by Ann Rule
Mary Lou Coates,* who had been dating Groth since 2003, was sorry that she had ever called the police on Groth. After he was questioned in May 2006, she said they had had a long talk.
“He told me then that he didn’t kill Dina Peterson. And he felt better when he talked to the police. He thought he had finally been cleared as a suspect in her murder.”
She had believed him. “He wouldn’t do something like this,” she offered. “He told me that they were just good friends.”
Mary Lou denied that Groth had physically assaulted her, insisting that he was only verbally abusive to her, and that was what the domestic violence charges against him were about.
“I blame myself for his arrest. I never wanted him to go to jail—to be locked up,” she said softly.
Even given Jim Groth’s history of violence toward women, he must have said some pretty bad things to his girlfriend. That made no sense at all. It’s quite possible that he threatened her. But now, as so many abused women do, Mary Lou was feeling very sorry for Jim.
“He’s the nicest person in the world,” she emphasized to Seattle Times reporter Jennifer Sullivan.
* * *
Jim Groth didn’t get out of jail in December 2007. He was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the long-fallow case of Dina Peterson.
“What will I tell my girlfriend?” Groth asked. “I’ll never get out of jail.”
On January 9, 2008, Groth pleaded not guilty to the murder charges.
Judge Laura Inveen’s King County Superior Court room was crowded with observers, among them the Peterson family, who had not seen Groth for more than thirty-two years. Leanne Peterson looked at the stocky, bald man and realized he didn’t look at all like the teenage boy who used to be their neighbor.
“I never thought this would happen,” she told Sullivan of the Seattle Times. “We are grateful to the cold-case people.”
Leanne had been hopeful that Jim Groth would plead guilty to the charges against him, so that she and her family wouldn’t have to relive the pain they had felt in 1975. That didn’t happen.
Sheriff’s spokesman John Urquhart told reporters that Jim Groth had been under intense scrutiny by current detectives and prosecutors for more than a year. Although Groth was a “person of interest,” Urquhart acknowledged that there were no DNA matches.
The single piece of physical evidence was Tim Diener’s bone-handled knife, and even forensic science of the new century could not isolate DNA or blood on it.
On May 12, 2009, after another seventeen months’ delay, King County senior deputy prosecutor Carla Carlstrom was prepared to present a case based on circumstantial evidence to the jurors selected. It certainly wasn’t the easiest case to prosecute. Nor was Groth an easy defendant to represent. Julie Lawry, Jim Groth’s public defender, however, felt confident that she could raise enough doubt in the jury that her client would go free.
Lawry had been a public defender for sixteen years.
As the trial began, it was unlikely that Tim Diener would be able to testify. He was in the final stages of liver cancer. His testimony had been videotaped, and that would have to serve.
In her opening statement, Carla Carlstrom asked the jurors to correct the mistake that sheriff’s detectives had made in 1975. She submitted that they had had tunnel vision “within days” after Dina Peterson was murdered in her own yard.
“Because of that,” Carlstrom said, “they focused on the wrong person, and her killer went unpunished for thirty-four years!”
Moreover, she offered, the original investigators had soon turned to the “Ted Bundy murders” and “disregarded” many factors in the “vicious and angry” attack that could be linked to Jim Groth.
Defense attorney Julie Lawry pointed out in her opening statement that there was no new evidence that might clear Tim Diener of the crime. “In this country, we don’t ‘guess’ people guilty.” She explained that the case against Groth was based “on a whole lot of rumor and speculation.
“Ms. Carlstrom doesn’t know who killed Dina Peterson. Jim Groth doesn’t know who killed Dina Peterson. At the end of this trial, you still won’t know who killed Dina Peterson.”
Jim Groth’s trial took three weeks. Detectives, Dina’s family, and witnesses testified. The defendant declined to testify. Tim Diener’s testimony on videotape was needed as the whole case played out in the trial. He was far too ill to appear in person.
