by Ann Rule
Christine Jonsen was arrested, and she seemed relieved. She had asked to be taken into custody, saying that she was fully prepared to be hanged for what she had done. Long months of psychiatric evaluation lay ahead. Now there were so many “if onlys” spoken by her neighbors and the members of her church. If only they had known. But hindsight could not save either the little boys or Christine herself.
If Christine’s sons were to be found so that there could be a funeral or a memorial service, it would take some kind of a miracle.
• • •
Since the majority of detectives think in terms of hard evidence and things that can be seen, touched, smelled, and proven to a jury absolutely, they are rarely impressed by psychics. Three thousand miles away from the Tri-Cities area, a detective in Nutley, New Jersey, had overcome his own doubts about the positive results that could come from clairvoyance. Salvatore Luberpazzi, of the Nutley Police Department, was highly resistant when he first met a fifty-four-year-old grandmother named Dorothy Allison. Dorothy was a typical middle-aged woman in the Italian community, but there were many people who had turned to her in desperation when all other methods to find their missing loved one had failed. She was neither highly educated nor extremely brilliant, but Dorothy Allison had a remarkable gift, one that sometimes haunted her so much that she wished it would just go away. She could see where the bodies of lost people rested. She was especially psychic when she was asked to find children, particularly children who were under water.
Luberpazzi had very reluctantly agreed to let her work on some of his cold cases. “It’s a very strange feeling to go up to this woman and tell her what I’m looking for and she describes an area that’s miles and miles away.” He shook his head in wonderment as he said: “In the past eleven years, she has found twenty missing or deceased persons for us.”
Dorothy Allison had no axe to grind. Unlike many well-known psychics, she certainly wasn’t into clairvoyance for the money; she asked only for reimbursement for the cost of transportation and lodging when she had to travel far from her home. She had a family and would have preferred to be with them, but she accepted that she had been blessed—or cursed—with her ability to “see” what was hidden to everyone else. By the time Christine’s boys vanished beneath the river’s surface, Dorothy had long since overcome police skepticism about her ability to locate those she called “my babies...my angels.” Although the earthly remains of missing children might be only decomposed skeletons, they were smiling, innocent children to her, and she was compelled by the visions that came to her.
Dorothy Allison’s involvement in the search for missing children began in 1968 when she woke from a nightmare. She had seen the image of a little boy stuck in a pipe. For a month, she tried to put it out of her mind, and then she went to the Nutley police. When she told the desk sergeant what she had dreamed, she described his reaction: “The officer jumped off his chair like a maniac and told me a little boy with that description was missing and believed drowned.”
The police followed Dorothy’s instructions, and she led them to that small boy. Michael Kurcsics, five years old, was found caught in a drainage pipe, and became the first picture in Mrs. Allison’s “book of angels.”
She had seen that Michael’s rubber boots were on the wrong feet, and down to that small detail, she was correct.
Soon, Dorothy pictured the body of fourteen-year-old Susan Jacobson and led Staten Island police to an oil drum where her killer had secreted her body. He was caught and convicted. She “saw” the grave of eighteen-year-old Debbie Kline of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, and gave police a composite sketch of the man who had killed her. It was uncannily accurate, almost as if the prime suspect had posed for it.
Asked if she might be able to receive images from the other side of the country, Dorothy agreed to try. When she was alone and in a meditative mood, images rushed into her mind. Although Dorothy Allison had never been in Washington State, the pictures in her head sounded familiar to the Pasco police investigators. She told them that she could see Ryan and Christopher Jonsen in a wide river. For some reason, she kept getting a sense of “doubles—everything is double.” Even she didn’t know what that meant.
Dorothy said she saw the bodies near a bridge, and she could make out the numbers seven and eight. She also saw the number four and thought that that might mean the bodies would be found in the fourth month. “And there are cars,” she added. “Many cars parked nearby.”
Dorothy’s visions were published in an article in a local paper on March 21, and John Waibel, a retired man who lived in Wallulah Junction, some twenty miles south of the Tri-Cities, decided to see if he could locate an area similar to what she had described. He drove to a spot near Sacajawea Park, which was three miles downstream from the Pasco-Kennewick Bridge where Christine Jonsen said she’d thrown her children into the icy Columbia.
He stepped out of his truck, and his breath caught in his throat as he looked around. Right in front of him, he saw two huge electrical towers, two railroad bridges, two looming holding tanks. Two Rivers Park was just across the river. The park had a large parking lot filled with cars. And on one of the electrical transmission towers he read the number “78.” A nearby buoy bobbing in the river had “44” painted on it. Doubles. Doubles. Doubles.
Waibel began his eerie search, hoping that he wouldn’t find what he was looking for. But he did. The body of two-year-old Ryan Jonsen, clad only in a diaper, rested face up where his body was caught on the rocks. Well preserved in the freezing water, he appeared to be only asleep.
Dorothy Allison had been tragically accurate.
And then, eleven days later, it was again doubles. It was now the first day of the fourth month, April 1, when a pair of seventeen-year-old twins from Hermiston, Oregon, were fishing in the Columbia River. The twins found Christopher’s body. It, too, was lodged among the rocks of the river.
