Kiss Me, Kill Me and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  “Let’s check his legal address and see what they know about him,” Steinhauer suggested. “That’s a tight community out there.”

  Ballard would be the natural place for a Norwegian to choose—Seattle’s “Little Scandinavia.” Built along the shores of Puget Sound in the northwestern section of the city, its residents are principally from the Nordic countries and have a strong sense of community spirit.

  The two detectives visited the address given by the FBI and found that the resident there did know Knutsen; he had sponsored him when he first came to America at the age of 17. But he had not been in touch with him lately. The husky Norwegian had found work as a commercial fisherman shortly after he arrived in the Seattle area. And as far as his sponsor knew, Knutsen was still making regular fishing trips into northern Pacific waters in Alaska.

  Hartshorn and Steinauer checked missing-persons reports in both their own department and the Seattle Police Department’s files. They hit pay dirt in the Seattle records. Karsten Knutsen had been reported missing only a week before his body was discovered. The skipper of the fishing boat that Knutsen had been scheduled to sail on told detectives in the Missing Persons Unit that his crewman had not shown up as they were scheduled to depart for Alaska. It was unlike Knutsen, a very dependable guy, to miss a sailing date. His skipper had been concerned enough to officially report him missing.

  Steinauer questioned the skipper, who explained that Knutsen had returned to Seattle from Alaska the first week in August. Knutsen had been working on an Alaska king crab boat in Dutch Harbor and Adak. His time was, of course, his own between trips. The skipper had assumed that the young bachelor probably would have enjoyed some bright lights and fun, including the female companionship that was missing on the icy and lonely fishing voyages to Alaska. The money was good but it was punishing work, and often dangerous on the crab boats. Over the years many boats that moored in Ballard between trips had been lost during violent storms off Alaska.

  “He have any trouble with other men in the crew?” Steinauer inquired. “Any beef that might have carried over onshore?”

  The captain shook his head; he was at a complete loss to explain how Knutsen could have met his death this way. “Everybody liked Karsten,” he said.

  Now Nault, Hartshorn, and Steinauer knew they had to trace Karsten Knutsen’s life back for the weeks before his murder, and perhaps even longer. They hoped they could pick up threads of his world that would give them some clue to what had happened to him after he reached shore in early August.

  “Gene,” Hartshorn said to Steinauer, “you know the Ballard area. It looks like our only route is heel-and-toeing it. It means a lot of night work for you—canvassing every tavern and cocktail joint in Ballard. Somebody there saw Knutsen after he got back from the last trip. He’s lived there long enough—between trips, at least—and he’s bound to be a familiar face along Market Street and down on the wharfs. Maybe something happened. A fight, a scuffle, or even an argument that didn’t seem important at the time.”

  Steinauer nodded. After eleven years in the department, he knew all too well the hours—probably days—of questioning it might take before something turned up that might hold the key to Knutsen’s death.

  “In the meantime,” Nault said, “let’s ask the Alaska state troopers to check on Knutsen’s last trip up there. Maybe they can come up with something.”

  Steinauer spent the next four nights checking out a dozen taverns in Ballard, many of them down near the waterfront. The sunshine was suddenly gone as he plodded through an unseasonal rain that turned the late summertime evenings cold and gray. Steinauer showed Karsten Knutsen’s passport picture to dozens of bartenders and patrons. The husky detective, his voice slipping unconsciously into the Norwegian dialect of his childhood, moved quietly among the patrons. If anyone asked, he identified himself as a sheriff’s detective. Most didn’t bother to inquire. They turned grudgingly from a foaming mug of beer, glanced at the picture in his hand, and shook their heads.

  He checked each spot several times a night, hoping to catch all the regulars. After days and nights of footwork, it began to look like no one had seen Karsten Knutsen that first week in August—or even knew him.

  And then, for perhaps the thousandth time, Steinauer showed the passport picture, this time to a couple sitting at the bar of a local tavern.

  “You ever seen this man?” he asked, fully expecting the usual negative answer.

  “Sure,” the man answered. “Karsten Knutsen. Comes in here a lot—or he does when he’s in town.”