On June 2, 2009, the jury in Judge Inveen’s courtroom returned with a verdict. They found James E. Groth guilty of Dina Peterson’s murder, although they agreed on the lesser charge of second-degree murder.
Sentencing was set for July 24.
Tim Diener died of liver cancer on June 19, 2009. He was fifty-three. For most of his life, he had been a suspect in the murder of the girl he loved. He lived only seventeen months after he was relieved of that dark shadow when Jim Groth was arrested.
Although Jim Groth didn’t take the witness stand in his own defense, he did grant a jail interview to Jennifer Sullivan. He told her that he didn’t kill Dina. When asked who had committed that murder, he said he wasn’t sure.
“My life is over in a sense,” Groth said. “How did these people—knowing what they know—make this determination?”
Lawry said that she had never been so upset by a verdict in her sixteen years in the public defenders’ office. “The evidence is so thin. There’s no DNA—there’s no forensic evidence. There’s no confession. There’s no eyewitnesses . . .”
Circumstantial evidence demands a criteria of what a reasonable man would deem a reasonable outcome when he knows the facts of the case.
Jim Groth was fixated sexually on Dina Peterson. She was seriously dating another suitor. She may have been in her backyard, headed to Tim Diener’s house, when another figure approached her in the dark. Perhaps that person—Jim Groth—was so frustrated that he grabbed her and attempted to kiss, fondle, or rape her. Her natural instinct would have been to fight back, scratching him.
And a reasonable man might well conclude that he had stabbed her with the knife that belonged to the teenager that Dina really cared for.
But Dina was found with her face toward the sky. Someone undoubtedly came back and turned her over. There is little question that that was Jim Groth. As he sat smoking on the beach, he must have begun to wonder if she might still be alive. If she was, Dina would tell on him and he would be in big trouble. And so, I believe, he went back to reassure himself that she was truly dead—and that he would not be identified as the one who stabbed her.
Jim Groth lied, and his two versions of what happened on Valentine’s night were bizarre. He went on to live a life marked by violence to the women in his life.
On July 24, 2009, judge Laura Inveen sentenced Jim Groth to a minimum of sixteen years in prison. His final sentence would go to the Washington State’s Indeterminate Sentencing Review Board, which could sentence him to life in prison.
At Groth’s sentencing, George Peterson spoke as tears ran down his face. Jim Groth stared straight ahead, his face blank of expression.
“Thirty-four years doesn’t heal,” Dina’s father said. “There is a scar on my heart with the loss of my daughter. I have forgiven you, Jim Groth.”
Julie Lawry announced her plans to appeal his sentence. Thus far, that has not been granted.
* * *
THE LAST VALENTINE’S DAY
* * *
Dina Peterson walked to a pizza parlor with a girlfriend, went in her front door, and exited out the back. Relatives heard a “scuffle” in the backyard but believed it was Dina with a friend. They never saw her alive again. It would take more than three decades to find Dina’s killer. (Police file)
King County sheriff’s lieutenant Richard Kraske, who directed the investigation into Dina Peterson’s murder. (Ann Rule)
King County sheriff’s detective Randy Hergesheimer worked tirelessly to find Dina’s killer. Sadly, he did not live to see the murderer arrest
ed and convicted. (Ann Rule)
Dina’s body was found in her own backyard—only a few feet from her home. Her little dog had stayed with her all through the chilly night. (Police file)
This man had a huge crush on Dina Peterson when they were both teenagers. For years, investigators focused on Dina’s boyfriend—not this man. But the convicted murderer wanted her so badly that he stabbed her to death. With someone else’s knife. (The Seattle Times)
THE MAN WHO
LOVED TOO MUCH
It was Halloween night in 1977, a holiday for all things ghostlike, macabre, and frightening, and the streets of Seattle were shrouded with appropriate fog and mist. The mournful wail of the foghorns near Puget Sound added to the bleak atmosphere of the night. Lights on the ferries steaming toward the docks on Seattle’s waterfront were only dim beacons. Trick-or-treaters were long since off the streets and home counting their largesse. As the rain began to fall in earnest, it was a time to be home, and anyone with a place to go had headed there.
