by Ann Rule
“One thing,” Kathie said with a laugh, “I know what I had to go through to be cleared by security for my job. They not only checked me out—but the rest of our family, too. Al can’t have any secrets now. You have to be clean as a whistle to qualify for the Polar Program, and have the proper identity to pass customs in New Zealand to get there!”
Kathie had never expected to be married again; she was happy with her extended family. And they needed her; she was the matriarch of the Hill family, the shoulder to cry on, the one who would always listen, and offer good advice. The Hills were a very close group of relatives whose home base was in Colorado. They all cherished Kathie.
The Hills had gone through so much in recent years. Kathie’s older brother Jim (Jami’s father) died young. Kathie’s mother, Barbara, fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease and sight-stealing macular degeneration. She was nearly blind because of the latter ailment. Where she had always been gentle and sweet, Barbara’s personality changed as the diseases moved on inexorably. She became mean and used obscenities she’d never used before. It was Kathie who cared for her mother. She couldn’t go to Antarctica those years because she stayed with her mother until the end—even after Barbara Hill had to be moved to an assisted living facility. She wanted to be sure her mother had the best of care.
The Hill family losses did not end there. Kathie’s brother David had been happily married to his wife, Jeanette, for many years. Sadly, she contracted breast cancer. Although she fought hard, she lost her battle.
Al never gave up on Kathie. Throughout the tragedies that stalked the Hill family, he was always there, attending funerals, memorial services, and weddings, comforting Kathie or celebrating happy times with her. In the end, his persistent courtship both charmed Kathie and wore her down. In 2007, they were married in Colorado in front of her family. Kathie was forty-nine, and Al was fifty-eight.
Kathie’s decision to marry Al Baker had come rather suddenly and her relatives were surprised, but she was clearly so happy that not one of them dared to rain on her parade. Behind Al’s back, some of her family called Al “The Troll,” which he did resemble—with his long white hair in a ponytail and his voluminous white beard. Still, the Hill family welcomed him to their gatherings. To his face, they called him “Alan,” a name he preferred. They thought he was a little odd, but they never dreamed he would hurt Kathie. He seemed to dote on her.
Kathie had far more assets than Al did: a lovely home in Aurora, Colorado; savings; and investments. She was scrupulous about keeping records and managing her own finances.
Al was the idea man, freewheeling, with dreams of making a fortune. As yet, he hadn’t done that. Opposites do attract, and they were as different as night and day.
Kathie Hill Baker could juggle her marriage, her job at Raytheon, and the needs of her extended family. Kathie refused to let her family fall apart despite too many losses in too short a time. Through her efforts, she kept them together, supporting one another.
So it was wrenching for Kathie to acquiesce to Al’s plans to settle on Whidbey Island, Washington. It was such a long way from the Hill family and the house Kathie owned in Colorado.
Still, Kathie loved her husband and was prepared to follow him wherever he would be happiest. That was her nature—to take care of those she loved. During most of the time they were married, she continued to work for Raytheon, where she was highly respected. It meant doing much of her work via the Internet and phone, and with quarterly visits back to Raytheon headquarters in Colorado.
Al also continued to work for Raytheon, and was sometimes also employed by the National Science Foundation. The Bakers bought a house on Silver Cloud Lane in Greenbank, Washington, on Whidbey Island. It was a home with a lot of potential, and Al had a number of DIY projects he wanted to accomplish.
Al Baker always seemed to choose isolated corners of the planet, perhaps with a sort of animal instinct, places where he might easily obscure his being. While Whidbey Island is certainly no parallel in its remoteness to the South Pole, it is accessible only by ferry and a two-lane bridge at its northern point, spanning, in a bleak coincidence, the waters of Deception Pass.
The island where the Bakers made their home was off the beaten path and as lush as Antarctica was barren.
Life was peaceful in the town of Greenbank, named for the historical Greenbank Farm—legendary for its onetime fields of sweet berries, it is now a hiker’s paradise.
