The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  This time, no one had seen anyone suspicious. No man with his arm in a sling. No Volkswagen Bug. Kathy had never talked of being afraid or of receiving obscene phone calls. She had been a girl so subject to wide mood swings that the question of suicide arose. Had she felt so guilty about fighting with her father, perhaps believing that she had caused his heart attack? Guilty enough to have taken her own life?

  The Willamette River, which wends its way near Corvallis, was dragged, and nothing was found. Had she chosen another means of self-destruction, her body, would surely be located soon, but it was not.

  Lieutenant Bill Harris, of the Oregon State Police Criminal Investigation Unit, was stationed on the O.S.U. campus, and he headed the probe in Oregon. He had had a tragic homicide in Sackett Hall a few years before, where a coed was found stabbed to death in her room, but his successful investigation had resulted in the arrest of a male student who lived on an upper floor. That youth was still in the Oregon State Penitentiary.

  After a weeklong search, Harris was convinced that Kathy Parks had been abducted, probably seized as she walked between the great masses of lilac bushes blooming along the path between Sackett Hall and the Student Union Building. Gone, like all the others, without a single cry for help.

  Police bulletins with pictures of the four missing girls were tacked up side by side on the office walls of every law enforcement agency in the Northwest, smiling faces that looked enough alike to be sisters. Yet only Herb Swindler was absolutely convinced that Kathy Parks was part of the pattern. Other detectives felt Corvallis was too far away for her to be a victim of the same man who prowled Washington campuses.

  There was to be only a short respite. Twenty-six days later, Brenda Carol Ball, an acquaintance of my elder daughter, disappeared. Brenda, twenty-two, lived with two roommates in the south King County suburb of Burien. She had been a Highline Community College student, until two weeks before. She was five feet three, 112 pounds, and her brown eyes sparkled with her zest for life.

  On the night of May 31-June 1, Brenda went alone to the Flame Tavern at 128th South and Ambaum Road South. Her roommates had seen her last at 2 P.M. that Friday afternoon when she told them that she planned to go to the tavern, and mentioned that she might catch a ride afterward to Sun Lakes State Park in eastern Washington and meet them there.

  She did go to the Flame and was seen there by several people who knew her. No one remembers exactly what she was wearing, but her usual garb was faded blue jeans and long-sleeved turtleneck tops. She seemed to be having a good time, and stayed until closing at 2 A.M.

  Brenda asked one of the musicians in the band for a ride home, but he explained he was heading in another direction. The last time anyone remembers seeing Brenda Ball, she was talking in the parking lot with a handsome, brown-haired man who had one arm in a sling.

  Because Brenda, like Donna Manson, was a free spirit, given to impulsive trips, there was a long delay before she was officially reported missing. Nineteen days passed before her roommates became convinced that something had happened to her. They’d checked with her bank and become alarmed when they learned that her savings account hadn’t been touched. All of her clothing was still in their apartment. Her parents, who lived nearby, hadn’t heard from her either.

  At twenty-two, Brenda was the oldest of all the missing women, an adult who had proved herself capable and cautious in the past. But not now. It seemed that Brenda too had met someone she should not have trusted. Brenda was gone.

  But the stalking was far from over. Even before Brenda Ball was reported as a missing person to King County Police, the man law enforcement officers sought was on the prowl again, about to strike audaciously, virtually in full view of dozens of witnesses—and still remain only a phantom figure. He would thumb his nose at police, leaving them as frustrated as they had ever been in the series of crimes that had already both galled and horrified them. Many of the detectives searching for the missing girls had daughters of their own.

  It was almost as if it was some kind of perverse game of challenge on the part of the abductor. As if, each time, he would come a little further out of the shadows and take more chances to prove that he could do what he wanted and still not be caught, or even seen.

