by Ann Rule
Indeed, they had celebrated the one-year anniversary at Harbor Pizzeria on June 2 the night before Kathie vanished. Lots of people took pictures to commemorate the happy evening. That film was evidence that the Island County sheriff’s investigators certainly hoped to find.
Kathie left the party before Al did, but it was because she was tired—not because they had an argument or anything like that.
Al continued to answer the investigators’ questions. He made no effort to convince them that his wife had left him in March. That seemed to be a story he told only to Trudi.
“Kathie usually calls me every few days when she’s away,” Baker said glibly. “But it can be longer. She’s not real good at keeping in touch with her family and friends, but she is always available to Raytheon.”
Detective Price asked about what time on June 3 Al had taken his missing wife to catch her plane to Denver. They would have had to take a ferry from South Whidbey Island to Mukilteo on the mainland, and then drive south on I-5 about thirty miles to Sea-Tac Airport.
“We got on the ten or ten thirty A.M. ferry at Clinton, and headed east to the mainland on June third,” Baker answered. “When I got to Mukilteo, I missed the I-5 on-ramp so I had to approach the airport from I-405. I dropped Kathie off at the Southwest Airlines departures level around one thirty.”
The entrance to I-5 was well marked far in advance of the actual turn. How odd that Baker had missed that.
“How is your marriage?” Price asked suddenly.
“Things are going good,” Baker said.
“Was your wife worried about anything?”
Baker shrugged. “Kind of stressed—but she’s always stressed about work.”
Leif Haugen excused himself as he left the interview room. Now that he had the name of the airline that Kathie Baker had allegedly taken on June 3, he could ask about her record with Southwest.
Port of Seattle’s Officer Josh Maiuri followed up within the hour. Southwest Airlines said that Kathie Baker was a frequent flyer with them, almost always between Denver and Seattle. She had, however, not flown with them out of Sea-Tac since April 10, 2012! Kathie hadn’t flown to Colorado for over seven weeks. She certainly was not on their roster for June 3.
Now it was June 8. Where had Kathie Baker been the last five days?
Detective Mark Plumberg had hit the ground running when he got involved in the probe into Kathie Baker’s disappearance. He gathered all the follow-up reports and evidence that had surfaced so far. Plumberg was impressed—and grateful—for all the work that Evan Tingstad, Laura Price, and Leif Haugen had already done. Plumberg and the patrol officers were now trying to sort through any motives Al Baker might have had to kill his wife if, indeed, she was dead.
Al said he and Trudi Gerhart were not lovers—and Trudi certainly insisted that they weren’t. Even though she had had those two visits from Al at her home in Alaska in the spring just past, and he had assured her that Kathie and he were estranged, and that Kathie was moving back to Colorado. Trudi wasn’t ready to commit to a sexual liaison with Al.
Or so she said.
Trudi’s mind raced as she tried to absorb the possibility that her good friend, and perhaps her potential lover, was not at all whom she thought he was. She had believed him when Al said Kathie had moved out three months earlier. Now she knew that wasn’t true.
At the same time, Trudi herself had become a suspect, although she didn’t realize it. She could not have participated in a fatal attack on Kathie; the timing was wrong. She could, however, have assisted Al Baker as he dragged someone who was dead-weight heavy through the house, leaving the large bloodstains. Al was a very small man and Kathie probably weighed about 175 pounds.
Detective Laura Price talked to a convincingly shocked Trudi Gerhart in the house as the male investigators searched the garage with Al Baker. They walked to a door inside the garage.
“What’s this?” Evan Tingstad asked.
“The laundry room,” Baker answered.
“Can we take a look?”
Baker swept his arm widely in an exaggerated gesture, as if he were presenting the room to a possible buyer. He and Tingstad moved into the small laundry room, where they were only inches apart.
Tingstad saw a white bedspread/comforter soaking in the deep sink.
“Did you put this in here?”
“Yes,” Baker said. “I had to wash it.”
