The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

She saw that one of his arms was suspended in a beige sling, and she answered, “Sure, what do you need?”

  He explained that he wanted to load his sailboat on his car and he couldn’t manage it with his bum arm. She agreed to help him and walked with him to a metallic brown VW Bug in the parking lot.

  There was no sailboat anywhere around.

  The woman looked at the handsome young man—a man she later described as having sandy blond hair, being about five feet ten inches tall, and weighing 160 pounds—and asked where his boat was. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. It’s up at my folks’ house—just a jump up the hill.”

  He motioned to the passenger door, and she stopped, wary. She told him her parents were waiting for her and that she was already late.

  He took her refusal with goodwill. “That’s O.K. I should have told you it wasn’t in the parking lot. Thanks for bothering to come to the car.”

  It was 12:30 when she glanced up and saw the man walking toward the parking lot with a pretty young woman, a woman wheeling a bike and engaged in an animated conversation with the man. And then she forgot about the incident—forgot until she read the papers the next day.

  July 14 had been a lonely day for twenty-three-year-old Janice Ott, a probation case worker at the King County Youth Service Center in Seattle, the county’s juvenile detention hall and court. Her husband, Jim, was 1,400 miles away in Riverside, California, completing a course in the design of prosthetic devices for the handicapped. The job with the Juvenile Court—a job Janice had waited a long time for— had kept her from going to California with her husband. It meant a separation of several months, and they’d been married only a year and a half. She would join him in September for a reunion. For now calls and letters would have to suffice.

  Janice Anne Ott was a tiny girl, weighing only 100 pounds, and barely topping five feet. She had long blond hair, parted in the middle, and startling gray-green eyes. She looked more like a high school girl than a mature young woman who had graduated from Eastern Washington State College in Cheney with a straight A average. Janice’s father in Spokane, Washington, was an assistant director of public schools in that city and had once been an associate of the State Board of Prison Terms and Paroles. The family orientation was decidedly toward public service.

  Like Lynda Ann Healy, Janice was well-educated in the theoretical approaches to antisocial behavior and disturbed minds, and, like Lynda, she was idealistic. Her father would say later, “She thought that some people were sick or misdirected, and felt that she could help them through her training and personality.”

  It was just after noon when Janice, riding her ten-speed bike from her Issaquah home, arrived at Lake Sammamish State Park. She had left a note for the girl she shared her small house with, saying she would be back around four that afternoon.

  She found a spot to spread her blanket about ten feet away from three other groups. She wore cutoff jeans and a white shirt tied in front. Beneath it, she had on a black bikini, and she stripped to that and lay down to take advantage of the sun.

  It was only minutes later when she felt a shadow and opened her eyes. A good-looking man, a man wearing a white T-shirt, white tennis shorts, and white tennis shoes looked down at her. He had a sling on his right arm.

  The picnickers nearby couldn’t help but overhear their conversation, as Janice sat up, blinking in the bright sun.

  They would remember that the man had a slight accent—perhaps Canadian, perhaps British—as he said, “Excuse me. Could you help me put my sailboat onto my car? I can’t do it by myself. I’ve got this broken arm.”

  Janice Ott had told the man to sit down, and they’d talk about it. She told him her name, and those close by heard him say his name was “Ted.”

  “See, my boat’s up at my parents’ house in Issaquah …”

  “Oh really? That’s where I live too,” she’d said with smile.

  “You think you could come with me and help me?”

  “Sailing must be fun,” she said to him. “I never learned how.”

  “It will be easy for me to teach you,” he responded.

  Janice had explained that she had her bike with her, and she didn’t want to leave it on the beach for fear it might be stolen, and he’d answered easily that there was room for it in the trunk of his car.

  “Well … O.K., I’ll help you.”

  They’d chatted for about ten minutes before Janice stood up, slipped back into her shorts and shirt, and then she’d left the beach with “Ted,” pushing her bike toward the parking lot.

