In 2001, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals turned down William Pawlyk’s appeal. But he was determined to be free. He applied to the state Clemency and Pardons Board in 2004 after serving fifteen years in prison—only fifteen years of a life sentence. Governor Gary Locke was leaving office, and about eighty prisoners sought clemency and pardons. Pawlyk had built himself a superior prison résumé of good deeds and public service. His plea was set to be heard in late October 2004 in Olympia, the state capital.
Lee Yates, now assigned to the Appellate Department of the King County Prosecutor’s Office, revisited the case he prosecuted some fifteen years earlier when he argued against clemency.
Pawlyk, who testified by phone, submitted a stack of letters from friends, prison officials, and even a few jurors who all felt he would never re-offend.
At long last, Pawlyk finally apologized for what he had done. In his letter to the board, he wrote, “Having reflected much upon the horrible magnitude of what my actions wrought, I deeply regret the anguish and grief inflicted on the family and friends of Debbie and Larry. They didn’t deserve to die.”
Norm Maleng, the King County Prosecutor, said he had already considered William Pawlyk’s crime-free life before the murders when he chose in 1991 not to ask for the death penalty. “The crime Mr. Pawlyk committed was among the most horrific in King County during my tenure. The life sentence he received was—and still is—commensurate with his brutal, premeditated, and prolonged act of violence against two unarmed people.”
Debra Sweiger’s brother was shocked that his sister’s killer would even be considered for clemency. “I just think this process is so sick,” he said. “I thought it was a joke. I said, ‘It’s impossible. He got life without parole.’ ”
Her brother remembered seeing Debra as she lay in her coffin with scarves carefully draped around her neck and her hair styled so that it clung to her cheeks. “It was to hide the knife marks on her beautiful face because she was literally sliced to pieces….”
Phil Sturholm recalled that the Medical Examiner’s Office had strongly advised him not to view his brother’s body. He did not feel that seven and a half years per victim even approached justice. “Neither mercy nor clemency was uttered by Mr. Pawlyk [when he was stabbing his victims three hundred times].” Sturholm continued, “His crime was savage and cruel.”
And indeed it was. Governor Locke, who was quite aware of the horror in Issaquah fifteen years earlier, chose not to override the recommendation of the clemency board. Pawlyk would remain in prison. He has said that he feels an obligation to do good. And, in prison, he has done that. He will almost certainly continue to teach and perform acts of kindness inside prison walls and fulfill his obligation there. But not even a forensic psychiatrist can predict how he would react if he were free and might once again be consumed with jealousy and a terrible blow to his pride.
The mass of men and women experience broken relationships, jealousy, wounded pride, and despair over lost love. It is never easy for any of us.
Only a tiny percentage of humans react with unbelievable violence.
In Larry Sturholm’s own words, William Pawlyk did it “all for nothing.”
Over the years, the stress of living through the murders of Debra Sweiger and Larry Sturholm took a toll on those who had cared deeply for them: Mark Breakey, who tried so hard to get Debra the emergency treatment she so desperately needed, died at a young age, still haunted by the images of that July night. King County Detective Joe Purcell, who headed the investigation team and was of immense help to the prosecution, retired early. He was never able to forget the shock of seeing a “dead man” rise up from a tub of bloody water like something in a horror movie. Judy Sturholm, Larry’s wife, died at the age of 57 in 2001. Phil Sturholm, Larry’s brother, stayed active in his television career, still believing that the news should be truthful, no matter whom it impacts. A faithful member of his church, he has tried to find forgiveness toward his brother’s killer. It has not been easy.
Phil reportedly did finally have a conversation with Pawlyk about Larry’s last moments, although what was said is an intensely private matter and will remain private.
I wish that I could find the answer to why Bill Pawlyk reacted to romantic rejection with such stunning violence, but I never have been able to. Men have been destroying women who try to leave them for centuries, and every day I hear from a few women who live in fear of reprisal from men who will not let them go free. Of course, some men do let go.
And some do not.
In prison, Bill Pawlyk helps many people. He plans to appeal his sentence in a few years. Freed from the restraints he lives under, would he ever again fall so passionately and possessively in love that he might once more be dangerous if he were thwarted?
I honestly don’t know.
A Desperate Housewife
There is a bleak kind of irony in this case. The water-shed point in this remarkably unhappy marriage came about several years ago, and I began to write it long before the blockbuster ABC Sunday night show Desperate Housewives took America by storm. To almost everyone’s surprise, the new show captivated a major share of viewers almost from its debut. The lives of five gorgeous, totally fictional housewives living on Wisteria Lane in their perfect houses with their not-so-perfect husbands are full of romance, affairs, suicides, murders, drug addiction, nosy neighbors, money problems, and keeping up appearances. The plotlines are clearly designed to end each week’s episode with a mysterious cliff-hanger and everyone has a secret—or two—or even three. Despite the constant threat of sudden violent death in the television series, the show is humorous. It’s written in strokes that are much too broad to be taken seriously.
