by Ann Rule
In his own obsessive way, Terry thought he loved Emily. Had he not been filled with such emptiness and inadequacy, had his need for a complete love slave not been so all-encompassing, he might have been able to accept her love and to trust it. Initially, he had the total devotion he said he wanted—but he was destroying any love Emily had for him with his jealousy, his physical punishment, and the terrible emotional flogging he constantly administered to her.
Emily was seventeen years old, but she felt as if she were a hundred.
Like a butterfly trapped in a cigar box, Emily beat her wings hopelessly against her prison. One night, she rode her bicycle around the block a few times, only to come home and find Terry in one of his rages. Where had she been? Who was she sneaking off to meet?
Before she could open her mouth to answer, he was on her—hitting and kicking her in full view of a neighbor. When the neighbor started in their direction to stop him, Terry was even angrier at Emily, blaming her for “embarrassing me in public.”
Then a time came when she was no longer allowed to talk to her friends on the phone. He was mad when he got a busy signal when he tried to call her. Foolishly, he ordered her to leave the phone off the hook so her friends couldn’t get through, apparently not realizing that if she did that, he couldn’t get through either.
Twice, her courage honed by especially rough beatings, Emily left Terry and ran to friends’ houses. But she stayed away only overnight. He always tracked her down. Predictably, he was full of remorse, and sounded sincerely miserable when he promised to change.
Things would be different. He pleaded that he needed Emily. If she would only come back to him, he would never hit her again.
Still, nothing changed. As soon as she was home, the beatings began again. She feared that he really would carry out his threats to murder her, the awful things he voiced when he was in one of his maniacal rages and claimed not to remember later.
The final straw came with another beating. This time, however, it was not Emily who was the victim; it was her dog. They had been caring for one of Terry’s relatives’ dogs when Emily’s dog crept out on the porch and ate the other dog’s food, a perfectly predictable thing for an animal to do.
But Terry had rules for animals, too, and this was unforgivable. He beat the helpless dog with a broom handle until Emily’s tears and sobs mingled with the anguished howls of her pet.
Somehow, she saw Terry’s cruelty and sadism more clearly when she herself wasn’t the victim. With a flash of great clarity, Emily knew she couldn’t stay with him any longer. She waited for her chance, and as soon as he left the house, she gathered a few clothes and her dog and she fled to her girlfriend’s house.
Emily had managed to put a little extra money in their bank account. She planned to draw it out and head for her own family. Her grandparents and her aunts and uncles lived in Seattle. If she could get that far, she knew they would protect her. Then she could make her way up to Alaska and her parents.
But Terry was one step ahead of her. When Emily went to the bank to withdraw her half of the savings account, she found he’d put a hold on the account. She had faithfully deposited a hundred dollars out of each of her paychecks. It was her money. The bank teller studied the tense young girl in front of her and made what was perhaps a fatal decision. She told Emily that she couldn’t take her money out without her husband’s permission. “I’ll call him and ask him,” she said with a smile.
Emily’s face blanched stark white, and she whirled and ran as the woman began to dial a number. She was caught, trapped, and there was no one to help her.
Her friend could give her shelter, but that was all. And her friends were afraid of Terry, too. They told Emily he was crazy.
It was only a matter of time before he tracked Emily down.
And that was exactly what he was doing. He knew that Emily was very close to her grandparents in Seattle, Bill and Florence Borden. He figured they might be a weak link in the protective fence around Emily. He called Florence Borden, who was seventy-five, and told her he had to talk to Emily. He explained that he was in a sanitarium getting treatment for “nerves,” and that he knew he’d recover more rapidly if he could just talk to Emily.
Florence Borden knew where Emily was, but she didn’t trust Terry. She knew her granddaughter had suffered a great deal at his hands. For almost three weeks, the elderly lady talked daily on the phone with Terry. He pleaded, cajoled, and tried to reassure her that everything was going to be all right.
