by Ann Rule
Still, he knew where she worked, and he checked often for her car in the store parking lot so he would know what shift she was working. Although Kaitlyn and Wayne had no contact after the strangulation attempt, she always knew he was around, watching her.
He made sure she did. When she got to her car, she froze as she found things he’d placed inside. He still had a key. He left her flowers and candy. He even put a television set in the backseat. And there were always his notes in which he begged her to come back to him. Together, they had once collected fifty-cent pieces. Now she saw that he had balanced a row of the coins on her dashboard.
When the coins appeared on her car while it was parked in the lot of her new apartment, she was filled with dread. That meant Wayne knew where she lived. It was eerie: even though he had stopped trying to approach her directly, he knew where she lived.
Kaitlyn talked to the apartment house managers, a couple in their fifties, and asked if she could have a parking space in sight of their windows. They agreed at once, and gave her a spot close to their apartment and also to the front door. They promised to watch her car and to keep an eye out for anyone prowling around.
On her twentieth birthday, Kaitlyn had the locks changed on her car, an expense she could ill afford. But at least Wayne couldn’t get into it and leave notes and gifts. Although she didn’t tell anyone else because they might think she was paranoid, she was actually afraid he might hide inside to surprise her. He might even put a bomb in her car.
Thwarted when his key didn’t open her car’s doors, he started to leave presents in her sister’s car or on her family’s doorstep. There was a huge mirror and a pair of earrings for her birthday. On what would have been their first anniversary, he left a large carton on her parents’ porch. She was afraid to open it.
Wayne had huge arrangements of flowers delivered to the store where she worked. She gave them away to other employees. The very sight of them frightened her.
Kaitlyn felt almost as trapped as she had been when she was living with Wayne. He simply would not let her go; everywhere she went, there were reminders that he was following her, watching her, waiting for her. He didn’t call because he hadn’t been able to get her number. She wasn’t sure why he no longer confronted her, but she feared he would when she least expected him.
Kaitlyn had asked her manager at Safeway to assign her to continually changing shifts, so that her comings and goings were difficult to chart. When she left work, she always arranged to be accompanied to her car by a fellow employee. Before they even left the store, she checked the parking lot to see if one of the three cars Wayne had access to was parked there. In some ways, Wayne was like a ghost. She never actually saw him, although she sensed that he was often around. She realized that people were going to think she was crazy, but she could feel his presence, and the little hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stood up and she shivered as if a rabbit had run over her grave.
Kaitlyn did her grocery shopping at the store, and then she drove directly home. She parked in front of the managers’ apartment, glanced around, and then sprinted for the front door of the building. The front doors of the apartment house could be opened only with a key, and then the dead-bolt lock slid into place immediately when the heavy glass doors closed behind her. She felt safe only when she was inside the lobby. There were no apartments opening off the lobby—just the stairs leading down to the basement floor and to the upper levels.
Kaitlyn didn’t dare get in the elevator for fear Wayne might be waiting inside. Instead, she ran up the stairs to her third-floor apartment and double-bolted that door behind her. Only then could she take in a deep breath and try to relax.
It wasn’t any way to live, but she had no choice. Short of moving away from Seattle completely to a strange state where she knew no one, the “secret” apartment seemed the safest plan.
• • •
Kaitlyn had dinner with her sister’s family on Sunday, June 18. The question of Wayne came up, as it always did now. She was adamant when she told her sister and brother-in-law that she hadn’t changed her feelings about Wayne at all. She was going ahead with the assault suit against him, and planned to give an affidavit on June 26.
On June 21, a Wednesday night and the first day of summer, Kaitlyn worked at the store until 11:15. There was a light rain falling as she walked out to the parking lot with another clerk, who would recall that Kaitlyn seemed to be feeling secure in her belief that Wayne was nowhere around. She got into her car, clicked the locks, and tooted her horn lightly to let her friend know she was okay as she drove off into the rainy June night, her car disappearing into the mist.
Her neighbors at the apartment house on Bothell Way and N.E. 148th were snug inside. Some had gone to bed, some were watching the Johnny Carson show, and one man was switching the channels back and forth between watching the extra innings of the Seattle Mariners’ baseball game and The Odd Couple.
Kaitlyn’s cousin was getting ready for bed. She expected Kaitlyn to be home just before midnight as she always was when she worked the late shift. At 11:45, her cousin was washing her face when she heard several “banging” sounds. She turned off the water, listened, and heard only silence. Given their circumstances, she was frightened and she checked the apartment door to see if it was locked. It was, and she went to bed, although she would soon waken to loud pounding on her door.
At the same time that she heard the loud sounds, the man who’d been watching the Mariners game was especially watchful of the parking lot. Someone had looted his truck recently, taking his work tools and his stereo. He noticed a green Mustang with a black vinyl top make a U-turn in the center driveway in the west end of the lot. It was going too fast for a parking lot. He watched as it exited at the south end and zipped across Bothell Way.
Some minutes later, he looked out the window again when he heard a car door slam. He saw a girl wearing a yellow smock and dark slacks walking briskly toward the apartment entrance. He recognized her as one of the occupants of a third-floor apartment.
