Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  There were two constriction marks caused by the leather shoelaces tied around her neck. They were deep enough to cut into the flesh, but the larynx beneath had not been fractured. Save for a small abrasion on her upper lip, there were no other wounds on the victim's body and no defense wounds to indicate that she had fought her attacker.

  The vaginal examination indicated evidence of rape and the presence of viable sperm. "It could have been deposited there just before— or just after— death," Wilson said.

  Dr. Wilson set the approximate time of death at 9:00 P.M. on December 15, fourteen hours before the postmortem examination. It looked as if someone had dealt Carole Erickson a fatal blow as he came up behind her on the path. If he had approached her from the front, surely she would have fought him, but there was no evidence that she had. She was slender, but she wasn't a small girl; she could have put up a fight. Sexual intercourse had taken place— but it had not been consensual intercourse.

  Women reading about Carole's murder were afraid. How terrible to be walking along a dark path where no one could help you, where the sound of the river would drown out screams. Even after the brush was cut down, the shortcut to the library no longer attracted walkers; they now preferred to take the longer— safer— route.

  The Renton detectives launched a massive manhunt, following up on leads they obtained from Carole's school and work associates. A picture of Carole was printed in local papers along with a request for information from anyone who might have seen her on the day she died. There were many responses, but most of them were from people who meant well but who had little useful information.

  Some of the people who worked at the restaurant with her recalled that Carole had argued with her current boyfriend on the very day she died. She told her co-workers that they had had words when he drove her to work that afternoon. Dashnea and Huebner were very much interested to learn that Carole's current boyfriend drove a small foreign car. They questioned him about his activities on December 15. Regretful now that his last moments with Carole had been angry, he explained that their quarrel was brief and over something silly. He said he'd been with several friends throughout the evening. When the detectives checked, they found that he was telling the truth.

  Even more interesting was a fellow student of Carole's at Renton Vocational Tech. Her friends described him as "very shy, afraid of girls." He apparently had a crush on Carole. "He got up his nerve once," one girl told Dashnea, "and he wrote her a really corny note, like 'Meet me tonight. I'll be wearing a white carnation.' That kind of thing. She didn't go, but he still acted like he was spaced out about her."

  Investigators found the lovesick student. He was certainly nervous and very unhappy about Carole's death, but he assured them that he had nothing at all to do with her murder. He was appalled that they would think he would ever hurt her. He agreed to take a polygraph examination to back up his claim. The test, administered by Seattle Police polygraphist Dewey Gillespie, supported his protestations of innocence. He was telling the truth.

  With the cooperation of the Renton Library, the detectives began a tedious search. With no other clues to go on, they could only wonder if someone had seen Carole in the library and decided to follow her down the gravel path when she left. Now they copied down the names of every patron who visited the library on December 15. They found that eight hundred people had passed through the library on the day Carole was killed. Was the killer somewhere on that list?

  Their meticulous backtracking eased— if only for the moment— when a man came forward in response to an appeal for information. "I think it's possible that I saw that girl's killer just before it happened," he said. "My son and I were driving along the river at dusk on December 15."

  Huebner and Dashnea showed him a photograph of Carole Erickson, and he was sure she was the girl he had seen on the path. But he had also seen a man— a man who was walking several feet behind her. "I doubt that she even knew he was there," the eyewitness recalled. "He was an adult, I think. Over twenty-one, anyway. He was a white man with dark hair combed straight back and a pompadour in front. He wore a long-sleeved windbreaker jacket and 'Beatle' boots that came up over his trouser cuffs. I'm sure he was aware of me because he ducked his head and turned his face away when he saw me."

  The man regretted now that he hadn't warned the girl, but he had no idea she was in danger. Working with a Seattle Police Department artist, he described the man he'd seen on the river path. Gradually, a composite sketch emerged. It was done in profile, the angle at which he'd seen the man. That was all he could recall, at least consciously. He readily agreed to submit to a session with a hypnotist in the hope that there was more information locked in his memory that he might be able to tap into. Disappointingly, the hypnosis elicited no further information.

  Working on the theory that murderers seldom report for work the day after their crimes, the Renton detectives obtained absentee reports from the Boeing Company for December 16. Their murder investigation took place well before the computer era. A computer would have made their search much easier, but the principle of winnowing out non-suspects was the same. First, they eliminated all females, then non-Caucasians, and finally individuals whose age didn't match that of the man on the path. The names that were left were matched against the eight hundred library patrons. Names that popped up on both lists were examined and culled. In the end, they questioned more than two hundred individuals and arranged for ten polygraph examinations.

  Despite their efforts, the name they were seeking didn't drop out of the mass of information. A sad Christmas passed, and the identity of Carole Adele Erickson's slayer remained a mystery.

  All through the spring and summer that followed, the investigation continued with no tangible results. By fall, reports on the investigation of Carole Erickson's murder were relegated to occasional newspaper updates. For everyone but those who had loved her, her murder was old news— but the Renton detectives still followed every possible lead that came their way.

