by Ann Rule
Once more, time dragged as Larsen comforted the critically injured woman and tried to assure her that she was going to be okay when he wasn’t so convinced himself that she would be. He estimated that it was about ten minutes before the ambulance arrived.
He asked her what had happened to her, and she gasped, “Steve cut me.”
But she had no answer when Larsen asked her, “Why?” She didn’t know why.
While the wounded woman was being rushed to West Seattle General Hospital, more patrol cars and detectives from the Seattle Police Department’s Homicide Unit sped to the crime scene. John Nichols, Larsen’s partner, arrived first and he moved to guard the door of the apartment where the women had been attacked. He strung yellow tape around the area to protect whatever clues that might be present.
Homicide detectives Richard Schoener and Elmer Wittman reached the apartment a few minutes later, followed by Owen McKenna and George Berger.
They talked with the Russells and other neighbors who were able to identify the tenant who lived there. It was Ruth Coster, a young divorced woman who was only 20 years old. None of them recognized the wounded woman; they had never seen her before.
From information in the two rifled purses, the investigators were quite sure that the bleeding woman was her former sister-in-law, Mallory Gilbert,* 22. They learned from other relatives that Mallory had been staying with Ruth for only a week. That would explain why Dan Russell didn’t know her when she came to his door for help.
Grimacing, Owen McKenna glanced around the gore-stained living room. The leafy pattern on the wallpaper was sprayed with blood droplets that could only have come from medium velocity arterial spray, coupled with larger drops with “tails” that indicated the stabber had lifted the knife again and again as he inflicted more wounds. It looked as if a terrible struggle had taken place there. It seemed eerier, somehow, to see the normal things there too: the phonograph with a 45 rpm Patsy Cline record on the turntable, a small white sneaker, an ashtray, an alarm clock. But the record player’s needle had worn a groove into the record and scratched it deeply, and the other items were scattered on the worn carpet.
Oddly, just as in the bedroom, there was a single empty beer bottle sitting upright on the floor next to a chair. It looked almost as if the assailant or assailants had taken time to drink two beers after the attacks, but before he left Ruth’s apartment. Debbie Marvin estimated that she had heard a man’s voice say “I’m sorry” more than a half hour before she heard the door slam next door.
McKenna had the same thought that Charles Larsen had had: “It’s hard to believe that girl’s still alive when you look at this room.”
“I know,” Berger answered from the bedroom. “But look in here: There’s absolutely no sign of struggle.” He gestured toward the bedside table. The telephone, some trinkets, and even a glass of water rested in place, all of them undisturbed. The covers of the bed were only slightly rumpled. “It looks like she didn’t—or maybe couldn’t—fight back at all.”
Ruth Coster’s body lay facedown as if she were sleeping. The only indication that she might have suffered as she died was her right hand, which was clenched tightly around the edge of the blankets.
The four detectives busied themselves gathering evidence, which they found in abundance. The blood-soaked T-shirt, dress shirt, towel, quilt, and the victim’s sleeping garments were labeled and slipped into plastic evidence bags, while all likely surfaces were dusted for fingerprints.
“You know,” McKenna remarked, “this whole place looks like a normally cluttered apartment after a party—except the living room. That’s a bloody shambles. I don’t see how this victim could have slept through what went on there—unless she was already dead.”
“Yeah,” Berger mused, “and if both women fought him off in the living room, the dead woman would certainly have some bloodstains or cuts on her body. We’ll have to wait for the medical report, but it looks like she’s been strangled and that was all.”
Larsen had told them about what might have been Mallory Gilbert’s deathbed statement. She had managed to tell him that “Steve did it.” And she had referred to him as a friend.
Larsen had also asked her if there had been some kind of a fight in the duplex, but Mallory had said no. She had absolutely no idea what had made their “friend” attack them.
She didn’t know yet that her sister-in-law was dead, and no one was going to tell her in her extremely critical condition. Nor could they question her further; they could only hope that she would live.
