by Ann Rule
“I don’t know why,” she said, “but Sandy kept coming into my mind that night and we decided to drive over and see her. The lights were on but she didn’t answer the door. We stuck the cigarette up over the door so she’d know we’d been there when she came home.”
The couple weren’t positive of the time they had knocked on Sandy’s door, but they thought it was between eight and nine.
During subsequent reconstruction, the homicide investigators realized that Sandy probably wrote the note to Tom in the last half hour of her life.
The investigation, however, was clouded with almost too many clues and too many bizarre coincidences. Schrader, Dorman, and Strunk felt that both Wilkins and Leffberg were prime suspects. And Al Schrader also felt that Bobbi Roselle knew much more than she was willing to tell officers. She, too, appeared to be afraid of something.
5
Every name of someone connected to Sandy or Tom Bowman was compared to Seattle Police records of people who had been the suspects, victims, or witnesses in earlier cases on file—for everything from purse snatching and window peeping to murder. One name started bells and whistles sounding. The detectives had found a strong connection to another unsolved murder. Two and a half years earlier, in June of 1966, two United Airlines flight attendants had been brutally bludgeoned in their Queen Anne Hill basement apartment. One of the flight attendants, Lonnie Trumbull, was dead of massive head injuries when officers responded to the frantic call from the apartment manager’s wife. The other girl lay near death for two weeks after the attack. The only thing that had saved her, physicians surmised, were the big wire rollers in her hair. “The curlers absorbed a lot of the force of the blows,” the ER doctor had told police. “But we won’t know if she has permanent brain damage until she regains consciousness.” Detective Joyce Johnson had been assigned to sit beside the injured girl’s hospital bed in case she said anything that might lead them to the attacker. But the victim had mumbled only nonsense phrases and moaned. Although the young woman recovered completely, she was never able to tell officers anything about the events of the fatal night. She had a total blackout.
This attack took place several miles from the Ballard district. But there was a connection. The manager of the apartment house where the flight attendants lived had been Wayne Brosnick, who was, of course, the Bowman’s next-door neighbor. It was Brosnick who Tom Bowman had run to after discovering his wife’s body.
Follow-up reports on the stewardess’s murder indicated that Wayne Brosnick had been questioned extensively. He had submitted willingly to a lie detector test, which he passed completely. However, Brosnick was now interrogated about friends who might have visited him in either or both apartment houses. He acknowledged that one of his acquaintances had a record of sex offenses and had been questioned in the earlier case. Questioned and released.
“There’s not a thing to tie Brosnick’s friend to the Bowman case beyond simple coincidence,” one investigator said. Still, the man was checked out and found to have been miles away at the time of Sandy Bowman’s death.
• • •
In 2004, it is far easier to look back at Lonnie Trumbull’s murder thirty-six years ago and even to name her killer. It was undoubtedly Ted Bundy, who was eighteen at the time and working at a Safeway store on Queen Anne Hill. The M.O. of the attack on the flight attendants had virtually the same scenario as Bundy’s savage murders in the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida, some fourteen years later. In the former, he picked up a piece of two-by-four from a woodpile outside the flight attendants’ apartment; in Tallahassee, he used an oak log from another woodpile. But no one had ever heard of Ted Bundy in 1968, and he had not even been a suspect in the disappearance of 8-year-old Anne Marie Burr in Tacoma, Washington, in August 1962—although he delivered her family’s morning paper.
6
As the Sandy Bowman homicide investigation moved on, detectives fanned out in many directions. Detectives Nat Crawford and Wayne Dorman went over the Bowman apartment inch by inch with an iodine fumer, which could bring up latent fingerprints. Even the picture tube from the television set was removed and taken to George Ishii, the Seattle Police Department’s crack criminalist, for print identification. There were prints there, but they didn’t match any suspects. In 1968, the thought of a computer-generated fingerprint identification system would have been something straight out of science fiction. The FBI kept a full set of ten fingerprints only on their Ten Most Wanted felons, and they had no way to compare single unknown prints to the millions of prints on file.
Billy Dunagen, who was the Seattle Police Department’s handwriting identification expert, determined that Sandy herself wrote the note found on the coffee table.
• • •
Sandra Bowman’s funeral was held four days before Christmas. Detectives E. T. Mullen, Wayne Dorman, and Nat Crawford mingled with the crowd to observe those attending, and pictures were taken of the crowd. Lee Wilkins and Jim Leffberg served as pallbearers. There was a reason for that: the investigators wanted to keep track of them and have them out of the way so that their vehicles could be processed for evidence.
Sandy’s uncle, Hector Gillis, recalled that he was asked to keep Leffberg close to him. “All of the pallbearers were in the same vehicle, and I was sitting right next to this weird guy. I knew that Leffberg was one of the prime suspects in my niece’s murder, and it wasn’t easy to make conversation with him. But we had to be sure that he was being watched all during the funeral.”
Lee Wilkins, Sandy’s former steady boyfriend, smiled a great deal during the services, and one of the detectives who had questioned Wilkins recalled that he hadn’t seen Wilkins smile at all during previous contacts with him. Other than that, nothing unusual transpired at the final rites and interment of the lovely teenager who had so looked forward to Christmas and to motherhood.
