by Ann Rule
Maybe he felt the area was lucky for him, and that it would hide the evidence of his crime forever. He could never give a good reason for it.
Tom Nault, in recalling the investigation, smiled as he mentioned the many “doubters” among the Major Crimes detectives who felt that they would never identify the body, much less find the killer or killers. He praised Gene Steinauer highly for his meticulous investigation and exhaustive legwork in tracing Karsten Knutsen’s life.
Detective Steinauer said only, “My bosses insist on answers. I knew I had to come up with some.”
• • •
Dee Dee’s minimum sentence had never been set, so there was a fairly good possibility she would be out of prison long before Mick O’Rourke was. She must have wished, though, that she had taken the offer of a plea bargain for admitting to second-degree murder.
She had always believed her life would be over before she was 25, and in a way it was. She was transported in the “chain,” a line of prisoners going to the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Dee Dee was a free spirit and a woman whose emotions were sometimes erratic. Prison was exceptionally difficult for her. Things got slightly better when the new women’s facility in Purdy, Washington, was opened. The first ninety-four women prisoners to be housed at Purdy were loaded onto a bus in 1971. If you have to be locked up, Purdy was a lot better facility than Walla Walla was.
But Dee Dee didn’t want to be locked up. After being behind bars for three years, her delicate mind broke in 1972 and she was taken to Western Washington State Hospital in Steilacoom for treatment. Two weeks into her stay, Dee Dee escaped. She managed to stay free for five days, but one of her sisters called Washington authorities to say that Dee Dee was at their parents’ house in California, and she was arrested and returned to prison.
Dee Dee paid a high price for five days of freedom. All of her three years of “good time” were erased and she had to start serving her sentence from scratch again.
She tried to fit within the parameters set for prisoners who got time off for good behavior, although it went against her sometimes stormy temperament. Prisoners got twenty-five cents an hour for doing work around Purdy—gardening, filing, painting. Dee Dee took classes until she had enough credits to earn two associate in arts degrees. But it was the superintendents who determined which prisoners received good-behavior merits, and Dee Dee called one a “drunken bitch.” And not behind her back, giggling with other prisoners, but to her face.
That didn’t bode well for her good-behavior points.
At first, Dee Dee was in a tight group of fellow inmates, women who bonded and looked out for one another. They laughed at the same things, traded what few clothes they had, got to know one another’s families on visitors’ days.
But the other women were all paroled. One by one, they walked out of Purdy, and Dee Dee was left behind. They wrote to her for a while, but she had learned not to get too close to anyone after that because, in the end, she was left alone.
Her two sisters had visited her a few times when she was first in prison, but they gradually stopped coming. Mick O’Rourke was in prison in Walla Walla. Both her parents died, so Dee Dee had no more news about her daughter. She really didn’t have anyone.
Dee Dee felt tremendous guilt over Karsten Knutsen’s murder, although she never admitted to participating in killing him. She called him by his first name—as if he’d been a friend—and grieved that he had never lived to see 25.
For the first sixteen years of her daughter’s life, Dee Dee had sent little presents of toys and clothes she sewed herself, unaware that the child never saw any of them; her adoptive parents stored them in a trunk. At 16, the girl found out who her real mother was and wrote to Dee Dee, complaining that her religious parents were too strict with her. Dee Dee wrote back in her usual combative way, telling the girl that she was “a brat,” that she should be grateful that someone loved her enough to take care of her and worry about her.
She never heard from her daughter again.
She wrote letters to Mick and sometimes he answered. They were three hundred miles apart, but even if they had been free and together, the ghost of Karsten Knutsen would have haunted them.
The photographs Dee Dee kept in her cell of people who had meant something to her began to look dated to anyone who had been in the outside world; the clothes and hairdos were old-fashioned.
Mick’s slicked-down look in the one picture she had of him was right out of the fifties. Sometimes it was difficult to believe they had ever been together.
She hadn’t heard from him in a long time when she sent him a letter in late 1979. It came back to her stamped DECEASED. He had been dead since Christmas Day 1978, and no one had told her. He’d succumbed to diabetes and cancer at the age of 46.
She wasn’t really his wife, but it seemed as though someone should have let her know.
Dee Dee Sogngaard passed through her thirties, and then she was rapidly heading for 50. She finally got her own cell, a huge luxury in prison. She made pets of the tiny tree frogs that were all over the grounds at Purdy and kept dozens of them in her cement-block cell.
Of all the ninety-four women who came to Purdy in that first bus in 1971, Dee Dee would be the last one left, imprisoned for twenty-two years, longer than any woman in the Washington State corrections system. She saw the world outside on rare occasions—during visits to a dentist or doctor.
She was trained to work outside the walls, if she should ever be free, but it seemed that she might die in prison as Mick had when she got breast cancer, especially when she refused chemo treatments.
But Dee Dee survived. In September 1991 she was paroled to a halfway house, where she had guidance as she encountered a world that must have seemed as if she had stepped onto another planet. She took her most precious possessions—her photos and her tree frogs—with her.
