by Ann Rule
The couple told Wooster that they had removed all their victim’s clothing and then took the body to a remote area in Woodinville, Washington.
Both of them had been extremely eager to talk to Wooster. They even told him who they were: Mick O’Rourke and Dee Dee Sogngaard. In fact, Dee Dee wrote down her name and drew a little map of the area in Woodinville where they’d left their victim’s body, adding the date they killed the man on the back of one of the waiver forms.
When he realized he was dealing with two murder confessions instead of a simple domestic squabble, Wooster contacted his superior officers. Ed Jones, Investigator for the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, and Captain Ted Smith, night supervisor of the Patrol Division, sped to Sanibel Island.
Although a “want” notice on the two hadn’t been received yet in their southern Florida location, they tended to believe that the shapely blonde and her handsome traveling companion were telling the truth. If they’d started out in Seattle, they had literally run from one coast to the other. If they hadn’t run out of cash, they might have driven south of Miami to the Florida Keys, but they would soon have run out of road there—just as they had on Sanibel Island.
They had trapped themselves in their frantic attempt to elude police. Sanibel was no place where someone could get lost; it was too small. And they clearly no longer enjoyed each other’s company. Conscience, alcohol, too much togetherness, and recriminations made for an incendiary combination. Their nerves were frayed raw. Each of them pointed at the other as the guilty party.
Before the team of detectives removed the couple to the Lee County jail, Mick O’Rourke had voluntarily gone out to his Ford convertible and reached under the front seat of the car—while, of course, the Lee County detectives kept their guns pointed at him. He came up with his own weapon—.38 revolver—but he didn’t point it at them. He gave to them quite meekly.
Dee Dee’s purse held a partly opened switchblade knife.
At the sheriff’s headquarters, the Lee County men learned that Mick O’Rourke had not picked the Sanibel Island retreat by accident: at one time he had lived in nearby Fort Myers and sold insurance there. That might explain his choice of destination, but he surely couldn’t have expected to go back into the insurance business.
By the time they were booked into the Lee County jail, the couple had a scant $200 left of the savings account nest egg that Karsten Knutsen had worked so hard to build up. That wouldn’t have lasted them very long at the rate they were spending money.
The Lee County Sheriff’s Office contacted the NCIC at once and asked that a message be relayed to the King County Department of Public Safety regarding a possible “want” on Mick O’Rourke and Dee Dee Sogngaard. The nerve center of all law enforcement communication in the country sent back the word: “King County wants them. Hold for further communication.”
Tom Nault and Gordon Hartshorn left the next day for the long flight to Florida. There they expressed their appreciation to the Lee County officers for the apprehension of the much wanted suspects. Investigator Lee Jones handed over some very valuable items of evidence, the most important being the .38.
Mick O’Rourke gave a written statement admitting that he had killed Karsten Knutsen. Without fighting extradition, the prisoners boarded a plane for Seattle with Nault and Hartshorn. They smoked continually on the flight, and Dee Dee managed to cause panic on an otherwise uneventful flight by “accidentally” igniting a whole pack of matches as she sat next to Tom Nault. She blamed it on her nervousness, but after that either Nault or Hartshorn lit her cigarettes for her.
In her early statements, Dee Dee told detectives her first version of what had happened the night Karsten Knutsen died. She admitted that she was the bait to get Knutsen to leave the first bar with her. Mick joined them later in an apparently coincidental meeting, she said, and the trio hit a number of bars as the potential victim became more and more intoxicated.
At that point, she said Mick invited Knutsen to come to their apartment to smoke dope. After some time there, Mick left the room while Dee Dee allowed Knutsen to kiss her as they sat on the couch.
But then Mick came from the bedroom holding his gun and he crept up behind the victim and attempted to knock him out by smashing his head with the .38.
“I reached up to stop him,” Dee Dee said, “and he broke my hand with the gun.”
It was at that point, she said, that Mick O’Rourke announced that he intended to kill Knutsen and told her to get some clothesline they had in the bedroom to tie him up. She refused, and she said Mick then fired the gun twice at her. The slugs ended up in the wall of their apartment.
