by Ann Rule
As unimaginable as it might sound, the true solution of the case that follows took almost thirty-six years! As I recall, it was the third case I wrote, far back in the beginning of my career as a true-crime writer. This was the tragedy that made me question whether my conscience would allow me to keep writing in the reality crime genre, and I almost quit right then. As I read the files on the death of a teenage bride, a girl who was totally happy with her new husband and looking forward to the baby they expected, I was saddened and heartsick.
I actually scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist and told him of my doubts, explaining that I was alone with four children to raise and that having a steady assignment as the Northwest correspondent for True Detective magazine meant a lot to us financially. I only made two hundred dollars for an article, but in the late sixties that was enough for us to get by. At the same time, I wasn’t comfortable with the thought that I was making a living from someone else’s misfortunes.
The therapist smiled slightly at my question. He explained that half the population of the United States probably depended at least partially on the mishaps of others for their livelihood.
“I do,” he said, “and so do insurance salesmen, doctors, police officers, firefighters, hospital workers, funeral directors, journalists, ministers, social workers. Well, you get the point. The list goes on and on. What really matters is how you feel about the people you write about.”
“Then I think I can deal with that,” I said. “I have no question about how I feel. I care a great deal for them. It’s never going to be just a story for me. The victims are very real to me, and I want to do the best job I can to tell about their lives.”
“Then you have your answer,” he said. “You have no reason to feel guilty. If you ever stop caring about the victims, then you should write about something else.”
I cared about Sandra Bowman then, and I still do now. If she were alive today, she would be fifty-two, probably a grandmother.
But she never got that chance.
The world went on for these thirty-six years without Sandra, and no one ever knew who had killed her. It was really a double murder because her unborn child died with her.
Ann Rule
August 2004
1
One of the reasons Sandy’s—as she was called—murder disturbed me so much was because I knew her uncle. Her mother’s brother, Jerry Yates, was a detective sergeant in the Crimes Against Persons Unit of the Seattle Police Department. His unit investigated homicides, robberies, sex crimes, and missing persons. Yates was in charge of the Missing Persons Division. He was an extremely kind man who worked hard to find loved ones other people had lost, and everyone who knew Yates was saddened that he would lose his own niece to an unknown killer. Although homicide investigators do their best to solve every case assigned to them, the men who had worked beside Jerry Yates for years vowed they wouldn’t stop until they saw his niece’s killer brought to justice.
But it would prove to be a baffling case marked by bizarre circumstances. In the beginning, the vicious senseless murder of a 16-year-old girl seemed to be only a slight challenge to experienced detectives. But so many suspects who might have killed Sandy Bowman emerged, clouding the probe with false leads that led only to frustrating dead ends.
Sandy Bowman was her maternal grandfather’s favorite of all the offspring. Benjamin Yates was a hardworking Kansas native born around the turn of the century, and he had suffered many tragic losses in his life. His first wife, Ida Murphy Yates, died eight years after their marriage, leaving him with three children to raise. He was remarried to Neva Taylor Yates and they had eight more children. Sadly, their two baby sons, Earl and Donald, both died when they were only a year old, and another son, Ray, succumbed to leukemia at the age of 13. James, Jerry, Shirley, Dorothy, and Beverly grew to adulthood.
Every family deals with grief in its own fashion, and perhaps because Benjamin and Neva had to bury three of their children, they covered up their pain, kept their sorrow to themselves, and seldom discussed their losses.
Dorothy Yates married Roy Maki in 1947 three months before her sixteenth birthday. Dorothy, was a native of Kansas who married a young Washington State man. Beverly Yates was 16 when she married Hector Gillis Jr.
Dorothy Maki was only 17 when her first son, William, was born, followed by Robert in just eleven months. Two baby boys in one calendar year meant that Dorothy had her hands full. Sandy came along four years later, and she was a sweet-faced baby girl with dark hair and huge eyes, someone her mother could dress up in frilly clothes.
Sandra Darlene “Sandy” Maki was born on December 3, 1952, the adored baby sister of her brothers William and Robert Maki.
The Yateses were a close family, and Dorothy’s sisters, Beverly and Shirley, had children—who, along with Jerry’s, played with their cousins often. When the children were young, they lived near each other in the Ballard section of Seattle, the neighborhood populated mostly by Scandinavians—Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, and Finns. Fishing ships docked in Ballard in between trips to Alaska and the Pacific Ocean, and both commercial and private boats had to move through the Ballard Locks to reach the open sea.
Ballard was a low-crime area and so was most of the near north end of Seattle in the fifties and sixties. Ballard was on the western end of 45th Street, and the University of Washington was on the eastern. In between were the family neighborhoods with Craftsman-style houses and local shops: Wallingford, Fremont, Green Lake. Decades later, they would be hip, then funky, and finally very expensive.
The elder Yateses, Benjamin and Neva, lived over in Port Orchard on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Their grandchildren visited and Benjamin doted on freckle-faced Sandy. She was always laughing and she loved dogs.
Sandy’s parents divorced in 1964 when she was 12 and her mother remarried later in the year. Surrounded by her large extended family, she seemed to handle the divorce well.