Dee Dee Sogngaard spent less than six months with Mick O’Rourke. Together—in greater or lesser degree—they led a man to his violent death. In the end, all three of them saw their pursuit of pleasure end in ashes and blood.
If she is alive, Dee Dee turned sixty years old in 2004. She has been absorbed into the world outside prison walls. Records show she has not reoffended, and that is all I could learn about her. It’s just as well. Both prisoners and guards cried as she walked out of prison, pulling for her to make it in the free world.
What she did was wrong, but she served almost double the time that most male inmates convicted of first-degree murder in the sixties did. She was an elderly woman when she was paroled.
When she walked out of Purdy, she was still slim, but the years had etched her face prematurely. She was a long way from the gorgeous blonde who turned every male head in a cocktail lounge when she walked in.
I have changed Dee Dee’s name; she has paid her debt to society, and any other debts she might still owe are not up to me or to anyone. She sometimes said that prison saved her life, and perhaps it did. I hope she is alive.
Old Flames Can Burn
Television talk shows can always rely on a solid Nielsen rating when the topic concerns the reunion of onetime lovers who have lost touch with one another. The moment of revelation is fascinating to watch: the homecoming queen who has put on forty pounds confronted by the man she dumped when they were teenagers; the couple who have been separated by disapproving families; the man who went off to war and came home to find his girlfriend had married someone else.
Will they reignite the cold ashes of their relationships over a romantic dinner paid for by the talk show host? Have they longed for one another for years? Will the now-successful man be grateful that the onetime beauty queen didn’t want him twenty years earlier?
Even though the viewers may hope for instant romance or just deserts, most of the couples lured in front of the cameras return to their current lives with hardly a ripple. Life goes on and we all mature. High school heroes fade and love cannot be rekindled so easily. The most we
can hope is that we still have anything at all in common with the people we knew in our teenage years, especially if we’ve moved away to a different city, where careers make school days seem only a distant memory.
But disappointment, new perceptions of reality, and the dashing of rosy hopes that dating after many years is going to end like the lyrics of a love song usually aren’t fatal.
In the following case, it was.
Fourteen-year-old Debbie Marvin* was visiting her older sister, Mrs. Diane Russell,* on the Friday night of November 8, 1968. She always looked forward to visiting her sister and brother-in-law in their cute little duplex apartment near Alki Beach in West Seattle. She didn’t mind at all that she had to sleep on a couch in the living room. Teenagers can sleep anywhere, and Debbie was no exception.
She, her sister, and her brother-in-law had been out that evening, returning to their apartment shortly before eleven P.M. Her sister gave Debbie bedding and a pillow for her couch-bed, and the three retired. The couch was located about three feet from the front door, and against the wall that divided the two units of the duplex. She stayed awake awhile, watching the headlights of approaching cars sweep across the ceiling and listening to the faint sound of records and muffled conversation from the adjacent apartment, although she couldn’t really make out what people were saying. She finally drifted off to sleep.
Debbie had planned to sleep in on Saturday morning, but something woke her early, around 6:30 A.M. The sun wasn’t up yet and, sleep-dazed, she thought that it was still night and that she was hearing records again from next door.
But then she heard sounds of bumping and banging against the wall, as if some heavy object was being slammed against it. The force was enough to shake the couch she lay on.
Suddenly, she froze as she heard a woman’s voice scream—just once. Hardly breathing as she strained to listen, Debbie heard a male voice say, “I’m sorry.”
And then she relaxed. She was just overhearing a family fight. She didn’t know who lived next door, and nobody else in her sister’s house even woke up. Things were quiet next door now, so she turned over and went back to sleep, not anxious to get up in the dark before dawn.
Sometime later, Debbie heard the door to the neighboring apartment open and shut. By this time her sister was up and working in the kitchen. She had finished fixing breakfast for her husband, Dan, who had to work that weekend. She glanced at the clock to see if she was on schedule. It was 7:10 A.M.
Diane heard the front door of the next apartment slam closed too. Staring out through the window in the rain-washed morning light, she saw a young man leave her next-door neighbor’s apartment and walk down the street toward Admiral Way. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry and there was nothing unusual about him.
Diane knew Ruth Coster,* the woman who lived next door, but not very well. They were both in their early twenties, and they chatted once in a while as they picked up their mail or worked in the yard. But she hadn’t even seen Ruth for about two weeks. That wasn’t unusual, especially in the winter, because they both had jobs.
Absently, she noticed that the man leaving was young, white, and had light hair. He looked to be about six feet tall and in good condition. But she wouldn’t be able to pick him out from other men who matched the same general description. Her neighbor had apparently had a male visitor stay overnight—and that was unusual.
While Dan finished eating, Diane Russell continued to work in her kitchen, stacking dishes to drain, sweeping the floor, and putting out milk and cereal for her little sister.
In the living room, Debbie was wide awake now. The voices and then the door’s slamming had made more sleep impossible, and she was at the point of deciding to get up and eat breakfast with her brother-in-law when she heard more sounds coming from next door. The wall between the two units wasn’t particularly thin, but noises carried easily through the heat registers. This time the sounds were kind of scary. She strained to hear what seemed to be moans. She started to call her sister to come and listen when she heard a voice at the front door and a feeble knock.
