After the services, Morgan Stanley hosted a reception in honor of Carolyn. Her neighbors and friends held a final get-together in the Renton Highlands where she had once loved her home and doted on her children. They planted a flowering pink cherry tree in the park where the neighborhood kids played, they had a potluck dinner with dishes made from Carolyn’s recipes, and, as the sun set, held a candlelit ceremony. They released white balloons, tying chocolates to the ribbons, Carolyn’s favorite.
Her children’s cat went to live with them at their grandparents house. Daisy, her parakeet, was adopted by the Jannusches. (Daisy lived until 2004.) Her friends cleaned her house and packed up her things. In a way it was over, but it was a long way from being truly over.
Robert Durall went through a succession of attorneys, most of them the very top criminal defense lawyers in Seattle. One of them declared him “the most difficult client I’ve ever had.”
Durall wanted to run his own defense and to ignore any agreements previously made between his lawyers and the prosecutors. He intended to take the stand at his trial. He would not plead guilty to having anything whatsoever to do with Carolyn’s murder. The public did not know yet that he was the person who led police to her body.
In jail he grew a beard, perhaps to make up for his jail-forbidden hairpiece. He had quite a few visitors, and his mother was often there to comfort and support him. She refused to believe that the son she cherished could have committed a crime like murder. At her urging, some of the men who had been neighbors or coworkers visited him out of friendship and the possibility that he had not been himself when he killed Carolyn. Some, however, frankly admitted that they went to the jail hoping he would say something that would help convict him.
He mentioned to one former associate that he had checked on his pension fund shortly after Carolyn vanished; he didn’t want it to be claimed by anyone else if he was incarcerated. He expected to be acquitted or to receive a short sentence for something he “did not do,” and he wanted to keep his investments and his pension fund protected.
When the news media publicized Bob Durall’s arrest, a few women came forward to talk to detectives about their correspondence with him on Match.com. One said that she had begun writing to him in December 1997, some eight months before Carolyn’s murder. They had met for lunch at a small restaurant a few blocks from the University of Washington. Theirs was not a romantic liaison, but Bob had been somewhat open with her about his feelings. He wasn’t completely honest with her but did discuss the possibility of his “upcoming” divorce. He sounded very bitter about his wife and clearly had no love for her, but she noted tears in his eyes when he said he couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing his children every day. As for his wife? “She would be better off dead,” he had said bluntly.
On August 18, Bob’s lunch date said, he wrote to her about his situation. “I don’t know how to say this,” he wrote, “but Carolyn has vanished. I assume she’s run off somewhere but no trace [so far]. I am worried and confused. Our family could use some prayers.”
There were probably a number of women who did not come forward, women who held their collective breaths that they wouldn’t be linked with Bob Durall in any way and that their correspondence and meetings with him would remain secret.
Durall and whichever attorney was representing him at any given time delayed his trial with a number of pretrial motions. Washington statutes grant defendants the right to a speedy trial, assuring them that their cases will be heard in court within sixty days. The accused, however, have the right to ask for more time. Durall exercised that right at least five times. And he would have five different attorneys who had to start from scratch in reviewing his case.
The defense team attempted to have the evidence seized at the Durall home excluded from his trial, claiming that the investigators had done a sloppy job of drawing up their search warrant.
Denied.
Bob Durall had other objections. He didn’t want a corrections officer from the Regional Justice Center jail to testify about something he overheard Durall saying to himself: “Forgive me for what I have done.”
He held that he had a right to pray without being overheard.
With his bail set high, Bob Durall remained incarcerated awaiting trial because of his own demands. It seemed further and further in the future. He made a close friend behind bars, a man in his cell block who seemed to have little in common with him, indeed nothing beyond their being close in age and in proximity. Clarence Burns* was a 39-year-old transient serving jail time for a third-degree assault and for taking a car without permission. He had no family that cared about him and he’d never had the kind of home that Bob Durall once owned or children he could dote on.
Burns and Durall passed the time by playing pinochle. The two men often appeared to be in intense conversation, with Durall doing most of the talking and Burns nodding in response.
The tragic summer was over, and the rains came to Seattle along with the holiday season. Thanksgiving and Christmas in jail are very pale imitations of happy family gatherings. Carolyn had always loved the baking and decorating of Christmas, and one wonders if her husband ever thought about what he had taken away from his children and, even, from himself.
Instead of reminiscing, he planned what he would do next. He had, according to Clarence Burns, come up with a diabolical scenario that would not only bring about the ultimate revenge for Carolyn’s alleged affair but also lead to his own freedom. Bob Durall knew the name of the man Carolyn was attracted to and seethed to think that he was locked up while Dirk Lansing* walked around free. As far as Durall was concerned, Lansing was the one responsible for breaking up his family; his own infidelity and lies were entirely different matters.
Clarence Burns was due to be released in the spring of 1999. Durall had plans for him. Before he broached the subject, he groomed Burns to believe that they were good friends. Burns had no money to buy food, personal-care products, or anything else from the jail commissary, so Durall generously shared his purchases with him. He also arranged for money to be put into Burns’s jail account. Durall said they would go on being friends on the outside once they were both free. If Burns did what he asked, Durall would not only pay him thousands of dollars, he guaranteed that the onetime street person would become much more than a friend; he would be a member of the family. “My kids will call you Uncle Clarence,” Durall said. “You’ll be visiting in our house often.”