Sandy was always popular and dated often in junior high and high school. She was petite and wore her thick brown hair in a short bouffant cut with a fringe of bangs over her high forehead. Like most young women who followed the fashion of the day, she lined her blue eyes with a dark kohl pencil and applied several coats of mascara. Teenagers tried to emulate the English star Twiggy, and even though few of them were as sliver thin as she was, they all wore short dresses and go-go boots in 1968 and listened to recordings by the Doors and the Beatles.
Sandy had gone steady with a boy named Lee Wilkins* for a while, but it was Tom Bowman who won her heart. She had never planned on going to college; so far all the women in her family dropped out of school to marry young, and she had looked forward to being married and having her own home.
She and Tom were very young. Sandy was only 15 when they were married on July 27, 1968, but her family saw that she had a lovely wedding. She was happy when her stepsister, Jo Anne Weeks, caught her wedding bouquet. The two young women got along very well.
Sandy and her new husband rented a small apartment, but something frightened her there and they quickly found another where she would feel safer. They were able to rent a second-floor apartment in the Kon-Tiki complex at 6201 14th Street N.W. for a reasonable price. They didn’t have much furniture, but what they chose was Danish Modern.
She wasn’t pregnant when she got married, but Sandy conceived two months later and both she and Tom were eagerly looking forward to the birth of their baby in June 1969.
Tom worked the three to eleven P.M. shift at the American Can Company, so Sandy was alone most evenings, but she had so many friends she didn’t feel lonesome.
On December 3, Sandy celebrated her sixteenth birthday. She was excited about her first Christmas as a married woman.
Washington State had an extremely cold winter that year and Seattle’s city streets were clogged with snow before Christmas, when usually it was only the mountain passes where snow was to be expected. In the Cascades, drifts towered over vehicles and the summits were
often closed to traffic—and skiers—until the roads were cleared and avalanche danger was past.
Temperatures had dropped on Tuesday, December 17, and Ballard’s streets were soon covered with snow.
That day, just a week before Christmas Eve, began happily when Sandy checked her mailbox and found a letter from a relative in New York with a twenty-dollar check tucked inside as a Christmas gift. Today, it doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it went much further in 1968. The average yearly income was about $6,400 a year, and gasoline cost only thirty-four cents a gallon. Tom was making a good living at the can factory, but the check was a wonderful surprise for Sandy. She smiled as she waved the check in front of her husband and told him she was going to buy more presents with it.
Snow fluttered past their windows as they shared a leisurely breakfast. It was the one meal of the day they could enjoy together without rushing. Then they listened to records on their stereo set—Hey Jude and Green Tambourine.
Two of Sandy’s girlfriends who had attended Ballard High School with her dropped by to visit with them. The snow kept falling, making the apartment seem very cozy.
Early in the afternoon, Tom changed into his work clothes and Sandy asked if she could ride along with him as far as the bank. She wanted to cash the gift check, and then she planned to shop and visit some of her relatives who lived in Ballard. She promised him she would be home early; it would be dark well before five. The shortest day of the year was only four days away, and Seattle’s winter days were almost as dark as those in Alaska. Tom didn’t want her out after dark or walking alone on slippery streets when she was pregnant, even though she was six months from having their baby.
He grinned as he watched her walk away from his car toward the bank, enjoying the enthusiasm Sandy showed over even a simple shopping trip. Their marriage was still at the “playing house” stage and the newlyweds considered themselves very lucky.
2
It was 11:30 that night when Tom got home from work. Ordinarily, he would have finished his shift at 9:30 but he had a chance to work two hours overtime, and he took it. Without checking to see if the apartment’s front door was locked, he automatically slipped his key into the lock. The door swung open. Later, he couldn’t remember if the door had been locked or even if it had been ajar.
As he stepped into the living room an extra-long cigarette fell from the doorjamb above his head and dropped on the floor in front of him. It was a Pall Mall that had never been lit. That puzzled him slightly because Sandy smoked only occasionally, and then she chose Winstons. He didn’t smoke at all.
The living room was a little messy, but Sandy wasn’t a meticulous housekeeper so he didn’t think much of it—until he noticed that her purse lay in the middle of the floor with its contents scattered as if someone had deliberately dumped it out and hadn’t bothered to put the scattered items back in. One of Sandy’s black pumps lay next to it. The coffee table was stacked with Christmas presents, along with some holiday wrapping paper and the daily paper. It had been read, its sections haphazardly stacked.
The lights in the apartment and the television set were still on. That was odd. Sandy usually turned off the lights when she left a room to save on their electric bill.
Tom saw that she had left a note propped up on the coffee table. Walking quietly so he wouldn’t wake her up, he read it. “Tom,” she had written, “I went to bed early because I didn’t feel so good. The baby started moving tonight, it’s not kicking yet, it squirms and moves. It moved up on my ribs. AND IT HURT. It must be a boy because it’s strong. I got $23.00 left. I love you very much.
“Love, Sandy”
He doubted that she could actually feel their baby when she was only three months pregnant, but she was so thrilled about being a mother she probably had imagined she felt it inside her.
