by Ann Rule
As they approached a bridge, he said, “Turn left before you cross this bridge, and you’ll be on Garland Hotsprings Road. Go past the gravel pit where there’s a shed in the middle. You’ll find another body on the north side of this road, just past that big mound of snow there.”
They did. Mary Annabelle Bjornson, gone from her apartment even as she was dressed in pink chiffon for an important date and stirring dinner on the stove, had been there in the snowbank since January 4. The pink dress was gone, and so were her shoes and undergarments.
She, too, had been strangled, and autopsy results indicated that rape had been attempted but not consummated.
The three cases involving Lynne Tuski, Mary Annabelle Bjornson, and Connie Stanton were “similar transactions” under the law, with so many commonalities. Canaday had many charges hanging over him:
Count One: Attempted Rape of Mary Annabelle Bjornson.
Count Two: Murder in the first degree of Mary Annabelle.
Count Three: Rape of “B.B.”
Count Four: Assault with a deadly weapon in the second degree during the rape of “B.B.”
Count Five: Rape of Lynne Tuski.
Count Six: Murder in the first degree of Lynne Tuski.
John Canaday pleaded not guilty by reason of mental irresponsibility that he claimed had existed at the time of his crimes.
His trial was set for the summer of 1969. He would be defended by the well-known Seattle criminal-defense firm Whipple and Mahoney, and prosecuted by Patricia Harber and William Kinzel, under the direction of the new prosecuting attorney of King County, Chris Bailey.
The prosecution team had decided not to seek the death penalty, should Canaday be convicted.
Just before his trial began, his attorneys notified the Court that he wished to withdraw his not-guilty plea in the rape of “B.B.,” and he was allowed to plead guilty to that specific charge.
It was an odd situation—as if John Canaday was admitting that he was eminently sane only a few days before Connie Stanton’s abduction but was insane at the time he took her to the mountain cabin, and also insane when Mary Annabelle and Lynne were killed.
• • •
I attended John Canaday’s trial when it began on July 8, 1969. It was, in fact, one of the first murder trials I have ever covered. I found it both disturbing and fascinating.
Ever since then, I have said I would rather go to a trial than a Broadway play. Until the advent of television documentaries and Court TV’s live coverage of trials, my friends were baffled by my enthusiasm for watching cases unfold and listening to witnesses. Since John Canaday’s trial, I have sat on the hard benches familiar to courtroom devotees in dozens of jurisdictions from Florida to the Northwest, and watched a hundred or more cases move through our American justice system.
They have all been memorable in some way, but Canaday’s trial taught me so much about human nature that I could never have imagined. I remember sitting in the second row of the gallery, not that far from the defendant. Even after months in jail, he looked very strong, with huge shoulders.
There was a quiet, rather plain young woman sitting beside me, observing the trial. It was several days before I realized that she was Connie Stanton, one of the alleged victims who survived being abducted by John Canaday.
During subsequent courtroom breaks, Connie told me that she was grateful to be alive. John Canaday, whom she had known for many years, had convinced her to leave her apartment with him on Thursday night. It was supposed to be a quick errand, and she didn’t have to meet her brother until Friday afternoon. All he asked for was her help as a driver. He said he had to pick up a second car a short distance away, and needed Connie to drive one of the cars back to his parents’ house. It hadn’t seemed like that much of a favor to ask of her, and he assured her that it wouldn’t take long.
Once Connie was in Canaday’s car, however, he hadn’t driven very far before he pulled over to the side of a country road, where he tied her up with ropes that he had precut and hidden in the backseat of his station wagon.
Connie told me she had kept her wits about her during the forty-eight hours he held her captive. She had kept him talking, reminding him that they were old friends from the same town and bringing up happy memories of the old days. When he began to talk about sex, she impressed upon him that she was a virgin and that she had always wanted to save herself for the man who would one day be her husband.
According to Connie, Canaday understood that and respected her wishes. “He did try to have intercourse with me, though,” she confided, “but I was always able to stop him before he penetrated me. In a way, I’m grateful to him for that.”
Sometimes, Canaday had been gentle with her. “He even cooked chocolate pudding for us,” she told me.
But there were other moments when she feared for her life. He had tried to strangle her and she had passed out from lack of air a couple of times, although usually she had talked persuasively enough to snap him out of it. And it was Connie who had convinced her captor to bring her back to his house. She thought she would have a better chance of survival if she was around other people.
That certainly made sense.
Connie Stanton was still somewhat confused about her feelings. Given the four criteria for brainwashing, she had endured them all: she was shocked when she realized her friend’s ex-husband meant to kidnap her and tied her up with ropes; she was far, far, away from home and the people who meant the most to her; Canaday had warned her often that he might kill her—“do to you what I’d like to do to [my ex-wife]”; and yet, he occasionally told her he might let her go without hurting her any more. That would be her reward, and she had wanted to live so much that she finally came to think of him as being a good person because he didn’t kill her.
