by Ann Rule
The movie was one of her first social outings for weeks.
The two teenagers took a bus to downtown Seattle a little before nine in the evening. Minda rode down the hill from her house, and Sara Beth got on at 24th NW and North 85th Street. “I remember the driver was new,” Minda recalled, “a really nice black woman who showed us how to get to the Coliseum Theatre.”
As she’d promised, Sara Beth called her mother right after the movie to let her know they were okay and would probably be on the midnight bus to Ballard.
Outside the theater, some teenage boys “hassled” the girls, dancing around them, blocking their paths, and asking for their names and phone numbers. They were annoying, but they weren’t frightening, and they didn’t follow Sara Beth and Minda onto the bus. But they did make them too late, so it was a little bit after 11:30 when the girls caught the next bus back to Ballard.
Depending on how many stops it made, they would be in their home neighborhood around a quarter after midnight.
The Seattle Transit bus got to Sara’s stop at 24th NW at 12:20, and she hopped down the steps, waving to her friend. Sometimes they called each other after they got home, but if not, they would be on the phone together the next day—as they always were.
Reassured by Sara Beth’s call saying she would be on the midnight bus, her mother had drifted off to sleep. She was very tired and thought she would hear Sara Beth come in; her daughter was always good about curfews and getting home when she said she would. And she had only to walk through a family neighborhood to get to her house.
On Sunday morning, the phone rang and Lynne Carlson went to Sara Beth’s room to tell her she had a call. She was surprised to see that she wasn’t there. At first, she wondered why Sara Beth would have gotten up so early and had already made her bed.
Then it dawned on her: Sara Beth hadn’t come home the night before….
She immediately checked with Minda to see if Sara Beth had stayed overnight at her house, but Minda told her that Sara Beth had gotten off the bus alone at her regular stop and started walking in the direction of her home.
The next call Lynne Carlson made was to the Seattle Police to report her daughter missing. On that Sunday morning, there was still a possibility that Sara Beth had changed her mind and stayed overnight with another girlfriend. Patrol officer LaVerne Husby, who came to take Lynne’s report, asked about the possibility that Sara Beth had run away, but she was adamant that Sara Beth would never do that.
More frightening was a scenario where Sara Beth had been hit by a car, fallen, or been involved in some other kind of accident and was in the hospital. But a check with Seattle hospitals indicated there were no young “Jane Does” who had come in during the night.
A half hour passed, but it seemed like a day, and Lynne Carlson felt cold fear with every passing moment. Each time the phone rang shrilly, she prayed it would be Sara Beth with an explanation about where she was.
On Leary Avenue Northwest, three miles from where Sara Beth lived, a crew of family members were spending the holiday weekend helping Bill of Bill’s Tire Exchange finish transforming a deserted gas station into his new business. The weather had held the day before when they painted the exterior of the station, but now rain had started to fall. They were preparing to finish the paint job on the interior.
It was shortly after noon when Bill’s teenage nephew opened the men’s room door to get some tools they had stored there. Or rather, he tried to open the door. Something was blocking it from inside. Puzzled, he looked down and saw a small hand with perfectly polished nails. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, and he backed away and called his uncle.
Bill knelt to examine the hand. It felt cold and stiff to his touch. As he told detectives later, “There was just no life in it at all. I knew—I’ve seen bodies before—and the way that hand lay, I knew someone was dead in there.”
He called 911, and Officers Warren Lisenby and LaVerne Husby, and Patrol Sergeant G. S. Perkins responded to the stark report of “a body in a service station.”
They had no idea who it might be, although they were inclined to think it was probably a homeless person who’d found a place to get out of the rain. From the description of the body’s hand, it was probably a female, maybe a “bag lady” who lived outdoors because she had no money for a room or an apartment.
Still, this area wasn’t a neighborhood where many street people hung out.
The three officers peered through the crack in the door. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light inside, they could make out the figure of a young woman. She lay on her back in the six-by-eight room.
The officers immediately put in a call to the Homicide Unit.
All unattended/suspicious deaths are considered homicides first, suicides second, and accidental last. If this young woman had perished through homicidal violence, the patrol officers didn’t want to risk losing any physical evidence.
Detective Sergeant Don Cameron’s team was working the weekend shift, and he and Detective Mike Tando responded with the homicide van.
“All we know now is that she wasn’t here when the painting crew left last night about eight thirty,” Sergeant Perkins told the detectives. “The owner doesn’t know her, and neither do the others here.”
Officer Husby stepped forward. “I think I may know who she is, although I wish I didn’t. I took a missing persons report this morning from a woman who lives at Eighty-fourth and Twentieth, about three miles from here. She was worried sick because her daughter Sara Beth didn’t come home last night.”
“How old is she?” Cameron asked.
“Fifteen. And from what we can see, the girl in the men’s room is wearing clothes that match the clothes Sara Beth was had on last night almost exactly.”
Cameron and Tando—the only homicide detectives working on a skeleton crew that holiday—reached tentatively through the opening in the restroom door and touched the dead girl’s arm. She was cold and had apparently been dead for many hours.