The King County detectives knew that. They’d found the fragments left in the wall.
Dee Dee said she had begged Mick not to kill the drunken fisherman, but she’d been terrified when he shot at her and she’d responded meekly to what he ordered her to do. She had left the apartment then to go to Karsten’s apartment and get his bankbook. When she came back, she saw that he was unconscious.
She continued to plead with Mick not to go through with his plan. “I said, ‘Please don’t kill him, Mick!’ ”
But he carried Karsten to the trunk of his car and forced her to accompany him as he drove to Woodinville. “We were on this deserted road when he stopped. He got out and opened the trunk,” she said, “and I heard three shots.”
After that, O’Rourke drove directly to a car wash so he could rinse Karsten Knutsen’s blood out of the trunk.
As they awaited trial for more than five months, Dee Dee Sogngaard and Mick O’Rourke each revised their memories of the events of August 10. They no longer wanted to be tried together. Their separate defense attorneys asked Superior Court Judge James W. Mifflin to detach their trials. By agreement with King County Chief Deputy Prosecutor C. N. “Nick” Marshall, and both the defense attorneys, Mifflin pronounced that Dee Dee and Mick could be tried separately. They would face two different juries in consecutive trials. Judge Mifflin would officiate at both trials.
Dee Dee was given a chance to plea bargain. Her attorneys urged her to accept it. If she would plead guilty to second-degree murder, she might be out of prison in ten years or maybe even less. At the time, most life sentences for first-degree murder in Washington State ended up being thirteen years and four months.
But Dee Dee was adamant. She insisted that she would not plead guilty to anything because she had nothing to do with Karsten Knutsen’s murder.
Dee Dee Sogngaard’s trial was first. It began on February 4, 1970.
Nick Marshall, who was a former FBI agent, was known for his devastating cross-examinations, and he had prepared a tight case against the defendants. Gene Steinauer, who had devoted untold hours to successfully tracking down Karsten Knutsen’s killers, sat at the prosecution table next to the red-haired prosecutor during all court sessions as a consultant.
Dee Dee Sogngaard looked very young and quite innocent, her blond hair grown out to its natural light brown, her eyes downcast. She wore a pastel short-sleeved sheath with white trim at the modest neckline. Dee Dee bore a striking resemblance to actress Lola Albright, who was familiar at that time to most television viewers as a frequent costar on Peter Gunn.
Dee Dee looked drawn and wan as she took the witness stand in her own defense to recount the events of the previous August. Speaking in a whispery voice, she told the jury about her life. She related that she had been sexually molested, and that her parents had abused her. The parental abuse had been too many slaps in the face or spankings with a strap that left red welts. She felt that she could never do anything to please them, particularly her father.
She’d begun to drink at the age of 15 and it softened the rough edges of her life. But it only accelerated Dee Dee’s talent for picking the wrong men to love. She was soon pregnant, but there was no likelihood that she would be getting married: her boyfriend had impregnated three other girls within a two-month period and he didn’t want to marry any of them.
Whe
n she revealed her pregnancy to him, Dee Dee’s father threw her out of his house. She had no skills to earn a living for herself and her baby girl. She loved her baby, but she longed to regain the important years she’d lost and she realized she couldn’t support the child, anyway. She put her daughter up for adoption.
Giving up her baby was much harder than she thought it would be. Dee Dee had the first of several “nervous breakdowns,” and was hospitalized. She said she had been given shock treatments during that time. She may have; it was often used in mental hospitals in the forties and fifties.
When she was released, Dee Dee headed north to Seattle to start a new life in a city as different from her hometown as she could find. And it was. Rain instead of sunshine, and a great deal more nightlife. It wasn’t long before she was hanging out in cocktail lounges and bars. She had no trouble meeting men; Dee Dee was soft and sexy-looking and they were drawn to her.
It seemed inevitable that Dee Dee would add drugs—mostly marijuana—to her penchant for alcohol, and by the time she was in her early twenties, she went from depending on boyfriends for money to prostitution.
