But there was nobody who checked Bob Durall’s computer.
On Thursday, August 6, 1998, Carolyn’s friends at work could tell that she was distracted and a little depressed. She finally confided in several friends and told them what Denise already knew. She had made a decision: she was definitely going to ask Bob for a divorce that evening. She wasn’t sure how he would respond, but she would never expose their children to an emotional scene. At the very least, there was bound to be an argument. This was the best time to do it.
“I’m going to tell him tonight,” she told several coworkers who were her closest friends.
“Oh, Carolyn,” one of the women cried, alarmed. “No! You mustn’t be alone when you tell him. We’ll all go out to dinner with you. You can tell him, but at least we’ll be close by.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I can handle it.” She said that her neighbors weren’t that far away and, besides, Bob wasn’t physically violent. He was suspicious and jealous—even obsessive about some things—and he always had to have his own way, but she didn’t fear him. “He’d never hurt me,” she said firmly. “He may cry, but I know he wouldn’t hurt me.”
Besides, it wouldn’t be fair to him to have an audience when she broke the news to him. Divorce wasn’t a spectator sport.
As Carolyn left her office that night, she was wearing a periwinkle-blue silk pants suit.
“She walked past my desk,” one woman recalled, “smiling her beautiful smile. She said to me, ‘Wish me luck. Tonight’s the night.’ I told her I would keep her in my prayers, and then I said good-bye to her. It was the last time I ever saw her…”
When several of her friends asked her to reconsider facing Bob alone, Carolyn turned back to them, trying to reassure them. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Before she reached the parking lot and her 1990 maroon Ford Aerostar van, she turned around a second time and went back to calm her coworkers’ fears. They will never forget what she said.
“If I’m not here tomorrow morning,” Carolyn said quietly, “just remember that my whole life is in my desk.”
Her van was barely out of the parking lot when the phone rang. It was Denise, calling from Lake Chelan. She had been worried about Carolyn all week. “When I talked to her on Monday,” Denise said, “I said, ‘Keep your chin up and you can do it. You’ll be fine, and it’s going to work out okay.’ It was a good conversation. She told me twice, ‘Have a good vacation.’
“It was seven minutes after three when I called the office on Thursday afternoon, and Kim Arriza answered. She said Carolyn had just left, that she was very nervous and worried.”
Kim told Denise that Carolyn intended to go ahead with her plan that night and was going to talk to Bob Durall as soon as she got home. Again, Denise felt that she should be there, close enough for Carolyn to come to the Jannusches’ after she told Bob.
“We had given her our security code, though,” Denise said, “so she could go to our house if she needed to.
“But Thursday night I had a bad dream about Carolyn, and I woke up needing to talk to her. It was a nightmare full of blood and she was in danger.”
Carolyn was never late to work, never. She was due at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter at 8:30 Friday morning, August 7. After a mostly sleepless night, Denise called at 8:37 to talk to Carolyn, but she wasn’t in the office yet. “I thought, ‘No big deal,’ ” Denise remembered. “Maybe it was a tough night, and I thought I would call back later—but I did leave a voice mail asking Carolyn to call me just as soon as she got to work.”
Denise’s cell phone rang at nine. With a sigh of relief, she answered, but it wasn’t Carolyn; it was the office calling to ask if she had heard from Carolyn. For the first time in anyone’s memory, Carolyn was half an hour late. With anyone else, it might have been different. But not Carolyn.
Denise asked one of the male brokers to check across the street from their office where Carolyn’s parents kept a small condo to stay in when they were in the Seattle area. “See if her van is there, would you?”
He came back on the line. “No van.”
Kim Arriza, who had said good-bye to Carolyn the previous afternoon, lived just up the street from the Duralls. She worked a later shift, so the increasingly worried staff at Morgan Stanley called her and asked her if she’d drive down to Hoquiam Court to see if she could spot the van.
When Kim turned into the Duralls’ driveway, she saw that Bob’s 1997 green Nissan Pathfinder was there, backed up to the garage. There was no sign of Carolyn’s van. Bob came around the house, and Kim noted that he was sweating profusely. He seemed surprised to see her. When she asked him where Carolyn was, he answered, “She left for work.”
But Carolyn hadn’t come to work at all that morning. Her friends and her supervisors were now worried in earnest. When they called her home, the phone rang and rang until voice mail with a standard message picked up.
They called Carolyn’s next-door neighbor, Linda Gunderson, and asked her to check to see if Carolyn’s car was in the driveway.
“Her car’s gone,” Linda said, “and so is Bob’s. It looks as if there’s nobody home.”
Now Linda Gunderson felt a sense of urgency. She hadn’t seen any activity around the house next door that morning, and as far as she knew, they weren’t planning to leave a day early to go to Carolyn’s parents’ island cabin. After she knocked on the door and received no response, she glanced up at the master bedroom’s window. It was shut. She felt a pang of fear. Bob and Carolyn always left that window open, even when they were away. It kept the house from getting stuffy, and it was too high for a burglar to reach unless he scaled the roof.