The only traffic on that Monday night consisted of emergency vehicles. The Seattle Police Department’s blue and white patrol cars crept along in the fog, and an occasional Medic One unit screeched by on an urgent run.
At the downtown police headquarters, the 911 lines had been busy with both critical and crank calls. Operators, used to frantic calls, answered in deceptively laconic voices, fielded the calls, got as much information as they could, and dispatched the cars on the street to addresses all over the city.
The call from the manager at the Rendezvous Restaurant was fairly routine. Their female bartender hadn’t shown up for work that day—nor had she come in to supervise the Halloween party that she’d planned. Her fellow employees were concerned because it wasn’t like Sue Ann Elizabeth Baker to let them down. They had tried to call her repeatedly, only to get a busy signal. They’d checked with an operator at the phone company and learned that Sue Ann’s phone was off the hook.
The 911 operator asked a few questions and then told the manager that she would send a car to Baker’s apartment on Magnolia Bluff.
Police radio communications are, of necessity, terse and to the point. The call that went out shortly after nine that Halloween night didn’t sound particularly ominous.
“Three-Queen-One, copy on a call.”
“Three-Queen-One by, go ahead.”
“Three-Queen-One, service call. Check on the welfare of a Sue Baker, 3459 23 West. No apartment number given. Possibly husband’s name ‘Ron Baker’ is on the mailbox. The phone is off the hook now and someone called her in sick today for work.”
“Received.”
“Subject is a white female about twenty-eight.”
“Received.”
The 911 operator returned to taking other calls. Within a few minutes, the patrolman in Three-Queen-One—Tim Dillon—was calling back in.
“911—Operator 70.”
“Yeah. This is Three-Queen-One on a call to check the welfare of—”
“Uh-huh.”
“I have a dead body. Get me a sergeant. Get me Homicide.”
“Okay, okay. Will do.”
The wheels of a murder investigation were in motion. Homicide detective sergeant Craig VandePutte’s crew was working its last night shift. All the homicide crews worked the night shift every three months. On November 1, they were due to report for the day shift at 7:45 A.M.
But now they had a full night’s work ahead of them. VandePutte and detectives Ted Fonis and Gary Fowler left for the scene with the homicide van. The streets were wet and it was 46 degrees out as they headed north to the upper-middle-class residential district of Magnolia Bluff, one of Seattle’s lowest crime areas.
Patrol Officer Dillon met them outside the cedar-sided apartment house and explained what he had discovered. He’d quickly determined that the apartment where Sue Baker lived was on an upper level, reachable by stairs and then along a catwalk/porch. He’d knocked, and then knocked louder, but there was no response from the darkened apartment.
“I tried the front door handle and found it locked,” he said. “Then I contacted the owner-manager who lives in a downstairs apartment. She came with me back upstairs, carrying her keys.”
Dillon said he opened the door and used only his flashlight as he entered the apartment. He checked the living room and found nothing unusual, and preceded down the hall, calling, “Sue Ann—Sue Ann—”
There was no answer.
He opened the first door to the right of the hall and found a small bedroom—empty. Continuing on down the hall, Dillon checked the main bathroom and found it neat and clean, and also empty.
It had been very still, almost eerie, as Dillon crept quietly down the hallway playing his flashlight over the walls. The only room left was the master bedroom, where he found the door was ajar. Dillon nudged the door with his flashlight, and it swung open.
“There was a king-sized bed there,” he told VandePutte and Fonis. “I could see the spread had red roses on it. She was there in the center of the bed, and the spread and blankets were drawn up under her chin. Her long dark hair spread out over the pillow.
“I said, ‘Sue Ann?’ but she didn’t answer.”