“Why did you have to wash it?”
“It was dirty.”
“Dirty with what?”
“It was just dirty.”
“Where did it come from?”
“The bedroom.”
Tingstad lifted the damp comforter and saw what appeared to be a bloodstain about five inches long and a few inches wide. He asked Baker if the stain was blood.
“I don’t know,” the suspect said, and now volunteered that he’d misspoken before. Thinking about it, he realized that he hadn’t put the comforter in the sink, and he didn’t know why it was there.
Tingstad noted that the washing machine in the laundry room was full of clean clothes. He advised Al Baker that he was seizing the comforter as evidence.
“Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” Baker said calmly.
* * *
It was growing dark, even though the encroaching long hours of Pacific Daylight Time had pushed the Northwest sunset to around 10:00 P.M. In just twelve days, it would be the longest day of the year.
The detectives all felt an unnerving sense that with the next door Al Baker might open, he would “present” the body of his missing wife. Kathie might be a thousand or more miles away or she might be close enough to touch somewhere on this property that she loved so much.
“Can we look at your truck?” Tingstad asked.
“Sure.”
Baker led the patrol lieutenant and Detective Plumberg out of the garage and they headed for his red truck. As they did so, Tingstad glanced to his right and saw a mop bucket with a mop stuck in it; it was filled with dark red water.
They walked to the truck, and Al Baker opened the driver’s-side door and stood back. Tingstad peered in, but saw nothing of possible evidentiary value in the cab. Then he opened the hard cover on the truck bed. Fully expecting Kathie’s body to be in the truck bed, the searchers braced themselves. But there were only bungee cords, rope sections, two cardboard boxes, a full twelve-pack of Coca-Cola, and an open twelve-pack of Diet Coke.
And no sign at all of Kathie.
“I don’t think I want to answer any more questions,” Baker said slowly. Then he leaned against his truck for a very long time. The air was electric with tension.
Finally, Baker volunteered that he had a knife in his pocket and asked if it would be okay to take it out.
Evan Tingstad told him he could—“but very slowly.”
Baker complied as he drew a folding knife out of his right front pants pocket.
Tingstad slipped it into an evidence envelope and gave it to Detective Plumberg. When Baker said he was cold, Mark Plumberg retrieved the suspect’s jacket from the house. Baker was allowed to take one credit card and his driver’s license. He had twenty-eight dollars in cash. Plumberg loaned Baker his cell phone so he could call a taxi to take him to his pizza shop where he said there was a back room he could sleep in.
Trudi Gerhart was spending the night of June 8 at the Harbor Inn.
Al Baker wasn’t in custody, although it seemed that Kathie Baker must surely be dead. There was just too much blood in her house, but the sheriff’s staff had yet to find her body. She could be anywhere—lost forever in the deep waters that surrounded Whidbey Island or in some desolate spot between Mukilteo and the airport.
By 11:00 P.M., the detectives secured the scene. It was pitch-dark; they would have to search for Kathie Baker another day.
As much as they wanted to find her body, the group of investigators let out a sigh of relief. Against all odds, there might still be some hope that Kathie was alive.
* * *
On Saturday morning, June 9, the weather was clear with occasional short-lived rain showers. The temperature in Greenbank was in the high fifties. The house, garage, and grounds of the property on Silver Cloud Lane were alive with activity. Not only were there Island County sheriff’s investigators, but some members of the Washington State Patrol Crime Scene Response Team were already there, and more were expected. They swarmed over the Bakers’ place, looking for physical evidence, but primarily for Kathie. She could be there, hidden someplace on the property. No one but Al recalled seeing Kathie leave on June 3, getting on the ferry, or being dropped off at the airport.
And Al Baker had given so many versions of where Kathie might be and told so many obvious lies that he was hardly a reliable source of information.
