by Ann Rule
He called Julie Tuesday evening to tell her they were making headway on painting the new house they were working on in Ritzville. “Things were normal,” Mike said. “She told me she had been to our accountant and everything looked fine. She did the books for my business. I told her I would try to be home late the next night, but I’d call her at five to let her know for sure.”
Julie said that the man who was their farrier might be there at five, so Mike reminded her to take their cordless phone out to the barn with her.
Mike did call Julie at five Wednesday afternoon, but the phone rang on and on. The two men hadn’t quite finished the house in Ritzville, so they planned to work as late as they needed to and head home Thursday. There were no cell phones in 1987, so he had to go to a phone booth each time he called home.
“I tried calling Julie again at 7:30 and there was still no answer,” he said. “Tried again at eight. Same thing. I kept getting my own voice on the recorder.
“I wasn’t worried because I knew that Julie was probably over at our horse trainer’s house. Sally only lives eight miles from us, and when I’m gone, they visit a lot.”
Mike ordered a pizza for himself and his friend, picked it up, and they ate hurriedly before they went back to painting.
It was close to midnight when they quit painting that Wednesday night. They figured they could finish the last of the trim in a few hours in the morning. The two men went back to their motel prepared to fall into bed, exhausted.
As he recalled what happened next, Mike Weflen’s voice mirrored the fear he’d felt when they got to the motel. “There was a note hanging on the motel door,” he recalled. “It said, Call BPA. Your wife’s been kidnapped.”
Mike stared at the brusque note in his hand, uncomprehending for a minute, and then ran for the nearest pay phone. He called the power company. All they could tell him was that Julie’s empty BPA van had been located at the Spring Hill substation near Riverside State Park.
There was no sign of Julie anywhere around there, Mike was told.
As Mike stood in the phone booth, a Ritzville police car pulled up. The officer who stepped out said he’d been looking for Mike to be sure he got the news about his wife’s disappearance.
“He could see how upset I was,” Mike recalled, “and he warned me not to try to go to Spokane. He said they’d pick me up if I was speeding. I just looked at him.”
He leapt into his truck and drove as fast as he could toward Spokane. No cop pulled him over, but he spent a terrible hour on the road. He was in shock, unable to believe that Julie was really missing; he kept telling himself that she would be found by the time he got there. He was still in his work clothes, his hair and skin spattered with paint, when he strode into the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office in Spokane at one A.M.
It had to be some kind of crazy mistake. How could Julie have been kidnapped? She had been doing her regular job in a safe area. It didn’t make any sense. Maybe she’d been hurt—maybe she was in a hospital somewhere.
The deputies on duty told Mike Weflen everything they had learned so far. Julie had been out in the field and due back in the BPA headquarters at 4:30 P.M.
He nodded his head impatiently. “Yeah, that’s right. She gets home at five.”
But she hadn’t answered the phone when he called at five. He berated himself for not being concerned about that, remembering all the times he’d called her.
The sheriff’s officers said that people who lived in the Spring Hill area had become concerned when the BPA rig was parked for so long at the substation with the door open and the tailgate window open.
“They finally called us about 9:30 tonight,” the deputy said.
At least there was no waiting around to see if Julie had left of her own accord. Her disappearance was already being treated as if foul play was involved.
Mike called his closest friend, Don Miller, and the two men drove to the substation. They couldn’t get right up to it because the road was blocked off and sheriff’s deputies and Washington State Patrol troopers were questioning everyone who drove up. The scene was almost as bright as day because floodlights had been set up. Handlers and German shepherd search dogs were moving around the road and the substation trying to pick up a scent, although they seemed to keep returning to the van itself.
Mike learned that Julie’s purse and car keys were still inside her van; her yellow hard hat had been found on the ground outside.
By holding their flashlights at an oblique angle, Spokane County sheriff’s deputies had noticed that a section of gravel near the BPA Dodge van looked as if there had been a struggle. The ground and rocks were in disarray from the driver’s door to the front of the van. Moreover, there were some deep tire marks in the gravel that suggested another vehicle had peeled out of there.
The van was very dusty from the dry roads in the area, but there were scuffing, sliding marks in the dust, imprinted by what looked like jeans. That also suggested that Julie had probably put up a tremendous fight with whomever she had encountered.
The sheriff’s detectives had arrived at three A.M. on Thursday morning. The most obvious answer as to what had happened was also the most ominous. Someone must have driven by and seen Julie working alone inside the Cyclone fence enclosure. Or someone had followed her. There had been a struggle, and Julie had fought like a tiger. But she was only five feet four inches tall and weighed 110 pounds. Strong and athletic though she was, she wouldn’t have been able to best even an average man. Although there were several houses within sight, no one they had yet encountered had heard screaming.
BPA coworkers at the scene were able to reconstruct Julie’s movements until the time she vanished on Wednesday. She had notified the main office that she had arrived at Spring Hill at two P.M. It was her usual practice to spend an hour inspecting a substation. She routinely left the driver’s door of the van open so she could hear the radio dispatches from her headquarters.
