by Robert Scott
Undersheriff Randy Hamilton said, “We’re not sure if we’ll be able to release that until we know more about the identity of the body.”
That was easier said than done. Another week went by and the Daily Chronicle reported, Police ask for help with ID. Hamilton told a reporter that because dental records and fingerprints had not been helpful in identifying the woman, he doubted that she had ever been reported missing. Hamilton said, “If she was missing, the description given was not detailed enough.” He also noted that she may have been a transient, homeless person or a prostitute.
Hamilton later gave out more information about the dead woman. He said that she had a narrow pointed nose, was Caucasian, and had a large jaw and an overbite. Hamilton added, “She would be remembered for her bucktooth appearance.” Then Hamilton gave a phone number for citizens to call, but no one did so. The dead woman from the marsh remained a Jane Doe.
16
THE LOST GIRLS
That case had barely died down in Lewis County when another young woman went missing in the area, as Connie Rolls had done in 1984. This young woman was eighteen-year-old Roberta “Dee” Strasbaugh, of Grand Mound. And just like Connie, there was a missing persons poster put out on Roberta. She was listed as being five feet four inches tall, 115 pounds, with brown hair and hazel eyes. She had last been seen wearing blue jeans, white sweater, tennis shoes and possibly a bright red ski jacket. She went missing on September 29, 1985, and her vehicle was found on Harrison Street in Lewis County, just south of the Thurston County line. The poster related, Suspicious circumstances surround Dee’s disappearance. The suspicious circumstances related to the fact that it appeared that the vehicle she was driving had run out of gas, and she probably had gone down the road with a gas can to get some more.
Three weeks went by and then on October 18, a dead body was found in a rural area by a logger working near Lincoln Creek, about twelve miles northwest of Centralia. LCSO deputies and detectives began treating the scene as a homicide and scoured the area for clues. Once again the body was that of a young woman, and almost immediately they and the local newspaper turned their thoughts to eighteen-year-old Roberta Strasbaugh, who had been missing since September 29.
Back around that time detectives determined from a witness that Strasbaugh had probably accepted a ride from a man who was in his fifties and had a few day’s growth of beard. He had driven a four-door full-sized sedan, and he’d been wearing a “Harrison Ford–style hat” made popular in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. The body was found about eleven miles from where Roberta had last been seen. Whether the gray-bearded man with the Harrison Ford–style hat had anything to do with her death could not yet be determined. He may have given her a ride to a gas station, and as Roberta walked back toward her car, she may have been picked up once again by her abductor and possible killer.
By October 21, the Daily Chronicle reported: Death probe continues—autopsy indicates body found near Lincoln Creek is that of missing Grand Mound teenager. By “teenager” they meant Roberta Dee Strasbaugh. Once again dentist John Hendrickson was called in to confirm that teeth found in the dead woman’s body matched that of Roberta’s dental chart.
LCSO detective Glade Austin didn’t give out many details, but he did say that the dead young woman appeared to have been killed by blunt-force trauma. And the Lewis County coroner declared that the cause of death was due to “multiple traumatic injuries.” He added that he couldn’t determine the time of death or whether the body had been moved.
Because the young woman’s body had been discovered so close to the Thurston/Lewis County line, both TCSO and LCSO were working on the case. The chief criminal deputy Jerry Palmateer met with all the detectives in his agency, and Thurston County sheriff Dan Montgomery had a meeting with his detectives. Eventually a joint task force of LCSO and TCSO was put together to investigate the murder.
One more detail came out about Roberta and her last journey. Her purse had been found on the seat of her pickup truck, and the pickup’s gas tank was found to be empty. And it was added that the sedan in which the fiftysomething-year-old man had been driving was tan. Asked for more details by a reporter, Detective Austin replied, “There were certain things found at the site where Strasbaugh’s body was found. We’ll be following up on those. I can’t be more specific about them.”