In the true-crime genre I write, there are too many stories of real desperate housewives who find themselves trapped in relationships they never bargained for. They sought love and lifetime commitment only to find that they had married someone who, through the looking glass, was a man they did not know. There is nothing funny about the story of a real-life desperate housewife that follows. It is certainly rife with secrets and mystery, but the denouement is grim, and too many real hearts broke before it was over.
I will admit that I could not talk to the victims’ friends or read the documents that accompanied this case without crying.
Every neighborhood seems to have one couple that appears to be enjoying an ideal life. It’s easy to like them and at the same time to envy them. Their homes are too neat, their yards and gardens wonderfully manicured and alive with blooms. Their children always seem to be well behaved. While the rest of the block’s residents have weeds in their yards, peeling paint, dogs that bark in the middle of the night, cars that need to be washed, and kids who break windows, miss the school bus, and rarely, if ever, get straight A’s, the perfect couple avoids those problems. If they have arguments, they usually manage to do it behind closed doors. A marriage with no bumps at all is impossible; and who wants to be part of such a union, anyway? Still, it’s a challenge to try to emulate people who seem to do it with so little effort.
To the casual observer, the couple in this case, Robert and Carolyn Durall, had a good marriage. Both held prestigious jobs with high incomes. After work, like most young couples, they shuttled their three children to and from soccer, baseball, church activities, Cub Scouts, and all the organized classes and clubs that are so important to youngsters growing up in an era when achievement and being the best have become more important than just playing. Kids don’t play hide-and-go-seek or kick-the-can anymore. They don’t climb trees or go fishing or read adventure books.
Robert and Carolyn Durall’s children were no different: their parents wanted them to have a running start at success in life.
Even though the Duralls looked happy, at least to those neighbors who didn’t know them very well, there was danger simmering there, little fires occasionally breaking out that might destroy their family if they took hold. Perhaps it was easier to hide their unhappiness beca
use they had a nineties kind of life.
To a closer observer, there was an undercurrent that whispered trouble ahead. But even those who knew them well could not possibly have foreseen the terrible way the Duralls’ marriage would implode.
Carolyn Durall was born on December 1, 1961. She was a truly nice little girl who grew up to be a woman who brightened any room she walked into. When she was eight, she made a birthday cake for the woman who lived next door. Nobody suggested it to her; she just wanted to be sure that her friend had a special birthday. She loved to bake even then, and her enthusiasm for cooking grew as she did.
Carolyn loved life, her family, her pets, and nature. She wrote poems when she was in grade school. Many of them were based on the changing seasons:
Autumn Leaves
When Autumn leaves whirl
In a neat little swirl
They fall from a pretty tree,
To meet the ground with glee
And birds fly south
To feed their mouths
And when the wind is blowing
It makes the snow snowing.
Carolyn always loved to cook, but ironically she married a man who ate only health food, organic vegetables, and no red meat at all. She went to extra effort to find sugar-free recipes and other ingredients acceptable to him. Since she couldn’t very often bake treats for her husband, she baked things for her children, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Every birthday of anyone remotely close to her was an occasion for a cake, and she often brought warm scones with raspberry jam to her office at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and left them on her friends’ desks. Her weakness was chocolate, anything chocolate.
As a child, Carolyn was captivated by horses, and she learned to ride at a young age; not just to ride but to show in competition, which included jumping and performing intricate movements around barricades. For most of her life, she had her own horse. When she was 36, her horse was named Drizzle, and she kept him in stables near her house and rode him whenever she could. She also loved ice-skating.
Whenever anyone describes Carolyn, they begin, “She was always smiling—always.” And when you look through albums or watch videos, it’s obviously true. Just as some people’s facial muscles tend to fall into a frown even when they’re not grumpy, Carolyn’s face naturally lent itself to smiling.
She was a lovely blonde, and slender—when she wasn’t pregnant, as she often was after her marriage. She was five feet seven inches tall and usually weighed about 120 pounds. She dressed well, although she tended to spend more money on other people than on herself.
Carolyn grew up in a great family as one of two children, herself and a brother. She was especially close to her mother, Leni, and talked to her every day.
Carolyn met Bob Durall in the mid-eighties when they worked in a real-estate firm in Bellevue, Washington. She was very good at her job but had always looked forward to being married and having a family of her own. Bob seemed to have all the qualities she hoped for in a mate.
Bob Durall was intelligent, a high achiever, a National Merit Scholar in high school; and he had two college degrees: a Bachelor of Arts in accounting from the University of Puget Sound and a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the University of Washington. He was attractive, if slightly built, at five feet ten and only 148 pounds. Bob wasn’t as outgoing as Carolyn was, and he had fewer close friends than she did, but that wasn’t a problem for her, not at first; their personalities complemented each other. He came from a family background as solid as hers; his parents were ten to fifteen years older than Carolyn’s, and he had a sister eight years older than he was, a warm and loving woman. His dad, Arnie, was fun and kind, and his mother, Bernice, very genteel and welcoming. She was a perfect lady, a little prim, but always friendly. Arnie was a salt-of-the-earth kind of man who didn’t put on airs. They liked Carolyn right away.