  “When did you see him last?” Steinauer asked, trying to keep his voice casual when he felt such elation.

  “Gee, honey, when was it?” the man asked the pretty woman with him.

  “It must have been two or three weeks ago,” she said after a moment’s thought. “Wait, it was a Sunday night, because they closed at ten. I’m sure it was August tenth.”

  “Was he with anyone?” Steinauer asked.

  “He sure was—a pretty little blonde,” the husband responded.

  His wife darted a glance at him, not that happy that he was getting involved.

  He didn’t notice, and went on talking to Gene Steinauer. “It was Dee Dee. Her name’s Dee Dee Sogngaard.* You know, the whole thing was really strange, anyway.”

  “Strange?” Steinauer asked. “In what way?”

  “Well, Karsten and Dee Dee were sitting in that back booth, and they were very chummy. We thought that was odd, because Dee Dee was supposed to be going with Mick O’Rourke.*”

  “O’Rourke?”

  “Yes, Mick used to be the bartender at a place up the street. Dee Dee worked there for a while too, but they let her go. Then we heard they fired him because she kept coming in and hanging around the bar.”

  “She and O’Rourke were going together?” Steinauer asked.

  “Going together? They were living together!” the wife said, jumping into the conversation. “Maybe even married, according to some—”

  “Well, anyway,” her husband continued in the way that some couples interrupt each other without meaning any disrespect. “While Dee Dee was in the back booth with Karsten, Mick came in and he was talking with us. After a while, Dee Dee got up and came over to O’Rourke. She acted like you would if you hadn’t seen someone for a long time. Gave him a big smooch on the cheek and asked him what he’d been doing with himself lately.”

  “We just looked at each other,” his wife said. “I guess we expected O’Rourke to go back and start something with Knutsen but he didn’t say a word when she went back and sat down with Karsten. Mick kept right on talking to us as if his girl wasn’t cuddling up to another man. Then he left.”

  Now the husband took up the story. “About ten or fifteen minutes after that, Dee Dee and Karsten left.”

  “Was he drunk?” Steinauer asked.

  “Drinking, but not drunk—just having a good time,” the man said.

  “Do you know where Dee Dee and O’Rourke live?” Steinauer asked.

  “Someplace over on Northwest 53rd, I think—in a duplex,” the woman answered.

  “Have you seen either O’Rourke or Dee Dee Sogngaard since?” Steinauer persisted.

  “Come to think of it, no—not since that night,” the man answered. “Haven’t seen Knutsen, either, for that matter.”

  Gene Steinauer explained to the shocked couple that they wouldn’t be seeing Knutsen again, gave them his card, and asked them to call him if they should see either Dee Dee Sogngaard or Mick O’Rourke.

  The next morning, the Alaska State Patrol called to say that they had been unable to turn up information that Karsten Knutsen had had any difficulties in their state.

  They did have some interesting information, however. The Alaska detectives found that, on the last day he’d spent there, Knutsen had received a tax rebate check on his Alaska state income tax. The check was for $40 and had been cashed and returned, with an endorsement allegedly with Knutsen’s signature. But han
dwriting experts felt it wasn’t his handwriting. The signature appeared very feminine when compared to Knutsen’s own scrawling style.

  The cooperative couple that Gene Steinauer interviewed supplied him with names of Knutsen’s friends. And detectives spent the morning tracing down Mick O’Rourke and Dee Dee Sogngaard’s address. They located a duplex at 821 N.W. 53rd and talked to the landlady, who verified that the couple had lived there.

  “Until August eleventh,” the disgruntled landlady recalled. “They lived here all right, and then they just left without giving me notice. Left the place dirty too.”

  “Was this a furnished apartment?”

  “No, they had their own furniture, but they didn’t take it with them. Some friends came around a few days later and moved everything out. Say,” she said, “I’ve got something I saved. Probably isn’t anything, but when I went to clean the bathroom, there was a piece of metal in the bowl. I tried to flush it down but it wouldn’t go. I fished it out and it looked like a bullet. Well, I kept it for a while and then I threw it out with the trash.”