As the girl left his line of vision, he heard what he took to be firecrackers exploding in rapid succession. He mused to himself that the girl in the yellow smock must have been frightened at the noise, as she would have been just inside the entrance at that point.
He looked outside again and saw the same green Mustang drive onto Bothell Way with its lights out.
Other residents had heard the loud pops reverberating in the night, and they, too, had seen the Mustang with its lights out accelerate and disappear onto the main street. The night was quiet again, and they had returned to their dreams or TV sets when they were distracted by the wail of sirens in the distance, growing louder and louder as they approached.
The apartment building’s managers had heard the popping sounds too. Together, they had run to the top of the stairs that led down into the small lobby. The husband reached the stairs first, looked down, and signaled to his wife that she must not come any closer.
“Go back! Don’t look,” he cried, “Call an aid car—quick!”
Then he ran to the girl who lay facedown just at the top of the stairs. He recognized her at once as the young woman who lived on the third floor with her cousin. He knelt beside her, saw the blood welling up from several holes in her yellow smock. In shock, he wondered how she could have torn it in so many places.
She was alive, moving feebly and making sounds.
“We’ll get help,” he promised. “Help’s on the way.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. He looked beyond her down the stairs to the double glass doors and saw that the glass was shattered in several places and the frame was bent and twisted. Still, his mind could not comprehend what had happened.
He bent over the young woman, helpless to do anything for her but mutter words of comfort.
She didn’t hear him. She would never hear anything again, and none of the expertise of the aid crew that arrived within minutes could do anything to save her. She had been sho
t in vital organs and she had rapidly bled out.
Kaitlyn Merriam was dead, cut down with a barrage of bullets even though she’d reached the “safety” of the apartment house lobby. Indeed, she had almost made it to the top of the stairs and with two more steps could have rounded the corner, putting a wall between herself and the gunman.
The first deputies who responded to the murder scene cordoned off the parking lot and the apartment’s lobby and steps. Now it was up to the King County Sheriff’s Major Crimes Unit to sort out what had happened. Detective Sergeant Harlan Bollinger, and Detectives Donna Nolan, Frank Atchley, Ben Colwell, and Bob Keppel arrived at the apartment house.
Colwell and Atchley photographed the scene, capturing the slender body that rested at the top of the stairs on film. Then they drew an outline in chalk around it on the bloodstained carpet. The other investigators fanned out in the complex to try to find witnesses while Keppel surveyed the scene.
Bob Keppel—who would one day be known as Dr. Robert Keppel, co-lead investigator into the Ted Bundy murders, consultant to the Green River Murder Task Force, and a university instructor in the investigation of homicides—was a young detective on the night Kaitlyn Merriam died.
Keppel counted ten bullet holes in the glass front doors and in the frame of the doors. The shooter had been an expert marksman. Seven of the holes were in the entry door, piercing the word Push. The highest hole was five feet five and a half inches from the sidewalk—the lowest three feet three and a half inches.
The gunman had aimed well.
Detective Donna Nolan assisted Keppel as he measured the site from triangulation points. Long after Kaitlyn’s body was removed, they would be able to tell exactly where she had fallen, how far she was from the shooter, and where he—or she—had stood.
The two investigators collected the copper jackets and slugs that lay scattered around the lobby and on the stairs and bagged them into evidence. The small area looked like a shooting gallery.
The dead girl lay on her back now, with her head tilted to the side. Her beige purse lay against a wall. It wouldn’t be difficult to determine who she was. Her Safeway smock had a name tag pinned to it: Kaitlyn.
Keppel gently took the keys from her hand and tested them on the front door. He found that one did open the front doors, and saw that they were designed to immediately swing shut and lock after someone passed through, so that no one could slip in afterward.
He checked the bullet holes in the glass door. By looking at the wavy pattern along the broken edges, he could establish the direction of fire. All of the bullets had been fired from the outside in.
The dead girl had clearly made it into the building and was climbing the stairs as her killer stood just outside the doors, firing methodically as she’d tried to outrun the gunfire. She had had nowhere to run but downstairs or upstairs, and she probably had chosen not to be trapped in the basement if the shooter followed her through the shattered door.
It would have been like shooting fish in a barrel.
At this point, the detectives could detect four wounds—three in her back and one in her arm. An autopsy would give a more definite answer on the number of times she had been hit.
Dr. Robert Eisele, King County deputy medical examiner, arrived to check the victim and to oversee the removal of her body. Bob Keppel made arrangements to secure the doors for evidence. Apartment dwellers would have to leave by the rear exit until they were thoroughly processed. He retrieved the remaining evidence—Kaitlyn’s purse and her keys.
The bullets appeared to have come from a .30-caliber M1 rifle, a most accurate weapon commonly used by the military.
Kaitlyn Merriam’s family had received word that she had been shot, and they rushed to her apartment building, only to be told that they could not enter while the detectives were processing the scene. Her sister waited there. Detectives had broken the news that Kaitlyn was dead, and she fought back hysteria as the investigators questioned her gently.
“Do you know anyone who drives a green Mustang, or anyone who might have wanted to kill Kaitlyn?”
