by Ann Rule
There was only one thing that really frightened Jane Costantino, and that was water and her fear of drowning. So she forced herself to become adept at water sports—scuba diving and kayaking down white-water rivers—to overcome her phobia. Even when she nearly drowned while fording a river in the Katmai region of Alaska, she continued to risk her life in deep and raging waters, stubbornly refusing to give in to her terror.
Jane Costantino taunted Nature. While she was mountain climbing in Yosemite, she slipped and literally fell off a cliff. Fellow climbers watched in horror as a cascade of rocks plummeted down on her, almost burying her—and yet she survived with only a broken ankle and a concussion.
In 1979, Jane climbed Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, and Mount St. Helens all in one nine-day period, and then bicycled to Mexico for good measure. She missed the disaster that befell Mount St. Helens months later, and sometimes spoke a little ruefully about the fact that she hadn’t been there for all the fireworks. Jane was the kind of adventuress who would have happily camped in the shadow of Mount St. Helens even as the peak threatened to blow. If she hadn’t been so busy on her winter job, she would have been there when the mountain finally blew its domed top on May 18, 1980, spewing tons of lava and mud down its slopes, taking a number of victims. And, if Jane Costantino had died that way, no one would have been surprised.
Because she was in great shape, it seemed to her that she would be in her twenties forever, but one day Jane woke up and realized that she was thirty-two, and in eight years she would be forty. It was a sobering thought. She was still young at thirty-two, but she knew that she wasn’t “young-young” any longer. Already, old injuries ached when the weather was changing, and she sometimes thought that her lung capacity wasn’t what it was when she was nineteen.
Typical of her personality, Jane raised the bar, setting harder tasks for herself, willing her body to remain as trim and tautly muscled as a ballerina’s. As if she hadn’t already proved herself enough in 1979, she set off to bicycle alone from Nova Scotia to New York. Along a dark stretch of road, she collided with a truck and was carted off, bleeding and bruised, to a hospital. After a stay of several days, she insisted on finishing the trip.
If Jane Costantino had been a cat, she would have had five lives yet to go. But she was, after all, only a human, only a woman alone in a world fraught with dangers far more menacing than lightning or an unlit country road.
Jane Costantino’s carefully charted 1980 trip was the most rigorous adventure she had ever attempted. She and her brother bicycled from Denver to New York City. They had a wonderful time, their time together turned out to be everything she had hoped, and the summer season was far from over. She had pedaled her way to one coast, and intended to make it to the West Coast, too.
She flew back to Colorado and began another bicycle trip west, but this time she was all by herself. She liked her own company and she always met interesting and friendly people so she never really felt alone. There was no question at all that she could manage the second trip physically.
Jane’s plan called for her to go to the shores of the Pacific Ocean first. She would dip her bicycle wheels in the ocean at Cape Alava off the Ozette Indian Reservation. This was on the farther-most northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. After that, with her trip symbolically over, she would bicycle leisurely back to Seattle to meet with friends on Thursday, July 24.
As she knew she would, Jane made it to the Pacific Ocean all right. Tanned and healthy, she attended an archaeology lecture at the Ozette digs. She was a woman that people always remembered and several would recall seeing the lovely, blonde woman headed toward the beach. Although it didn’t seem that ominous at the time, they also remembered seeing a man walking on the trail behind her, also headed toward the ocean. He was big, burly, and had black hair.
It was early afternoon then. The sun was shining. In the forty-second year of its existence, the Olympic National Park had been a safe haven. It was a place for communing with nature, for renewing one’s soul after a long winter, and that was all Jane Costantino had on her mind. She was a short walk away from her goal; she was about to swish her bike’s tires through the salt water in the shallows of the Pacific Ocean. And then she would head toward Seattle. Seattle was well over a hundred miles and a couple of ferry boat rides away, but it wasn’t much of a challenge after she’d just traversed the entire country.