  The officers exchanged chagrined glances.

  “And then,” the woman said, “well, I felt kind of foolish but I went out and got it back before the garbage men came.”

  She handed the detective a battered slug. It looked as though it was a .38 caliber. The crime lab would check the weight and the lands and grooves (vertical ridges and depressions) carved there as it was fired through a particular gun barrel. If they found the suspected weapon, they might be able to prove that the gun had fired this bullet.

  The investigators went over the apartment room by room. A screen door and the living room ceiling bore unmistakable damage from gunfire. The interior stairway leading to the basement of the duplex was stained with what appeared to be blood. The stained area was very small, but there was enough for criminalists to categorize for species and blood type.

  Gene Steinauer talked with other fishermen who had known the victim. One of them came up with an interesting rumor. “I don’t even know if this is true,” the burly fisherman said. “Lots of stories have been flying around since Karsten was killed, but I heard that Karsten and another guy had a savings account together. We do that, you know, so if one partner is up in Alaska on a trip and needs money, the other one can draw it out in Seattle. Anyway, somebody said that after Karsten disappeared, the other guy checked the account—and most of the money was gone.”

  The informant gave Steinauer a hotel address in Ballard. Checking with Karsten’s banking buddy, the detective found that someone had, indeed, taken $750 from the joint savings account on August 11.

  Steinauer talked with officials of the Ballard branch of the victim’s bank. Their records indicated that a man had presented a withdrawal slip, printed with Karsten Knutsen’s name, at the Stoneway branch of the bank. The teller at the Stoneway branch had called them to be sure the money was on deposit in the Ballard branch and then paid the man $750. Bank officials released the original withdrawal slip.

  Steinauer turned the slip over to ID Technician Jack Reid. On the surface, it didn’t seem to be nearly as hopeful a clue as the .38 slug or the blood samples found in the duplex. And they had proved of little help: lab tests could not determine the blood type on the wall of O’Rourke’s apartment. The sample was too small. And the bullet had been too battered and mutilated for the criminalist to say that it was absolutely identical to the .38 slugs taken from the victim’s skull.

  Many hands had undoubtedly touched the withdrawal slip since it left the fingers of the man who withdrew Karsten Knutsen’s savings. Besides that, lifting prints from paper is often difficult, but there is a process using the chemical ninhydrin and heat that can bring up fingerprints left on paper even decades earlier.

  Suspects who have done library research before committing their crimes have occasionally been shocked to learn that their prints or other minuscule crystals or fibers left on pages there helped to identify them.

  Circumstantial evidence linking Dee Dee Sogngaard and Mick O’Rourke with Knutsen’s death was building. But circumstantial evidence probably wasn’t enough to get an arrest warrant for them. That small slip of paper could mean everything.

  While the technicians worked with it, word came back from the Clark County Sheriff’s Office in Las Vegas. Acquaintances of the missing couple said they had taken a trip to the gambling city in early August, and sheriff’s detectives in Seattle had contacted the Nevada authorities for information about that trip.

  Clark County, Nevada, officials now informed the Seattle investigators that Patrick Joseph O’Rourke had married Dee Dee Irma Sogngaard on August 1 in Las Vegas. Dee Dee had listed her age as 25 and O’Rourke said he was 37.

  Mick O’Rourke might not be guilty of murder, but this information indicated he was guilty of bigamy. The detectives had located the third—and current—Mrs. O’Rourke, and she wasn’t Dee Dee Sogngaard. The Seattle woman said she had married O’Rourke the previous March, only six months before, but she hadn’t seen him since May. She had filed for divorce in June. Given Washington State’s three-month waiting period for a final divorce decree, O’Rourke would not have been free to marry Dee Dee on August 1.

  Jack Reid called Chief Tom Nault’s office with some electrifying news. Using ninhydrin, he had been successful in lifting one perfect fingerprint from the bank withdrawal slip used to take the $750 from the account Karsten Knutsen shared with another fisherman. The print belonged to Dee Dee Sogngaard.