  Georgeann Hawkins, at eighteen, was one of those golden girls for who luck or fate had dealt a perfect hand until that inexplicable night of June 10. Raised in the Tacoma suburb of Sumner, Washington, she’d been a Daffodil Princess and a cheerleader. She attended Lakes High School and, like Susan Rancourt, she was an honor student. Vivacious and glowing with good health, Georgeann had a pixie-like quality to her loveliness. Her long brown hair was glossy and her brown eyes lively. Petite at five feet two inches tall and 115 pounds, she was the youngest of the two daughters of the Warren B. Hawkins family.

  While many good students tend to find the University of Washington’s curriculum much more difficult than that of high school and drop to a comfortable C average, Georgeann had continued to maintain a straight A record. Her biggest worry during that finals week of June 1974 was that she was having a difficult time with Spanish. She considered dropping the course, but, on the morning of June 10, she had phoned her mother and said she was going to cram for the next day’s final as hard as she could, and she thought she could handle it.

  She already had a summer job lined up in Tacoma and she’d discussed it by phone with her parents at least once a week.

  During rush week in September of 1973, Georgeann had been tapped by one of the top sororities on campus, Kappa Alpha Theta, and lived in the big house among several other Greek houses along 17th Avenue N.E.

  Residents of the sororities and fraternities along Greek Row visit back and forth much more freely than they did back in the fifties when it was strictly forbidden for members of the opposite sex to venture above the formal living rooms on the first floor. Georgeann frequently dropped in to see her boyfriend, who lived in the Beta Theta Pi House six houses down from the Theta House,

  During the early evening hours of Monday, June 10, Georgeann and a sorority sister had gone to a party where they’d had one or two mixed drinks. Georgeann explained that she had to get back to study for her Spanish exam. But first she was going to stop by the Beta House and say goodnight to her boyfriend.

  Georgeann was cautious. She rarely went anywhere on campus alone at night, but the area along 17th Avenue N.E. was so familiar, so well-lighted, and there was always someone around she knew. The fraternal organizations front the street on each side, with a grassy island running down the middle. Trees, in full leaf in June, do block out some of the street lights. They’ve grown so tall since they were planted back in the twenties.

  The alley that runs in back of the Greek houses from 45th N.E. to 47th N.E. is as bright as day, lit by street lights every ten feet or so. June 10 was a warm night, and every window facing the alleyway was open. It is doubtful that any of the student residents were asleep, even at midnight. Most of them were cramming for finals, with the aid of black coffee and No-Doz.

  Georgeann did go to the Beta House, a little before 12:30 A.M. on June 11. She visited with her steady boyfriend for a half hour or so, borrowed some Spanish notes, and then said goodnight and left by the backdoor to walk the ninety feet down to the backdoor of the Theta House.

  One of the other Betas heard the door slam and stuck his head out his window, recognizing Georgeann.

  “Hey George!” he called loudly. “What’s happening?”

  The pretty, deeply tanned girl wearing blue slacks, a white backless T-shirt, and a sheer red, white, and blue top, craned her neck and looked back. She smiled and waved, talked for a moment or two about the Spanish exam, and then, laughing, called, “Adios.”

  She turned and headed south toward her residence. He watched her for about thirty feet. Two other male students who knew her recall that they saw her traverse the next twenty feet.

  She had forty feet to go—forty feet in the alley brightly lit. Certainly, there were some m
urky areas between the big houses, filled with laurel hedges and blooming rhododendrons, but Georgeann would have stayed in the middle of the alley.

  Her roommate, Dee Nichols, waited for the familiar sound of pebbles hitting their window. Georgeann had lost her key to the backdoor, and the sorority sister would have to run down the stairs and let her in.

  There was no rattling of pebbles. There was no sound, no outcry, nothing.

  An hour passed. Two hours. Worried, Dee called the Beta House and learned Georgeann had left for home a little after 1:00 A.M. She awoke the housemother, and said softly, “Georgeann’s gone. She didn’t come home.”

  They waited through the night, trying to find some reasonable explanation for why Georgeann might be gone, not wanting to alarm her parents at 3:00 A.M.

  In the morning, they called the Seattle Police.