  No one ever saw Janice Ott alive again.

  Eighteen-year-old Denise Naslund went to Lake Sammamish State Park on that Sunday in July too, but she wasn’t alone. She was accompanied by her boyfriend and another couple, arriving in Denise’s 1963 Chevrolet. Denise, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and startlingly attractive, was exactly two days older than Susan Elaine Rancourt, who had been gone now three months. Maybe she had read about Susan, but it’s doubtful. Denise was five feet four, weighed 120 pounds, and she matched the pattern so well.

  She once babysat for a good friend of mine, who remembers her as an unfailingly cheerful, dependable girl. Her mother, Mrs. Eleanore Rose, would recall later that Denise often said, “I want to live. There is so much in this beautiful world to do and to be seen.”

  Denise was studying to be a computer programmer, working part-time as a temporary office helper to pay her own way through night school, and the picnic on July 14 was a welcome vacation from her busy schedule. The afternoon had started out well, and then been somewhat marred by an argument with her boyfriend, an argument quickly resolved. The four young people in her group had stretched out on blankets in the sun, eyes closed, the voices of the swimmers and other picnickers a pleasant cacophony in the background.

  A little before 4:00 P.M.—hours after Janice Ott had vanished—a sixteen-year-old girl, walking back to her friends after a stop at the park’s restroom, was approached by a man with his arm in a sling. “Excuse me, young lady— could you help me launch my sailboat?”

  She shook her head, but he was insistent. He tugged on her arm. “Come on.”

  She quickly walked off.

  At 4:15 another young woman in the park saw the man with his arm in the sling.

  “I need to ask a really big favor of you,” he began. He needed help in launching his boat, he explained.

  The woman said that she was in a hurry, that her friends were waiting for her to leave for home.

  “That’s O.K.,” he said with a smile. But he stood staring at her for a few moments before he walked away. He’d been wearing a white tennis outfit, had looked like a nice guy, but she was in a hurry.

  Denise and her friends roasted hot dogs around four, and then the two men had promptly fallen asleep. About 4:30, Denise got up and strolled toward the women’s restroom.

  One of the last people known to see her alive was a woman who saw Denise talking to another girl in the cinderblock structure, saw them walk out of the building together.

  Back at their campsite, Denise’s friends began to get restless. She’d been gone such a long time when she should have returned within a few minutes. Her purse, car keys, and her woven leather sandals still rested on the blanket. It hardly seemed likely that she’d decided to walk away from the park wearing just her cutoff shorts and blue halter top. And she hadn’t mentioned that she was going swimming.

  They waited, and waited, and waited, until the sun began to dip low, casting shadows over the area, and it began to grow chilly.

  They didn’t know, of course, about the man with the injured arm. They didn’t know that he had approached yet another woman a little before 5:00 P.M., asked her the same favor, “I was wondering if you could help me put my sailboat on my car?”

  That twenty-year-old woman had just arrived at the park, via her bike, and she’d seen the man staring at her. She hadn’t wanted to go anywhere with him, and she’d explained that she really wasn’t very strong, and that, besid
es that, she was waiting for someone. He had quickly lost interest in her and turned away.

  The timing was about right. Denise was the kind of girl who would help someone, particularly someone who was handicapped, however temporarily.

  As the evening wore on, the park emptied, and there was only Denise’s car left in the lot, only her worried friends who had searched the whole park without a sign of her. They had hoped that she might have gone off to search for her dog, which had wandered off.

  They found the dog, alone.

  Denise’s boyfriend couldn’t believe what was happening. He and Denise had been together for nine months. They loved each other. She would never have left him like this.

  They reported her disappearance to the park ranger at 8:30 that night. It was too late to drag the lake, or even search the park thoroughly. The next day, one of the most extensive searches ever carried out in King County would begin.