She might have been out of her head from loss of blood and shock, but it seemed unlikely that a stranger had broken into the apartment where two young women slept. The back door was bolted from the inside, and the front door locked automatically when it was closed. In November, in a storm, it wasn’t likely that they had left any windows open.
Alcohol had probably played some part in what had happened. Berger counted eighteen empty beer bottles placed next to the small gas range in the kitchen, and there were more around the apartment. There was also a large can of tomato juice on the kitchen floor next to the six-pack containers of drained bottles.
The homicide investigators’ best witness so far was Patrol Officer Charles Larsen. “As close as Larsen could get it,” Wittman said, “the injured woman knew the man who did this. She had been out with him last night. I gathered that she’d known him before—he wasn’t a pickup. I think his name was Steve, and the last name sounded like Maier or Meyer.”
The investigators spent over five hours in the death apartment, taking scores of pictures, gathering evidence. By the time they had finished collecting evidence, there was one man they wanted to talk to, and that was 20-year-old Steven Meyer. But Meyer was gone. Diane Russell had seen a man who matched his description walking away from the duplex next door, but hadn’t though much of it at the time.
While Mallory Gilbert fought gallantly for her life in the hospital’s intensive care unit, deputy medical examiners removed the body of Ruth Coster.
ER physicians worked frantically to save Mallory. She had lost so much blood, and they guessed that she was stretching the limits of the “golden hour” beyond which critically injured patients often go into irreversible shock. The ambulance EMTs had already started a line to keep her veins from collapsing, and now the doctors cross-matched her blood as quickly as they could and started transfusing whole blood. Her skin was chalky white, and it took two quarts—a quarter of the volume of blood in a normal adult woman’s system—before she began to pink up even a little.
Replacement blood, however, does not have the oxygen-carrying properties that a person’s own blood has, and she was in danger of a brain hemorrhage or a stroke.
Life gradually began to take a firmer hold on the brave girl, and though she was still in shock, physicians permitted the detectives to talk with Mallory Gilbert—as long as they promised to keep their questions short.
It was around noon when she was finally able to tell them her chilling story. The lovely gray-eyed brunette, her throat full of stitches and tubes and heavily bandaged, could barely speak above a whisper.
She explained that she and Ruth were both from Yakima, Washington, a medium-sized fruit-growing city about 150 miles southeast of Seattle. They had both known Steve Meyer there, and believed they knew him well. In fact, Mallory said she and Steve had dated for quite a while. Their breakup had been amicable as far as she knew, and Steve was dating someone else back in Yakima.
On Thursday, November 7, Steve and his apartment mate, Dave Romano,* had asked the two girls for a date the following evening. Although Mallory and Steve were no longer dating seriously, she assumed there were no hard feelings: Mallory paired off with Dave Romano while Ruth and Steve were a duo. Since Ruth had a practically new Camaro, she and Mallory drove to the men’s Queen Anne Hill apartment. Then the four of them walked to the nearby Brownie’s Tavern, where they drank beer and reminisced about their school days in Yakima.
; After an hour or so, Ruth offered to cook a late supper for all of them at her apartment. Steve said he’d like that, but Mallory and Dave decided to go back to the men’s apartment to talk and listen to records. Mallory shook her head when George Berger asked her if this was a romantic date for either couple.
“We were all just old friends,” she whispered.
Dave Romano wasn’t used to drinking much beer, and he fell asleep while he and Mallory were listening to records. Mallory watched television by herself, but it wasn’t long before Ruth and Steve returned to the Queen Anne Hill apartment. At that point it was getting late, and the two women just wanted to go home and get to bed, but Steve insisted on accompanying them.
“We didn’t want him to come,” Mallory said, “but he was insistent about it, even though we promised him we’d be back for our date the next day. We finally gave up arguing with him, and he ended up coming back home with us.”
The girls were tired and went to bed while Steve Meyer sat up drinking beer by himself. Ruth slept in the bedroom while Mallory bedded down on the couch, under the patchwork quilt.