Julie had finished her inspection by three P.M., but then she had noticed that one of the nitrogen tanks was leaking and said she was going back to use her “leak tech” bottle.
The sheriff’s investigators urged Mike Weflen to let them handle the search for Julie, but there was no way he could just go home and wait. From the beginning, he had to be part of the effort to get her back.
He could not allow himself to think that Julie might really be gone. Just as any human would be, Mike was in shock, of course, and in denial about what the worst news could be. “I expected to find Julie that first day,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well, somebody took her and they probably raped her. But she’s out there, and she’ll be okay, and we can handle it together.’ ”
But the first searchers found no sign of Julie, and even an all-out effort for the next forty-eight hours by the sheriff’s department came up empty.
Mike Weflen barely slept. For two months, he and his friends spent their evenings parked near the substation, out of sight, and watched the vehicles that traversed the road. Sometimes they sat in the ditch and watched the substation itself. They quickly became aware of certain vehicles that drove by the Spring Hill substation often. “We even disabled one deliberately,” Mike recalled, “so the detectives would be able to find it and search it.”
One detective who didn’t consider Mike Weflen a thorn in the side of law enforcement was Mark Henderson. Mark and Mike already knew each other from playing golf, and Henderson privately believed that Mike “would make a good detective.”
The men were a year apart in age, and Henderson—whose father, Calvin Henderson, had once been the commander of the Crimes Against Persons Unit in the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office—was second-generation law enforcement. Calvin had had a heart attack from the stress of the job, and Mark was often asked, “Why would you want to be a cop when you have seen what it’s like?”
“But I loved it,” Henderson said later. “They didn’t grasp that part of it.” He’d started as a cadet when he was only 19, and made detective in 1983. He under
stood Weflen’s pain and loss and the need to keep looking for his wife.
“Mark was really good at putting people at ease,” Mike said. “I can’t say enough about him. This isn’t just another case for him. It’s comforting to know he’s doing everything he can.”
Helicopters hovered low over the trees on the 225 square miles of the search area. Even after the sheriff’s department had to pull back a full-time effort, there were at least twenty-five people who showed up at seven A.M. every weekday at the substation to search; on weekends, there were over a hundred.
It was the worst possible kind of terrain in which to look for someone—rocky, rugged, with thickly treed hills, deep crevasses, rivers and lakes. There were a thousand—ten thousand—places to hide a body. Caves were explored and rivers were dragged, but they found no sign of Julie Weflen.
By the end of the second day, there was a $20,000 reward, and the Bonneville Power Administration donated the same amount, plus the use of their vehicles and helicopters. Some of Julie’s fellow workers took two weeks’ leave of absence so they could join in the search for her.
Members of the Weflens’ church congregation at Trinity Baptist flocked to pitch in.
Mike knew that he was the first suspect the sheriff’s detectives would look at. He didn’t mind; it was just something to be eliminated so the real investigation could continue. He had been in Ritzville painting a house since Tuesday night; there was no way he could have been at the Spring Hill substation on Wednesday afternoon. The painting crew working with him had seen him all afternoon, as had the motel staff and the clerks at the hardware store where he had bought more paint.
Asked to take a polygraph examination, he did so at once. He passed it cleanly. There was no indication that he had any guilty knowledge of Julie’s disappearance.
The Spokane County detectives tried to find some motive for anyone to want to hurt Julie Weflen. They found no one at her job who had a beef with her, and no one among the Weflens’ friends. She hadn’t spoken of being afraid of a stalker, or of an encounter with any man that might have upset her. The most obvious answer was that she had had a stalker, someone watching her who either followed her to the substation on that September day or who saw her working alone there.
But who? They checked on the whereabouts of men with records for violent or sexual crimes in the area and came up with several—and cleared them. They compared Julie’s disappearance with that of Debra Jean Swanson, 30, who had vanished as she jogged along a lakeside trail in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, on March 29, 1986. The pretty schoolteacher had never been found. Coeur d’Alene was in another state, yes, but it was only nineteen miles east of Spokane.
The cases were, indeed, too similar not to discount a connection.
Mike and his friends went door-to-door in ever-widening circles around the Spring Hill substation in what old-time detectives call “heel-and-toeing,” canvassing for possible witnesses to Julie’s abduction: “What did you see that day?” “Anything that was unusual?” “Is there anything on your property that we should search—garages, outbuildings, trailers?”
At first, Mike Weflen’s friends tried to protect him from the media, but then he realized, as days became a week, that Julie could have been taken farther and farther away from Spokane and that he had to get the word out. Patiently, he met with reporters and appeared on local television news as well as national shows like West 57th Street and Hour Magazine.
With the help of hundreds of people who wanted to help find Julie, Mike and the search team sent out thousands of flyers bearing her picture. Ten thousand buttons with Julie’s photograph and yellow ribbons were distributed to stores and hospitals and to police stations around the country. With the gracious donation of space from billboard companies, eight billboards went up from the Canadian border to California.