Evan Tingstad arrived at Silver Cloud Lane shortly before 9:00 A.M. and met with Detective Mark Plumberg, who was already there. Plumberg walked state patrol criminalist Mary Wilson from the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab through the scene, pointing out where the sheriff’s investigators had searched the night before until darkness forced them to give up. Wilson, the primary investigator from the state patrol, had an assistant and a trainee with her to observe.
Evan Tingstad joined the state patrol team as they were assessing the scene and dividing it into sections for processing. They looked over the bank behind the house and firewood shed, and into the ravine below. Mary Wilson’s assistant spotted a suspicious mannequin-sized object wrapped in a silver and blue tarp.
Suddenly, the search for Kathie Hill Baker was over. All this time, she had lain undiscovered only a few steps from the house.
Plumberg immediately called Dr. Robert Bishop, the Island County coroner, and when he arrived Plumberg helped carry the body up out of the ravine without disturbing the tarpaulin tied with bungee cords and short lengths of rope. Plumberg and Dr. Bishop then transported it to a cold room to await autopsy the next day.
Leif Haugen and Evan Tingstad went to Harbor Pizzeria and asked to talk with Al Baker. But his employees said he wasn’t there. Then the sheriff’s men went to the nearby Harbor Inn and asked if Baker was registered there. He was—and hadn’t yet checked out.
“He’s in 129,*” the desk clerk told them.
As they approached room 129, Tingstad and Haugen noted that all the curtains were closed and there was a “Do Not Disturb” placard hanging on the door.
* * *
They weren’t sure what they would find inside. Al Baker had seemed very deflated and morose the night before, when he was read his Miranda rights. There was the possibility that he had committed suicide, or perhaps left by taxi or on foot during the night. He had to comprehend by now that he had nowhere to turn, and perhaps had made a dash for the mainland. Still, it would be almost impossible to hire a taxi on Whidbey Island in the wee hours of the morning without starting rumors. And the ferries didn’t run all night.
Deputy Leif Haugen knocked on the door.
The two officers waited. Haugen prepared to knock again when the door opened. Al Baker, wearing only trousers, stood there. He didn’t seem surprised to see them.
“We’d like to talk with you about your wife,” Haugen said.
“Yes—just let me finish getting dressed. I need to put my shoes on.”
When he had a shirt and shoes on, Baker walked outside to Leif Haugen’s patrol unit without being asked, and submitted to a search for weapons before he was transported to the South Precinct offices. He wasn’t armed; apparently the knife he’d turned over to Evan Tingstad the night before had been his only weapon.
Lieutenant Tingstad, Leif Haugen, and Baker sat down in one of the conference rooms at the South Precinct.
“Al,” Tingstad began, “we’re very concerned about Kathie. We want to give you the opportunity to provide a written statement describing what’s transpired in the past two weeks.”
Baker was given a Miranda rights waiver. He agreed to sign it but wanted to be sure he could later change his mind. Tingstad pointed to the paragraph that said Baker could change his rights form “at any time.”
After talking with Baker about his version of events, Tingstad asked if he would like to write his statement, and the suspect nodded. The investigators provided him with statement forms and a pen and moved to the lunchroom; he could see them, and they could see him as he wrote.
Baker, unaware Kathie’s body had been found, wrote that they had split up the first week in June, and that she had agreed to leave. (This despite the fact that she had provided most of the money for their property.)
“I spent the weekend in my shop, slept there, too. I came up to the house Sunday morning—that would be June 3—and I saw that she had left . . .”
He could not say which day Kathie left—whether it was Friday or Saturday—but he was positive she wasn’t there on Sunday. Believing she was gone for good, Baker said he’d headed to the airport to pick up Trudi Gerhart.
Answering a few follow-up questions from Tingstad, Al Baker assured him that he hadn’t been in a physical fight with Kathie. But he agreed that some of his previous stories weren’t true.
“I was telling two stories to two women,” he answered, spreading his hands at the situation he had found himself in. “What would you do?”
Baker said he hadn’t seen anyone come or go to his house, and had no idea just how Kathie had left. The investigators knew her SUV was there in their carport. Her purse, her laptop, and her dogs were still in their house. Her makeup was spread out on a counter as if she planned to use it in the morning.