There were two more “angels” whose pictures would be placed in Mrs. Allison’s pathetic scrapbook.
There was probably no one in the Tri-Cities area who could read who did not know the details of Christine Jonsen’s “crime,” so a change of venue was granted at the defense’s request. Her trial began on October 3, in Seattle, with Benton-Franklin County Superior Court Judge Albert Yencopal presiding. Franklin County Deputy Prosecutors Stan Moore and Michael Kinnie would argue that, although they agreed that Christine was emotionally disturbed, she was not legally insane under M’Naughton, the guideline in the State of Washington. Moore would insist in his opening statements that the young mother had prepared for her crime, and sought to avoid detection until she confessed, and that she had a purpose in what she was doing. These elements, he stressed, would block the defense claim that she did not know right from wrong at the time of her crime.
The state would not, however, seek the death penalty— a penalty that Christine herself was fully prepared to accept. She wanted to die so she could be with her children.
As the trial progressed, the six-man, six-woman jury were not immune from the overwhelming sense of grief that gripped the courtroom. There were many, many tears there. Christine wept quietly as her defense lawyers, J. D. Evans and Greg Lawless, described what her life had been like since her husband had walked out on her the prior Thanksgiving.
“She just broke,” Evans said. “She thought she was evil and her husband was evil. She thought the children had no chance in life other than to go to hell.”
Christine’s plea—innocent by reason of insanity— seemed the most cogent plea ever heard in a courtroom. “It’s our position,” Evans said, “that no mother in her right mind, who loves her children, could take them to a bridge in the middle of winter and drop them into the water. There’s a motive for every crime. The only reason or motive for what she did is insanity.”
Christine, her soft, dark hair parted in the middle and her face virtually expressionless beyond a consuming sadness, had only one dress, a dress she wore each day to the long trial. Clothes
mattered nothing to her; indeed, life itself seemed to mean nothing to her. Whatever the verdict, it was patently clear to observers that she herself had “died” on that windswept bridge in February, all hope and dreams gone for her as surely as they were for the smiling little boys she had adored.
Friends came forward to testify in her behalf, waitresses who had worked with her, women with little money themselves who had given up two days’ work and paid their own fares to travel across the Cascade Mountains. They told of Christine’s metamorphosis from a happy young wife to a desperate woman who had been deserted. They had watched her disintegrate as she was left penniless and stunned when her world evaporated. Neighbors from the trailer park took the witness stand and told of a Christine who had hugged baby Ryan two days before he died and crooned, “I love you.” No one had ever seen her hurt her children, or even raise her voice to them.
Dr. Thomas Corlew, a psychiatrist from Eastern Washington State Hospital, testified that when he examined Christine in June, he had found her “the most profoundly depressed person I have ever seen.” Corlew felt that she met both tests of legal insanity: In his opinion, she was unable to tell right from wrong on the night she killed her babies, and she was unable to perceive the nature and quality of her actions.
“The day after she killed her children, she seemed to be under the severe influence of an outside force [something] that seemed to be controlling her.”
“Did she say what that influence was?” Evans asked.
“She said it was Satan.”
Even the husband who had left her testified for the defense. He had left Christine, yes, but he had always found her to be a loving mother whose one concern was to see that their sons were happy and healthy. His eyes, too, were haunted. He had to be thinking that if he hadn’t left his family the tragedy would never have happened.
The Mormon leaders testified, castigating themselves for not realizing how profound Christine’s mental aberration was.
Dr. Claude McCoy, a Seattle psychiatrist, testified for the prosecution. McCoy, who agreed with the defense lawyers when they pointed out that he had never personally examined Christine, said his diagnosis that she was legally sane at the time of her crime was based on his conclusions after reading police reports and medical documents. “People who have a mental illness usually know what they are doing,” he said somewhat obscurely. “I believe Christine Jonsen is no exception.”
The defense asked Dr. McCoy if he had ever concluded in court that a defendant was criminally insane.
“No, I have not,” he admitted.
The tape of Christine Jonsen’s confession to Detective Pittman played in the hushed courtroom. For twenty-five minutes, we heard the quavering voice of a mother who had killed her babies—to save them from hell. Several jurors wiped tears from their eyes as she relived the moments on the bridge, relived hearing the “kerplunk” as the children hit the water. Then she told how she had driven around for a while before going to City Hall. She thought that that was where the police station was located. She was then directed to the correct location, where she approached Detective Pittman.
In an attempt to console her, Pittman had murmured, “Things will work out. They always do.”
“No,” she had replied without hope. “They won’t work out.”
And now, “the best mother in the world,” according to her friends, would have her fate decided by a jury. The prosecution claimed she was a woman who had planned her crime, however “mentally ill, mentally diseased, mentally defective.” The defense scorned the state’s psychiatric witness who had never even examined her, and deemed the taped confession only further proof of legal insanity.
Attorney Greg Lawless said, “You heard it—the way she talked... the flat voice... it gave me the chills.”