The Duralls had lived in the south end of Seattle for almost fifty years and raised their children in the Mount Baker Presbyterian Church. Bob’s parents were in their forties when he came along on October 24, 1957, and they doted on him. He was a late baby much longed for. Everyone who knew them was happy for them.
As he grew up, he did them proud. They didn’t really spoil Bob, but they certainly made him feel that he was a unique, extraordinary boy. Most of his parents’ friends recalled him as being gentle and dependable, a nice kid.
When Carolyn met Bob, he was 25 and she was 21. He was confident and successful at his job, definitely a young man on his way up. Carolyn quickly fell in love with him, and she really liked his family. She was thrilled when Bob proposed. Together with their families, they planned their wedding. There was no question but that it would be in a church; they were both devout Christians. In 1986, they had a lovely formal ceremony in the Mount Baker church in Seattle, with a color scheme of white and beige. And then left for their honeymoon in Hawaii.
Carolyn gave Bob a Bible and wrote in its dedication that he was “one of the nicest men I’ve ever met.”
Bob’s mother took him aside during his wedding reception to give him advice that she didn’t really think he needed. Nevertheless, she reminded him that his father “always treated me like a queen.” She told him she hoped that he would cherish Carolyn in the same way and make her happiness his most important concern. Bob assured his mother that he would.
Bob’s mother was delighted that he had chosen Carolyn; she was exactly the kind of young woman any woman would want for a daughter-in-law. Carolyn was nice to Bernice and Arnie, and it was obvious how much in love she was with Bob. Her parents approved of Bob, too. Bob and Carolyn were young, but they were responsible.
To Carolyn’s shock, their honeymoon wasn’t particularly happy. They argued a lot, and she realized that he was a man who was used to having things just the way he wanted. Even that far back, she had the feeling that she should not have married him. She tried to put their differences down to the natural difficulties any two people would have adjusting to living full time with each other. She was sure she could learn to do things the way Bob liked and that he would compromise about what mattered to her. But as they settled into marriage, it became clear that Bob was going to be the head of the household, and Carolyn deferred to him when it came to making decisions.
It was important to them to have a family. And, although Carolyn continued to work for a while, she stopped when she gave birth to the first of their children in 1989. It was a boy. A few months later, she felt once more that she and Bob should not be married, only to find that she was pregnant again. She had a second son in 1991. Carolyn adored her babies, but her marriage wasn’t working. Bob insisted on counseling. He picked the therapist, and she agreed to go. Somehow, with all four of the counselors they eventually saw together, she always came away feeling that she was the partner in the wrong, and she felt guilty that she hadn’t measured up to Bob’s expectations. Or, apparently, to the counselors’ either.
They attended religious services together in the same church where Bob went most of his life. He taught Sunday school. In 1995, they joined the church and became even more active there. During the early years in their first house on Hoquiam Court in Renton, the Duralls outwardly seemed happy enough, although they had very different personalities. They participated in neighborhood get-togethers. Bob was a different kind of guy from most of the young husbands. One man described him as “a cocky guy, but I had the feeling: ‘Is anybody in there?’ when I talked to him. As if he wasn’t really listening.” Carolyn, on the other hand, was truly concerned about other people.
Bob was something of a job-hopper, although he usually moved up the financial ladder. But he was let go from a few jobs because he wasn’t a man who went along with other people’s programs. When he printed out his résumé, he simply didn’t mention the jobs from which he was fired. He was a computer expert in a newly burgeoning area of business, so he never had trouble finding another job. Over the years, he worked for some time at IPC Pension Service and the Bon Ma
rché department store.
In the early nineties, Bob accepted a job with Royal Seafoods. There he worked closely with a man named Gary Jannusch. Gary met Carolyn and knew at once she and his wife, Denise, would have a lot in common. He grabbed Denise at the company Christmas party and brought her over to meet Bob Durall’s wife. Gary was right; Carolyn and Denise were soon best friends.
Certainly, they had their husbands’ jobs in common, but it was far more than that. They got along, laughing at the same things. Since Carolyn wasn’t working at the time, she was happy to babysit for the Jannusches’ daughter, Tera, when Denise went back to work part time in a job-share arrangement at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Bellevue. Denise never worried about her little girl when she was with Carolyn.
The Jannusches found Bob a little strange, and his lifestyle was different from most people’s. He was a health food nut, a compulsive jogger, and into meditation, strange ethereal music, and other fairly far-out mystical stuff. They felt a little sorry for Carolyn when they saw how she had to scurry to be sure Bob had his special natural foods before she could relax on any of their mutual vacations. But they didn’t presume to judge anyone else’s marriage. If Carolyn loved Bob, even though he seemed to control every aspect of her life, that was certainly her choice.
The Jannusches and the Duralls lived in the Highlands area of Renton, a Seattle suburb, and their homes were quite close. The neighborhoods there were made up of new houses occupied by couples in their twenties and thirties. The four of them socialized, and their children liked each other.
In 1992, Denise’s job-share partner at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter left, and she asked Carolyn if she would like to work with her; that way each young mother would have an interesting job but would only have to work part time. Carolyn liked the idea, came in to be interviewed, and was hired. Now, they were not only best friends; they were also coworkers.