by Ann Rule
Maybe it was someone Wendy knew—or at least recognized—so that she wouldn’t have been afraid to walk toward them. Her aunt said again that it seemed as though Wendy had looked up and appeared to know whoever stood too far from the window for her to see.
Or had it been a stranger, a wicked stranger, who just happened to be driving by as Wendy finished the errands her mother had asked her to do? Probably not, unless that individual had a car that Wendy thought was familiar. She had run off willingly.
Toward what?
Her mother and stepfather tried to think of anyone they knew who acted in a peculiar manner, particularly if they had seemed particularly obsessed with Wendy. But there simply wasn’t anyone.
Military investigators located Wendy’s birth father, who was living in a southern state. He said he hadn’t seen her in years, and her mother verified that. Moreover, he was just as worried as everyone else, and he had witnesses to prove that he hadn’t left Florida.
That was a blow, because finding out that her own father had taken her away would have been the only “safe” reason for Wendy to be gone. He loved her.
Although Wendy’s parents knew nothing about an earlier case, the similarities chilled Pierce County sheriff’s officers and Tacoma police. They remembered Anne Marie Burr. It had been a long time ago, but that case haunted them.
In the summer of 1963, Anne Marie Burr was a pretty, dependable, strawberry-blond-haired child. She lived in a home in Tacoma with her parents and younger brothers and sisters. Sometime during one summer night, Anne Marie had wakened her parents to tell them that her little sister was complaining that the cast on her broken arm itched so much that she couldn’t sleep.
And that was the last time anyone ever saw Anne Marie.
When her parents woke in the morning, they found the child gone. None of her clothes, beyond her night clothing, were missing. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood, nothing. Only a window in the front of the house left slightly open.
The search for Anne Marie was just as massive as the search for Wendy, but no one ever found her. It was the worst possible tragedy a family could endure, never knowing. Many theories were put forward. Some thought the Burr child had been kidnapped by someone who just wanted a child to raise, someone who had taken her far away and brainwashed her until she no longer remembered who she was or where she had come from.
Others pointed out the fact that nearby streets had been torn up and excavated at the time Anne Marie had vanished. They suspected that the child had been killed and hidden in one of the deep holes, her body covered with tons of dirt and pavement as the street work was completed.
And there are many who still believe that Anne Marie was the first victim of Ted Bundy, whose uncle lived close to the Burr family.
At the time Wendy disappeared, if she were alive, Anne Marie Burr would have been a grown woman in her twenties. If she were alive.
No, Wendy’s family didn’t know about Anne Marie, and no one wanted to tell them. They were already experiencing profound anguish.
* * *
Monday passed, and it was Tuesday with no word of Wendy. Helicopters hovered like giant dragonflies over the bases, hoping to see something from the air that they could not see on the ground. Just a glimpse of blue, or golden hair gleaming in the sunlight. Police and military police, search dogs, volunteers on foot, soldiers and airmen, all of them tromping through underbrush, woods, and along dirt roads from dawn until almost midnight.
They feared they were no longer trying to find a living child, although no one would admit that out loud; instead, they searched for a body. Wendy had been gone for almost four days. If she was lost, there were homes, barracks, and businesses close to where she disappeared. Unless someone was holding her captive, the chances were great that Wendy was dead. The weather was warm, but the nights were cool and she needed food and water.
Some feared that she might have been dead within minutes of the time she ran laughing out of her aunt’s line of vision.
If she had been taken away in a car, as so many searchers believed, she could be anywhere, even thousands of miles away in four days. If she was still on the base at McChord or Fort Lewis, there were so many hiding places for a small girl, living or dead; acres of forest edge Fort Lewis, deliberate wilderness used for war games and to buffer the fort from nearby property.
Wendy’s mother, stepfather, aunt, and little brother waited in their home on Juniper Street, unable to believe what had happened. It was as if Wendy had walked through a hole in the curtain of eternity and it had closed up behind her, leaving no trace. She had been so safe, so happy, so closely guarded and yet she was gone.
It was 10 A.M. on Wednesday, July 14, when engineer Howard Churchill, guiding a Burlington Northern train toward the little town of Rainier, glanced idly beside the tracks. He saw something there, something that looked like a store mannequin.
And then he wondered if he had actually seen a naked human body. When he reached Rainier, Churchill reported what he had seen to Garth Jones, the town marshal.
Jones called McChord with word of the report. There was a miscommunication, however, and he was told that that section of tracks ran through Fort Lewis, not McChord.
“You should call the military police at Fort Lewis,” the man on the other end of the phone line said. “Your report should be made to them.”
How on earth could anyone at McChord Air Force Base be unaware of the missing girl? The grim series of misunderstandings continued. The Fort Lewis police understood Jones to say that a naked man, a streaker—a popular fad in the seventies—was running beside the tracks. They drove to the area and failed to find the man, despite a thorough search of the surroundings.
It wasn’t until three hours later, when a second train crew spotted the still form beside the tracks and reported it, that a clear message came through. Military police located the body of a young girl lying facedown beside the tracks.