The whole house was locked up tight. It seemed to be zipped up completely and lifeless.
Carolyn’s coworkers and Linda Gunderson gave up any pretense that everything was all right. They called the Renton Police Department and asked if a patrolman could go to Hoquiam Court and check on the Durall house.
An officer was dispatched to the pale green house shortly after ten to do a “check on the welfare of Carolyn Durall.” No one answered his pounding on the door, either, but that didn’t seem unusual to him on a Friday in summer. He noted there were no cars in the driveway and figured that the family who lived there had probably just decided to leave early for the weekened.
Their worries hardly eased, Carolyn’s coworkers attempted to report her as a missing person, but the Renton officer explained that such a report had to come from someone in her family. Undeterred, they then called Carolyn’s parents on the island. They hadn’t heard from Carolyn, either. The island was accessible only by ferry, and on a summer weekend, there were long lines at either end. They all hoped that Carolyn was waiting in one of those lines.
Carolyn’s parents were very concerned, too. It wasn’t like her to be out of touch with them when her children were staying with them.
Some people go missing for a week or so and nobody thinks much about it. But Carolyn’s friends at Morgan Stanley knew what her plans for the night before had been and that she had fully intended to be at work this morning. As Friday crawled by, they grew increasingly worried.
Bob Durall didn’t go to work at the Seattle Housing Authority on Friday morning, but he wasn’t expected; he was scheduled to attend a class in Fife, a small town near Tacoma. His coworkers, alerted by Carolyn’s office, tried to call him there. They learned that he had called in to say he would be an hour late.
Denise Jannusch, still at Lake Chelan, learned that as she called everyone she could think of. Bob wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t at his office or the computer class. He finally answered the phone at his house in the early afternoon.
“Bob,” she asked, “where’s Carolyn? What is going on?”
He answered a little vaguely, saying she had gone to work.
“She never showed up at work.”
Then Denise asked Bob if he and Carolyn had had a fight the night before
.
“Yeah,” he said curtly. “What do you know about that? I hear she told people she was going to have a serious conversation with me. What do you know about that?”
Denise backed off. “I don’t really know. Have you checked her horse’s stall? Maybe she just totally lost it, and she went—like maybe she’s sitting in the corner of Drizzle’s stall.”
Bob Durall didn’t appear to be worried about Carolyn, even when he heard she hadn’t gone to work. Denise could hear no emotion in his voice, but that was like him. She asked him to run upstairs and check to see if Carolyn’s makeup, her shampoo, the solution for her contact lenses, and the special gel she always used on her hair were there. He put down the phone for a few minutes then came back on the line. “Yeah, it’s all there.”
“Okay,” she said firmly, “I want you to go and check the stall and see if she’s there. Call me back at three.”
He did call her back then, but he hadn’t found Carolyn, and he had heard no news at all about her. No one had seen her. Still, he sounded calm, as if there was nothing to worry about.
By now, Bob’s work associates had heard that his wife was missing, and they had also learned that he had called the class he was supposed to attend and said he wouldn’t be able to be there at all. No one knew where he had been all day Friday.
Denise called Bob back at six. He said he still hadn’t heard from Carolyn.
“Bob,” she said, “you should call the police and find out what you should do. Just call the Renton Police Department and tell them your wife is missing and give them the information they ask for. Just report it, and ask them how long it takes before you can officially file a missing report.”
“Okay,” he said in a calm voice. “I’ll do that.”
Even if a husband or other close relative calls the police, the fact is that most departments don’t take missing reports on adults—other than those with handicaps or mental disorders—until the person has been missing twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The vast majority of adults return to their homes safely within that time period, having left for reasons of their own. When there is evidence of foul play, of course, the rules change.
But there were no overt signs that something bad had happened to Carolyn Durall. Her husband certainly didn’t seem concerned when he called the Renton Police Department to report her missing.
He had seen her early Friday morning, he said, as they were both preparing to leave for work, but she hadn’t come home Friday evening.
“When did you see her last?” Detective Gary Kittleson asked.
Bob Durall spoke slowly, as if he was trying to remember helpful details. He said that he had awakened at about 5:45 Friday morning and that he had driven Carolyn’s van down to the shores of Lake Washington, where he went jogging in Gene Coulon Park. After he returned home, he was taking a shower when he heard her call out that she was going downstairs.
“…So she was headed down the stairs from our bedroom, and I assumed she was leaving for work,” he said. “I didn’t know until late afternoon that she didn’t show up at Morgan Stanley.”
The detective noted that Durall seemed very calm, very different from the panicky feelings of his wife’s friends.
Bob Durall said there might be a number of reasonable explanations for his wife’s sudden disappearance, although he wasn’t specific on this Friday night. “I have no idea why she would leave or where she might have gone.”
The Renton police did send out a statewide computer request asking for “an attempt to locate” both Carolyn and her wine-colored van.
When her family compared notes, they realized that the last one to speak directly to Carolyn was probably her brother’s wife, who called her about 8:30 Thursday night. Bob had answered on the fourth ring, sounding “very subdued.”