What really caught Lane Youmans’s eye about the Roberta Strasbaugh case was that she had been murdered by blunt-force trauma, much as Gerard had tried killing Frankie Cochran by blunt-force trauma—just as Carol Leighton had been struck in the head, possibly several times, before being killed by a knife slash to her throat. And even more intriguing was the fact that Roberta Strasbaugh was the daughter of the Strasbaughs who owned the Red Barn Restaurant in Grand Mound, the restaurant that David Gerard let his acquaintances know was his favorite. It was the same restaurant where he would start dating Frankie many years after Roberta Strasbaugh’s death.
By October 22, the Daily Chronicle reported: Final ID made on body. It was indeed the body of Roberta Strasbaugh. The ID had been confirmed by John Hendrickson’s dental record chart. By now, three detectives from LCSO and three from TCSO were working on the case. The only new evidence disclosed to the media was that the body had been badly decomposed by the time it was found. Roberta had been lying facedown, and part of her clothing had been removed. It was also noted that the body had been found near Weyerhauser Company land that was currently being logged.
And then, not unlike the Connie Rolls case, Elaine McCollum case and Carol Leighton case, the Roberta Strasbaugh case went cold. But that was far from the end of Lane’s investigation into what murders David Gerard might have committed in the area. On October 24, 1988, only days after Roberta Strasbaugh’s body was discovered in Lewis County, a man was in the Vance Creek area outside of Elma. He was walking through the woods, looking for elk and chanterelle mushrooms—the mushrooms being worth a lot of money. As he scanned the forest floor, he spotted a jawbone containing four teeth. Not recognizing what kind of animal it came from, he picked it up and examined it more closely. It was then that he noticed a filling in one of the teeth. Obviously, the jawbone was not from an animal.
The man called GHSO and later led detectives to the spot where he had discovered the jawbone. After a thorough search of the area, Lane and the other detectives recovered 90 percent of the remains and some fragments of clothing as well. Along with those things, they also recovered a pearl ring, a blue sapphire earring and a spent large-caliber bullet. The skull had been shattered from the bullet striking it between the eyes. It became apparent that the jaw was broken prior to death.
The remains were found at the end of a spur road, about five miles from the nearest paved road. A forensic pathologist later determined the body was that of a female, possibly Native American or Asian, about twenty-eight years old, five feet tall, one hundred pounds, with shoulder-length dark hair. All attempts to identify the remains failed. The experts concluded she had been dead from one to five years.
Lane looked very closely at the Roberta Strasbaugh and Elma Jane Doe cases, and that of the murder of Teresa Franich as well. Teresa was last seen in Tacoma in 1987, and then her body was later found on a logging road forty miles away. She was lying on the side of the road, and she had been shot in the head.
There was another case that really attracted Lane Youmans’s attention. It had occurred in Mason County, not far from where Connie Rolls’s remains had been found, and this time it concerned a Mason County girl named Tracy West. From the circumstances of the case, everything pointed to the perp as someone who knew the area. Especially its back roads.
Tracy was seventeen years old in 1988, and she attended Shelton High School. Tracy was bright, and had a real knack for languages. She studied French, Spanish and some German. Tracy was in the foreign languages club at school, and part of their annual moneymaking event was called the Foreign Fair. People who attended the fair turned in their dollars for francs, pesos and
marks; then they could buy ethnic food and items at the fair. All of this was to raise money for the club’s future events.
Like Frankie Cochran, who was a waitress, or Roberta Strasbaugh, whose parents owned the Red Barn Restaurant, Tracy had restaurant connections as well. After school and on weekends she worked at the Taylor Towne Restaurant, near Shelton. She mainly worked as a busperson and washed dishes, but lately she had also been a cook’s helper. To get to the restaurant, which was about two miles from her home, Tracy rode a motorized trail bike along a private road, which was owned by the Simpson Timber Company. The reason she did so was that even though she had a driver’s license, this did not include a motorcycle permit, which would have allowed her to ride the trail bike on Highway 101 to the restaurant. The route she took wound through dense forest, then cut across to the highway.