“Sometimes he was so nice to me,” she murmured. “I’d like to just give him a note to thank him for not killing me, but they won’t let me talk to him.”
As she tried to catch his eye, she seemed to bounce between her fear of Canaday and her concern for him as a troubled person whom she had tried to help. He never glanced in her direction.
I’ll admit I was baffled that she seemed so sad for his current predicament, but I could see she was a really kind person. I asked her if she had romantic feelings toward the defendant, and she denied that vigorously. It was more that she had had preconceived notions of what a kidnapper would do to his victim, and once John Canaday had promised not to rape her and that he would bring her back to Seattle, he had kept his word.
Now he sat at the defense table, his sports jacket too tight for him, his shaggy head hunched forward, and he surely looked like a man who had run completely out of luck. It was very easy for me to remember that he had made his own luck, and that he had probably destroyed two young women’s lives absolutely. I didn’t feel at all sorry for him.
Finally, Connie Stanton prevailed upon me to at least give the short note she had written to John Canaday to one of his defense attorneys. If it made her feel less sad, I didn’t see that it would hurt anything, although I doubted the attorney would pass the note on to the defendant.
At the noon break, I ended up giving it to the bailiff. I have no idea if John Canaday ever saw it. I spent the rest of the trial urging Connie Stanton to talk to a counselor about her feelings. She had done nothing wrong. She was a victim who had come closer to dying than she realized, and she was the last person who needed to be concerned about what was going to happen to a man who had tightened a rope around her neck until she passed out. Had her neck muscles or arteries been configured in a slightly different manner, she probably would have ended up in a snowbank too.
That was the odd thing about strangulation—and another thing I learned from sitting in on murder trials: some people died within a minute of having their airway cut off; some survived for several minutes. By ligature or manually, strangulation is an iffy thing, and many people have become murderers when they didn’t intend their actions to go that far.
<
br /> But they are construed by the law to have planned to kill from the moment they grabbed someone by the neck.
“Accidental strangulation” is not an adequate defense in a homicide trial.
14
John Canaday wanted to testify and tell his story to the jurors. Defense attorneys appear to be unanimous in their hesitancy to allow their clients on the witness stand. They know that the defendant immediately opens himself up to cross-examination by the prosecution.
And anything can happen. Few murder defendants are adroit enough to joust with trained prosecutors, and they are likely to blurt out answers they never meant to give. They may think they are giving the appearance of innocence—or, in John Canaday’s case, insanity—that will sway a jury.
At this point, Canaday didn’t need to fear the death penalty because the State had not asked for it. But the jurors could do whatever they wanted and they might invoke it.
Canaday was adamant. He was going to speak for himself.
The jury had heard many witnesses who recalled their last moments with Mary Annabelle and Lynne, and the testimony of investigators, forensic pathologists, and relatives of those who had been sexually attacked and/or murdered. Now they stared at the man who had already confessed to many of the charges against him.
Jurors are notoriously hard to read, but, to me, none of them looked friendly as Canaday took the stand. He said he was 24 years old, a high school graduate, an honorably discharged Navy veteran, and that he and his ex-wife had two small children.
He agreed with his defense team that he had asked that the investigators be contacted so that he could tell them about Mary Annabelle Bjornson and Lynne Tuski.
“Now, it is not your desire to be turned loose at this time, is it?”
“No.”
“Do you feel that you are dangerous to be at large at this time?”
“Yes.”
“. . . Do you have a clear recollection of the incidents?”
“If I sit down and think about.”
So far, the defense wasn’t making a very strong case. Pat Harber rose to cross-examine Canaday. The slender blond prosecutor was adept at pulling out statements that made defense attorneys cringe. She began by showing premeditation on Canaday’s part. He admitted that he had burned the ends of the lengths of rope the patrolmen had found in his car after Connie Stanton was rescued. He had done it, he said, to keep the ends from unraveling. It seemed glaringly obvious that he had prepared his garottes carefully so that they would be ready when he spotted a woman he wanted.
Canaday said he remembered the night he went to Mary Annabelle’s apartment house, but denied that he had ever seen her before and gave no reason for choosing her apartment. He was just “looking for a girl.”
“And you had your pea jacket on when you knocked on her door?”
“Yes.”
When he was asked how he got Mary Annabelle to leave her apartment with him, he replied that he told her his car wouldn’t start and asked her to help him.
“At the time you went up to the door, do you recall what was wrong with your car?”
“Nothing was wrong with it.”
But he had raised the hood and asked her to get behind the wheel, and he told her when to turn the key. The engine started. Then he had slammed down the hood and walked around to the driver’s-side door. Mary Annabelle was still sitting behind the steering wheel.
To Harber’s questions, he said repeatedly, “I don’t remember.” He didn’t know if she had worn a coat or a scarf. He claimed not to remember her pink party dress.
“Now, at this point, did you just get into the car, or what did you do?”
“I pulled a knife. It was in the automobile, somewhere on the floor . . . Most of the time I used to keep it under the seat.”
“When you used the knife, did you hold it in your hand—how did you use it?”