“I’m here voluntarily,” he said earnestly. “I signed myself in for treatment. I just want Em to know that I’m doing the right thing, and I want her to know that I love her.
“The doctors here tell me that my behavior wasn’t my fault—it was caused by some pain pills I was taking for a bad tooth.”
Florence Borden wasn’t fooled. She knew that Terry had been acting crazy for a year and a half. She reasoned that pain pills prescribed only recently probably hadn’t triggered his violent attacks on Emily.
Still, as the weeks went by, Terry wore her down. He was so convincing, so contrite. And he seemed to be sincere. At length, Emily’s grandmother gave in, thinking that he really did love Emily, and she told Terry the address where she was hiding.
That was all he needed.
Emily returned to her friend’s house that afternoon and her heart stopped when she saw Terry’s Capri parked at the curb. Her girlfriend had tried to convince Terry that Emily wasn’t living there, but he saw their pet dog and knew she couldn’t be far away. He was determined to wait, and no amount of diversionary tactics had distracted him.
Emily knew she had no chance to get away when she saw Terry’s car. Her heart pounded with fear, but she took a deep breath and entered the house.
Terry was contrite, as he always was when he wanted her back. He told her the same lie about having gone into psychiatric treatment. He said he realized he’d been wrong, and he vowed to change—with professional help.
“I won’t ever hurt you again,” he promised, his eyes glistening with tears.
But Emily didn’t believe him, and she had also had a taste of freedom, even though it was freedom haunted by the specter of her eccentric lover. She wasn’t fifteen any longer; she was eighteen and of age. She remained resolute in her decision to stay free. Her friends supported her. They warned her that she must never go back. However, she knew Terry had a gun, and she was afraid. Afraid to stay away. Afraid to go back.
Terry talked of their going back to Hawaii. Things had been better in Hawaii, he insisted. If they could just go back and start all over, he told Emily, he was sure it would be all right.
Emily encouraged him to go, hinting that she might follow him when she got all their things packed up. It was enough to satisfy him in that meeting.
Now that Terry knew where she was, he was a constant visitor, almost camping out on her friend’s porch. One day he found Emily alone. He suddenly grabbed her by the throat, tightening his forearm against her larynx. He accused her of trying to ship him off to Hawaii so that she could run away once he was gone.
“But Terry,” she argued desperately, “it was your idea to go back. You go. And I’ll follow you.”
He pulled out his revolver and held it to his head, threatening to commit suicide. Emily managed to wrestle it away from him and unloaded it. But they were at a standstill. She knew he could overpower her and take the gun back. He wanted the gun, and he said he was going to use it to kill them both.
To lead him away from the gun, Emily finally agreed to go to a motel with Terry, but only if he agreed to leave it behind. There, she told him, they could talk in private.
They talked for hours, and Terry seemed to agree to the plan to go to Hawaii. He would pack and leave the next day. She helped him pack enough clothes for the journey and was almost hopeful that he really intended to leave. She was lying to him, but she knew she had to.
Emily had tried everything else. A restraining order against him was
now in effect. She had changed all her identification back to her maiden name. If he would just go, she could get away. By the time he got back, he wouldn’t be able to trace her.
But Terry didn’t leave the next day. Or the day after. Or the day after that. He found one reason after another to delay his departure. And he insisted on seeing Emily. When her friends refused to let him in to visit her, he threatened to break in—restraining order or not.
Emily faced him, wondering what tactic he would use now. But he was charming, persuasive; he said all he wanted to do was take her out for dinner one last time before he left for Hawaii. He said he had reservations to leave the next day.
“Just one dinner—at a really nice place?” he urged.
Emily finally agreed. She had been away from Terry for three weeks. She thought she had broken any legal bond to him, although she really wasn’t married to him. Someone had told her that if she just changed her social security ID back to her maiden name, the common-law relationship would be dissolved.