As they eased the door open, they encountered what looked like a scene from a movie, not the usual ugliness of a homicide scene. Even in death, the girl was beautiful. She wore a silk print blouse, and a jean outfit. A little dried blood marked her face, but her expression was serene and unmarked by fear.
Except for the blood staining her blouse, and the cluttered and inappropriate spot where she lay, she might only have been sleeping, sprawled out with the careless grace of the young. Her chestnut hair fanned out around her head and then was caught in the dried pool of blood beneath her body.
Despite the macho image we see on TV, a good homicide detective never looks at a victim’s body without feeling a pang of regret for the loss of a human life. Still, some cases bother them more than others. This girl—was it Sara Beth?—shouldn’t be dead, murdered, tossed aside in a pile of flaking plaster. She was so young. She should be going back to school in the fall, maybe riding on a homecoming float or wearing her first corsage to a prom.
But homicide detectives don’t make the rules and they can’t change the ending of a tragic story; they can only pick up the raveled strands of mystery that are left behind and try to weave some pattern out of them.
The teenager in front of them appeared to have suffered deep stab wounds to the chest, but they couldn’t tell how many. One of her hands was cut as if she’d tried to defend herself.
Cameron, who had a daughter of his own the same age, put in a call for Dr. John Eisele of the Medical Examiner’s Office and requested that a fingerprint technician be dispatched to the scene. He had to keep concentrating on his job, not on his emotions.
The owner of the building said that the restroom doors hadn’t been locked. All the fixtures had been removed.
“Someone broke the lock a while back, and there seemed no need to replace it right away,” he said. “Nothin’ worth taking.”
The small frame building was located in a commercial area where there was little likelihood that anyone would have been
around late on a Saturday night to hear screams for help, if, indeed, there had been any. The detectives’ chances of finding an eyewitness or an ear witness were slight, so they made every effort to glean what they could from the scene itself.
Detective Lieutenant Bob Holter and Detectives Don Strunk and Paul Eblin, along with senior ID technician Marsha Jackson, joined the solemn-faced group at the tire store.
Even though they knew it might be futile, patrol officers began a door-to-door canvass of businesses in the neighborhood while Marsha Jackson dusted the outside of the restroom door for latent prints, lifting several. They might be vital, or they could have been left by any of a dozen workmen on the site.
Then they completely removed the door itself after lifting out the pins.
The girl’s body was now revealed in its entirety. They took photographs and measurements, and bagged what might be useful physical evidence and marked it with their initials and the date.
As much as forensic science has moved forward in the last hundred years, there is one axiom that never changes. It’s been handed down to those processing a crime scene from the famed French criminalist Dr. Emile Locard: “The criminal always leaves something of himself at the scene of his crime—something perhaps too infinitesimal to be perceived by the naked eye—and he always takes something of the crime scene away with him.”
This rule of thumb surely held true in the grimy washroom of the remodeled gas station. They just had to identify what had been left and what had been taken away. Tando and Cameron slipped more than three dozen bits of evidence into glassine bags and vials and marked them for lab technicians.
The officers doing the door-to-door canvass found that a nearby tavern had been open until just after 2:00 a.m., but it was now closed. If the apartment above it was rented, nobody answered the door. A woman who lived nearby said that her dog always barked at unusual sounds. “But he didn’t bark at all last night,” she said, “and I’m the only one who lives around here—all the rest of it is shops and businesses.”
She lived eighty yards from the gas station–tire shop. She was the only private resident around, and she admitted she sometimes got jittery when all the businesses closed and the workers went home.
“I would have noticed if anyone screamed in the night,” she said emphatically.
Medical examiner Dr. John Eisele arrived and knelt beside the dead girl. He commented that rigor mortis was fully established in the body, which indicated the victim had died sometime during the night—at least twelve hours before she was found.
“I can tell you the time of death more closely after we begin the post,” he commented. “The cause of death is apparently deep stab wounds—too many for me to count here—but that can also be more precisely defined at autopsy.”
If rape had been the motivation for the murderous attack, it might not have been accomplished; the girl’s jeans were in place, and her shirt, though opened several buttons in the front, was still tucked into the waistband. Her shoes were gone, and the detectives found no sign of a purse or wallet near the body.
Robbery? Hardly likely. Teenage girls don’t carry that much money, and the victim still wore relatively inexpensive jewelry. Revenge? Jealousy? Maybe. They didn’t know the victim at all at this point, or what her world had been like.
But they would. Like all exceptional detectives, the six investigators who worked quietly throughout the rainy, gloomy Sunday would come to know Sara Beth Lundquist as well as they knew anyone in life.
After Sara Beth’s body was removed. Marsha Jackson dusted the inside of the room for fingerprints. She succeeded in raising several more latents from the smooth wall surfaces.
There was still doubt that the dead girl was Sara Beth Lundquist, and they needed her fingerprints, too, for comparison.
The puzzle of Sara Beth’s missing shoes and purse was solved at 3:00 p.m. when word came that a widow living in the area of 19th NW and 83rd—very close to Sara Beth’s home—had found a pair of clog shoes and a purse. Someone had tossed them in her driveway and in the alley behind her house. The purse still held Sara Beth’s ID.