While balmy in comparison to the frigid South Pole, the waters of Puget Sound average a crisp fifty-three degrees in July. Whale watchers gather here in hopes of glimpsing a magnificent orca. Though commonly called killer whales, the enormous black-and-white beasts are actually members of the dolphin family.
Kathie missed Colorado, but she was enchanted with the beauty of Whidbey Island. Several years after they moved to Greenbank, the Bakers bought Madistone’s pizza restaurant and renamed it Harbor Pizzeria. Kathie managed the pizza shop while Al was working in Antarctica.
“I think she made only one pizza there,” her niece Jami recalls. “She handled the counter and the cash register.”
The rest of the year, Kathie and Al worked side by side.
“She was the rock of our family,” one niece recalled.
“There were so many secrets we didn’t know,” Jami Hill recalls. “It was like peeling an onion. You think you’ve come to the last layer—but there’s always something more lying beneath.”
* * *
June 2012 marked exactly two hundred and two years since Joseph Whidbey had first mapped Deception Pass, as he explored the island as part of Captain Vancouver’s expedition.
June 7 was a typical spring day in the temperate climate. At dawn, a gray mist shrouded the island, yet fronds of shimmering green plant life embroidered its terrain, bringing promise of summer.
The pastoral quiet was broken by an ominous phone call to the Island County Sheriff’s Office.
The caller said he was in Colorado, stationed at a Raytheon office there. Bill Sloan was a security officer and had grown concerned when he had been unable to reach one of their most reliable employees. She had never before ignored her coworkers’ calls.
Bill had been trying for a week to get ahold of her. He requested a well-being check on Kathie Hill Baker.
“This isn’t like her,” Sloan explained. “We usually hear from her several times a week. She telecommutes from her home, but we can’t even get her on her cell phone—our calls go directly to her voice mail.”
Patrol lieutenant Evan Tingstad and Deputy Leif Haugen were two of the first sheriff’s men to arrive at the Baker home on Silver Cloud Lane. Haugen drove all the way to the house as Tingstad stopped to check the name on the mailbox. As he did, a red pickup with a male driver turned onto Silver Cloud and approached him slowly. Tingstad walked over to the truck.
“Are you Mr. Baker?” the patrol lieutenant asked.
“Yes,” the white-haired man said.
Asked if his wife was home, Baker shook his head. “She flew to Denver a couple of days ago—for her job. I haven’t talked to her or gotten any messages from her since.”
Tingstad noted that the pale-faced Baker appeared unusually nervous. One would think he was dreading some bad news about his wife—but he didn’t ask any questions about Kathie or show any outward concern about her.
“Can we talk with you?” asked Tingstad.
“C’mon up to the house.”
Once there, Tingstad glanced up at a window on the second story of the home. A buxom woman in a hoodie stood peering out at him. He noted the ash-colored hair, and he thought that she matched the description of Kathie Baker.
Puzzled, he asked, “Is there anyone else in your house?”
“A friend,” Baker answered. He sounded calm now, and he explained that he had taken Kathie to Sea-Tac Airport on June 3 to catch her flight to Denver for one of her regularly scheduled meetings at Raytheon. After Kathie entered the departures level, he had picked up a mutual frien
d of theirs.
The woman that Lieutenant Tingstad saw at the window was, Baker said, Trudi Gerhart, whom both he and Kathie had befriended while they were all working down on the ice in Antarctica. Without any prodding, he assured the detectives that Kathie knew Trudi was coming for a visit, and didn’t mind at all.
While the circumstances seemed a bit peculiar, there was no reason for Tingstad and Haugen to linger. But later, when Haugen spoke with Bill Sloan, he learned that Kathie still had not contacted her employers. Nor had she been scheduled for any training or other site work at any Raytheon facility.
“She hasn’t used her corporate credit card, either,” Sloan said.
Kathie’s relatives were contacted, and not a one of them had heard from her with news of a sudden trip to Colorado. Worried sick, they offered to do anything they could to help find her.
