The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  Sheriff Redmond and his investigators were left with the girl’s body, the mock suede coat with fur trim, the blue jeans, a white peasant blouse, waffle stomper boots, and some cheap costume jewelry. The time lapse between her disappearance and the discovery of her body made it next to impossible to get a handle on the man who had killed her.

  “It’s that damned new hitchhiking law,” Redmond said. “Kids can stick their thumbs out and get in a car with anybody.”

  There was so little to go on, but I took copious notes and spent the weekend putting the Devine case in chronological order, listing what was known, and concluding that Kathy Devine had probably been killed by the man who gave her the ride. It seemed an isolated case. I had not written up any similar homicides in several years.

  I spent that whole weekend, with the exception of Saturday night when I attended the Crisis Clinic party, working on my thirty-page report for Redmond. On Sunday evening, two deputies were sent up from Olympia to pick it up. As a special deputy on assignment, I was paid $100 from the department’s investigative funds.

  I didn’t forget the Devine case. A few months later, I wrote it up as an unsolved case for True Detective, asking that anyone with information contact the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office. But no one did, and the case remained unsolved.

  With the New Year, 1974, I was aware that, if I was going to support four children, I would have to step up my writing sales. Although their father’s cancer had seemingly been arrested, I remembered the first surgeon’s prognosis that Bill’s life expectancy could range anywhere from six months to five years.

  Most of my cases came from the Seattle Police and the King County Police homicide units. Those detectives were exceptionally kind to me, allowing me to interview them when crime in Seattle was at a low ebb. Far from being the tough, hard-bitten detectives depicted on television and in fiction, I found them to be highly sensitive men—men who understood that if I didn’t find enough cases to write up, my kids might not eat. I formed some of the strongest friendships of my life with those men.

  For my part, I never “burned” them, never took anything “off the record” and used it in a story. I waited until trials were ended, or until a defendant had pleaded guilty, careful that my reporting would in no way prejudice a prospective jury before trial.

  They trusted me, and I trusted them. Because they knew I was trying to learn everything I could in the field of homicide investigations, I was often invited to attend seminars given by experts in law enforcement and, once, a two-week homicide crime scene course given as part of the King County Police basic police school. I rode shifts with the Washington State Patrol, the K-9 units, Seattle Police and King County patrol units, Medic I paramedics, and spent 250 hours with Marshal 5, the Seattle Fire Department’s arson team.

  I suppose it was an odd career for a woman, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Half the time I was an everyday mother. The other half I was learning about homicide investigative techniques and how to spot an arson fire. My grandfather and uncle had been sheriffs in Michigan, and my own years as a policewoman had only enhanced my belief that lawmen were “good guys.” Nothing I saw as a crime reporter tarnished that image, even though in the early 1970s policemen were frequently referred to as pigs.

  Because in a sense I had become one of them again, I was privy to information on cases being actively worked, as I had been with the Devine homicide. I didn’t discuss this information with anyone outside the police world, but I was aware of what was happening in 1974.

  The year had barely begun when there was a shocking attack on a young woman who lived in a basement room of a big, old house at 4325 8th N.E., near the University of Washington. It happened sometime during the night of January 4, and it was bizarre enough that Detective Joyce Johnson mentioned it to me. Johnson, with twenty-two years on the force, dealt with crimes everyday that would upset most laymen, but this assault had disturbed her mightily.

  Joni Lenz, eighteen, had gone to sleep as usual in her room, a room located in a basement accessible from the outside by a side door that was usually kept locked. When she didn’t appear for breakfast the next morning, her housemates assumed she was sleeping in. By midafternoon, however, they went down to check on her. Joni didn’t respond to their calls. As they approached her bed, they were horrified to see that her face and hair were covered with clotted blood. She was unconscious. Joni Lenz had been beaten with a metal rod wrenched from the bed frame, and when they pulled the covers away, they were stunned to see that the rod had been jammed viciously into her vagina, doing terrible damage to her internal organs.