  Detective “Bud” Jelberg of the Missing Persons Unit took the report, and rechecked with the fraternity house where she’d been seen last, then called her parents. Usually, any police department will wait twenty-four hours before beginning a search for a missing adult but, in view of the events of the first half of 1974, the disappearance of Georgeann Hawkins was treated very, very seriously immediately.

  At 8:45 A.M. Detective Sergeant Ivan Beeson and Detectives Ted Fonis and George Cuthill of the Homicide Unit arrived at the Theta House, 4521 17th N.E. They were accompanied by George Ishii, one of the most renowned criminalists in the Northwest. Ishii, who heads the Western Washington State Crime Lab, is a brilliant man, a man who probably knows more about the detection, preservation, and testing of physical evidence than any other criminalist in the western half of the United States. He was my first teacher of crime scene investigation. In two quarters, I learned more about physical evidence than I had ever before.

  Ishii believes implicitly in the theories of Dr. E. Locarde, a pioneer French criminalist who states, “Every criminal leaves something of himself at the scene of a crime—something, no matter how minute—and always takes something of the scene away with him.” Every good detective knows this. This is why they search so intensely at a crime scene for that small part of the perpetrator that he has left behind: a hair, a drop of blood, a thread, a button, a finger or palm print, a footprint, traces of semen, tool marks, or shell casings. And, in most instances, they find it

  The criminalist and the three homicide detectives covered that alleyway behind 45th and 47th N.E.—that ninety feet—on their hands and knees.

  And found nothing at all.

  Leaving the alley cordoned off, and guarded by patrolmen, they went into the Theta House to talk with Georgeann’s sorority sisters and her housemother.

  Georgeann lived in Number Eight in the house, a room she shared with Dee Nichols. All of her possessions were there, everything but the clothes she’d been wearing and her leather purse, a tan “sack” bag with reddish stains on it. In that purse she had carried her I.D., a few dollars, a bottle of Heaven Sent perfume with angels on the label, and a small hairbrush.

  “Georgeann never went anyplace without leaving me the phone number where she’d be,” Dee said. “I know she intended to come back here last night. She had one more exam and then she was going home for the summer on the thirteenth. The blue slacks—the ones she was wearing—were missing three buttons. There was only one left. I can give you one of the buttons like it from our room.” Like Susan Rancourt, Georgeann was very myopic. “She wasn’t wearing her glasses or her contacts last night,” her roommate recalled. “She’d worn her contacts all day to study, and after you’ve worn contact lenses for a long time, things look blurry when you put glasses on, so she wasn’t wearing them either.”

  The missing girl could have seen well enough to negotiate the familiar alley, but she would have seen nothing more than a vague outline of a figure more than ten feet away. If someone had been lurking in the alley, someone who had learned Georgeann’s name after hearing the youth call to her from the Beta House window, he could easily have used a soft “George—” to call her close to him. And she would have had to walk very close indeed in order to recognize the man who beckoned to her.

  Perhaps so close that she could have been seized, gagged, and carried off before she had a chance to cry out?

  Surely, anyone looking down the alley would have been alerted at the sight of a man carrying her away. Or would they? There are always high jinks during finals week, anything to break the tension, and strong young men frequently pick up giggling, squealing girls, playing “caveman.”

  But no one had seen even that. Georgeann Hawkins may have been knocked out with one blow, chloroformed, injected with a swift-acting nervous system depressant, or just pinioned in powerful arms, a hand held tightly over her mouth so that she couldn’t even scream.

  “She was afraid of the dark,” Dee said quietly. “Sometimes, we would walk all the way around a block just to avoid a dark spot along the sidewalk. When he got her, I know that she was hurrying back here. I don’t think she had a chance.”

  The sorority sister who had attended the party earlier in the evening with Georgeann remembered that they’d parted on the corner of 47th N.E. and 17th N.E. “She stood and waited while I walked to our house, and I yelled to her that I was O.K., and she yelled back that she was O.K. All of us kind of checked on each other like that. She went into the Beta House and that’s the last time I ever saw her.”