Tom walked toward their bedroom and saw that was the only room in the apartment where the light was switched off. He could make out Sandy where she lay across the end of the bed. His first thought was that she must have been so exhausted that she’d fallen asleep without even bothering to get under the covers.
And then he snapped on the light switch next to the door. He saw a silent tableau that he would never be able to forget. It was the most horrendous sight he would ever see.
Sandy lay in a crimson welter of her own blood, making him think at first that she had suffered a miscarriage and passed out from hemorrhaging. But as he dropped to his knees beside the bed, Tom saw that her hands were bound together with some sort of rope or cord. She wore the green dress she’d had on earlier, but now it looked as though it had been ripped almost completely off her body. The flowered sheets on their bed were soaked with blood, and the wall was spattered with scarlet droplets.
Someone had done this to Sandy. Tom looked at her closely, hoping to see that she was breathing and her heart was beating. But he knew. Even as he ran from their apartment, Tom Bowman knew it was too late to save Sandy. There was no dial tone on their own phone. Tom pounded first on the closest apartment, but no one answered. Then he ran to the apartment in the other direction. Mr. and Mrs. Wayne Brosnick* lived there.
Wayne Brosnick opened the door immediately, and saw an almost hysterical man with tears in his eyes. He blurted, “My wife’s been raped and killed!”
The Brosnicks led Tom to their phone and helped him place a call to police. Then he muttered that he had to get back to his wife. Seattle Police patrolmen B. Mayhle and I. Citron, who were working out of the nearby Wallingford Precinct, responded to the call for help. As they ran up the steps to #203 of the Kon-Tiki, they found Tom Bowman sitting outside his apartment with his head in his hands. He pointed into the apartment as he sobbed, “My wife—”
It took the patrol officers only seconds to determine that homicide detectives were needed, and they hurried back to their squad car to notify the radio room. The Homicide Unit was on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building in downtown Seattle. From midnight until seven A.M., it was usually empty and investigators were called at home when they were needed, but Sergeants Elmer Wittman and Cary Parkes, and Detective William MacPherson, who were just about to go off duty, were still there. They grabbed their homicide kits and ran instead to the police garage and leapt into an unmarked car. They asked radio to alert their command officers who were off duty. Lieutenant Dick Schoener and Captain Wayne Simpson said they would respond to the Bowmans’ Ballard apartment.
While Tom Bowman sat in shock on the living room couch, the detectives entered the bedroom. They were all experienced officers, but the insane violence before them was almost unbelievable. If anything could make it worse, it was the sight of more Christmas presents that Sandy Bowman had stacked beside the bed.
The dead girl had obviously been stabbed, but it would be impossible to count the number of thrusts. It would take the medical examiner to determine the exact number if even he could do that. This was clearly a case of “overkill,” usually the sign that the killer had known the victim and had some grievance to settle, some terrible rage to get out.
Sandy’s panties, pantyhose, and bra had been ripped from her body and flung carelessly on the floor. The entire bed was stained with blood, but there were two distinct pools that appeared to have soaked through the bedding and into the mattress. It looked as if she had been stabbed and then rolled or moved to another part of the bed.
Her wrists were bound with cord, now tied loosely, although there were deep grooves there that indicated they had once been tightened cruelly. For some inexplicable reason, her slayer had loosened them before leaving the apartment.
A pair of black-handled household scissors and a butcher knife lay on the bedroom floor. At this point, it was impossible to tell if either—or both—had been used in the attack.
In the bathroom, the detectives checked the sink for signs that the killer had washed his hands. They would remove the P-trap later to see if anything of evidentiary value had been caught there. Glancing toward the toilet, they saw
a gruesome mask fashioned from adhesive tape, a mask the size of a face. They didn’t know yet whether the murderer had used it as a disguise or if he had put it on Sandy Bowman’s face as some kind of blindfold or gag. Someone had tried to flush it down the toilet but it had been caught, too large to go down.
While Cary Parkes photographed Sandy’s body, the obvious evidence, and then every room in the apartment, Dick Schoener called the “next-up” detectives—Wayne Dorman and Don Strunk—at home. They would gather any more possible or trace evidence, bag it and tag it, and take measurements of the rooms.
Schoener studied the cords binding Sandy Bowman’s wrists and determined that they had been cut from the draperies in the living room. By measuring the cords on the opposite side of the windows, he was able to determine that all the cord cut was still in the apartment.
A search of garbage cans behind the apartment produced one knife. Upon autopsy, Dr. Gale Wilson would be able to tell if it matched any of Sandy’s fatal wounds.
Detectives questioned the Brosnicks, whose apartment shared a common wall with the Bowmans: “Did you hear or see anything this evening which might have been unusual—anything at all?”
The couple looked at each other. Then Wayne Brosnick answered slowly, “Yes. We did. Now we realize what was happening, but at the time, I’m afraid we thought everything was all right. We heard a scream at about 7:30. I’m sure of the time because we were watching The Jerry Lewis Show, and it had just come on. We heard a male voice, too, but we couldn’t understand what he was saying.