“He didn’t sound like himself,” she recalled. “He sounded disturbed, and I asked him, ‘What’s wrong? You sound sad.’ He said he was fine but ‘really tired.’ ”
When she asked to speak to Carolyn, Bob said he thought she was probably asleep. She asked him to check. After a long wait, Carolyn came on the line, but she sounded odd, almost as if she “was talking in extreme slow motion.”
“I said, ‘What’s up?’ ”
Maybe she was only sleepy, but her words were very deliberate, and she said that Bob had just mixed her a margarita. Although Carolyn rarely drank, a margarita was her preferred cocktail. However, as far as her sister-in-law knew, Bob had never mixed a drink for Carolyn. He disapproved of her drinking any alcohol and usually forbade her to drink except to grudgingly allow her to have an occasional drink at a family gathering. He himself drank only beer and that just a few times a year. It was hard to believe that Bob had actually mixed a drink for Carolyn.
Worried because Carolyn was speaking so slowly, her sister-in-law asked her if she was okay. “She just said again that Bob had made her a margarita. She sounded happy enough but very unlike her usual self.”
Asked if she had told Bob about her decision to separate from him, Carolyn said that she couldn’t talk but promised to call her back the next morning.
Gary and Denise Jannusch packed up their children and their possessions and left Lake Chelan early Saturday morning, even though they weren’t due back until Monday. As soon as they got to Renton, they drove to the Durall house, hoping that Carolyn would answer the door. But she didn’t. They walked around the house and peered into the garage but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Both of the family cars were gone. They learned that Bob had left to catch a ferry to his in-laws’ island home to spend the weekend with his children.
That seemed odd: how could he leave when his wife was missing? It seemed that the people who should be the most concerned about Carolyn weren’t even looking for her. Bob certainly wasn’t, and the police had said they could do nothing until Monday. From the very beginning it was Carolyn’s coworkers and neighbors who looked for her.
The Jannusches drove to the property Bob and Carolyn had bought off I-90, planning to eventually build a house. They walked the property, not really sure what they might find. “We didn’t really see anything,” Denise recalled, “except for a wide trail where we could see a car had gone up in it and kind of turned around. We saw a tree where bark had been torn off, and it was fresh, white underneath the bark. And we saw what looked like fresh tire tracks on the property. We tried not to disturb anything, but we took note of it.”
As far as they recalled, the tread on Denise’s van tires were in a straight line and the tires that left marks in the mud were “windey.” But how many people really look at their own tire patterns, much less someone else’s?
For the whole weekend, Carolyn’s friends and coworkers searched for some sign of her or her van. They found nothing.
Spending the weekend with his in-laws, Bob Durall received a call late Sunday night from the Washington State Patrol. The King County Police had located Carolyn’s Ford van parked alongside the road between Renton and Issaquah (a small town further east, toward the mountain foothills). The van was only about two miles from the Duralls’ house. To his host’s consternation, Bob said he would wait until Monday to return to Seattle to check on it. By that time, he couldn’t find it, he told her friends, suggesting that Carolyn had driven it someplace else.
As soon as they got word on Monday morning that her vehicle had been sighted, four of Carolyn’s coworkers went out to look for it, driving slowly along the route where Bob said it was parked. If the van was ever there, it was gone. They called the State Patrol offices, giving them a description of Carolyn’s van and the license number.
The patrol’s radio operator confirmed that it had been seen again. “A citizen reported seeing it this morning at 4:55 AM on the freeway, headed toward Burien. The car was being driven erratically, weaving in and out of traffic lanes.”
Burien is more than twenty miles southeast of where Carolyn’s van had been parked on Sunday night in the Licorice Fern area. Burien is close to Sea-Tac
airport. Her friends were relieved at the thought that she had been seen only about five hours earlier. But that hope was dashed when the driver was described as “dark-haired, slight build.” Carolyn was a blonde. It might have been her van, but it didn’t sound as though she had been driving it early that Monday morning.
It was Monday, August 10, and Carolyn hadn’t been seen since the previous Thursday at three PM. She hadn’t talked to anyone since six hours after that. Back in the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter offices, her coworkers did what she had asked of them. They weren’t intruding on her privacy; they were carrying out her wishes. She had told them what they should do if she disappeared, “If I don’t come back…my whole life is in my desk.”
Still, they felt uneasy about looking through the drawers of her desk. Taking a deep breath, they went ahead, hoping there might be an address or a phone number—something—that would help them find her. They discovered that Carolyn’s whole life was indeed in her desk, including her private financial records and her poignant writings about her failed marriage. They found a copy of a letter she had either sent to Bob or planned to send or give to him, perhaps on Thursday night.
“Our marriage was a mistake from the beginning,” Carolyn had written. “I love you too little, and you love me too much.”
Carolyn said that for years she had been “unhappy, guilt-ridden and humiliated. I am dying inside. There is so little left of who I used to be. My spirit is crushed. I feel that you are too controlling and obsessive and jealous.”
There were numerous notes and a journal that told the same story, written by a woman who was being emotionally suffocated.