  It was incomprehensible then, and it is still incomprehensible to Seattle homicide detectives, that Georgeann Hawkins could vanish so completely within a space of forty feet. Of all the cases of missing girls, it is the Hawkins case that baffles them the most. It was something that couldn’t have happened, and yet it did.

  When the news of Georgeann’s disappearance hit the media, two witnesses came forward with stories of incidents on June 11 that were amazingly similar. An attractive sorority girl said that she’d been walking in front of the Greek houses on 17th N.E. at about 12:30 A.M. when she’d seen a young man on crutches just ahead of her. One leg of his jeans had been cut up the side, and he appeared to have a full cast on that leg.

  “He was carrying a briefcase with a handle, and he kept dropping it. I offered to help him, but I told him I had to go into one of the houses for a few minutes, and, if he didn’t mind waiting, I’d come out and help him get his stuff home.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. I was inside longer than I thought, and he was gone when I came out.”

  A male college student also had seen the tall, good-looking man with the briefcase and crutches. “A girl was carrying his case for him, and, later on, after I’d taken my girl home, I saw the girl again, walking alone.”

  He looked at a picture of Georgeann Hawkins, but said he was positive she wasn’t the girl he’d seen.

  At this time, the notation in the Susan Rancourt file in Ellensburg about the man with his arm in a sling was not generally known. Only after publicity about the man with his leg in the cast was disseminated would the two incidents so far apart be coordinated. Coincidence, or part of a sly plan to throw young women off guard?

  Detectives canvassed every house on each side of 17th N.E. At the Phi Sigma Sigma fraternity at 4520, just across from the Theta House, they found that the housemother recalled being awakened from a sound sleep between one and two on the morning of June 11.

  “It was a scream that wakened me. It was a high-pitched scream … a terrified scream. And then it just stopped, and everything was quiet. I figured it was just kids horsing around, but now I wish … I wish I’d …”

  No one else heard it.

  Lynda … Donna … Susan … Kathy … Brenda … Georgeann. All gone as completely as if a seam in the backdrop of life itself had opened, drawn them in, and closed without leaving so much as a mended tear in the tapestry.

  Georgeann Hawkins’s father, his voice breaking, summed up the feelings of all the desperately worried parents who waited for some word. “Every day, I’m a little bit lower. You’d like to h
ope, but I’m too realistic. She was a very friendly, very involved youngster. I keep saying ‘was.’ I shouldn’t say that. It’s a job raising kids. You steer them along, and we figured we had both our kids over the hump.”

  Any homicide detective who has ever tried to cope with the anguish of parents who realize intuitively that their children are dead, but have not even the faint comfort of knowing where their bodies are, can attest to the fact that this is the worst. One weary investigator commented to me, “It’s rough. It’s damn rough, when you have to tell them that you’ve found a body, that it’s their kid. But it’s never over for the parents who just don’t know. They can’t really have a funeral, they can’t know that their children aren’t being held and tortured someplace, they can’t face their grief and get it over. Hell, you never get over it, but, if you know, you can pick your life up again, somehow.”

  The girls were gone, and each set of parents tried to deal with it, and brought in the records that would mean the identification one day, perhaps, of a decomposed body. Dental records from all the years of paying for fillings and orthodontics so that their daughters would have good teeth to last a lifetime. The X-rays from Donna Manson’s broken bones, set clean and strong again. And, for Georgeann, X-rays taken when she’d suffered from Osgood-Schlatter’s Disease as a teenager, an inflammation of the tibia near the knee. After months of concern, her legs had grown long and shapely, marked only by slight bumps just below the knee.

  Any of us who have raised children know, as John F. Kennedy once said, that “to have children is to give hostages to fate.” To lose a child to an illness, or even an accident, can be dealt with during the passage of time. To lose a child to a predator, an insanely brilliant killer, is almost more than any human should have to bear.