Oddly, that area had been searched many times over, and no one had seen her before. Had someone placed her body there recently? Or was it because the undergrowth was almost impenetrable there?
“It’s really thick brush in there,” an army official commented to a reporter. “It would have been real easy to miss finding her.”
The three hours wouldn’t have mattered. The child had been dead for four or five days. Wendy’s aunt sobbed as she positively identified the dead child as her niece.
Pierce County coroner Jack Davelaar announced in a breaking news flash that Wendy Ann had died of strangulation—a cord used was still tightly wound around her neck when she was found.
OSI detectives and FBI agents cordoned off the area where her body was found. Engineer Howard Churchill told them that he had made the same run the day before, and that he hadn’t seen the body then.
“I guess I could have been looking in the other direction,” he said. “She could have been there yesterday and I didn’t see her.”
The investigators couldn’t find any of Wendy’s clothes near the railroad tracks, but they located a sheet and a bedspread close by. The bedding was quite new and it appeared to have been in the area only a short time; it wasn’t faded by the sun or mildewed by rain. Rather, it looked as if someone had wrapped the tiny victim in the bedding to transport her to the spot beside the railroad spur line. An adult body wrapped in a shroud of bedding might well have drawn notice, but a sixty-five-pound child would have made a very small bundle, and could have looked like somebody’s laundry.
Special agent Ray Mathis, a spokesman for the FBI in Seattle, announced that the federal agents were working around the clock on the case and that twenty special agents would assist military police in tracking down clues and leads.
Wendy’s autopsy report confirmed that she had died of strangulation by ligature. And she had been sexually assaulted. Her time of death would have been sometime between Saturday night or early Sunday morning.
There would be no more agonized waiting for Wendy’s
family, nor was there any hope left. They had the slight comfort of knowing where she was, that she had not been held captive or molested for very long. That wasn’t much to cling to as they wondered who could have killed her and why.
Over and over again, the FBI agents and the military police asked about the happenings of that fatal Saturday. There might be something, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, that would give them a lead in a case where there were no leads. It might not have seemed unusual at the time, perhaps a casual encounter that would be vital only in retrospect.
Wendy Ann’s family and neighbors tried their best to remember the moments and hours of the day. There were so many other dependent children on base who might be in danger; Wendy’s killer had to be found fast. They wouldn’t wish their grief on any other family.
Her stepfather searched his mind, trying to remember. Saturday morning had been taken up with building the picnic table.
“Any visitors?” an MP asked.
The sergeant shook his head. “Well, my wife’s sister, of course. And one of our neighbor’s brothers came by. He was looking after Sam’s place—Sam’s our next-door neighbor—and he was out on bivouac for a couple of days.”
“What’s his name? Sam’s brother?”
“Larry—Larry Mayo. He’s about twenty-three, I think. He came over and was watching me put the table together, and then he pitched in to help. He’s a sheet-metal worker but he’s a pretty good carpenter, too.”
After they finished with the picnic table, the Smiths left for strawberry picking.
“Anyone go with you—did you talk to anyone when you were out in the fields?”
“No, nobody.”
“Was Wendy afraid of anyone? Did she talk about anyone bothering her or teasing her?”
“No. I asked my wife, and she can’t remember anything like that. We warned her, of course, about strangers—and she knew about that. She never said she was scared of anyone.”
That made sense. Wendy had apparently seen someone she knew Saturday evening. If she had been afraid, she wouldn’t have looked up and smiled and then run over to someone she apparently trusted. If that person had no part in her death, why hadn’t he (or she) come forward? The news of Wendy’s disappearance and finding her body was on the front page of every paper from Olympia to Seattle, on every television news broadcast.
The investigators were fielding plenty of useless leads from people who wanted to help, but they hadn’t heard from anyone who might have called to her shortly before she disappeared.
Close records are kept on all armed services personnel; any man with a known history of preying on children for sexual gratification wouldn’t have been able to enlist. And if child molestation occurred while they were in uniform, they would have been discharged without delay.
There was always the chance, of course, that some serviceman had sexual aberrations that none of his superiors knew about, even some dark past where he’d never been discovered.
No screening process is perfect, and the blandest smiles and most clever lies of a sociopath can form perfect masks to hide what lies within a sick mind.
There was also the chance that Wendy Ann’s murderer was not service-connected at all. It wasn’t wartime; civilians could come and go on the base as long as they had a reason to be there and proper identification.
But Wendy didn’t know anyone off the base. Her world was inside McChord Air Force Base.
Pierce County and Tacoma police checked through their files for known sex offenders. They didn’t find any with a history or MO that would link them to Wendy’s killing. Pierce County detectives had arrested a pet store employee several years earlier for the murder of a young blond girl—but that man was still safely inside prison walls. To be absolutely sure, they checked and found he had not been released to any outside halfway houses or to Western State Hospital’s sexual psychopaths’ program, which was notorious at the time for allowing dangerous offenders out on unsupervised leaves.