  “She’s still unconscious,” Joyce Johnson told me a week later. “It breaks my heart to see her parents sitting by her bed, praying she’ll come out of it. Even if she does, the doctors think she’ll have permanent brain damage.”

  Joni did beat the odds. She survived, but she had no memory of events from ten days before the attack until she awoke from her coma, and she was left with brain damage that will stay with her for the rest of her life.

  She had not been raped, except for the symbolic rape with the bed rod. Someone in the grip of a maniacal rage had found her asleep and vented that anger. Detectives could find no motive at all. The victim was a friendly, shy girl who had no enemies. She had to have been a chance victim, attacked simply because someone who knew she slept alone in her basement room, had perhaps seen her through a window and found the basement door unlocked.

  Joni Lenz was lucky. She lived. She was one of the very few who did.

  “Hi, this is Lynda with your Cascade Ski Report: Snoqualmie Pass is 29 degrees with snow and ice patches on the road. Stevens Pass is 17 degrees and overcast with packed snow on the roadway. …”

  Thousands of western Washington radio listeners had heard twenty-one-year-old Lynda Ann Healy’s voice without really knowing who she was. It was a sexy-sweet voice, the kind of voice that disc jockeys could talk back to and that commuters driving to work at 7 A.M. could enjoy. The last names of the girls who gave the pass reports were never revealed, however, no matter how many interested men might call in. They were anonymous, the vocal personification of the All-American girl.

  Lynda was as beautiful as she sounded, tall, slender, with chestnut hair that fell almost to her waist and clear blue eyes fringed with dark lashes. A senior majoring in psychology at the University of Washington, she shared an older green frame house with four other students. Marti Sands, Jill Hodges, Lorna Moss, and Barbara Little split the rent at 5517 12th N.E.

  Lynda had grown up in a sheltered, upper-middle-class home in Newport Hills on the east side of Lake Washington from Seattle. Gifted musically, she had played Fiona in Newport High’s production of Brigadoon, and she had been a soloist in the Congregational Church’s “Winds of God” folk mass. But it was psychology, particularly working with retarded youngsters, that interested her most. Certainly, in her years at the University, she had had ample opportunity to study the deviant mind. Study, not know.

  None of the five roommates in the big old house was particularly naive, and they were all cautious young women. Jill’s father was the prosecuting attorney in an eastern Washington county, and, as a criminal lawyer’s daughter, she had been aware of violent crime, but none of the girls had ever been personally exposed to violence. They had read of the attack a few blocks away on January 4, and they had heard rumors of a prowler in their own neighborhood. They took the proper precautions, locked their doors, went out in pairs after dark, and discouraged men who seemed odd.

  Still, with five of them living in the same house, they felt safe.

  Lynda’s job at Northwest Ski Reports meant that she had to get up at 5:30 in the morning and bike over to the office a few blocks away, so she rarely stayed up past midnight. Thursday, January 31 began routinely for her. She’d recorded the ski report, gone to classes, and then come home to write a letter. She hadn’t a problem in the world, other than the fact that her boyfriend worked such long hours that they had littl
e time together, and some vague stomach pains that had been bothering her. She wrote a note to a friend, the last letter she would ever write:

  Just thought I’d drop a line to say ‘Hello.’ It’s snowing outside so I’m writing this letter bundled up in my blue afghan. You wouldn’t believe how comfortable it makes studying, or napping. Everyone at my house is fine. I’ve invited Mom and Dad, Bob and Laura to dinner. I think I’ll make Beef Stroganoff. I’ve been doing a lot of skiing, some working, and studying… not necessarily in that order.

  At 2:30 that afternoon, Jill Hodges drove Lynda to the University for chorus practice and returned at five to pick up Lynda and Lorna Moss. They ate dinner, and afterward Lynda borrowed Marti Sands’s car to go to the grocery store, returning at 8:30.

  Lynda, Lorna, Marti, and a male friend then walked to Dante’s, a tavern popular with University students, located at 53rd and Roosevelt Way. The foursome shared two pitchers of beer, and the girls talked to no one, although Lorna and Marti would later recall that their friend Pete had visited briefly with some people who were playing a dice game at a nearby table.