Dan Russell went to the door. “I answered the knock on the door—it must have been 7:15 A.M. or so,” he recalled. “I found a female there. I didn’t know who she was, but she was sitting down on the front steps. I could see blood in the front room next door, too, through the open door.”
Russell was shocked at the condition of the woman on his porch. He could barely see her face because she was “dripping blood.” Her nose might have been broken, but he got the impression that her whole face had been “bashed in.”
“I couldn’t tell for sure where the blood was coming from,” he recalled, “but some was from her nose.
“I called to my wife to stay inside and I stepped out and shut the door and locked it. I saw a sleeping bag in the living room next door so I got that and covered the girl with it. We didn’t have a phone and I ran next door to Mr. McNeill’s house to call for help, then came back to the girl. When an ambulance and police didn’t come right away, I got worried. I told the girl I was going for help and I got in my car and drove to meet the police. I met them a block away. I guess the girl didn’t understand me because she got up and somehow made it across the yard to Mr. McNeill’s house.”
Ralph McNeill,* whose home was next door to the duplex, wouldn’t ordinarily have been home at 7:30 in the morning as his railroad job required him to be away most weekends. But November 9 was his day off. He was as shocked as Dan Russell had been by his first glimpse of the stricken girl.
He saw that a young woman was half-crawling, half-staggering toward his house with hands holding her throat. He noticed that she wore slacks and a blouse, and that they were completely saturated with blood, both in the front and the back.
“She was a pretty bloody mess,” McNeill said. “Her face was covered with blood too. It was hard to tell where she was wounded. For some reason, I got the impression that her throat was wounded but I couldn’t tell how bad because her hair hung down over her neck. She was still actively bleeding, but not too heavily, it seemed. I sat her down on the porch, and then the police car arrived.”
Officer Charles E. Larsen was working without a partner on First Watch, and he was the initial officer to respond to the call for aid. He spotted the wounded woman sitting on the McNeill porch and wheeled his squad car to the curb, jumping out of his car and running toward her without shutting the door. He could see already that she had multiple wounds and that her clothing was soaked with scarlet blood. Knowing it would be like a finger in a dike, Larsen turned back to grab his first aid kit.
“I saw she was wounded—slash wounds around the neck that seemed to be knife wounds. I put gauze compresses on her neck but I couldn’t completely stop the bleeding. I asked her who hurt her, and she said, ‘My friend. He cut me and hurt me.’ Then she said, ‘I think he hurt my girlfriend too. I couldn’t wake up my girlfriend.’ ”
Larsen knew an ambulance was right behind him, and he left the wounded woman with Ralph McNeill and raced to the duplex apartment with its door standing open. He saw the large pool of blood on the porch and the bloodied sleeping bag Dan Russell had used to cover the woman.
Larsen, of course, had no idea what had happened or how many people were still inside the apartment. He drew his service revolver and entered the apartment. There was a couch against the west wall with a bloody quilt, and large pools of coagulating blood on the floor. It was difficult to believe that one woman could have bled so much and still be alive.
The white Formica coffee table in front of the couch was knocked over and he saw two women’s purses, their contents spilling out, open on the floor.
Cautiously, Larsen walked toward the duplex’s single bedroom. “I saw a figure on the bed with the blankets pulled up over the head,” Larsen said. “About three-quarters of the head and the right arm showed.”
He had no idea if it was a male or female in the bed, but he couldn’t stop to check until he scoped out the rest of the apa
rtment to be sure that there was no one hiding there. The tiny kitchen was empty. Absently, Larsen noted a number of beer bottles on the counter. He found the back door was locked, the bolt slid into place from the inside. There was a little bathroom that opened off the bedroom. That was empty too.
Now Larsen turned back toward the bed. As he pulled the blanket down, he saw another young woman who was lying facedown on the bed. There was no blood here at all, but the woman lay so quietly. The officer saw that she had a piece of pink lingerie twisted tightly around her neck. Carefully, he loosened it with his finger, but he felt no reassuring pulse in the carotid artery in her neck.
“Her right arm was hanging down,” Larsen said, “and her fingers were cold. There was no pulse in the wrist.”
She looked so young that he wasn’t ready to give up. “I put my ear to her back and listened for a heartbeat,” he said quietly. “There was none.”
There was nothing more he could do for the dead woman. Larsen then checked the apartment more thoroughly. “There was a stained pink towel soaking in the bathroom sink and a T-shirt and dress shirt—both of them bloody and sopping wet—on the floor along the bathroom wall.”
He looked at the old-fashioned patchwork quilt on the couch and saw the blade of a knife, about eight inches long, its handle broken. It was heavily stained with blood.
Larsen felt as if he were walking through a nightmare. Even though only three or four minutes had passed, it seemed to him that he’d been in the apartment with the dead woman for hours.
“My main concern was for the wounded woman,” he said. “I shut the door of the murder apartment and ran back to her. The front door was directly in my line of sight all the time I was with her, and I could observe it to see if anyone went in or out. No one did.”