• • •
On the same day as Sandy Bowman’s funeral, two mortuary attendants transported a corpse to another Seattle funeral parlor. It was not Sandra Bowman’s body, but the attendants called police about a macabre incident. As they wheeled the corpse from a hearse into the establishment, a wild-eyed young man approached them, demanding to know, “Is that the body of the 16-year-old girl? It better not be!”
The attendants ordered the man to leave the mortuary, but one followed him and memorized the license number of his car as he drove hurriedly away. He reported this intelligence to homicide. A license check with auto records gave them the name of the registered owner, a Seattle woman.
Two homicide detectives drove to her address at once. The door was answered by a distraught older woman, who admitted that her son had been driving her car that day. She explained that he was a former mental patient. “He was traumatized when my husband was murdered ten years ago,” she said. “It upset my son so much that any murder he hears about seems to send him into a psychotic state. There’s been so much about that poor girl in the newspapers, and I’m afraid the publicity about her death has disturbed him a great deal.”
When the investigators talked with the woman’s son, he gave them an erratic account of his activities on the night of December 17. “I had the car and I went out to the country club because that’s the only place in Seattle where the water isn’t poison,” he said. “When I got there, I had an accident. Another car hit me by the entrance gates.”
They checked and found that the deranged man had, indeed, been involved in a minor accident near the guard station at the entrance to the posh grounds of a north end country club. The accident took place at 7:35 in the evening.
The unfortunate woman had her hands full with her psychotic son, but he wasn’t Sandy Bowman’s killer.
7
Lee Wilkins and Jim Leffberg remained the top suspects, even though their cars hadn’t held a smidgen of evidence linking them to Sandy’s murder. Keeping an eye on Jim Leffberg was no problem: he seemed always to be underfoot, pestering the dead girl’s relatives, repeating his
story of the magazine salesman, and demanding to be allowed to attend all family functions. At the funeral parlor, he had insisted on sitting with the family as if he truly did have close connections to them.
Leffberg answered questions easily at first, and then became more and more evasive as detectives interviewed him. He refused to take a polygraph test. He said that he had been painting a home in North Seattle until 7:00 or 7:30 on the night of the seventeenth. Then he had gone to a bar in South King County where he played pool with a friend and drank beer. He chided the investigators because they weren’t looking hard enough for the magazine salesman.
Detective Al Schrader had already made every attempt to track down Leffberg’s theory on the elusive magazine peddler but he had found no one in the Kon-Tiki complex who remembered seeing such a salesman within the six months preceding the murder.
Obtaining a search warrant, Schrader searched Lee Wilkins’s room. The boy was advised of his rights and he offered no objection. Schrader was looking for a knife—the knife, because the butcher knife found on the floor of the murder bedroom wasn’t the murder weapon.
Now, in Wilkins’s room, Schrader found three knives. All of them were hunting knives, but all of them were also rusty from disuse. Still, Lee Wilkins, like Jim Leffberg, refused to submit to a lie detector test, which was his right.
After conferences with his lawyer and his parents, Lee Wilkins finally agreed to take a polygraph. Investigators had already checked out his alibi, but they did it again. He insisted that he had spent the entire evening of December 17 with three friends in the basement recreation room of one of the boys’ houses. Each boy still verified that Wilkins had been with them from shortly before seven until eleven o’clock. Lee continued to deny that he had borne Sandy any grudge at all. “She was my good friend,” he sighed. “Why can’t you believe that?”
Dewey Gillespie was the most experienced polygraph expert in the Seattle Police Department, known nationwide for his accurate readings. Gillespie had never met Lee Wilkins and would have no preconceived notions about his guilt or innocence. He was chosen to administer the lie detector test to him. After hooking Wilkins up to leads that would register respiration, blood pressure, heart rate, and galvanic skin responses, Gillespie began by asking the teenager innocuous questions to establish his normal responses. His name. His age. Where he lived. Only gradually did he begin to ask questions about Sandy Bowman and her murder, all the time watching the pens that moved along the graph in front of him. There were no high spikes that indicated Gillespie’s subject was being deceptive.
“He doesn’t have any guilty knowledge of the girl’s murder,” Gillespie told the detectives who waited anxiously for the test results. “He passed without a hitch. I don’t believe he’s the guy you’re looking for.”
That left Jim Leffberg as the top candidate among the suspects. He was placed under even more intense surveillance than he had been before. He was a strange man, indeed. Why had he insinuated himself into Sandy Bowman’s circle of young friends? He was twenty or thirty years older than most of them, and had nothing in common with them. Leffberg had known Sandy’s mother since she babysat for his children before his divorce. When she moved away and the children no longer needed day care, Leffberg had attached himself to Sandy and Tom.
He always seemed to be somewhere around them and their extended families. One of Sandy’s cousins recalled, “Jim wasn’t invited to Sandy and Tom’s wedding—but he came anyway. He got drunk and obnoxious and we finally had to ask him to leave.”
Friends remembered an incident when Leffberg approached Sandy in a local restaurant and insisted that he accompany her home. “Sandy kidded him along, but she didn’t really want him around.”