At 4:00 P.M. on October 26, 1988, Tracy left home on her motorbike for work. Schoolchildren, who were getting off a bus, saw Tracy’s motorbike in her driveway just before 4:00 P.M., and a little later it was gone. It normally took her ten minutes to ride down the Simpson Logging Road to the Taylor Towne Restaurant, but on October 26, she did not arrive there at 4:30 P.M,. as usual.
Tracy’s father, Roy, who was a manager of Hoodsport Seafood, was working on the family’s boat that evening, and Tracy’s mother, Eunice, was working the swing shift at the Auburn Boeing plant. Shirley Randall, Tracy’s aunt, was taking care of Tracy’s younger sister, Daisy.
Around 9:30 P.M., one of Tracy’s friends called the West home, where Shirley was taking care of Daisy, and wanted to talk to Tracy. Shirley told this friend that Tracy was at work. This friend had actually taken Tracy’s shift at the restaurant, and didn’t tell Shirley that Tracy had never shown up there. The friend thought that Tracy had a reason for not showing up—one that she might not have told her parents or her aunt. This friend didn’t want Tracy to get in trouble. The friend did, however, tell the restaurant manager, Brad Wilson, about her conversation with Shirley Randall.
Wilson was surprised by this turn of events. He would later tell a reporter, “Tracy was an excellent worker, with a good personality. She had never done anything like this before.” Wilson was so concerned about this situation that he phoned Shirley Randall and told her what he had just learned. Hearing this, Shirley became distressed and called her husband, Tom, to come over to the West house immediately.
Not long thereafter, Roy West returned home from working on his boat, and became alarmed as well. He called a friend, Dennis Carlson, who owned a four-wheel-drive vehicle that was capable of negotiating the small, bumpy logging road that Tracy took to work.
The two men set off and searched all up and down the road, but they couldn’t find a trace of Tracy in the dark woods. They returned to the West home, where someone—and it’s not clear if it was Shirley Randall or Eunice West—had already called the sheriff’s office. By 1:30 A.M., there were search-and-rescue personnel in the forest, along with a K-9 team.
Scouring the woods, an officer spotted Tracy’s motorbike turned upside down right in the middle of the Simpson Logging Road, near a large tree. Why Roy West and Dennis Carlson didn’t go to that section of road is not clear. The motorbike was only a half mile from Tracy’s home, and the key was still in the ignition. The glasses that Tracy almost always wore were lying in the road, not far away. Sheriff Bob Holter said later that there was no indication of excessive speed, quick acceleration or braking action. He related, “There was no apparent reason why it should have turned over.” And then because of the situation, he added, they were looking at this as if Tracy had either run away from home, or she was the victim of foul play.
The search soon grew to foot searchers, off-road vehicles, officers with search dogs and even a spotter plane. Other than the overturned motorbike and the pair of glasses, there were no other clues of why and how Tracy West had disappeared. Sheriff Holter told a reporter that there were also no indications that Tracy had been having problems at school or at home.
Tracy’s parents addressed this issue with a local newspaper reporter, saying that Tracy wouldn’t run away. They gave a long list of reasons why. Tracy was just a few months short of getting her diploma at Shelton High School in January, rather than May, and she was doing well in school. They said she was taking a computer course, and she wanted to work part-time and go to college part-time when she graduated from high school.
They said Tracy was a collector of keepsakes and if she’d run away, she would have taken some of her most prized possessions with her. Tracy’s bank account, where she had built up money, saving for a car, was untouched. In fact, she hadn’t even taken her wallet when she left home on the motorbike.
Tracy’s parents also pointed out that she had a very strong relationship with her seven-year-old sister, Daisy. She wouldn’t have just taken off without telling Daisy good-bye. And Tracy had no serious boyfriend with whom she might have run away.
When Roy West saw the area of where Tracy’s motorbike had overturned, he told the reporter, “There’s nothing along the trail where the motorcycle was found to cause an accident. No rocks, overhanging branches or bends. The bike probably left the trail at no more than fifteen miles per hour. There weren’t even any skid marks to indicate she’d slammed on her brakes.” Roy gave out a few more details as well about the actual condition of the motorbike when it was found. It was lying upside down, balanced on its seat and handlebars. The ignition was on, and it was in first gear. The clutch and throttle cables on the handlebars were damaged when it tipped over. Something, or someone, must have startled Tracy as she rode down the dark forest road.