Maybe it would be easier for Terry to accept if she agreed to one last meal together. She changed her clothes. Somewhat oddly, Terry insisted that they take their dog along with them.
It was 10 P.M. on December 14, 1975.
Terry said that the restaurant was in Fort Worth and that he had to take Highway 287 to get there. But he kept driving and driving, and promising that the place was only a few miles farther. They passed innumerable restaurants. And then traffic began to thin out and soon they were in the country. Although Terry still said the restaurant was just around the next bend, Emily began to get suspicious.
He ignored her questions for a while, staring straight ahead. Finally, along a lonely stretch of highway, he pulled over and parked his car alongside the road.
Terry turned toward Emily and grinned, but there was danger in his eyes. “We’re not going out to eat,” he said. “I have a surprise for you. We’re going to Seattle.”
This was the last thing she wanted. Emily did hope to get to the Northwest and reunite with her relatives there, but she wanted to go alone.
“I don’t want to go, Terry,” she said quietly. “Please turn the car around.”
Instantly, he became angry. He began to scream and slammed his fists around, frightening her badly. She tried to keep her voice as calm as possible, but he was wired, almost vibrating with rage.
Now he locked the car’s doors so that she couldn’t jump out. And he revved the engine up; the speedometer inched up to eighty miles an hour as they headed north.
Once they were on the road again, Terry became eerily calm. Emily didn’t want to get him excited again so she said very little, censoring all of her remarks before she said them aloud.
She wondered if her friends would report her missing when she didn’t come back. Maybe there was a chance the Texas Rangers or the highway patrol might stop them. But they passed several police units, and the officers inside didn’t pay any attention to them.
They drove past the Texas border and across New Mexico without stopping. Finally exhausted, Terry pulled into a motel. But he wouldn’t let Emily out of his sight for a minute. If she had thought she was a prisoner before, now she was really captive. He kept her beside him as he signed in at the motel’s front office. She thought about signaling the desk clerk there but couldn’t think of a way to do it. Terry would notice.
As long as she didn’t argue with him, he was calm. After they had some sleep, they continued on, heading northwest through Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and then into Oregon.
Something set Terry off as they approached Portland. They had been on their marathon trip for five days, and Emily was exhausted, more frightened with each day that passed. Suddenly, he shouted that he was going to turn around and drive until they ran out of money. He didn’t care where they ended up.
She pleaded with him to keep going toward Seattle; they were only 180 miles away. She didn’t want to hurtle through the countryside with him until they ended up in some godforsaken spot with no money. Maybe, if she could just get to her relatives, they could help her escape.
Terry finally agreed to keep heading north on I-5. It was a little after four in the afternoon on December 20 when they pulled up in front of Emily’s grandparents’ modest home. She saw them peering out the window in surprise, and then William and Florence Borden rushed out their front door and welcomed them with open arms.
Everything seemed normal for the first time in a week as Emily’s grandmother bustled around the kitchen to fix dinner for her unexpected guests. Emily was still afraid but she relaxed a little as they ate the home-cooked food and sat in the warm kitchen.
They spent the next four days joining in her grandparents’ preparations for Christmas and visiting her aunts and uncles. Terry could be so charming—when he wanted to. He told Emily’s aunt that he had been stationed in Bremerton, Washington, when he was in the navy and he was looking forward to revisiting the navy yard and seeing the Seattle waterfront, too.
On Christmas Eve, Terry and Emily went shopping for presents. He bought a shirt for Emily’s grandfather and a cutting board for her grandmother. They planned to open their presents Christmas morning and then go to Emily’s aunt’s house for Christmas dinner. Terry continued to act like a perfectly normal guest, and Emily relaxed a little more. She still wanted to “divorce” him, but he seemed so rational that she began to hope this could be accomplished without a lot of grief.
Christmas Day dawned wet and rainy—as it usually does in Seattle; exterior holiday lights all had halos that shimmered in the downpour.