  Seventeen-year-old Joann Marie Zulauf, who lived just outside the Renton city limits, felt no trepidation about taking a late Sunday afternoon walk by herself on September 20. The pretty teenager waved to a neighbor before she turned onto a deeply wooded path, one of many that crisscrossed a ravine in the Renton Highlands that led down to Honey Creek. The neighbor watched the blue-jean-clad teenager disappear into the trees, waited a few moments, and then himself headed down one of the sylvan trails. He didn't see Joann, but he didn't think anything about it; the area was a jungle of blackberry bushes, alder saplings, and evergreens as the path meandered down to the creek.

  In fact, he didn't think of Joann again until hours later, when her worried parents began to search the neighborhood and asked him if he had seen her. The Sunday dinner hour had come and gone and the tiny brunette girl had not come home. The night passed and the sun rose without anyone finding any sign of Joann. Her mother and stepfather and neighbors searched steadily for twenty-four hours.

  King County Police Deputy Les Moffett talked with her family and was convinced that this was more than a typical runaway-teenager case. He talked to his patrol sergeant, George Helland, who agreed that the sheriff's office should get involved. Search-and-Rescue Explorer Scouts arrived in teams, along with search dogs whose handlers would work them in grid patterns throughout the ravine area.

  "It was like a maze," one of the searchers said. "The dogs would run again and again to a dead end. Once my dog began to howl and sniff up in the air. I even looked up in the treetops, but there was nothing."

  He was relieved that there was nothing there. Experienced search dog handlers know that sometimes dead things on the ground send odors into the trees. When dogs look up, it is usually bad news.

  Thirty hours after Joann began her walk in Hidden Valley down to Honey Creek, the search ended. Clyde Reed, a member of the Washington search-and-rescue group, followed his bloodhound's throaty whoops, his mind full of dread because he knew what the sound meant.
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  Joann Zulauf lay sprawled in a depressed wash area next to the path she had taken on Sunday afternoon. She was naked, but oddly someone had piled her neatly folded clothing on top of her.

  The sheriff's deputies and detectives were summoned from where they were combing other areas of the ravine. Les Moffett arrived first. Knowing that it was useless, he nevertheless checked for signs of life and found Joann's body "very, very, cold." He backed away and summoned Homicide Detectives Ron Sensenbach and Robert Schmitz.

  It was full dark now, and the detectives had to use their flashlights to see the dead girl. The sweep of the lights gave them enough illumination to see that her face was grotesquely swollen and purple. In all likelihood, she had been strangled. They could see bruises on her forehead and dried blood in her hair on the right side of her head.

  It was after midnight in the tangled woods and there was little they could do in the pitch-black ravine but guard the scene and wait for the first rays of daylight.

  Deputy Michael Temcof stood by the body all night in the chill rain. It was a bleak and lonely vigil. The roped-off area had to be kept sacrosanct; they didn't dare risk missing some vital bit of evidence that even the high-powered auxiliary lighting might have missed.

  At dawn, the King County detectives processed the scene thoroughly, searching it literally inch by inch. But they found no leads to the slayer's identity. They cut blaze marks into the surrounding trees for the triangulation measurements that would allow them to pinpoint the precise site of the body long after it was removed.

  The postmortem examination of Joann Zulauf's body seemed to substantiate the detectives' first impression. The autopsy indicated that she had succumbed to asphyxiation, probably manual. Like Carole Erickson, Joann had sustained an injury from some force behind her. Dr. Gale Wilson discovered a V-shaped laceration on the back of her head just below her right ear.

  Although Joann had been a virgin with an intact hymen, the pathologist noted bruising at the vaginal entrance where rape was attempted. She had apparently been dragged for some distance, probably by the arms, just as Carole had. It wouldn't have taken much effort to drag Joann: she was only 5 feet 2 and weighed 113 pounds.

  * * *

  Now, eight months after the investigation into Carole Erickson's murder, another urgent plea went out to the public; the police needed information— anything, even if it seemed unimportant. And again there were precious few useful responses. Some tips verged on the bizarre. A woman called Renton detective Wally Hume to say that she had talked to a mystic on a Puget Sound ferryboat on the afternoon of the Sunday Joann disappeared. The man had suddenly become very agitated. "Then he told me that there had been another murder in Renton!" she reported.

  The man might have been clairvoyant, or he might have been putting on an act to impress the woman. Or he might have been a 220, as Seattle area detectives call mental cases. At any rate, the man was many miles away from Renton when Joann Zulauf was killed. There was no way he could have committed the murder himself, and the woman on the phone didn't even know his name or how to find him.

  Homicide detectives grow weary of psychic reports that come in after the details of sensational crimes have been published in the newspapers. While most good detectives will consider any avenue that might help, it is the rare seer who is able to offer precise details that will allow them to find a killer— or a body.

