Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Traia was inconsolable for a long time. She wondered how he could move out of his apartment and disappear without telling her what was wrong, or explaining his plans to her. She shed the tears that all women suffering from unrequited love do, but gradually she regained her sense of proportion and began to date other men—but only casually.

  In the spring of 1978, it looked as though Traia was going to have her happy ending after all. Her lover told her that his reconciliation with his wife hadn’t succeeded. He wanted to come back to Traia, and she welcomed him with open arms.

  Disappointments in love may cut cruelly for young women who have never had their hearts broken before, but a woman approaching sixty has the added sense that romance might never come again for her. Traia felt that way, and she’d loved Tom Scott* more than any other man she’d ever known. And now he was back in her life.

  Her ex-husband, grown children, friends, and coworkers at the bakery noticed a profound change in Traia. She smiled a lot, and she hummed softly as she worked. She knew that she and Tom might have only ten or twenty years left to be together, but that didn’t matter; Traia would cherish every day of that time.

  And yet Traia had a niggling premonition. It had nothing to do with Tom. It was more a sense of doom that she couldn’t put into words. Finally, she told a close friend, “I don’t know why—and it probably sounds silly—but I just have this terrible feeling that something is going to happen to me—”

  “What do you mean?” her friend asked. “What could happen?”

  “I really don’t know. It seems to me as if my children are spending so much more time with me, and they’re being so good to me—almost as if I won’t be around much longer.”

  “Traia, shame on you,” her friend said. “I don’t think you can accept being happy. You’re looking for something to be worried about, and you don’t need to. You’re healthy, Tom loves you, and you have all the time in the world.”

  Traia Carr nodded nervously. The only other worry she had was a direct contradiction to her fear of dying young. She sometimes wondered what would happen to her if the payments on the tavern ran out before she was eligible for her own Social Security checks. That was five years away. She lived comfortably on her bakery salary and the tavern payments, but she couldn’t make it if she lost either monthly stipend.

  She loved Tom Scott, but he had walked away from her once, and she had yet to be convinced that he wouldn’t do it again. She knew she would regain her complete trust in him, but she was still apprehensive. So many older women without men were one or two paychecks away from losing their homes. She’d seen it happen to friends.

  Basically, however, Traia was happy. Tom was kind and supportive emotionally, and she realized her fears for the future were only ephemeral—nothing she couldn’t deal with in the light of day. She knew she would deal with what she had to, if indeed, her anxieties ever came true.

  What Traia didn’t mention to anyone was something she couldn’t explain: When night fell, she often felt as if someone was watching her. That sounded paranoid, but she had the definite sense that someone might be just outside her windows, somewhere out there in the blackness. When she tried to peer out, she saw only her own reflection. She kept her shades and curtains drawn at night.

  July 4, 1978, was a good day, one she’d looked forward to. To celebrate the holiday, Traia and a woman friend went to a picnic at Traia’s daughter’s home, and they had a wonderful time. It was shortly before seven that evening when Traia drove her friend home. Invited in, Traia and her friend had two drinks apiece as they discussed the day’s festivities and the great potluck lunch they’d enjoyed.

  It was a little after 8:30 when Traia left for her own house, which was only about ten minutes away. Both women were tired, a little sunburned, but relaxed.

  Traia was due at the bakery to work the day shift on the morning of July 5.

  The workweek started that Wednesday, and a steady stream of customers stopped by the bakery. The owner was kept busy boxing and bagging orders, and putting bargain prices on some “day-old” items that were left over from the holiday closure. She kept glancing at the door, wondering where Traia was; she really needed her. Traia was never late, and she always called in if she was ill or wasn’t able to come to work.

  But there was no word at all from her.

  When the owner got a break, she called Traia at her home, but the phone rang and rang and no one answered. Her boss stood with her hand on the phone and a puzzled look on her face. That just wasn’t like Traia Carr. When she called someone to come in to take Traia’s place, both women were concerned.

  “Traia would have called us,” the other bakery clerk said. “I wonder if she’s fallen or something?”

  “I don’t know, but I think we’d better check on her. I’ll call her daughter, and if she hasn’t heard from Traia, I’ll call her ex-husband. If they don’t know where she is, we’re going to lock the store and go over there. Maybe she’s been taken ill and she needs help—but she can’t get to her phone.”

  Ominously, neither Traia’s former husband nor her daughter had heard from her since the July 4th picnic the day before. They suggested that the Marysville Police be called. Officer Herm Mounts agreed to meet Traia’s boss and fellow employee at her home on Third Street.