Burns had some dangerous assignments to fulfill before he would qualify as a beloved uncle. Once he was let out of jail, he was to track down Dirk Lansing and somehow overcome him, tie him up, and do whatever was necessary to hold him prisoner. Durall wanted Lansing dead and Burns was to eventually kill him, but first he had to force Carolyn’s alleged ex-lover to write a letter admitting that he was the one who murdered her.
After the letter was written in Dirk Lansing’s handwriting, Clarence Burns was supposed to kill him. His body and car had to be hidden where no one would ever find them. When that was accomplished, Burns was to make copies of the letter in which the now dead man admitted killing Carolyn and mail them to television stations, newspapers, the King County prosecutors, and to Bob Durall himself.
Since Lansing would never be found, Durall was sure the police would conclude that he had fled, perhaps to another country, to hide. They would believe that Dirk Lansing had felt guilty enough to admit to killing Carolyn, and to send his confession letters all over Seattle. That would lead to Bob’s being let out of jail.
Instead of being a reviled murder suspect, Bob would be seen as a wronged man, a widower left with his motherless children. He would get his children back, his job back, his house back, his whole life back—except, of course, for Carolyn.
The two men had many discussions on how not to leave fingerprints on the letters or the car—should it ever be found—and how Burns could track Lansing down. The method he used to murder his prisoner didn’t much matter to Bob Durall, just so long as it wo
rked.
Clarence Burns had a checkered past, but he had never killed anyone, and he became afraid of his jail buddy as he listened to the cold-blooded plan. It had seemed to be only a fantasy at first; soon he realized that Durall was completely serious. Burns agreed that he would do what Durall wanted, partly because he didn’t want to anger him and partly because he didn’t want to give up the treats from the commissary.
In February 1999, Burns was written up for breaking one of the jail rules and moved to another cell block. There, he was no longer afraid of reprisals from Durall. He asked his jailers to tell the Renton police he wanted to talk with them.
Clarence Burns said that his jailmate had told him that he had killed his wife because she was going to leave him.
Now Durall faced not only charges of premeditated first-degree murder, but on July 9, 1999, the deputy prosecutor, Patricia Eakes, filed to amend the complaint against him to add a charge of solicitation to commit first-degree murder. Already facing up to twenty-six years in prison if found guilty of killing Carolyn, he now faced many more years.
His fourth attorney, Michelle Shaw, had done her best to convince Durall to plead guilty, as his earlier attorneys had, telling him that the State’s case against him was extremely strong. But he was adamant that he wanted to go to trial. Shaw withdrew, and another attorney, Don Minor, agreed to represent him.
Two years had passed since Carolyn Durall’s murder when her husband finally went on trial in Judge Deborah Fleck’s courtroom in Superior Court in Kent in June 2000. The weather in King County was much the same as it was when Carolyn left her office for the last time, saying, “Wish me luck…”
Because the case had often been covered in the media during those two years, it wasn’t easy to pick a jury. Ten of Carolyn’s coworkers were in the courtroom for the opening statements, and at least one was present for the entire trial. It was usually her best friend, Denise Jannusch, who took careful notes so that she could share them with the staff at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. The company granted her a sad kind of leave; they wanted only to see Carolyn finally receive justice.
Judge Fleck ruled that both charges would be considered in this trial; she would not separate the murder charges from the conspiracy charges. However, the prosecutor’s office dropped the conspiracy charges halfway through the jury selection phase without comment. And they kept their promise not to tell the jurors that it was Bob Durall who led police and medical examiner’s deputies to Carolyn’s body deep in the lonely woods.
Now, finally, the trial, which took almost seven weeks to slowly unwind a complicated story of suspense and deception, had begun.
Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Baird made the opening statements for the State. They were succinct and horrifying.
“She wanted a divorce; he wanted her dead,” Baird told the jurors. “She searched for the best way to leave; he searched for the best way to murder her…. He crushed her skull, stuffed her in a garbage bag, and dumped her in the hills.”
While Carolyn was reading Too Good to Leave: Too Bad to Stay and trying to figure out if she had enough financial reSources to raise her children on her own, Bob was writing down those things important to him. The Renton police had found an ominous list in one of his filing cabinets, one that harkened back to the sites his fellow workers found on his computer. It read “bat, gloves, pillows.” Did he jot down those things after he read about “kill + spouse” and “suffocate…murder…poison (Sleep 2 pills (herbs), 3 Death?” He also wrote down chores he faced and forensic details: “disposal, tire tracks, footprints.”
Bob Durall was dressed for court in a well-cut gray suit and a crisp white shirt and tie. As he sat beside Don Minor, his attorney, he looked like one himself. He showed no emotion as Baird spoke.
The State had so many witnesses, each one verifying and validating what had been said by the others. There was a mountain of both circumstantial and physical evidence. How could any “prudent juror” not decide that the man at the defense table had indeed plotted, planned, researched, lied, and manipulated almost everyone around him before and after Carolyn Durall died at his hands in a brutal attack?