Dillon said he moved closer to the bed and shined his flashlight on the woman. Her eyes were slightly open, her chin tilted up. But she didn’t move, and Dillon touched her nose and cheek. She was cold to the touch. He pulled the covers down to her waist level. A red towel had been draped over her breasts and it seemed to be stained a deeper red in spots.
“That’s when I called for Homicide,” Dillon finished. “While I was waiting, I checked the other rooms again to see if anyone might still be hiding in here—but it was clear.”
VandePutte, Fonis, and Fowler looked at the woman on the bed. Even in death, she was beautiful. They folded the rose-dotted coverlet and blankets down to the foot of the bed. Now they could see that she was completely nude except for the red towel over her breasts.
Sue Ann Baker was a very tall woman, close to six feet, with the figure of a model. She lay in the center of the bed as if someone had positioned her there almost lovingly, her head resting on two fluffed pillows. One hand lay next to her hip, and the other was just under her body. At six feet, even though she was slender, she must have weighed 150 pounds and it would have taken a very strong individual to lift her.
The woman’s legs were spread somewhat—but not in the classic position in which rape victims are often found. She might have been only sleeping. But she was dead, and had been for some time. Rigor mortis was fully established.
The homicide detectives noted a red hand towel under her left knee and a red washcloth next to her right hand. The flowered sheet beneath her body was stained dark reddish brown in spots. A large pool of coagulated blood had seeped over the right side of the mattress when it was still liquid.
Oddly, despite the profusion of blood, the victim’s body was exceptionally clean. Looking closer, the investigators could see faint traceries of pink on her skin, as if someone had washed the blood off.
They removed the red towel that covered her breasts and could see the single wound over her right breast. It appeared to be a puncture wound about an inch long, its edges gaping open. That was all. No other wounds, no signs of defense wounds, no hesitation wounds—just the awful, deep wound in her chest. Because her body had been washed, there wasn’t even any blood on it.
At the foot of the bed, the detectives found a pair of women’s blue jeans; they were inside out, with a pair of panty hose inside. Apparently these had been stripped from the woman’s body either before or after death.
Starting at the front entrance, Sergeant VandePutte photographed everything in the apartment. The living room was lavishly furnished with a gold couch and matching love seat, gold lamps, and a glass-topped coffee table. A floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace almost covered one wall. There were many plants, carefully tended, a TV set, and a stereo with the tape in a cassette still circling, although the s
ound was turned down.
Like all the rooms, the living room was very clean but slightly cluttered. It looked as if someone might have been sleeping on the larger couch; a pillow and two blankets were tangled on the couch. Ted Fonis pointed out a glass on the end table next to the couch. It was half-full of a yellow liquid. He sniffed it and smelled alcohol. A woman’s red purse rested on the love seat. Its clasp was fastened.
The glass coffee table in front of the larger couch held an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. The top of the glass table seemed smudged. With a flashlight held obliquely, the detectives could make out smears of blood that had been haphazardly wiped up.
The kitchen was neat. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, but there was a brown paper bag on the counter containing an empty MacNaughton’s whiskey bottle. A full bottle of the same brand was opened next to it. There was also a steak knife on the counter. When Gary Fowler and Ted Fonis looked in a drawer, they found four more knives—steak knives and a hunting knife. The latter appeared to have bloodstains near the handle. It was more than five inches long, and the blade width appeared to match the wound found in Sue Ann Baker’s breast.
The smaller bedroom wasn’t nearly as neat as the rest of the apartment. There were clothes strewn around on the bed and the floor. Blood spattered the pair of men’s blue jeans on the bed. Peering into the closet, the detectives found a bra with its right cup saturated with blood, along with a bulky knit sweater with bloodstains over the right side.
“She had to have been wearing the sweater, the bra, and probably the jeans in the master bedroom when she was stabbed,” Fowler observed. “The stains look as though they’re in line. And why would anyone undress her after she was dead?”
“Maybe he was sorry. Maybe it was someone who cared about her and didn’t want her found the way she was,” VandePutte guessed.