“I had it in my hand.”
“Close to her?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“In other words, she couldn’t have run away the way you were holding her. Is that right?”
“I believe so . . . She started screaming and I put my hand over her mouth and told her to be quiet and she did.”
“Did she appear to be scared?”
“Yes. I think anybody under that situation would,” he answered calmly. He denied that he was angry at Mary Annabelle for screaming.
“Didn’t you feel that someone might come running if they heard the screams? Is that why you put your hand over her mouth?”
“It didn’t bother me.”
“At the point that you put the hand over her mouth, were you able to control her in any way?”
“Yes. I just put my hand over her mouth and dropped the knife and she shut up.”
“What did she do with her hands?”
“Nothing. She was more scared of the knife than anything else.”
Canaday described how he had entered the station wagon by forcing Mary Annabelle to slide over. He had taken his hand away from her mouth, but he had the knife very close to her body at this point. He then tied her hands with rope.
“Where did you have the rope?”
“I always have rope in the automobile. I’ve always had rope since I owned it—for about a year.”
He explained that he had tied his captive’s hands in front of her and driven away immediately. The nearest entrance to the I-5 freeway was right there. He said he found it “quickly, very quickly.”
Mary Annabelle wasn’t screaming any longer but she was “still scared. She was shaking.”
Canaday explained that he took the first off-ramp he came to, one that passed houses and led eventually to a wide body of water. That would have been Lake Washington, along Lake Washington Boulevard. The defendant recalled that he had driven to the Stan Sayres hydroplane pits.
No place in Seattle would have been more deserted in January; the powerful hydroplane races took place during Seafair in July, and tens of thousands of fans jammed the beach and the green sweeps of lawn then, but it was very dark and cold and completely deserted in the winter.
“I parked and told her I was going to rape her . . . She started screaming.”
“Did you react to this in any way at all?” Pat Harber asked.
“Yes—I put my hands around her throat.”
John Canaday testified that he believed Mary Annabelle was facing away from him, trying to roll down the windows with her hands, which were still bound, as he closed his huge hands around her throat. “I told her to stop screaming. It just disturbed me. I don’t like people screaming in the first place.”
“Did it make you angry?”
“In some ways, yes.”
“Did your wife used to scream at you?”
“No.”
Canaday’s answers came out in a stilted way. He remembered what had happened, but he seemed determined to keep his affect stolid. He described how he had “squeezed” Mary Annabelle’s neck until she made no more sounds.
“Did you think there was something wrong with her when she stopped screaming?”
“I thought maybe she’d be dead.”
“Did you, at this point, feel something had gone wrong? I mean, that you had done something wrong?”
“In a way, yes.”
The jurors’ faces were pale and their expressions set as John Canaday told of driving away from the hydroplane pits with the dead girl in the front seat of his car. He said he had headed north because he knew he couldn’t leave her body within the city limits of Seattle. He was afraid someone might find it.
He was heading for the road to Stevens Pass. He said he wasn’t concerned at all about needing snow tires because the tread was good on his tires, and he had driven in snow for many years. He had been skiing since he was ten and was a ski jumper. Leavenworth had several steep jumps. “I [never jumped off] the large one, no,” he said.
Oddly, John Canaday insisted he had never been to Index, and he had only accidentally f
ound the road where he left Mary Annabelle Bjornson. He described laying her body on the ground and then taking off all of her clothing. She had grabbed a light coat as she followed him out of her apartment, and he had used it to carry all of her clothing like a “laundry bundle.” He could not recall if she had worn jewelry.
“And now what did you do with her?”
“Threw her over the snowbank.”
“How deep was the snowbank?”
“Shoulder high.”
“Was she heavy?”
He could not remember. Taking her clothes with him, Canaday had driven directly back to Seattle. His parents weren’t home that night, so it had been easy for him to burn the pink chiffon dress, her coat, and other garments in the fireplace. He had started newspapers burning and thrown Mary Annabelle’s clothes in, watching them in the flames until there were only innocuous-looking ashes left.
So little time had passed since she was waiting happily for her boyfriend to arrive. As the last ember faded, she should have still been dancing to Jamaican music. She had been kind to a stranger who came knocking on her door three times. Was it true that John Canaday had never seen Mary Annabelle Bjornson before? That seems doubtful. He didn’t approach any other apartments in her building; he came straight to her door with his made-up story about looking for “Steve.” There was no Steve; Linda Williams’s friend, Steve Shelton, had told police he didn’t know Canaday. Neither did Linda.
It is far more likely that Canaday had spotted Mary Annabelle in the neighborhood and scoped out which apartment she lived in, and that he had gone there expressly to lure her outside with him.
15
Canaday returned to the witness stand after the lunch break. So far, he was strengthening the prosecution’s case far more than he was making points for the defense. His coldly matter-of-fact recitation of the details of Mary Annabelle’s abduction and murder was shocking to listen to—worse coming from his own lips than from Pat Harber’s or Bill Kinzel’s presentation for the State.