  Back at the little house at 75 Front Street in Issaquah, where Janice Ott lived in a basement apartment, her phone had begun to ring at four. Jim Ott had waited for his wife’s call—the call she’d promised to make when he talked to her the night before, the call that was never to come. Jim dialed her number repeatedly all evening, hearing only the futile rings of a phone in an empty house.

  Jim Ott waited by his phone on Monday night, too. He didn’t know that his wife had never come back to her apartment.

  I talked to Jim Ott a few days later after he’d caught a plane for Seattle, and he told me of a strange series of almost extrasensory communications he’d received during the days after July 14.

  “When she called me on Saturday night—the thirteenth— I remember that she was complaining about how long it took for mail to get from Washington to California. She said she’d just mailed me a letter, but she thought she’d call because it took five days for me to receive it. In that letter, she’d written, Five days! Isn’t that a drag? Someone could expire before you ever got wind of it.”

  When Jim Ott got that letter, there was every indication that Janice had indeed expired.

  He paused, getting a grip on his feelings. “I didn’t know she was gone on Monday night and I waited by the phone until I fell asleep. I woke up suddenly and I looked at the clock. It said 10:45. And I heard her voice. I heard it as clearly as if she was in the room with me. She was saying, ‘Jim … Jim … come help me. …’”

  The next morning, Jim Ott had learned that his wife was missing. “It’s funny. I’d sent Janice a card that crossed in the mail with her letter. It was one of those sentimental cards with a guy and a girl on it, kind of walking into the sunset. It said, ‘I wish we were together again … much too long without you.’ And then, I wrote at the bottom—and I don’t know why I chose just those words—‘Please take care of yourself. Be careful about driving. Be careful of people you don’t know. I don’t want anything to happen to you. You’re my source of peace of mind.’”

  Ott said that he and his wife had always been close, had often shared the same thoughts at the same time, and that he was now waiting for some other message, some sign of where she might be, but after those clear words in the stillness of his room on July 15, “Jim … Jim … come help me. …” there had been only silence.

  In Seattle, in his offices at the Seattle Police Department, Captain Herb Swindler opened the sealed envelope I’d delivered from the astrologer. A slip of paper read, “If the pattern continues, the next disappearance will occur on the weekend of July 13 to 15.”

  He felt a chill. It had come true. Twice.

  10

  “TED” HAD SURFACED, allowed himself to be seen in broad daylight, and approached at least a half dozen young women, beyond the missing pair. He’d given his name. His true name? Probably not, but for the media who pounced on the incredible disappearances it was something to headline. Ted. Ted. Ted.

  Indeed, the dogged pursuit of reporters seeking something new to write was going to interfere mightily with the police investigation. The frantic families of the missing girls from Lake Sammamish were besieged by some of the most coercive tactics any reporter can use. When families declined to be interviewed, there were some reporters who hinted that they might have to print unsavory rumors about Janice and Denise unless they could have interviews, or that, even worse, families’ failure to tell of their exquisite pain in detail might mean a lessening of publicity needed to find their daughters.

  It was ugly and cruel, but it worked. The grieving parents allowed themselves to be photographed and gave painful interviews. Their daughters had been good girls—not casual pickups—and they wanted that known. And they wanted the girls’ pictures shown in every paper, on every TV news show. Maybe that way, they could be found.

  The police investigators had little time to spend giving out interviews.

  Technically, the missing girls’ investigations fell within several different jurisdictions: Lynda Ann Healy and Georgeann Hawkins were within Seattle’s city limits and that probe was headed by Captain Herb Swindler and his unit. Janice Ott, Denise Naslund, and Brenda Ball had gone missing in King County, and Captain J. N. “Nick” Mackie’s men were now under the heaviest stress in looking for a solution to the latest vanishing. Thurston County’s Sheriff Don Redmond was responsible for the Donna Manson case, in conjunction with Rod Marem of the Evergreen State College Campus Police. Susan Rancourt’s case was still being actively worked by Kittitas County and the Central Washington University Campus Police, and Roberta Kathleen Parks’s disappearance was being investigated by the Oregon State Police and the Corvallis, Oregon, City Police.