By the next day, when there was still no word from Kathie, Whidbey Island investigators rallied. Joining Patrol Lieutenant Evan Tingstad and Deputy Leif Haugen in the probe into Kathie Baker’s whereabouts were Island County detectives Mark Plumberg and Laura Price. The case had ominous rumblings and the team suspected that the outcome would be grim.
“Baker’s given us improbable stories about the whereabouts of his wife,” Tingstad briefed Plumberg and Price when they arrived at the Silver Cloud Lane residence. “And now he’s stopped answering our questions.”
The gnome-like Baker had given them permission to search the house, and fortunately, he had yet to rescind it. As soon as Mark Plumberg crossed the threshold, he noted a vivid dark stain splotching the light-colored carpet in the living room. It was long and consistent with something having been dragged over the carpet.
Leif Haugen stood on an upstairs landing, and from there, he noted that the stain on the carpet continued across the kitchen floor tile, and then down a small flight of stairs to the garage door.
“They also located what appeared to be blood on the inside of the garage door,” Plumberg recalls. “And I could see that dirt on the garage floor next to the reddish stain looked like something had been dragged through it to the rear, exterior, garage door.”
Tingstad pointed out a small, dried pool of blood on the master bedroom carpet. It was partially covered with a pillow. Mark Plumberg wondered why no apparent attempt had been made to hide a virtual abattoir’s worth of blood in Baker’s house.
There had been plenty of time for Baker to clean up the mess since the investigators visited the day before. Was Al Baker so confident that he believed that the detectives accepted his story about dropping Kathie off at the airport? Was he so sure of himself that it didn’t even occur to him that they might ask to search his house?
Or was Al a candidate for “Dumbest Criminals of 2012”?
There was also the possibility that there was an innocent explanation for the bloodred stains. Detective Plumberg tried to keep an open mind, but his gut told him that it did not look good for the missing woman.
The investigators asked for access to the Bakers’ computers, so they could see if there had been any activity in Kathie’s accounts. Red-haired Detective Laura Price was tall and fit, and she towered over the short, bearded suspect as he typed in the various passwords to his missing wife’s email and banking accounts.
Meanwhile, Deputy Leif Haugen was scrutinizing the stained carpet. He did a double take when a woman suddenly walked down the steps from the upper part of the house. Was this some kind of a macabre joke? At first glance, the detectives thought that Kathie herself had appeared.
But on closer inspection they saw that she was heavier and somewhat older than the photos of Al Baker’s missing wife. Asked to identify herself, the blond woman held out her Alaska driver’s license.
She was Trudi C. Gerhart, sixty-one, and she said she’d come down from Alaska to visit Al. She had known both the Bakers for several years, she explained. They had all been Poleys—a term the Raytheon employees who worked at the South Pole called one another—although she hadn’t seen Kathie for quite some time. Deputy Haugen asked if she would step out on the deck. She agreed.
Leif Haugen asked her if Al Baker seemed concerned about his wife, and Ms. Gerhart said she felt that “he does now.”
Trudi recalled that in February 2012, Al had written to her with upsetting news. He and Kathie were having troubles in their marriage.
“All he would say was it was ‘heavy stuff, but we’re working through it. It’s heartbreaking but necessary. I just wanted you to know . . .’ ”
Trudi said she had commiserated with Baker about that news. “I told him I was sad to hear it—but sometimes things will be what they will be and everyone must adjust.”
Whether she really felt that way, since she and Al seemed to be living in an intimate situation, was moot. Trudi may have been glad that Al would soon be a single man.
As she talked to Leif Haugen, a light suddenly seemed to come on in Trudi’s brain. Maybe the deputy didn’t know the whole story.
“You realize, don’t you,” she asked, “that Kathie doesn’t live here? Right?”
Haugen was momentarily nonplussed.
“Right?” Trudi asked with more emphasis. “Kathie’s been living in Colorado for a long time. She doesn’t live here anymore.”
Trudi had her own doubts. She commented that she thought it strange that Kathie had left her two corgi dogs—one more than a dozen years old—at the house on Silver Cloud Lane. “Those dogs are like her children. Kathie’s life was work and those two dogs. She never would have left without them.”