Jane Costantino didn’t know that another woman in the park had been approached by a hulking man in a black cowboy hat and a purple shirt, nor that the woman had been alarmed by the way the stranger acted.
Jane didn’t know that this man was just behind her on the trail, stealthily keeping out of range of her sight and hearing as the rugged trail fell away behind her. Even if she had known, she might not have been frightened. She was full of stories about eccentrics she’d met on her travels. She would be the first to say that most of them were harmless enough. Maybe just a little crazy or lost or lonely.
The afternoon sun grew warmer, but it wasn’t oppressive because the wind from the ocean was cool and fragrant with the special salty sea smell that cannot be duplicated. Wild roses and berries vines gradually gave way to sea grass. Beyond, there was nothing but wave after wave as the Pacific Ocean rolled on into infinity.
It was 3 P.M. on that Wednesday in 1979: July 23. A group of hikers trudged toward the ocean; when they rounded a turn in the trail they came upon a woman who appeared to have fainted. She lay beside the beach trail two-tenths of a mile from the ocean. Moving closer and calling, their voices became hushed and then silent as they saw that her blouse was soaked in wet blood. Try as they might to find a pulse or to catch even a faint rising and falling of her breasts, they were unsuccessful.
Here, on a perfect day in a perfect paradise of a park, a woman was dead—and not by accident, but by violence. Her body was fully clothed, and there was no sign at all that she had been sexually assaulted.
Notified by a phone call from one of the hikers, three separate law enforcement agencies responded: Clallam County Sheriff’s deputies, tribal police from the Ozette Indian Reservation, and rangers from the U.S. Park Service. The Ozettes, the Park Service, and the Clallam County Sheriff’s office had worked together for nearly half a century to keep the park safe. Although the Clallam County Sheriff’s office was sixty miles away in Port Angeles, the sheriff’s detectives were on the scene within minutes. They had waited on a windy narrow finger of land named Ediz Hook, until a Coast Guard helicopter winched them up and shuttled them to the beach trail where the dead woman lay.
Park Rangers Gordon Boyd and Steve Underwood and Deputy Michael Lenihan saw that the victim had not died accidentally or of natural causes. She had multiple stab wounds in the chest, so many that she had probably died almost instantly. Either she had been part of an intensely violent argument with someone she knew, or she had been stalked by a maniac along the lonely trail.
Gingerly, they fished her wallet out of her backpack. It was pathetically easy to identify the tanned woman. There were numerous pieces of I.D. in the pack—listing addresses in Denver and Long Island. She was Jane Costantino, thirty-two. The description on her driver’s license and the photograph fit. She had come here from far away, but for what reason? Had she come alone or with a lover or husband?
The investigators organized a grid search of the vast national park, and they fanned out through the area, talking to other hikers and campers. Even though the murder had been discovered within a very short time of its occurrence, a national park is not an ideal crime scene to work. The killer might well have slipped away unseen, and already be headed back toward a city where he could lose himself. It had to have been a man—surely, no woman would have been able to overpower a victim who had been as ruggedly healthy and perfectly muscled as the woman who lay before them.
When the officers at the scene finished searching the sandy banks and the brushy areas off the trail, they released Jane Costantino’s body to the coro
ner.
Roads into the vast park were sealed off by deputies and rangers. Every car leaving the park was stopped and searched. Women hiking alone quickly joined up with other groups. It was still a long time until dark on a July day in the far Northwest, but every shadow cast in the forested area seemed threatening now.
The officers and rangers feared they were looking for a killer who might well strike again. Every male camper was suspect, even if he had a wife, a bunch of kids and dogs, and a picnic basket with him.
The probers were exceptionally fortunate in finding a witness who had an interesting—and chilling—story to tell them. She was slender and pretty, but shaken when she learned that a woman had been stabbed to death on the trail.