  The hue and cry from the public to produce, and produce some answers quickly, grew every day and the impact on the detectives was tremendous. If there could not be an arrest— or many arrests—the layman, bombarded with nightly television updates and front page stories, failed to understand why, at the very least, the bodies of the missing girls could not be found.

  For the King County Police, the abductions and probable murders of three girls in the county meant thirty-five percent of their average yearly workload occurring in one month. Although the county population equals Seattle’s half-million people, the population is spread out, most of it in small towns, rural and sylvan and not as catalytic to violent crimes as the crowded city.

  There were only eleven homicides in the county in 1972, nine closed successfully by year’s end. In 1973 there had been five, all cleared. Although the homicide unit in 1974 handled armed robberies in addition to murder cases, a field working sergeant and six detectives had been able to deal effectively with the caseload. The disappearance of, first, Brenda Ball, and six weeks later, Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, would force drastic restructuring of the unit.

  Mackie was a highly competent administrator. He was not yet forty when he took over as head of the Major Crimes Unit. He had reorganized the jail’s administration, and accomplished much, but his background was not heavily oriented toward actual investigative work. The field detectives were headed by Sergeant Len Randall, a soft-spoken blond bear of a man who made it a practice to join his men at major crime scenes.

  For the main part, the King County detectives were a young group. The only man in the unit over thirty-five was Ted Forrester, who wore his appellation, “Old Man,” with grudging good nature. He handled the southeast end of the county—farmland, old mining towns, woods, and the foothills of Mount Rainier. Rolf Grunden had the south end, urban part of the future megalopolis of Seattle-Tacoma. Mike Baily and Randy Hergesheimer shared the southwest, also principally urban. Roger Dunn’s sector was the north end of the county, the area between Seattle’s city limits and the Snohomish County line.

  The newest man in the unit was Bob Keppel, a slender, almost boyish looking man. It was in Keppel’s sector that the Lake Sammamish disappearances had occurred—the territory east of Lake Washington. Until July 14, 1974, Keppel had handled only one homicide investigation.

  In the end, as the years passed, the “Ted” case would
weigh most heavily on Bob Keppel’s shoulders. He would come to know more about “Ted,” more about his victims, than any of the other investigators in the county, with the possible exception of Nick Mackie.

  By 1979, Bob Keppel’s hair would be shot with grey, and Captain Mackie invalided out of law enforcement with two crippling coronaries. Captain Herb Swindler would undergo critical open heart surgery. It is impossible to pinpoint just how much stress comes to bear on detectives involved in an investigation of the scope of the missing girls’ cases, but anyone who is close to homicide detectives sees the tension, the incredible pressure brought on by their responsibility. If a corporation president carries the responsibility of bringing in or losing profits, homicide detectives—particularly in cases like the “Ted” disappearances—are truly dealing with life and death, working against time and almost impossible odds. It is a profession that brings with it the occupational hazards of ulcers, hypertension, coronary disease, and, on occasion, alcoholism. The public, the victims’ families, the press, and superiors all demand immediate action.

  The scope of the search for Denise Naslund and Janice Ott drew all of the King County’s Major Crimes Unit’s manpower into the eastside area, along with Seattle detectives, and personnel from the small-town police departments near Lake Sammamish State Park: Issaquah and North Bend.

  In a sense, they had a place to start now—not for Janice and Denise alone, but for the six other girls they felt sure were part of the deadly pattern. “Ted” had been seen. Perhaps a dozen people came forward when the story hit the papers on July 15: the other girls who had been approached, who shuddered to think that they had come so close to death, and the people at the park who had seen “Ted” talk to Janice Ott before she’d walked away with him.

  Ben Smith, a police artist, listened to their descriptions and drew a composite picture of a man said to resemble the stranger in the white tennis outfit. He erased, drew again, tediously trying to capture on paper what was in the minds of the witnesses. It was not an easy task.