  Now the sheriff’s detectives had probable cause to connect Dee Dee to Knutsen’s murder. With Teletype requests to law enforcement officials in the eleven western states, an arrest warrant was disseminated at once for Dee Dee Sogngaard’s arrest on forgery charges.

  There was nothing more the investigators could do, and they had to wait for the elusive couple to turn up. They wanted very much to talk with Dee Dee Sogngaard and Mick O’Rourke, but they knew the elusive couple had almost a month’s head start to vanish.

  Witnesses said that O’Rourke’s 1967 Ford convertible had been loaded until it sagged on its springs when it pulled out of Seattle on August 11. The pair obviously meant to stay clear of the Queen City for a long, long time.

  By monitoring mail and Western Union pickup addresses Dee Dee and Mick provided to friends, Steinauer was able to follow their progress across the United States, but it was little comfort to him to hear about where they had been. As September reached the halfway mark, the trail had meandered eastward across North Dakota, then to Kansas City and into New York State.

  If the investigators had only had access to the Internet (which, of course, was still far in the future) they would have gotten a hit in a small-town newspaper in Crescent City, California. An item on the society page had appeared there in late August of 1969. A candid photo showed a handsome couple standing in front of their highly polished convertible. The part-time society reporter’s headline gushed, “Crescent City Residents’ Kin on Nationwide Tour.”

  Nault, Hartshorn, and Steinauer prepared a dossier on the missing couple for the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., hoping that NCIC’s gigantic clearinghouse for every law enforcement agency in the United States could aid in locating Dee Dee Sogngaard and Mick O’Rourke. On September 14, they also released nationwide Teletype information.

  Three days later, Dave Wooster, resident deputy on exclusive Sanibel Island in Lee County, Florida, answered what appeared to be a routine call. Sanibel Island lies off the west coast of southern Florida along the Gulf of Mexico. The community could be reached only by boat or a bridge whose round-trip toll tab was then six dollars. The heavy toll had usually served to discourage troublemakers and undesirable transients, and the lush island’s serenity was seldom disturbed. But on September 17, Wooster, who owned a motel himself, received a report of a “family fight” in a posh motel a few blocks from his own establishment.

  The deputy entered the unit pointed out by the motel manager, and Wooster knocke
d on the door. It was flung open by the gorgeous blond female occupant of the room. She pointed at the man with her and began screaming hysterically: “He killed a man in Seattle. He murdered him!”

  For a moment or two, the deputy assumed he had walked into the middle of a drunken fight, but this was surely not the usual domestic disturbance. Thinking quickly, Deputy Wooster advised the couple of their rights, obtained waiver-of-rights forms, and read them to the couple. He then had them sign the waivers.

  When they were thoroughly apprised of those rights, he allowed them to talk, and an appalling story poured out.

  Later, Wooster told the King County detectives what he heard. “First, she pointed to him and said he murdered a man in Washington State. And then he said he was glad it was all over because he’d been carrying an awful mental load the past few weeks. They said they had gone to Las Vegas to get married and he had lost all their money gambling.”

  Wooster got an earful. The “bride” wasn’t very happy with her groom for leaving her alone so that he could spend the night in the casino, especially when he hadn’t proved to be either adept or lucky at gambling. She had slept around the clock in Vegas, awakening only once when he came to their room to ask if she had any cash. She’d made the mistake of pointing out the $100 she’d won playing roulette.

  Although their story burst out in almost hysterical dialogue, Wooster began to make sense out of it. After their wedding and the gambling disaster, the couple had apparently returned to Seattle flat broke. They were behind on their rent and on payments for O’Rourke’s pricey Ford Fairlane convertible. And they had no prospects.

  “So when they made it to Seattle,” Wooster continued, “they hatched a plan to get some money. They decided to go to a tavern to pick up some guy, take him to their apartment, and roll him.”

  The male half of the couple told Wooster that he had been smoking marijuana that day, and somehow things got out of hand, and they ended up killing the man his wife had picked up.

  “He said that he shot him, and then she stabbed him several times. They took a savings passbook from the guy’s body and withdrew $700 from his bank account the next day.”