They had given Steve a sleeping bag and told him he could sleep on the living-room floor when he got tired enough. They had no fear of him; he was an old buddy. He’d never given Mallory any indication that he had any tendency toward violence.
She fell asleep with the sound of Patsy Cline singing “I go out walkin’ after midnight” in her ears.
Her next recollection was one of shock and disbelief. “I was sleeping facing the back of the couch. I became aware of Steve trying to wake me up, but I was tired and I just wanted to sleep. Then I felt something grab me by the hair and pull my head back. Something sliced across my throat and I felt something warm dripping down on my chest.
“I screamed, ‘Steve!’ and he said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then he cut my throat again. I don’t know how many times he cut me. I remember that I crawled to the front door and somehow I got it unlocked, but I couldn’t get out because he dragged me back.
“The coffee table tipped over. Once, he had my head pinned between his knees and he was still stabbing me. He pushed me down on the couch and strangled me. Then I must have passed out.”
Mallory recalled that she thought she was dying as she lost consciousness. After an interval that she couldn’t begin to estimate, she regained consciousness. She had the impression that Steve wasn’t in the apartment any longer, and she managed to stagger to the bedroom to find Ruth. When she couldn’t rouse Ruth, she crawled next door to the Russells’ for help.
It was the morning of November 9 now, and the detectives listening to Mallory’s story were determined to find Steve Meyer. They visited Dave Romano’s and Meyers’s Queen Anne Hill apartment and roused the still-sleeping Romano. When he heard what had happened to Ruth and Mallory, he looked stunned. He said that as far as he knew, Steve hadn’t come home at all on Saturday, and he had no idea where he might be. It was possible that Meyer had come back to the place they shared while Romano was sleeping, but Romano had no recollection of seeing him.
“This doesn’t sound like Steve,” he muttered over and over. “I’ve known him for a long time and I’ve never even seen him lose his temper. I just can’t believe it.”
“Were there any arguments Friday night?” Berger asked him.
“No—nothing like that. Nobody disagreed with anyone. We just had a good time.”
Through discussions with Mallory Gilbert and Dave Romano, the detectives learned that Steve Meyer was currently dating a Yakima woman named Linda Crousseau.* And that relationship seemed to be going smoothly.
“He’s running—that’s for sure,” Dick Schoener said. “Probably in Ruth Coster’s car. Maybe he’ll head to this woman in Yakima. It sounds like she means quite a bit to him.
“Notify the Yakima police and have them contact Linda Crousseau. If she hears from Meyer, ask them to have her call us right away.”
In the meantime, a bulletin on Ruth Coster’s car was issued to the eleven western states. It was missing from its usual parking place near her apartment, and her keys were gone from her purse. The car was only two years old, a sporty Camaro with a dark top, a beige bottom, and a Washington license plate reading EUW-753. While Ruth’s apartment was tiny and furnished with odds and ends, her car had been her extravagance.
Mallory Gilbert’s doctors were cautiously optimistic that she was going to live, but it would take a long time before she could hope to leave the hospital.
King County Medical Examiner Dr. Gale Wilson conducted the postmortem examination of 20-year-old Ruth Coster. He found that she had died as the result of manual strangulation. Although Officer Charles Larsen had loosened the pink lingerie where it had been cinched tightly around her neck, the finger-shaped bruises on her neck indicated that the actual death weapons had been human hands. Blood vessels had burst in her eyes—tiny petechial hemorrhages which confirmed strangulation.
There were no other marks on her body, and certainly no defense wounds or bruises that would indicate she had tried to fight for her life. Dr. Wilson found no evidence that Ruth had engaged in sexual intercourse before her death, but noted that an act of sodomy had been attempted on her body.