Though they scoured the woods next to the tracks, investigators found no more physical evidence. Only the sheet and bedspread, and they were common brands that were sold in thousands of department stores around the country. Short of polling every one of the nine hundred homes on the base, the detectives couldn’t find out where they had come from. Without probable cause, there was no way they could search every home on the base for bedding that might match. And who was to say they had come from inside the base in the first place? A stranger might have had them in his car.
Since Wendy’s disappearance, her family had been flooded with calls offering help. Neighbors brought in casseroles, cakes, and pies and offered to care for Wendy’s brother. Larry Mayo, who had been one of the last people to see Wendy on Saturday before she went berry picking, tried especially to help. He offered to do anything he could, but Wendy’s family assured him there was nothing left to do.
Although Larry seemed earnest in his wanting to be there for them, they finally began to lose patience with him. He was always underfoot.
“He was kind of a nuisance,” another neighbor said. “He seemed to be getting in the way more than helping.”
Larry Mayo’s connection to the case seemed odd; he would have been more help if he’d gone out with the searchers instead of camping on Wendy’s family’s doorstep. Maybe he felt somehow responsible because he’d been so close and hadn’t seen Wendy’s abduction in time to help her.
A few days after Wendy vanished, Larry had had a run-in with a Pierce County deputy sheriff over his driving. The deputy stopped Larry on a routine traffic check after he noticed he was driving erratically. Larry had identified himself and explained he was visiting the area from the Southwest. But he seemed very nervous, and the deputy found a whiskey bottle, two-thirds empty, and a .38-caliber handgun in the vehicle. Larry had a permit for the weapon, and said he didn’t know that it was illegal to carry an opened liquor bottle. He got off with a warning.
The deputy asked him where he was staying, and Larry gave his brother’s address on Juniper Street at McChord Air Force Base.
The address sounded familiar to the deputy, and when he checked it and found it was right next door to Wendy Smith’s home, he turned the information over to army OSI agents.
The special investigators looked more closely at Larry. The tall, suntanned young man said he hadn’t seen Wendy after she came home on Saturday night, and he absolutely denied having anything to do with her disappearance.
Her stepfather had told the probers that Larry Mayo was a bit of an odd duck, who had behaved somewhat strangely and made a nuisance of himself during the days after Wendy vanished. Still, he couldn’t imagine that Larry would have harmed Wendy.
“We always talked,” he said. “Larry and I always got along good together.”
And then, Wendy’s aunt remembered that she had seen Larry shortly after Wendy disappeared.
“He was putting something in the back of his brother’s car,” she said, with a dawning look of horror passing across her face. “At the time, it looked like laundry.”
It hadn’t seemed important. Not then.
Now FBI special agent John R. Kellison questioned Larry Mayo. The sheet-metal worker continued to deny any connection with Wendy’s abduction, rape, and murder.
But then, suddenly, his shoulders slumped, and he looked at Kellison and said, “I wish I could borrow a gun. I’d shoot myself. I didn’t mean to do it. Oh, God damn!”
Mayo finally admitted that he had seen Wendy on Saturday evening. He said that she had tagged along after him to his brother’s house. She watched him clean a fish tank.
“I had been drinking beer all day,” Mayo said. “I lit a cigarette and looked at Wendy, and then a funny feeling came over me.”
He told Kellison that he had put down his cigarette and walked into the living room, where he obtained a piece of nylon drapery cord. When he returned to the kitchen, Wendy had her back to him, watching the fish. “I remember walking up behind her wit
h the cord in my hand.
“I had a thousand things going on in my head,” he said.
Mayo grudgingly admitted that he had made up his mind to rape Wendy minutes before he crept up behind her as she watched the fish.
From that point on, he claimed that his mind was very fuzzy. He said he had blank spaces, until he recalled falling down in the hall as he was carrying Wendy to the bedroom. Once in the bedroom, he had raped her.
“I don’t know where I killed her. [It might have been] in the kitchen—or the hall—or in the bedroom. I can remember hearing a ‘choking sound’ in the bedroom.”
Later, he had wrapped Wendy Ann up in the sheets and spread and carried her to his brother’s car. He drove to the spot in the woods near the railroad tracks.
There he had “abandoned her.”
Mayo said he’d returned to Juniper Street and became involved in the search, and in trying to help Wendy’s family.
Larry Mayo was an enigma, a pleasant-seeming man who was popular with his new neighbors. He had a good, steady job with the sheet-metal firm in Seattle. He told detectives that he had come from Texas to try to change his life. He had been a heavy drinker since he was twelve years old.
“I went from there to drugs,” he said. “I had trouble with the law in Texas, and I convinced my brother to let me come up to Washington for a new start.”
At first, he thought he was going to do that. He had found his job, started going to church regularly, and did chores around his brother’s home.
But he’d begun to drink again.
On Saturday, July 10, while Wendy and her family were out berry picking, Mayo said, he consumed eighteen beers in six hours.
The boyishly handsome suspect said he was used to having sex regularly when he lived in Texas, but he had no intimate girlfriends in Washington.
The outcome of his heavy drinking and having the little girl alone in his house had led to a brutal, tragic murder—even as Wendy’s family watched and waited for her next door.