Mike kept organizing bigger and bigger search parties as the hunt for Julie continued. “I realized that the police were looking for an arrest and a conviction, and then finding my wife. I wanted my wife back, period. They were worried about my screwing up evidence. Sometimes, I felt I was working against both the police and the person who took my wife.”
For the first two months she was gone, Mike couldn’t stand being in their house without Julie. It was as if she had only stepped outside to go to the barn. But he couldn’t go home. She was everywhere he looked. The house was as neat as it had always been. All of her things were there, but Julie wasn’t.
Finally, in mid-November, two months after Julie disappeared, he knew he had to go home. Friends had been feeding Sonn and Tony and the cats, but the home he and Julie had made and their pets needed him. It was wrenching for him to walk through the door, to see her clothes still hanging in the closet. He opened the refrigerator and saw the zucchini cookie dough she’d made in early September still waiting in the freezer to be sliced and baked.
Mike kept his phone number posted everywhere, and answered every call left on his answering machine. One woman woke him at one A.M. to say that she had heard a woman’s voice calling for “Mommy.”
“We got right out there,” Mike said, “and we searched the area she had given me until four A.M. We didn’t find anything.”
There were many so-called sightings.
Mike called six truck stops in Montana after someone thought they had seen Julie riding with a trucker. He called every major city’s hospitals and all the northern border crossings after a psychic assured him that Julie was in Canada.
Comparing Mike Weflen’s efforts to find his wife to Scott Peterson’s halfhearted attempts to find his wife, Laci, the difference is instantly apparent. Weflen usually managed to sleep only three or four hours a night. He worked just enough to pay the bills he had to pay.
• • •
I drove to Mike Weflen’s Deer Park home in October 5, 1988, to talk with him. Julie was still missing, and the gray and white house that I stepped into was exactly as she had left it a little more than a year before. I was writing an article about the search for Julie for a national woman’s magazine; for Mike, it was another way to get Julie’s picture out around the United States.
As he told me about Julie, it was clear that he had managed to build only a thin shell against the pain and stress of not knowing. It didn’t really matter where he was: the memories went with him. Mike had tried flying to his boyhood town in Aberdeen, South Dakota, hoping to ease his anxiety, but nothing changed. He had come to accept that life went on day by day.
We spoke of the possibility that Julie had amnesia, that she might have been hurt somehow on the job and didn’t remember her name or what her life had been up until September 16 the year before. I think both of us knew this was usually something that happened on soap operas, rather than in real life.
After we had talked for hours, I asked a question that I considered intrusive, but felt I had to ask: “Have you ever thought she might have left you on purpose?”
He paused for only a second. “No. Never. Of all the scenarios I ever pictured, that would be the easiest for me to accept. But no—not if you knew Julie. She wouldn’t leave her horses,” he said, breaking into a rare grin, “and she loves me a little more than she loves her horses.”
It had been a good but not a ridiculously sweetie-sweetie relationship, he explained to me. They had argued like any other couple. About the only thing they had ever argued about, though, was the fact that he sometimes envied the time Julie spent with Sonn and Tony.
“I’ll go anywhere to find her,” Mike told me. “I’ll listen to anyone to get a grain of truth. How do I go on if I stop? How do I go on without her?”
He vowed that he would not give up looking for her, even though friends had urged him to start living again and to think about dating. He had no interest in that. “I can’t leave the memories. I don’t know how to get back into the world—or if I want to get back into it. I always focus on Julie. My life is Julie.”
Talking with Mike Weflen was one of the most difficult intervie
ws I’ve ever done. As I write this, it is a week away from the seventeenth anniversary of Julie Weflen’s disappearance. She would be 45 now; Mike is 50.
Eventually, he did move tentatively back into the world, something I believe Julie would have wanted him to do. Many years later, he married again, and today he has children. He and his current wife plan to write a book about Julie. Until then, there will always be one last thing he can do for his first love.
Over the years, one after another suspect in Julie’s abduction has been cleared. There remain some likely possibilities, however. Mark Henderson is still a detective with the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, and he has never forgotten Julie, either. I talked to him this week, and he told me her disappearance remains a mystery. “There is no body, no sightings,” he said with a sigh. “Sometimes I think I’ll be retired when her killer is arrested.”
But he did say when; he did not say if. Henderson believes that an arrest may be very close. With the tremendous advances in forensic science, items of evidence that could not identify the prime suspect in 1987 can now be very dangerous to him. They have been resubmitted to a very sophisticated crime lab for testing.
It took thirty-five years to catch Sandra Bowman’s murderer—more than twice as long as Julie Weflen has been missing. Now that Sandy can rest, the time for Julie’s justice is coming. Until then, I would ask readers the same questions that Mike Weflen has asked over and over:
“What did you see that day?” “Anything that was unusual?” “Is there anything on your property that we should search—garages, outbuildings, trailers?”
Mark Henderson would still like to hear from anyone who may have information about that day in September 1987. Please call the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office at (509) 477-4760.
When Julie Weflen’s abductor is arrested, I will be so happy to include the updates on my website at www.annrules.com. If anyone wishes to contact me with information, they can do so through the website. I will keep your identity secret if you like.