Steve Meyer had many directions in which to run: east to Yakima, which was home; north to the Canadian border, or south to Oregon and California. He had a good car and a few hours’ head start. It would be easier for him to cross state lines than to try to go through customs into British Columbia, where every car was automatically stopped for quick questioning. Seattle authorities had alerted every agency possible, but until the victim’s car was spotted, there was nothing for the detectives to do but keep checking on Meyer’s background and label the evidence they had found.
Later that Saturday afternoon, an Oregon State Police trooper was answering a routine “car in ditch” call 215 miles south of Seattle. Phil Starbuck, assigned to patrol the I-5 freeway south of Salem, Oregon, pulled up behind a fairly new Camaro that was balanced sideways across a shallow ditch beside the freeway. He noted that the car had probably spun several times; there was damage to all four fenders and the front grille was severely crunched. He could discern no obvious damage to the undercarriage, and the car was probably drivable.
But when Trooper Starbuck looked in and around the wrecked car for signs of the driver or passengers, he didn’t find anyone. There was no indication, such as bloodstains, that anyone had sustained injuries in the accident, nor could he find any identification documents in the car.
Starbuck looked up to see an elderly man approaching him. The man said he lived nearby and he had seen the driver of the car crawl out of the wreck and hitch a ride toward Salem. “He shouted at me that he was going for help and he’d be back with a tow truck.”
“Anybody with him?” Starbuck asked.
“No—just the driver. Young guy.”
While Starbuck jotted down pertinent information on the abandoned car, and checked the VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) so he could trace the ownership, the driver was already in a Salem phone booth, making a longdistance collect call to Yakima, Washington. The recipient of the call was Linda Crousseau, the slender blond woman Steve Meyer had been dating before he moved to Seattle.
Linda had already been alerted by Yakima Police. She knew Ruth Coster was dead, but she hadn’t been informed that Mallory Gilbert had been critically wounded.
Linda Crousseau was as shocked as Meyer’s other friends—perhaps more so. Her role was not unlike that of Amber Frey’s in the Laci and Scott Peterson case three decades later. She was in love with Steve Meyer and she believed what he told her, but now something terrible had gone wrong. She was at her father’s sometime after two that Saturday afternoon.
When Steve called her, he told her he was in Salem. She didn’t know where that was, and he told her it was in Oregon.
“Then I asked him, ‘Why did you do it?’—meaning why would he have hurt Ruth—and he just said, ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t k
now that Mallory had been stabbed until he told me, and then I asked him if he knew Ruth was dead and he said, ‘Yes.’ ”
The Seattle detectives later asked Linda if Meyer had told her what happened during the fatal night he spent at Ruth’s apartment. “Yes,” she told them. “He said the girls had been teasing him and saying he was no good because he didn’t have a job.”
Linda urged Steve to contact the detectives or at least call the police in Salem, and he told her that he was going to do that as soon as he hung up the phone: “He said he had already planned to do that.”
Steve Meyer sounded frightened and he cried sporadically during the ten or fifteen minutes she talked with him. Then he suddenly hung up, leaving only a dial tone on the line.
When the telephone rang in the Homicide Unit of the Seattle Police Department shortly before three, Owen McKenna almost didn’t answer it, because their procedure dictated that a current homicide takes precedence over everything else, and detectives weren’t supposed to interrupt their work to answer phones. But McKenna and Schoener were trying to check in the loaded evidence cart from the Coster murder site, and the ringing phone was an annoyance. There weren’t any secretaries working on Saturday afternoon, and there was no one else to pick up the phone.
McKenna sighed and reached for it.
The voice that came over the line electrified him; seeing McKenna’s expression, Dick Schoener paused, too, and raised his eyebrows questioningly. McKenna signaled to him to pick up the line that was lit up, but held his finger to his lips.
“This is Steve Meyer,” the caller began. “Do you know about that thing in West Seattle?”
Cautiously, McKenna answered, “It so happens that I do.”
“I just wrecked the car—”
“Whose car?” McKenna asked.
“Ruth’s car.” There was no question now that this was Meyer.
“Well, what do you want to do?” McKenna asked easily, fearful that Meyer would panic and hang up.