“You’d better believe I do,” she said quickly. “Wayne—Wayne Merriam . . . her husband. That’s one of his cars, and he was hounding my sister, stalking her.”
It was 5:15 A.M. when the probers met to coordinate their information on the case. The victim’s full name was Michelle Kaitlyn Merriam, born in May of 1958; she had been barely 20 when she died. The suspect was Wayne A. Merriam, who was seven months older.
The detectives quickly found the last three addresses for Merriam. His driver’s license picture showed a thin man with a short beard. They had his car descriptions and his license numbers.
“Seattle Police have checked with Merriam’s parents,” Sergeant Bollinger said. “They haven’t seen him all day. They have a cabin on Stampede Pass and think he might have headed there. He had a good friend who lived right across the street from the victim’s apartment house, and another friend over in Bellevue who’s been taking him to church for counseling.”
In the early-morning hours, detectives drove to the new house that Wayne Merriam had insisted on buying, the one where he moved in without Kaitlyn. There was no one there, but they saw that the house itself obviously hadn’t been lived in. The garage had a bed, dresser, and some mens’ clothing on hangers.
“This is where he’s been living,” one of the investigators commented. “Odd—when he has a whole new house to live in.”
Ben Colwell and Bob Keppel headed out to talk with the suspect’s parents to get a more accurate location on their mountain cabin. Frank Atchley would watch the new house Merriam had bought, and Donna Nolan would talk to Safeway employees to get more background on the case. Possibly they had seen him around the store just before Kaitlyn was shot.
Merriam’s parents said they hadn’t seen or heard from him for the past day and a half.
“That’s unusual,” his father said. “He usually checks in every day. As for the cabin, it’s up on Stampede Pass. It’s green with a metal roof and there’s a flagpole out in front. It’s not that far from the weather station.”
Merriam’s family and friends were concerned that he might do harm to himself, but they all agreed that he would probably head for the cabin if he was attempting to leave the area.
The King County detectives checked all of Merriam’s friends in Seattle and on the east side of the Floating Bridge on I-90, but none of them had seen him.
Merriam was not known to have owned a gun—at least, not by his intimate acquaintances. None of those close to him even knew about his being investigated by the ATF about the missing guns from the store where he worked, so the King County detectives didn’t have that information in the first twenty-four hours of their murder investigation.
Bob Keppel contacted the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office 120 miles east of Seattle and asked that officers from that department locate the family’s cabin and put a stakeout on it to watch for the missing suspect and the green Mustang.
A Bellevue police officer called in to say that Wayne Merriam had once told him that he might kill a man Kaitlyn had dated. The man lived in southern King County. “He wanted to know the guy’s address,” the Bellevue cop said, “but I wouldn’t give it to him. He was jealous and he was mad, but I figured he’d cool down.”
As each department’s new shifts came on duty, command officers announced the urgency of finding Wayne Merriam to all King County patrol deputies and Seattle police officers. Every cop in the Greater Seattle area was looking for him.
An ATF agent who was very familiar with Wayne Merriam contacted Bob Keppel and let him know about his possible involvement in the gun theft from the Fred Meyer department store. “When I interviewed him,” the ATF investigator recalled, “he told me that his wife had left him and that he’d lost his head a while back and almost strangled her.”
That answered more questions.
• • •
Wayne Merriam had slipped through the fin
gers of the detectives who were so anxious to find him before more tragedies unfolded. To their frustration, they learned that he had been stopped about 1:30 A.M., less than two hours after Kaitlyn was killed—even as the King County investigators were still at the crime scene. A patrolman had noticed his car weaving as he drove along Bothell Way. When he was pulled over, he had seemed quite rational and had no odor of alcohol on his breath. He explained that he was very tired, and he was allowed to go with a warning ticket. At this point, the information on the murder of his wife hadn’t been put out on the air.
• • •
Now Wayne Merriam could be anywhere, and might well be in possession of guns and ammunition. There was no way of knowing how many other people he blamed for Kaitlyn’s leaving him. Her family, her coworkers, her friends, even her minister, had advised the couple to live apart until they could work things out. To someone like Wayne Merriam, that would have been likely to inspire a need for revenge.
While investigators and patrolmen fanned out over the western part of the state searching for Merriam, Detective Frank Atchley attended Kaitlyn Merriam’s postmortem examination.
Her killer had been deadly accurate. Bob Keppel had counted ten bullet holes in the doors of the apartment house. Dr. Eisele said that nine of those bullets had found their mark. It was almost as if she had had a target painted on her back. Kaitlyn would have been knocked down almost at once by a bullet in the back, but her killer had fired repeatedly into her prone body; the angle of many of the bullets showed that she had been facedown—helpless—as he continued to shoot. The EMTs had turned her over to treat her before she died.
Some of her wounds were comparatively minor, piercing only the soft tissue and muscles of her arms, thighs, and legs. But at least two bullets had been fatal shots. One slug had entered the lumbar region in her back, perforating her kidney and literally shredding it, and then continued on through the pancreas, the large intestine, the stomach, and the left pleural cavity, until it penetrated her heart. No medical aid could have saved Kaitlyn, even if she had been taken into an operating room at once.