Dee Dee, was, in reality, “right out of central casting,” and so were the men she was attracted to when she sought real romance. She wasn’t unintelligent, but she was a fatalist, and a pessimistic fatalist at that. She really didn’t imagine a life for herself after 25 because she was sure she’d be dead by then. She lived life by the old adage “Live fast, die young, and make a good-looking corpse.” She was drinking, smoking, and drugging too much.
To her surprise, she was still alive at 24, and that was when she met Mick O’Rourke. She was a little drunk, a little high from hashish, when she walked into the Ballard bar where O’Rourke was mixing drinks. He was a dozen years older than she was, which might have been part of the instant attraction she felt. He was very handsome, with his cleft chin and his sleek hair combed into waves ending in a “duck’s tail.” When he glanced at her as he poured drinks, smoke curling from the cigarette in his mouth, Dee Dee melted.
He helped her get a job as a cocktail waitress in the lounge where he worked. She soon found out he had been in prison in California for armed robbery and wasn’t averse to anything it took to make some money. It didn’t matter to her; she was besotted with him. Whether she knew he had just married his third wife a short time before is questionable.
Dee Dee was hooked, and she was willing to do whatever it took to stay with Mick. Everything about him was flashy and exciting and dangerous. When he asked her to move into his apartment, she knew it didn’t matter that he had a wife somewhere in his life. She assumed he had divorced the woman or had it annulled—or something. She was definitely out of the picture, anyway.
They drove to California so Dee Dee could introduce him to her family. She had never gotten over trying to be what her father wanted her to be, and the more she tried, the more he disapproved of her. Her mother and her two sisters at least tried to keep the family together, and her mother kept track of where Dee Dee’s daughter was and how she was doing.
But none of them was impressed with Mick O’Rourke. He struck them as a “hood” and a “lowlife,” which was fairly accurate. Although he could be charming and glib, they saw through him.
This only motivated Dee Dee to get more deeply involved with O’Rourke: one way to get attention from her family was to do exactly what they disapproved of. She was more determined than ever to marry Mick.
Whether she approached Karsten Knutsen on the night he was killed with a frank offer of sex for money, or let him think she was inviting him home for a night of pleasure, only Mick and she knew. On the witness stand, she admitted that she and O’Rourke had planned that she would take the victim to their apartment. They were hungry and broke.
But Dee Dee said, as she had before, that she had never intended for Knutsen to die; she thought she was only going to get him so stoned or drunk that she and O’Rourke could take his money. Then they could take him out and leave him someplace in Ballard where he would wake up with a hangover and empty pockets.
“I never stabbed him,” she said fervently, although one of O’Rourke’s earlier statements said that she had. “There is no way that I had anything to do with that murder . . . .
“I begged Mick not to shoot Karsten,” Dee Dee told the jury. “I was afraid he would shoot me too.”
In her trial, she denied that the fisherman had been shot in their apartment. Instead, she now said that O’Rourke had forced him into the trunk of his convertible before they drove to the spot in Woodinville where Knutsen was found. “Mick shot him while he was in the trunk of the car after we got to Woodinville. I waited in the car while Mick hid his body.”
With every retelling, Dee Dee was distancing herself from the murder of Karsten Knutsen.
Dee Dee discussed her “wedding” in Las Vegas, saying that she knew it wasn’t legal but they had gotten married just to spite her father for criticizing her judgment.
The cross-country “honeymoon” financed by the victim had, in Dee Dee’s current view, been a terror trail for her. She testified that she stayed with Mick O’Rourke only because she feared for her life.
Dee Dee sat with eyes averted as Deputy Dave Wooster related to the court the statements given him on the previous September 17. They did not jibe with what she had just testified to.
After only three days of testimony, the case against Dee Dee Sogngaard was given to the jury. They adjourned to the jury room to deliberate at four P.M. and returned at eleven. The verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree.
Dee Dee appeared stunned as she was handcuffed and led back to jail.