But jurors are never predictable.
Don Minor had said he wanted to delay his opening statement until the defense case began. Apparently, Bob Durall was now undecided about taking the stand in his own defense. Across the board, defense attorneys in major felony cases advise their clients not to testify. The moment they do, they open themselves up to cross-examination by the prosecutors. But Bob Durall himself was really all the defense had going for it.
So far, Durall’s witnesses hadn’t had much punch. There was the woman from the minimart who was sure she sold gas to Carolyn a few days after the night she disappeared, testifying that she recognized her when she saw the Missing fliers her friends distributed.
A physical therapist said that Bob Durall already had an arm injury before the night of his wife’s vanishing. Whether it was as serious as it proved to be when he consulted a physician a week later wasn’t clear. A torn biceps muscle can’t be fixed with physical therapy; it requires surgery to keep it from atrophying.
Would Durall testify? On Tuesday, July 25, he was still indecisive, and even Minor wasn’t sure what he intended to do. The end of the trial was approaching, but Minor had no choice but to request a delay. Judge Fleck agreed to stop the trial in midflight so that Minor could read the computer disk that contained email messages police had seized from Durall’s computers.
Even after Baird argued that the defense had had access to those disks for the past year, Judge Fleck went by edicts of discovery that said she had to grant the delay. She announced that court would reconvene the next Monday.
Jeff Baird was as frustrated as those in the gallery, a group that included relatives and supporters of each side. “This is a question about a defendant who has cold feet about testifying and, frankly, I think it’s time for him to fish or cut bait,” Baird said. “I don’t think he’s fooling anybody.”
Judge Fleck urged the defendant and his attorney to make up their minds whether Durall would testify on Monday. Don Minor answered only that he couldn’t promise. “On his way to the witness stand, he might change his mind,” he said, a hint of resignation in his voice.
It was Monday, July 31, and the courtroom was hushed, everyone waiting to see whether Bob Durall actually would take the stand.
He did. What followed was one of the most stunning demonstrations ever seen in a courtroom. It’s unlikely that even Don Minor knew what his client was about to reveal.
Bob Durall’s testimony veered completely away from the evidence that had thus far been presented. He said that even he couldn’t be positive about what had happened to Carolyn and then explained why. He discussed the night of August 6, 1998. “Nothing happened I consider way out of the ordinary,” he told the jury in a calm voice. There was no fight, no talk of divorce. They awakened early on Friday and he saw her only briefly before she left to go to work.
Yes, he admitted that he told her worried coworkers that he didn’t know where she was or why she hadn’t come to work. But he actually suspected that she was with another man. He had desperately searched for her van in motel and hotel parking lots but couldn’t find it anywhere. “In my mind, I knew she was somewhere with somebody.”
He had called the police later that day and attempted to file a missing persons’ report, but he was still thinking that she was cheating on him with another man.
He didn’t want to disappoint his children, and he wanted to be with them, so he had gone alone to the San Juan Islands to spend the weekend with his three youngsters and his mother- and father-in-law. When his 9-year-old son asked where his wife was, he said he had gently told him, “We can’t find Mommy right now.”
So far, Durall hadn’t deviated much from the story he originally told the Renton detectives. Then Bob Durall suddenly began an incredible tale with a whole new cast of characters.
He testified that had ret
urned from the San Juan Islands on Monday, August 10, in the early morning hours. (This would have been several hours after police had called to tell him that they had located Carolyn’s van two miles from his house.) That was when he had become involved in a terrifying situation. While he was standing in his bedroom, a man with a gun had appeared. The man had held a gun on him, Durall said, and tied him up in a bathroom, all the while threatening to shoot him.
Everyone in the gallery, not to mention those at the defense and prosecution tables, stared back at the man on the witness stand, bemused and bewildered.
Durall continued to tell the story of what “really happened.” Next, he said he was forced to drive several miles—he wasn’t sure how many—to a place where they met a second man, who was waiting in a parking lot somewhere in Issaquah. The second man was shorter and quite tan and had bushy hair. He was sitting in a large SUV. Both men forced the still-bound Durall into the SUV and drove for what he estimated was about two hours until they came to a forested area off I-90. (It would not take anywhere near two hours to drive from Issaquah to the region Durall was describing; it was only about twenty-four miles east.)
It was of course the place where Carolyn’s body was found. The mysterious strangers dumped a large bag there, which, he said, contained Carolyn’s body, but he didn’t ask.
Durall testified that he could not describe either man in detail, but knew they were both Caucasian. The one with the gun was taller and partially bald, while the other had a thick head of hair. “Bushy hair.”
One of his captors told Bob Durall, “There wouldn’t have been a problem. She should have kept her promise. She got caught on the phone.”
He didn’t ask about that either, apparently fearful that they might kill him too and leave him in the woods.
The men who had abducted Durall eventually returned him to his Nissan Pathfinder and warned him that he must not tell anyone about what he had seen. They ordered him to clean the bedroom of his home and remove all signs of blood in his house. If he told anyone, they threatened to harm his children, telling him that they would make him watch while they killed his children “one by one.”