that the house wasn’t empty. Debra had given him a key to her house so he could come in and wait for her, but he didn’t need it: he found the door unlocked. As he stepped in, he was confronted by Bill Pawlyk. But it wasn’t the same Pawlyk that his family and friends had known for decades; instead, he was a man on a deadly mission.
On Sunday, the day before, Pawlyk had purchased two razor-sharp hunting knives. He’d taped them to his socks where they would be hidden by his trousers. He knew exactly what he was going to do as he made the long drive west from the Tri-Cities area.
He didn’t know that Debra was almost home free or that Larry Sturholm was planning to wait for her in her house. Had Pawlyk delayed only one more day or even a few more hours, they would have been on a plane headed toward an island paradise and their lives would have played out in entirely different ways.
According to Pawlyk, Sturholm was as surprised to see him standing there in the foyer of Debra’s house as he was to see Sturholm.
There is no way to validate what happened next because only one eyewitness remains, and he had reason to fabricate. Bill Pawlyk said later that the two of them had a friendly enough conversation at first. But Sturholm had soon realized to his horror why Pawlyk was there. He tried to reason with a man possessed who had no intention of letting Debra go.
It was like reasoning with a mad dog. The thin veneer of civility and polite conversation fell away, and it all went sour. Larry Sturholm was a great talker, a man whose decades of interviewing people had taught him to understand the frailties and bitter disappointments of other men, but he was not a fighter. He had no reason to be armed, and he must have been totally shocked when Bill Pawlyk reached to his ankles and produced the knives he’d bought to kill Debra.
In a blind rage, Pawlyk struck out at Sturholm. Victims who have survived stabbings say that they never felt the cuts; instead, they recall only the sensation of someone hitting them with what felt like a closed fist. Hopefully, that is true. Trapped and unprepared, Larry Sturholm died rapidly from more than a hundred fatal thrusts and the exsanguination that followed.
Pawlyk left Sturholm’s body where it could not easily be seen by someone entering through the front door. Then he took time to shower and shave while he waited for Debra.
When she arrived home, she found to her surprise that Bill Pawlyk was there to meet her. He was committed now and perhaps angrier than he had been before. He had proof that Sturholm had a key to Debra’s house. In his mind, that was also proof of her infidelity.
According to Pawlyk, Debra also tried to reason with him. Since he had cleaned himself up, his clothing wasn’t blood-stained. She probably didn’t know that Larry Sturholm had been attacked and was dead and that her ex-lover had waited for hours in her quiet house for her return.
Again, no one can know for sure what happened next. Pawlyk said he allowed Debra to make a phone call to her partner, knowing that no one could possibly arrive in time to stop him from what he planned to do. Joyce quickly picked up on Debra’s coded words, realized that she was in trouble, and sent her husband, Mark, racing to Debra’s nearby house.
Already wounded but still conscious, Debra asked Pawlyk if she could write a good-bye note to her daughter. He permitted her to do that. It was a short note, stained with her blood: “Jenny, I love you. Mom.”
And then
Bill Pawlyk carried out his original plan. No matter how many years have passed since that terrible night, writing about it is very difficult. It always will be. Pawlyk cut Debra Sweiger’s throat in a final cruel act of revenge and jealousy after he had already stabbed her dozens of times. Believing that she was dead or fatally wounded, he left her in a welter of her blood. He planned that they would die together soon enough. He recalled later that he went upstairs to the bathroom. His lack of sleep and the overdose of sedatives he’d taken had made him “tired.” He described how he tried to cut his throat on the right side as he gazed into the mirror over the sink, but he couldn’t bring himself to use as much pressure as he had on his victims. Instead, he sliced his wrists until blood welled up.
As his life fluid seeped out, Pawlyk ran a bath and stepped into the tub. There he finally passed out.
When Mark Breakey arrived, probably thinking he had come to calm down only an argument, he found Debra in a room drenched and sprayed with her blood. It was a scene that would never leave him for the rest of his days. She was still alive, fighting desperately to survive. She held her throat, putting pressure on the severed arteries just as she had done to save other lives when she worked in the emergency room. She managed to gasp, “That son of a bitch, Pawlyk, did this to me…”
Mark picked her up, carried her to his car, and headed toward Overlake Hospital. But he knew in his heart they wouldn’t get there in time, and he couldn’t drive and help Debra at the same time. He pulled into the driveway of a home along the way and pounded frantically on their door. The family who lived there opened their front door, and Breakey begged them to call paramedics. They did so immediately.
But it was too late. Debra died in his arms.
When the King County detectives saw that the “dead man” in the tub was still alive, they called an ambulance to rush him to the closest hospital. The first ER physicians who examined him determined that he wasn’t in critical condition. (Pawlyk later complained bitterly that they made him stay in the hospital corridor on a gurney while they took care of patients who needed more urgent care.)