The tracking dogs were able to pick up Tracy’s scent from the bike overturn site back to the West home. And the dogs had picked up an earlier scent of Tracy from the restaurant’s back door. There was no scent of Tracy wandering off into the woods, if she had done so after being hurt from overturning the motorbike.
MCSO picked up a story that in the weeks before her disappearance, some man at the restaurant had made a comment to Tracy about taking her home. A detective checked out that man, and his alibi held up that he had nothing to do with Tracy’s disappearance. Brad Wilson said that his waitresses at the restaurant every once in a while got inappropriate comments, like the one Tracy had received, and they learned how to deal with them. Those comments were usually just some guy trying to be macho.
As the days went by, a reward fund was set up for anyone with information about the missing girl. A large jar was set on the counter at the Taylor Towne Restaurant, and customers stuffed it with spare change and dollar bills. Eunice West told a reporter, “We get alarmed every time we hear the phone ring.” She never knew if it was going to be good news or bad news.
Then, as had happened in the McCollum, Rolls and Strasbaugh cases, the newspaper a week later stated, No Clues on Tracy. The newspaper related that nothing new had come in to help sheriff’s detectives in their quest to find out what had happened to Tracy. The only new thing reported was that her motorcycle helmet and gloves had been found near the motorbike. The newspaper also reported that the West family had been impressed by the search efforts that had been made and were heartened by the amount of local support they were getting.
Weeks went by, and then on October 17, 1989, a hunter, Rick Leffler Jr., was walking through the woods and found a human skull on Taylor Ridge, outside the town of Shelton. Leffler alerted the sheriff’s office to what he had found, and they had dental records checked. The skull turned out to be that of Tracy West. Surprisingly, her skull was found quite a distance north of where her motorbike had been overturned. That meant that her killer had to have driven her, either alive or dead, back past her own house and up onto Taylor Ridge. A forensic archaeologist aided in determining that the remains were those of Tracy West.
Detectives worked for five days with the forensic archaeologist, and a jacket was found with the logo Certified Aerospace upon it. That was the jacket Tracy had been wearing when she disappeare
d. Other items of clothing were also consistent with the clothing she could have been wearing at the time of her disappearance.
MCSO lieutenant Howard Armfield told a reporter that the detectives and search-and-rescue people scoured a five-acre area around where the skull had been found. They turned up the clothing and “significant bone structure.” It was surmised that Tracy might have been buried in a shallow grave, or covered up with tree limbs and needles, but an animal had overturned all of that, exposing the bones. The MCSO sheriff said, “We are pleased with what we were able to find.”
MCSO, however, was less pleased from that point forward. It was indeed the remains of Tracy West, but just how and why she had disappeared, and who had killed her, remained a mystery. The efforts by the MCSO came up with a big zero when it came to finding a suspect connected to the murder of Tracy West.
Meanwhile in Grays Harbor County, Lane Youmans turned his search of possible victims connected to David Gerard back to Lewis County. He learned that in 1991 a woman named Minyan (sometimes written as Mignon) Hensley went to a job interview at a strip club outside of Tacoma. Apparently, she didn’t get the job, and not long after that she disappeared from the Tacoma area. A few weeks later, Hensley’s skeleton was found forty miles away in Lewis County, hidden in a pile of brush near a state highway. No cause of death was ever determined, but all indications pointed to homicide.
Lane later said of the Hensley case, “She was allegedly eight months pregnant when she tried to get the job. She didn’t seem like Gerard’s type, but then you never knew. He was an opportunist more than anything. He would be driving along, spot a vulnerable woman and take advantage of the situation. He certainly did that with Julie at the bar. And he may have done that with more women. Obviously, Elaine McCollum had needed a ride on the night that she was murdered. Minyan Hensley may have needed a ride somewhere as well.”