The next day, another jury was selected. Now Mick O’Rourke sat at the defense table, and faced the new jurors. O’Rourke’s story about Karsten Knutsen’s murder had undergone massive changes. Although his memory of the murder had been precise and detailed in September, he couldn’t remember the killing at all when he came to trial.
O’Rourke testified that he remembered nothing between the time he began to smoke a marijuana cigarette on the night of August 10 and the next morning when he woke up in the apartment he shared with Dee Dee. All he knew was that he felt vaguely “guilty” the next morning.
He said that he had been concerned when he found a bloodstained revolver and a switchblade knife in the bedroom, but it hadn’t triggered his memory. He said that he had consumed vodka, beer, and narcotics on the day of the murder, and thought that might explain his blackout.
Mick’s attorney submitted that O’Rourke’s knowledge of the murder of Karsten Knutsen had come almost entirely from what Dee Dee Sogngaard told him about what had happened.
Asked about his alleged plan to rob Knutsen after the victim was lured to Mick and Dee Dee’s apartment, the defendant said he didn’t remember that, either.
Any number of defendants have tried the “complete loss of memory” approach in trials, but it seldom works. Prosecutor Nick Marshall reminded the jury that voluntary intoxication is not a valid defense. Even if someone has a blackout after he chooses to drink or take drugs, that does not release him from culpability.
Marshall pointed out the beneficial aspects of O’Rourke’s “amnesia.” The timing was convenient, since the defendant’s memory was perfect right up until the so-called murder plot began, and it had returned as clear as ever—after the body had been disposed of. Marshall suggested that O’Rourke’s gambling losses in Las Vegas made robbery the most likely motive for murder. He reminded the jurors that Dee Dee Sogngaard and Mick O’Rourke had known where to find Knutsen’s bankbook, and that they had each practiced forging his signature before they cleaned out his savings account.
The fisherman’s brutal death was only part of a well-thought-out, premeditated plan.
Mick O’Rourke’s jury deliberated for seven hours. They had listened to his passionate plea from the witness stand—“I am very sorry for what happened: nobody’s life is worth a few dollars”—but in light of the State�
��s case, they were not impressed. They found O’Rourke guilty of first-degree murder.
On February 25, 1970, Dee Dee Sogngaard and Mick O’Rourke appeared before Judge Mifflin for sentencing. They were both sentenced to up to life in prison. Judge Mifflin recommended a twenty-year minimum term for O’Rourke, but no minimum recommendation was made for Dee Dee.
Although they had fought bitterly at the end of their long journey to Florida, and betrayed each other in their testimony, they now looked at each other tenderly, as if none of that had happened.
As they left the courtroom after sentencing, Dee Dee spotted a news photographer and called, “Are you going to take pictures?”
The lensman nodded.
“Wait,” she said, “take us together!”
Smiling, like the bride she never quite got to be, she leaned close to a worried-looking O’Rourke. Despite their handcuffs and the uniformed deputies behind them, they still made a great-looking couple.
Apparently, Dee Dee had forgotten her fear-filled “honeymoon” and realized suddenly that she and Mick were about to be separated for a very long time.
Then their smiles faded. Mick O’Rourke still looked dapper in this dark suit, pristine white shirt, and striped tie, his wavy hair gleaming. But his face had already taken on the yellow white of prison pallor and he did not appear cheerful as he contemplated two decades of prison.
• • •
One bizarre psychological aspect of the crime that came out as I discussed the Karsten Knutsen case with detectives was the possible reason behind O’Rourke’s choice of a dump site for the too-trusting fisherman.
They showed me a photograph of a fir tree growing next to the country road O’Rourke had taken to the Woodinville field. It stood only a few yards from the body site, and its trunk was marred with old, partially healed-over scars where a car had crashed into it, gouging it deeply.
Exactly one year and ten days before Karsten Knutsen’s murder, Mick O’Rourke had had an accident on that spot. He could easily have been killed as he left the road and hit the tree head-on. Why, of all the hundreds of thousands of areas O’Rourke could have chosen to hide a body, did he return to the scene of that accident that might have taken his own life?