Jim Leffberg had been anxious to be part of the homicide investigation in the beginning, but now with every police request he became more defensive and evasive. He wasn’t stupid—just peculiar—and he knew they had switched their suspicions from Lee Wilkins to him. On December 30, Al Schrader talked to him and asked him to take a “routine” polygraph. As he had told Lee Wilkins, it was the best way for Leffberg to eliminate himself from consideration as a suspect.
“Don’t you want to clear your name completely?” Schrader asked, “so we can get on with this investigation? You’ll be able to help us solve it—but we have to wonder now why you won’t agree to take the lie detector test.”
Leffberg agreed only to think it over and call back.
There was no physical evidence linking the bushy-haired handyman to Sandy’s murder. The red streaks on Leffberg’s clothes that had seemed so telling proved to be only Rustoleum paint, just as he had claimed. Cary Parkes and Bill MacPherson had talked to the couple whose home he had painted on December 17. They verified that he had, indeed, been there painting until well into the supper hour, although they could not give the exact time he left.
Leffberg had claimed that he was in the south end of King County after work that day, drinking and playing pool at the Sand Dunes Restaurant next to the Green River in Kent. Jorge Guerraro,* his drinking buddy that night, had given detectives what seemed to be a “well-rehearsed” verification of Leffberg’s alibi. Just to be sure, Bill MacPherson talked with a waitress at the Sand Dunes. She said she knew Guerraro and Leffberg as regular customers.
“Were they here on the 17th—the night the girl was murdered in Ballard?” MacPherson asked
“What day of the week was that?”
“It was a Tuesday.”
“I can’t be sure. They usually came in on the weekend. I don’t remember seeing them on the 17th.”
MacPherson was elated; maybe he’d found the first flaw in Jim Leffberg’s alibi.
But a few days later, another waitress from the Sand Dunes called him and asked him to come back to the restaurant. She had some information for him. She had been off duty when MacPherson questioned her coworker. “I remember them, and they were both here on the seventeenth. They hung around from about 6:30 P.M. until 10:30 P.M.”
“How can you be positive about that?”
“Well, that was the first night it really snowed, and we were all talking about it, wondering if we’d be able to get our cars out of the parking lot and if the roads would be dangerous. But I particularly remember because Jorge Guerraro borrowed some money from me. See here: I marked it down—with the date.”
She showed MacPherson a notation in a small notebook she carried in her purse. Sure enough, the date was December 17, and her loan to Guerraro was marked there.
“And you’re sure that Jim Leffberg was here with him that night?”
“I’m sure. They always came in together. They nursed beers and tried to hustle pool players, but they weren’t very good.”
8
The case with too many clues was rapidly turning into an almost impossible maze. When detectives tried to find Bobbi Roselle to question her again, they discovered that her parents had spirited her out of the state on a plane to California under an assumed name. As they questioned teenage friends who hadn’t been as close to Sandy Bowman, they met with more frustration. So many of them had been involved with drugs that they were afraid to talk to police, even when they were told, “We’re not investigating marijuana. We’re trying to solve a murder.”
One girl finally told them, “You should really try to find Bobbi. She was supposed to be Sandy’s best friend—but if that was true, she didn’t need any enemies. Bobbi liked Tom way too much. She used to go around telling us places she’d gone with Tom. She never mentioned that Sandy was along at the time. Bobbi’s a troublemaker. She likes to start rumors to mess people up.”
“You aren’t saying that Tom Bowman was interested in Bobbi, are you?”
“No way. He loved Sandy, but Bobbi had a crush on him. I don’t think he even knew it. Bobbi just made stuff up.”
That made sense. Their investigation so far had involved statements by dozens of people, and not one of them had ever even hinted that Tom was unfaithful. He had bee
n cleared as a suspect almost from the beginning. But Bobbi Roselle wasn’t a likely suspect, either: she was a tiny girl who could never have overpowered Sandy. She wouldn’t have had the strength to plunge a knife into the victim.
Bobbi Roselle returned from California in January 1969. The diminutive girl assured detectives that she had been Sandy’s friend and would never do anything to hurt her. They weren’t so sure about that, but again, she was just too small to do any physical harm to Sandy. Although she was chagrined to be asked, Bobbi Roselle grudgingly agreed to take a lie detector test. Once more, the results were negative. Bobbi may have been a rumormonger but she passed the polygraph examination easily.
• • •
Where there had once been so many likely suspects in Sandy Bowman’s murder, they had been winnowed out until there were none at all. There was a substantial reward offer put out to urge anyone with information on Sandy’s murder to tell the police about it. Several King County commissioners contributed to it and Tom Bowman added every penny he could.
No one came forward.
In the late sixties and early seventies, True Detective Magazine had a series called “Number One Mysteries,” and a year later I wrote Sandy Bowman’s story, entitling it “Washington State’s Number One Mystery” and asked anyone who might have information leading to her killer to contact Detective Al Schrader at the Homicide Unit of the Seattle Police Department.
Schrader received a few letters, but none of them contained useful information. They were filled only with theories that would-be sleuths who didn’t know Sandy or Seattle had come up with.