“This weird guy started following me,” she began with a tremble in her voice. “I tried to avoid him, but he caught up with me on the trail to the beach. He told me that he was a photographer for Playboy, and he offered me fifty dollars to pose for him in the nude. He sure didn’t look like any photographer for Playboy, and I didn’t see a camera, either. I told him to just go away.”
The woman looked down, biting her lip to keep from crying. She told them that she was feeling both frightened and guilty. “Just after that, another woman came along the trail. I’m afraid it might have been the woman who died. It must have been her—and he just stared at her, and then he turned around, and started following her.”
“What did he look like?” the Clallam County officers asked.
“Big. He was really big—probably over six feet, and kind of blubbery around the middle. Not real clean. He was wearing a purple shirt, and a cowboy hat, a dark hat. He gave me the creeps.”
The young woman told them she had hurried away, grateful to be free of the stranger. She hadn’t thought that anything was wrong because she had heard nothing. Certainly, there had been no screams, no cries for help at all.
“If I’d stayed, maybe I could have helped her,” she said somberly. “Maybe the two of us could have stopped him.”
“No. Maybe both of you would have been killed,” a deputy said quietly. “You couldn’t have known what he was going to do.”
The witness said that the man on the trail had appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties.
“You ever see him before?”
She shook her head. “Never—not until he came up to me on the trail.”
The deputies talked to other hikers, who gathered in quiet clusters in a clearing. Several of them remembered seeing a man who matched the first witness’s description. Two hikers had met him on the trail, but he had been in a great hurry, plunging past them. “He had dark red stains on his purple shirt,” a man said. “It looked as if he’d been picking berries, and wiped his hands on his shirt, at least at first. I realize now that wasn’t what it was.”
Park Rangers Gordon Boyd and Steve Underwood and Deputy Michael Lenihan headed down a trail that wound toward the beach. They came upon a husky man wearing a black cowboy hat, and a purple shirt. The shirt was soaking wet, and it clung to his beefy chest. But it didn’t have any stains on it at all. It was obvious to the investigators that the man had just washed it in the ocean.
They ordered the man to lean against a rock while they searched him. Lenihan pulled a hunting knife out of his belt and several lengths of rope from his pockets. The big man refused to answer any of their questions. He would only give his name: Dale C. Harrison, thirty-seven, from Othello, Washington. Othello is a farming community in eastern Washington, a ferry ride, a mountain pass and hundreds of miles away from Cape Alava. He refused to say why he was in the park.
They arrested Dale Harrison on suspicion of murder, handcuffed him and placed him in the back of a ranger’s car. Because Jane Costantino had been stabbed to death in a national park, her murder was a federal crime.
The FBI would continue the investigation. FBI Special Agent Paul Mack fed the name Dale C. Harrison into the computers to see if he was wanted. Surprisingly, he was not currently on any wanted lists, but he did have a record. His rap sheet showed a number of arrests for sex-related crimes dating back almost two decades. He had been convicted in 1962 of sexual molestation against two young girls. He had used a knife in that incident. He had served two years on yet another molestation charge and had been paroled from prison in 1965.
Yet Dale Harrison had apparently lived a “normal” life, too. In the fifteen years since he had been released from prison, he had married and fathered two children. He worked as a forklift operator and as laborer, and had a good employment record. Apparently, his predatory sexual fantasies had only been banked—until they erupted on a sunny day in July.
And Harrison had to have been a man consumed by lust and rage. The initial report from the Medical Examiner said that Jane Costantino had been stabbed six times in the chest with “hard, vicious thrusts.” The knife had pierced so deeply that the Medical Examiner believed Jane’s killer had to be a man of more than usual strength.
Dale Harrison fit that description. They believed he was the person who had shattered the forty-two years of serenity in the park. Forty-two years and never a murder.