  King County Police Sergeant George Helland was placed in charge of the investigation. He talked to Joann's relatives and friends, but he could find nothing at all in her life that might have marked her as a target for violence. She was only seventeen; she had no enemies; she'd been in no arguments. She was a lovely young woman, all alone in the woods. That was probably what had made her a target for someone who hid and watched her from the shadows. She had the great bad luck to have crossed a murderer's path when he was in a killing phase of his aberration.

  Joann's mother went through the ordeal of checking the clothes found with her daughter's body. The clothes she had been wearing when she left for her Sunday walk were all there, but her watch was missing. It was her sixteenth birthday gift— a white metal watch, with the brand name Lucien Perreaux. Her mother was positive Joann had been wearing the watch when she left for her last walk. She never went anyplace without it.

  Helland issued a bulletin to area pawnshops in an effort to locate the missing watch. It did not turn up.

  The investigation continued— just as the Erickson investigation had never really stopped. All of the police agencies in King and neighboring counties pooled their information on the two cases but their leads ended in midair.

  * * *

  Fall and winter passed and by the third week in April trilliums, forsythia, and dogwood dominated the woods and fields of western Washington. April 20 was a school holiday in Renton due to a teachers' confer ence. In the southern end of town, two six-year-old boys, who were fast friends and spent most of their waking moments together, began their day. Bradley Lyons got up at eight and ate the bacon and eggs his mother prepared for him. He rode with her and his sister to the lumberyard to pick up some boards for a home project. Then he changed into black rubber boots and a quilted green jacket and headed for his friend Scott Andrews's house.

  Scott, who had wanted only a bowl of Alphabits for breakfast, waited impatiently for his socks to come out of the dryer. Then he too donned black rubber boots and a jacket much like Bradley's and headed out to play. He was back in at eleven to ask for cookies "for the kids," then left again with a handful of them.

  The boys played for a while on a dirt pile near Scott's house and then left to go to the Lyons's backyard. It was a fascinating yard for six-year-old boys because it disappeared into a woods rife with trails, potholes, and marshy areas.

  A little before noon, Scott's mother called Brad's mom to ask her if she had seen the boys. Their laughter had carried on the air all morning, and their mothers had watched them from their kitchen windows, but now they were nowhere in sight. The mothers looked around the usual spots, but they were not frightened yet; they both expected Brad and Scott to come running around the corners of their houses at any moment. Theirs was a family neighborhood full of kids who ran between the streets and cul-de-sacs all the time. They were a long way from fast roads and commercial areas.

  But the boys didn't come home for lunch. Now neighbors passed the word that they were missing, and those who were home hurried out to help look for them. Before long the police were notified and a full-scale search was organized.

  Once again, the Explorer Scouts, tracking dogs, helicopters, and police and sheriffs' patrols gathered. They combed six square miles for the missing boys. Residents in the neighborhood were asked to check boats and trailers, car trunks, sheds, abandoned refrigerators— anyplace where the youngsters might have become trapped. Along with a growing number of civilian volunteers, forty members of the Spring Glen Fire Department joined the massive search.

  But that Tuesday night passed without a trace of Brad or Scott, and the search teams continued around the clock. Wednesday and Wednesday night went by and the first graders were still missing. There is no way to even imagine the terror in their families' hearts. The friendly woods seemed menacing now. The spring storms had flooded swamps and potholes deep enough so that a child could drown. Even though Brad and Scott had been warned over and over not to go near creeks and ponds, the searchers checked virtually every deep puddle, with negative results.

  Two days after the boys were last seen and two miles away, weary searchers came upon a child's clothing: shirt, jeans, undershorts, and socks, but their frantic parents could not identify the clothing as belonging to either Bradley or Scott. Next, someone spotted small footprints leading to an abandoned gravel pit a mile away. And yet, when the flooded pit was dragged, they found nothing at all.

  Much of the search area was choked with wild evergreen ground cover: salal, sword ferns, vine maple saplings, huckleberry bushes, and deadfall logs encircled with
bindweed and blackberry vines. Just beyond the recently constructed homes the woods were almost as impenetrable as they had been when the pioneers first came to the Northwest. It was tough going for volunteers but none of them quit as the days dragged by at an agonizing pace.

  It was early evening on Thursday, April 22, when a volunteer fireman spotted something that made him catch his breath; it was what they had all feared. A small boy clothed in a striped T-shirt lay as if asleep in a shallow dip in the woods. The firefighter called his team leader, who signaled the group to stay back as he walked carefully around the depressed area. Both of the missing boys lay in front of him, partially covered with ferns and soil. He felt the youngsters' chests for any signs of life. There were none.

  The firefighters secured the area and put out a radio call to both the King County Police and the Renton Police Department. Sheriff's Deputy Richard A. Nicholiason arrived first, followed shortly by Sergeant Helland. The gully where the boys lay was determined to be within Renton city limits and the Renton detectives who had investigated Carole Erickson's death responded. Don Dashnea, Arnold Huebner, Harold Caldwell, and I.D. expert Joe Henry hurried to the tragic scene in the woods.