The Christine Jonsen case was on the lips of everyone this writer talked to during the weekend of October 13-14. And the consensus of opinion was that she was, indeed, medically and legally insane, that she fit within the narrow parameters of M’Naughton.
All of us who waited for a verdict were reluctant to leave the marble corridor outside the courtroom. We expected the jury to return within a few hours. But time yawned, and to our surprise they deliberated more than fifteen hours. When they filed back in, the strain of their ordeal was apparent. Several seemed near tears, and their heads were bowed.
They did not even glance at Christine, and that was a very bad sign.
The jury foreman handed the verdict to the court clerk. They had found Christine guilty of first-degree murder on two counts.
Christine Jonsen showed no emotion at all. No tears. She had expected it, and she still believed that she was too unworthy to be forgiven. The verdict was only further proof that she needed to be punished: punished for being a bad wife, a bad mother, “a daughter of perdition.” She had believed that the police would draw their guns and shoot her on that bleak February morning when she’d gone to tell them what she had done. And then she expected to be hanged. Now she expected to be sentenced to the gallows.
When her lawyers tried to comfort her, she could not speak to them.
If there was emotion in that courtroom, it was from the jurors. Immediately after Christine was convicted, the jury foreman, Baxter Zilbauer, bitterly denounced the M’Naughton Rule, and the instructions to the jury that had left them no way to return with anything but a guilty verdict.
“We the members of the jury find the M’Naughton Rule morally objectionable. I speak for every member of the jury when I say this.”
The other jurors nodded. One spoke up. “We had to find her guilty under this rule whether we wanted to or not.”
The prosecution took no joy in the verdict. When a member of the courtroom gallery came up to congratulate Deputy Prosecutor Stan Moore on winning, he said curtly, “You don’t understand. I don’t want congratulations.”
But the jury had been convinced that, as the law was interpreted, Christine Jonsen had known right from wrong. And that was the criterion they had to base their judgment on. Had they had the option to consider whether she had the substantial capacity to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law, the jury would not have convicted her.
Christine faced the possibility of two life sentences in prison, which would mean that she would be behind bars for at least thirteen years and four months, twice that if her two sentences were to be served consecutively. If she should go to prison, few informed people believed she would survive. She had already been harassed and tormented by female prisoners in county jails. At the time, one long-time probation worker commented bluntly, “If she goes to Purdy [the Washington State Women’s Prison], they will kill her. Some morning, the guards will find her dead.”
A Seattle homicide detective, not actively involved in the case, lamented the problem. “I’ve seen several cases where killers were frankly psychotic. The blame is on society. We simply have nowhere to send them, and our laws stop us from forcing them to obtain treatment before they become so sick that they do kill someone. Then, when they do, what do you do with them? Warehouse them? It’s a problem the people are going to have to face up to—and change the laws before it’s too late.”
Christine did not go to prison, at least not in the immediate aftermath of her trial. She went, instead, to a state mental hospital to undergo more tests. It was conceivable that Judge Yencopal could place her on probation. Oddly, she simply disappeared from the headlines, and as the years have passed, I have been unable to find her. I wish I could say whether Christine is alive or dead, or if she ever managed to pick up the frayed threads of her life.
One thing I know—Christine Jonsen’s dreams will never be free of what happened on the edge of the Columbia River. She threw her life away, too—as surely as if she had leaped after the children.
Perhaps she wishes she had.
. . .Or We’ll Kill You
If any one of us were to be totally candid, I think all women would admit to moments of fear that we mig
ht encounter a rapist or some other violent man intent on taking us away from all the people and places that make us feel safe. We know statistics are on our side, and that the chance of meeting up with someone infinitely dangerous are slim. And yet there are always times when the sun goes down and we are alone. Although we didn’t expect to be walking or driving down a shadowy street, sometimes circumstances work out that way. Or we are alone in our own homes, listening to every creaking floorboard or the wind riffling bushes so that they scrape noisily against the house.
We wonder, “What would I do if I had to fight for my life? Would I panic or would I be able to use my head and make rational choices to save myself?”
Some of us have taken self-defense courses, while others hide their heads in the sand and try to ignore the possibility that something bad might happen. How many of us carry Mace or even a gun? Some women always carry a pair of athletic shoes in their cars so that they can slip out of high-heeled shoes after work, and feel somehow safer that they can run if they have to.
I can’t even count the number of women I’ve written about who did not survive encounters with total strangers or with someone they had trusted. I can’t tally up the stories told to me by women who lived to tell about what happened to them.
The story that follows was told to me by one of my readers, just a sketchy overview in an email at first, and then shared in minute detail when I asked her to tell me more. I found Kari Lindholm’s* story totally compelling and an experience that should be shared with other women. With Kari’s permission, the tale of her hours of chilling terror follows. By all rights, she probably should not have survived—but, somehow, she did.
As you read this, think about what you would have done. More important, plan what you will do if you should ever encounter someone like the suspects in Kari’s case. Every self-defense expert I have ever talked to has told me that the women who live through an attack like this are those who have some kind of plan already programmed into their brains.