Detective Don Strunk left at once to talk with Mrs. Lorraine Olsen.
“Something woke me up last night,” Mrs. Olsen told him. “I don’t know what time it was, but I heard a woman’s scream. Just one. Nothing more, no car, nothing. I listened awhile and it was quiet. I wondered if I’d been dreaming, and I finally went back to sleep.
“In the morning, I went out to move my car, and I found the shoes and purse. “I called one of the numbers inside and I got Mrs. Lundquist. Then I took the purse and shoes over to her.”
For Sara Beth’s mother, the sight of her daughter’s shoes and purse was chilling. They had been found along the route that Sara Beth would have taken after she got off the bus. At that point, she was just a few short blocks from home.
Strunk talked with Minda Craig. He had to tell her that her best friend was dead, murdered. Tears sprang into Minda’s eyes and ran down her face. Strunk waited while she tried to deal with the terrible news.
“Try to remember everything you can about last night,” he asked gently. “Was there anyone you might have noticed who was watching Sara, bothering her, anything that she might have been afraid of?”
Minda shook her head.
“Did anyone get off the bus at the same stop she did?”
“No, she was the only one. There was a young guy on the bus who talked to us, but he got off about two blocks later. He couldn’t have doubled back and caught up with Sara because she would have been almost home by then.”
“Did anyone get off at your stop?”
“I can’t remember anyone.”
Minda said she had gone home and right to bed. She had no idea what might have happened to Sara Beth after she’d walked out of the streetlight’s glow near the bus stop.
“Did Sara have any enemies? Anyone who didn’t like her?” Minda, still in shock, shook her head. “No. Oh, no—she’s very popular at school. She was nice to everyone.”
“Did she date?”
“Different boys, but nothing serious. She wasn’t going steady or anything. I think lots of guys like her, though.”
At a quarter to five, the detectives cleared the scene and returned to homicide headquarters to review what they knew of the case so far. Someone had to have grabbed Sara Beth Lundquist shortly after she got off the bus. Her shoes and purse were found in the driveway and the alley behind Lorraine Olsen’s house, and she had heard a cry for help.
“I think that’s where he—they, maybe—abducted her,” Cameron said. “Mrs. Olsen didn’t hear a car, but he probably had one. It was three miles to where he left her in the tire shop. But I think he killed her somewhere else, possibly in a car, because there wasn’t enough blood where we found her.”
The question was: Had someone known that Sara Beth would be on that bus, someone who waited for her until she was alone and virtually helpless? Or had a stranger seen her that evening, hopped on the bus without either Minda or Sara Beth noticing him, and exited through the back door? Minda could be confused when she said Sara Beth was the only one who got off the bus. Two teenagers busy talking about the movie they’d just seen, and talking with the young man on the bus, could have failed to be aware of someone who didn’t want to be noticed.
And there was always the chance that she had encountered evil in the few blocks she had to walk to get home. A chance meeting with a monster? It happened, and it was the hardest kind of case to solve.
Don Cameron sent a request to patrolmen working out of the North Station about the murder and asked them to look for vehicles that had bloodstains on the upholstery or even on the exterior, or drivers with bloodstained clothes.
“Even if it seems far-fetched, look for any evidence or anyone who acts suspicious that might tie in with this girl’s murder,” he noted. “If the killer’s weird, he might still be wearing the same clothes. And look for any vehicle fires. They may be arson.
He could have torched his car to hide any residue of this homicide.”
He ended his memo by asking that it not be broadcast over police radio (where citizens with scanners could pick it up) but that it be relayed only at roll calls when shifts changed.
Detectives contacted Metro Transit to ask for the name of the driver of the bus the girls had taken the night before. Homicide partners Wayne Dorman and Dick Reed talked with the bus driver.
The man searched his memory. “There were a lot of people on the bus coming from downtown, that time on a Saturday night,” he said. “I can remember two sets of teenage girls. One set of ’em were both wearing blue. I think one girl got off at Eighty-fifth and Twenty-fourth.”
“Anybody get off with her?”
“Maybe. I seem to recall a good-looking young fellow—maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, rides the run a lot, very friendly, six feet, slender, longish brown hair. He talked with the girls and he might have got off with the first one. I can’t be sure.
“The other girl rode on up the hill and I think she got off the same time as a middle-aged white guy.”
Odd. Minda Craig was positive that Sara Beth got off the bus alone. Detectives figured she would be more likely than the busy bus driver to notice a man getting off with her friend.
Minda examined the purse recovered in Lorraine Olsen’s driveway and verified that it was Sara Beth’s. “It’s got six dollars in it, and that’s how much she had when we left the movie.”
As far as she could tell, the contents hadn’t been disturbed since the last time she’d seen Sara Beth open the purse.
Dick Reed and Wayne Dorman asked Minda about Sara Beth’s boyfriends. She said the victim had mostly dated a foreign student at the University of Washington, the son of a very wealthy Iranian family.