The investigators doubted that Jane had known her killer. She was, almost certainly, a chance victim. Harrison had approached the other woman first. He hadn’t known her and he hadn’t known Jane either. When the first woman he accosted told him to “get lost,” he had turned around and seen Jane Costantino coming down the trail. When the agents and deputies checked on Jane’s background, they learned about her quest to ride a bike coast to coast. She had come so close to completing her journey. Just another fifth of a mile and she and her bike would have reached the ocean.
Instead, Jane had the tragic misfortune to cross paths with the man who pretended to be a Playboy photographer. She wouldn’t have believed that ruse for a minute. But a woman who had worked for years as a cocktail waitress would have become very adept at turning away men without offending them. Jane Costantino could think on her feet. She wasn’t a woman to panic and run. She would have tried to reason with an attacker—if he gave her a chance to do so. Why then had Jane Costantino been killed? Her clothing hadn’t been disarranged at all, so a sexual attack hadn’t even been begun. Had Jane said something to the man who approached her that had enraged him? It was possible that she had inadvertently made a remark that triggered terrible violence.
It looked more likely that Dale Harrison had been looking for a woman to kill. He had done it swiftly and violently. And silently. There was a great deal of both circumstantial and physical evidence that linked Harrison to the inexplicable murder of a stranger. His hunting knife matched exactly the wound measurements taken at Jane Costantino’s autopsy.
Tests of his wet purple shirt showed that the ocean had failed to wash away traces of human blood. The shirt fibers still held enough blood to test, and the blood matched Jane’s genotype.
A man whose appearance was as striking as Dale Harrison’s was not easily forgotten. Several people who had been in the park picked him from both a mugshot laydown, and from a line-up, positive that he was the same man they had seen on the beach trail. The first woman he accosted had no doubt at all that Harrison was the man who followed Jane Costantino as she hurried toward the ocean.
Dale Harrison was arraigned and held in lieu of $100,000 bail. When agents questioned him, he was adamant that he knew nothing at all about the murder of Jane Costantino. But then, faced with the hard evidence against him, he changed his story. He wasn’t the person who had killed her, he said confidentially. But he admitted that he had been a witness to her stabbing.
The suspect said that he had looked on helplessly as another man, a stranger to him, had grabbed his knife and plunged it into the woman with the bicycle.
The special agents glanced at each other. If ever they had heard a weak explanation, this was it. Here was a husky forklift operator, a man who should have been a formidable opponent. Why hadn’t he jumped to Jane’s defense? And even if he had been afraid to
help her, how could he have turned his back on her as she lay bleeding to death? He could have at least gone for help.
They asked him what had happened to the “mysterious stranger.” It was Harrison himself who was found with a knife, the bloodied shirt, and the rope.
Dale Harrison insisted that he had run away because he was terrified of being falsely accused of murder. Yes, he admitted, he had a record for sex crimes, and that was what scared him.
“Who would have believed me—once they knew about my record?”
Who indeed? The investigators stared back at him. His story made no sense at all. They wondered if he was going for a split personality defense. It wasn’t me; it was this guy who invades my body . . .
While Dale Harrison awaited trial for murder, he continued to insist that he was innocent. The investigators and special agents continued to check into his background, sure that they still didn’t know the entire story. They believed that Harrison had gone into the national park with a cruel mission in mind; he seemed to have no other reason for being there.
At length, they made contact with a man who said he was one of Harrison’s closest friends. Boyd Blaunt* nodded uncomfortably as they explained what they were looking for. Had Harrison ever talked about his former crimes? Had he ever spoken of something that might explain his vicious attack on a woman he had never seen before?
Boyd Blaunt said that he had. “He’s had some kind of fantasy—or obsession maybe you’d call it—for about a year and a half.”
There was another side to Dale Harrison, the hardworking, devoted family man—information that hardly surprised the FBI agents who had tried to categorize their suspect. Blaunt said that Dale had fashioned a very intricate and deadly fantasy. Once he first told Blaunt about it, Dale had brought it up many times—at least a dozen times, detailing every aspect of it to his friend.