  They were home in an hour and Lynda received a call from a former boyfriend in Olympia. Her roommates remember that she spoke with him for about an hour. The girls then watched The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman on television before retiring.

  When Lynda left to go to her basement room, she wore blue jeans, a white blouse, and boots.

  Barbara Little had been at the library that Thursday evening. At quarter to one she went to her room in the basement, a room separated from Lynda’s by only a thin plywood wall. Lynda’s light was out, and Jill was quiet.

  At 5:30 A.M., Barbara heard Lynda’s alarm radio go off as usual, and she went back to sleep. At 6:00 her own alarm sounded and she was somewhat surprised to hear the insistent buzzing of Lynda’s alarm still sounding.

  The phone rang. It was Lynda’s employer at the ski report company inquiring why Lynda hadn’t arrived at work. Barbara went to Lynda’s room and switched on the light. The room was immaculate, the bed perfectly made without a wrinkle. This was a bit unusual as Lynda’s habit was to make her bed after she returned from classes, but Barbara wasn’t particularly concerned. She turned off the alarm, and assumed that Lynda was already on her way to work.

  Lynda Ann Healy was not on her way to work, or to school. She was gone without a struggle, and without a trace.

  The green ten-speed bike that Lynda routinely used for transportation was still in the basement, but her roommates noted something alarming. The side door which led into the basement was unlocked. They never left it unlocked. Indeed, the door was very difficult—almost impossible—to unlock from the outside, so they always opened it from the inside when they wanted to push their bikes out and then locked it from the inside again, going around the house to reach their bikes. The single window with its transparent curtain next to the concrete interior steps had long since been painted shut.

  The girls who lived in the shared home met on campus that afternoon and compared notes. Each assumed that one of the others had seen Lynda at classes during the day, yet none had. When her family arrived that evening for the dinner she’d planned, they were frightened. Lynda was the last person in the world who would fail to show up for work, class, and, most particularly, for a supper where she’d invited her family.

  They called the Seattle Police and reported her as a missing person.

  Detectives Wayne Dorman and Ted Fonis of the Homicide Unit arrived to talk to Lynda’s worried parents and housemates. They were led to her neat room in the basement. It was a happy looking room, painted a sunny yellow, its walls festooned with posters and photographs, many of Lynda and friends skiing, and several of the retarded youngsters from the experimental school, Camelot House, where the missing girl volunteered her time. Lynda’s bed was next to the plywood wall. Barbara’s was just on the other side.

  The detectives pulled the spread back. The caseless pillow was stained crimson with dried blood, and a great splotch had soaked through the sheets into the mattress. Whoever had shed that blood would have had to have been seriously injured, perhaps unconscious, but there was not enough blood present to indicate that the victim had bled to death.

  Lorna and Marti pointed out to the investigators that the bed had been made differently from the way Lynda would have done it. “She always pulled the sheet up over the pillow, and now it’s tucked underneath.”

  Lynda had had a pink satin pillowcase on her bed. It was gone. Its mate was in her dresser drawer. Her nightgown was located in the back of the closet, the neck area stiffened with dried blood.

  A reasonable supposition was that someone had entered Lynda’s room as she lay sleeping, beaten her into unconsciousness before she could cry out, and carried her away.

  Her roommates looked through her closet and found the only clothing missing were the jeans, blouse, and boots she’d worn the night before.

  “And her backpack is gone,” Marti said. “It’s red with gray straps. She usually kept books in it, and maybe her yellow ski cap and gloves … and yes, she had a whole bunch of tickets to the Youth Symphony and some checks for tickets in there.”

  Lynda’s nightgown had been stained with blood, which surely indicated she’d worn it when she was attacked. The only conclusion the detectives could reach was that her abductor had taken time to dress her before he took her away. Yet all her coats were in her room. Had it been too late for her to ever need a coat again? And why the backpack? Why the pillowcase?