Trudi said she had arrived from Alaska on June 3 in the late afternoon, and Al had picked her up at Sea-Tac Airport, south of Seattle. She said she was hoping that Kathie would be at the house, that things might be better in their marriage. Perhaps.
But Kathie wasn’t there when they arrived in Greenbank.
“Al soon made it clear,” Trudi said, “that he wanted a romantic relationship with me. He didn’t say anything about Kathie or their marriage.”
Trudi said that Al had visited her in Alaska twice that spring; his March visit was close to two weeks long. He had sent her the ticket she’d just used to fly to Seattle for an extended visit. He told her Kathie had left him months before, and he was for all intents and purposes a single man. He did not tell Trudi about his taking Kathie to the airport only a few hours before he picked her up.
Kathie likely had no idea where her husband really was in March 2012, or who he was with. She had sounded like her usual peppy self when she emailed her brother David Hill in March saying how happy she was for him and his bride, Melody. Knowing that David had grieved terribly for his late wife, Jeanette, Kathie was relieved that he was now able to love again.
The plan was that David and Melody—who had met when they owned mobile homes next door to each other—would come to live with Kathie and Al until they found their own place on Whidbey Island. Al had assured Kathie that would be fine with him.
Kathie wrote:
Wow! What an awesome picture!!!! I can see you’re happy even in the dark and with you looking away from the camera.
Funny, you’ve been on my mind so much today! I almost called you but then I got called away. I’m in Colorado now. Alan is in Washington, D.C.! He’s meeting with the new Polar contractor, Lockheed Martin. Hopefully, he’ll be able to work out a deal with them to continue to work in the Antarctica program. If not, he’ll be full-time pizza man!
WE CANNOT WAIT FOR YOU GUYS TO GET HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m so happy for your and Melody’s happiness, Davey.
Seems like dreams do come true!!!
Love you!
Kath
Al wasn’t in Washington, D.C., in March, of course; he was in Alaska visiting Trudi Gerhart.
After Trudi’s startling information that Kathie hadn’t lived with Al for three months, Leif Haugen went back inside the house and confronted Baker. “How long has Kathie been living in Colorado?”
“Since March this year�
�when I got back from my assignment at the South Pole.”
Baker had backed himself into a corner with his many different stories about the last time he saw his wife. Nothing matched.
“Where is she residing now?”
“I don’t know . . . I don’t even have her address.”
“Where would you suggest we look for her?”
“I have no idea.”
* * *
Baker’s stories had become more and more entangled, but each one had to be checked out. Maybe he had driven Kathie to the Sea-Tac Airport and let her off there. Maybe he’d suffered a small stroke that damaged his memory and perception of time, but that theory strained credulity. Until investigators actually found Kathie—dead or alive—they couldn’t be sure.
Over the past two decades, a number of women have vanished from the sprawling airport, located between Seattle and Tacoma. Some were eventually located, and sometimes reported to the Port of Seattle Police that they had been abducted and raped, as they walked to the airline employees’ parking lot, or to the soaring parking garage provided to the public.
Tragically, other women had been murdered, while others were simply “walk-aways.” Maybe Kathie Baker was like the ones who had seemingly disappeared through the morass of tunnels and gates as roaring planes took off and landed. Once Al had dropped Kathie off at the departures gate, she would have been out of his sight within moments.
Detective Laura Price and Deputy Leif Haugen met with Al Baker at the Island County Sheriff’s South Precinct at 3:00 P.M. on Friday, June 8. Now, Al did seem worried; beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and his usually ruddy cheeks were pale. Five days had passed since he—or anyone else, apparently—had heard from Kathie.
No one yet had even hinted that Kathie wasn’t happy in her marriage. Everyone who knew them said she doted on Al, called him her “hubby,” and smiled widely as she told friends about some lunch or dinner they were going to share. She still sounded like a bride when she spoke about Al. Most of the year, they worked side by side at Harbor Pizzeria, striving to build their clientele. When Al left to spend his three to four months down on the ice, Kathie handled things at the pizza shop.