Furthermore, Baker insisted he knew nothing about the stains in his house, and he told them that the comforter had already been in the deep sink in the laundry room when he’d returned from picking up Trudi Gerhart.
After Al Baker signed his statement, Evan Tingstad continued to discuss with him the multiple versions he’d given of the events on June 3. How could he not have noticed the red-brown stains all over his property, known that Kathie was not around, and not be concerned?
“I didn’t see any stains.” He stuck to his litany of lies.
Mark Plumberg had painstakingly checked out the “shop” where Baker said he’d slept. Tingstad stepped out of the conference room and asked Plumberg to recall its condition.
“The futon there was filthy,” Plumberg said. “There were spiderwebs all over and mouse—or rat—droppings. The sink and toilet there had bugs in them. It was clear to me that nobody has stayed there for quite a while.”
Al Baker was a fastidious man. Why would he lie about sleeping in the dirty shop? He had bedrooms inside his house. Perhaps he wished to validate that his friendship with Trudi Gerhart was, indeed, only platonic?
Tingstad returned to the conference room and confronted Al with the fact that the investigators did not believe he had slept in his dirty shop.
“You like a clean house—and the shop is filthy.”
Al Baker had no answer. He let out a whoosh of air; he had been holding his breath for a long time.
“Why haven’t you asked us what we were doing to find your wife?”
“Because she left me.”
Baker had dug his heels in. He insisted he didn’t know where Kathie was, and he repeated that over and over.
“What would you do if I asked for an attorney?” he finally asked carefully.
“You can call one,” Tingstad said.
“I don’t have one—I’m not asking for one. I just want to know what you would do if I did ask for an attorney.”
“My role doesn’t change,” Tingstad said. “I still will do everything I can to find Kathie—continue investigating.”
As the interview was drawing to a close, Tingstad said, “I know that you know where Kathie is.”
“I don’t.”
Tingstad drew an aerial view of the Silver Cloud property on a yellow legal pad and he slid it over to Baker.
“Show me where to look,” he said bluntly.
�
��I don’t know.”
The sheriff’s lieutenant took the drawing back and made an X in the circle where Kathie’s body had been found. He pushed it back to Al Baker and began to track the time on his watch.
The room was totally silent, as still as death itself.
Baker said nothing for ninety-seven seconds, and then there was a tinge of anger in his voice. He had never responded with annoyance before, and he never would again.
“What is this?” he finally asked.
“You tell me; it’s your property. You know,” Tingstad said. “I think it’s disrespectful to lie to someone who knows you are lying to them—so from now on, instead of lying to me, just tell me you don’t want to answer or tell me the truth.”
“You lied to me,” Baker answered.
“In what way?”
The suspect pointed to the X and said, “You know things you’re asking me questions about.”
“What do I know?”
Baker started to say something, and then retreated before he said too much. Clearly, he was fishing for confirmation that Kathie’s body had been found.
The interview ended at 1:40 P.M. that Saturday afternoon. Al Baker was placed under arrest for first-degree murder, and Leif Haugen drove him to the Island County Jail.
He had believed he was so much smarter than the cops, but now the pizza-making scientist was facing an eventuality he apparently had never considered.
After Al Baker was safely locked in the Island County Jail, Detective Mark Plumberg, Lieutenant Evan Tingstad, and Deputy Leif Haugen returned to the now-empty house on Silver Cloud Lane and continued to search for evidence. Al had a number of “man toys”—motorcycles, an MG sports car, and a fishing boat—along with many full boxes and containers stacked there.
* * *
On Sunday, June 10, Mark Plumberg observed as Medical Examiner Dr. Sigmund Menchel and Coroner Dr. Robert Bishop performed an autopsy on the body of the woman found in the ravine. It had been a week since Kathie vanished and the weather was warm; any human body would decompose to some extent under such conditions.