  The owner of the house told Detectives Fonis and Dorman that he routinely changed all the locks on outer doors to the house when new tenants moved in. This might have been a prudent safeguard, save for the fact that the five girls had left an extra key in the mailbox on the front porch. Furthermore, both Lynda and Marti had lost their keys and had duplicates made.

  Any man, watching, waiting and aware that five women lived in the home, could have charted their movements and seen them retrieving the extra key from the mailbox.

  Now, filled with dread, the remaining four tenants moved out of the green house, and some young male friends moved in to monitor any strange activities. But what had happened had happened. The last peculiar incidents the other four girls could remember was that there had been three phone calls on the afternoon after Lynda vanished. Each time they answered, they could hear only breathing on the other end and then the line had gone dead.

  Every inch of the neighborhood was searched, all the dark leafy ravines of nearby Ravenna Park, both by officers and by K-9 dogs. But Lynda Ann Healy was gone, and the man who had taken her away had left no trace of himself. Nothing. Not so much as a hair, a drop of blood or semen. He had either been very clever, or very, very lucky. It was the kind of case that homicide detectives dread.

  On February 4 a male voice called the police emergency number 9-1-1. “Listen. And listen carefully. The person who attacked that girl on the eighth of last month and the person who took Lynda Healy away are one and the same. He was outside both houses. He was seen.”

  “Who is calling?” the operator asked.

  “No way are you going to get my name,” the man answered and hung up.

  Both Lynda’s current and former boyfriends volunteered to take lie detector tests, and both passed without question.

  As the days and then weeks passed, it was painfully clear that Lynda Ann Healy was dead, her body hidden so carefully that only her killer and God knew where she was. The Seattle Police crime lab had a pitifully short list of physical evidence items to work with. “One white sheet (bloodstained—type A positive), one yellow pillow (bloodstained—type A positive), one short cream-colored nightgown with brown and blue flowered trim (bloodstained—type A positive). Area of bloodstain on white sheet shows distinct ‘ribbed’ pattern at edges.” This was all that remained of the vibrant girl who had bade goodnight to her friends on January 31 and walked away into oblivion.

  To solve a homicide—and Lynda Healy�
�s disappearance was surely a homicide—detectives must find some common threads, something linking the victim to the killer, a similar method of operation in a series of crimes, physical evidence, or links between the victims themselves.

  Here, they were stymied. There were no connections at all between Lynda Healy and Joni Lenz except that they had both been attacked as they slept in basement rooms in communal houses less than a mile apart. Joni had suffered head wounds, and, from the blood pattern on Lynda’s pillow and the stains on her nightgown, it would seem that she too had been struck violently on the skull. But none of the residents of the two houses knew each other. They hadn’t even attended the same classes.

  February slipped into March, and Lynda didn’t come home, nor was there even one sighting of the possessions missing with her. The backpack. Her peasant blouse. Her old jeans with the funny triangular patch in the back. Her two turquoise rings, distinctive round, flat rings with tiny turquoise nuggets “floating” on the silver circles on top. There was no sign of any of it.

  Just two more quarters and Lynda would have graduated from the University and taken a job where she would have been of infinite help to the retarded children whose lives had not been blessed as hers had been with brains, beauty, and a loving and nurturing home.

  While Seattle Police detectives wrestled with the inexplicable disappearance of Lynda Ann Healy, Sheriff Don Redmond in Thurston County and his detectives were having problems of their own. A female student was missing from Evergreen State College, whose campus is just southwest of Olympia.

  Evergreen is a relatively new college in Washington with great, soaring precast concrete buildings rising improbably from the dense forest of fir trees. It is a school much maligned by traditional educators because it eschews required courses, accepted grading scales, and embraces a “do your own thing” philosophy. Students choose what they want to learn, everything from cartoon animation to ecology, and draw up contracts that they promise to fulfill each quarter for credit. The school’s detractors claim that a graduate of Evergreen has no real skills or educational background to offer an employer. They call it a “toy college.” Nevertheless, Evergreen attracts some of the brightest and the best.