In an extremely rare circumstance, even the Seattle Police Homicide Unit offices on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building were empty. There were detectives on call—there had to be—but Sergeant Don Cameron’s four-man crew hoped devoutly that their phones wouldn’t ring and that they would be able to spend the holiday with their families.
It was not to be.
The Patrol Division answered the first call. At twenty-eight minutes after two on Christmas afternoon, Officers Dick Gagnon and Al Smalley responded to an emergency call for help. Their patrol cars screeched to a stop in front of a small green-shingled house on South Myrtle Street. Within minutes, the rain-washed pavement in front of the house was alive with blue-and-white squad cars.
Don Cameron and Officer Bill Brooks arrived on the scene. They found a critically wounded seventy-five-year-old woman who was bleeding profusely from a wound in her throat. Ignoring her own injuries, she insisted on leading them into the house. They followed her along a narrow hallway to where a very old man lay motionless on a linoleum floor, the surface beneath him so awash with blood that its pattern was obscured.
More Homicide detectives and a Seattle Fire Department paramedic unit pulled up. The holiday for Sergeant Ivan Beeson and Detectives Dick Sanford and Dick Reed was over. They could see that any Christmas celebrating had long since ceased in the little house on South Myrtle.
The old man was dead.
Bill Brooks took a nearly incoherent Florence Borden to Harborview County Hospital. It was difficult to understand her, but she kept saying that someone named Terry had “hurt Papa” and herself, and she was afraid that he might have hurt her granddaughter, too.
“Where is your granddaughter?” Brooks asked. He wondered if the child—or maybe she was a teenager—was lying injured, or even dead, back in the Bordens’ house.
Florence Borden shook her head. “He kept knocking me down on top of Papa,” she sobbed, ”and then he grabbed Emily and made her leave with him. I’m afraid he’s going to kill her.”
The elderly woman was treated in the ER and then admitted to the hospital in serious condition from shock and blood loss. She had a jagged knife wound in her throat. It was a wonder she’d survived; the knife had barely missed her carotid artery.
Back at the Borden home, the Homicide investigators surveyed the carnage. The one-story, two-bedroom home must have been immaculate before everything in the kitchen
and hall area became sprayed and soaked with blood.
Dick Sanford had investigated many murders in his first year and a half as a Homicide detective, but he had never seen so much blood. He mentioned it to Dick Reed, who had more experience in the Homicide Unit than any of the eighteen detectives assigned there. Reed had seen other victims who had literally exsanguinated—bled out—but not often.
Trying not to notice the Christmas tree in the living room and the presents around it, they began to work the crime scene. Bloody footprints made a path down the hallway to the kitchen sink, and then out to the back porch, and back to the bathroom sink. The red stuff marked everything from the floors to the ceilings, on all the walls and doorways.
The frail old man lay on his side in the walkway just between the two bedroom doorways. He was fully clothed; his glasses were near his head. Someone had cut his throat, slicing through his jugular vein and left carotid artery. His life’s fluid had poured out unchecked. He would have been dead from such a wound in a matter of a few minutes. It was such an ugly crime, made more so by the obvious vulnerability of the victim.
“He couldn’t have put up any kind of fight,” Dick Reed said. “His wife said he was eighty-three.”
The Homicide crew sketched the scene, took measurements, and logged in numerous items of physical evidence they recovered, carefully sealing it and signing their initials.
And all the while, they tried to piece together what might have happened. They noted bloody fingerprints on a beige phone near the bed in the west bedroom. In the east bedroom, they found a white nightgown, a black lace scarf, and a green pullover shirt—all of them ripped to pieces.
The kitchen phone line was yanked from the wall.
The Bordens’ daughter pulled up in front of the house and wandered in shock past the squad cars. She had come to see why her parents hadn’t shown up for Christmas dinner. Barely able to speak, she was finally able to tell the detectives that the old man was her father: William Robert Borden. The gravely injured woman, who was currently in surgery, was her mother, Florence.