  From the outside, Traia Carr’s house looked normal enough—except for the fact that her car, a 1970 Pontiac, was not in its usual spot. It wasn’t anyplace on her property. Her front door was locked, but her daughter produced a key.

  Inside the house, nothing was normal. Traia was a meticulous housekeeper. She never left dishes to soak, she hung up her clothes immediately after taking them off, and her floors sparkled with fresh wax.

  Now her frightened daughter and her coworkers looked around her house with dismay. The clothes she’d worn to the picnic the day before had been tossed inside out on the living room couch. They appeared to have been removed hurriedly.

  “My mother wouldn’t have left her clothes that way,” Traia’s daughter exclaimed.

  “Maybe she was in a hurry to go somewhere,” officer Mounts suggested.

  “No, you don’t know my mother,” her daughter insisted. “She just wouldn’t have. She always hangs everything up. And I’ve never known her to undress in the living room.”

  “Traia?” they called as they walked through the silent house.

  There was no answer, only a faint echo of their own voices. They opened all the interior doors, peered into closets, and searched the yard and sheds outside, too. If Traia Carr had been taken ill, it hadn’t been in her home.

  She wasn’t anywhere on the property.

  On the other hand, there was no sign of a struggle, no blood droplets or streaks, nothing overt that shouted that there had been violence inside this quiet home.

  There was still a good possibility that Traia was safe and well but had been called away suddenly. Her car was gone, and that might be a good sign. Maybe she’d even eloped with Tom Scott, or left hurriedly to help a friend in trouble—someone her daughter didn’t know. Parents don’t tell their grown children everything.

  As Herm Mounts and the group left Traia’s home, they noticed a Snohomish County Sheriff’s patrol car parked at the house next door. Two of the county’s major crimes detectives—Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor—had been dispatched to the residence, a large two-story, older home that was currently occupied by a widow with many children. Whitman and Taylor were investigating an incident that had taken place at a teenager’s party. One of those attending had suffered a superficial knife wound.

  Gabrielle Berrios* had been widowed fourteen months before when her husband, Luis Sr.,* died at the age of fifty. Luis Berrios Jr.* was seventeen, one of the oldest of Gabrielle’s children. Now, the two Snohormish County detectives spoke to him about what had taken place the day before. They determined that he hadn’t been involved and he said that he’d never carried a knife.

  “But there’s a kid—my mom lets hi
m live here,” Luis said, “and he has a really big collection of knives.”

  As Whitman and Taylor left to return to their headquarters in Everett, they commented on what a coincidence it was that two local law enforcement agencies had reason to show up at the same time at houses next door to one another. Marysville was hardly a hotbed of crime, with its population of 5,000. The 1600 block of 3rd Street was a residential neighborhood where it was rare for either the Marysville police or the sheriff’s office to be summoned.

  At this point Whitman and Taylor knew nothing of Traia Carr’s disappearance—but they soon would.

  Longtime Marysville officers knew Traia’s house: They had sad memories of a violent event that had occurred there a decade earlier. In 1968, a Marysville patrolman was killed in the house when he went there to settle a family fight—one of the more dangerous calls police officers deal with. This was long before Traia moved in. Possibly she wasn’t even aware of the sudden death in what later became her home.

  As Marysville detectives conferred, they agreed that the situation in that same house didn’t sound good. A dependable woman was suddenly gone, her family was distraught because this wasn’t her pattern, and her clothing was left behind, inside out as if someone had ripped the garments from her body. From what her daughter could determine, no other clothing was missing from Traia Carr’s closet.

  It all added up to something far more menacing than a woman deciding to take a vacation on a whim. Because the Marysville Police Department had only a dozen sworn officers, who were rarely called upon to investigate circumstances as bizarre as Traia’s vanishing, they asked for assistance from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Department. As it happened, Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor handled all violent crimes in the county—and they certainly knew the neighborhood where Traia lived.

  Marysville officer Jarl Gunderson was heading the probe, and he thought the two county detectives with their vast experience and training would be of great help in finding Traia.

  At 4:30 on Wednesday afternoon, the trio of investigators returned to Traia Carr’s home. Nothing had changed, and there was still no word from Traia. They moved from room to room, looking at the most minute signs that something chilling had happened here.

  A glass of milk, drained of its contents, sat on the kitchen stove. The mattress was slightly off-kilter on the box springs in Traia’s bedroom, and her spread was askew. Several of her wigs were scattered on the floor.

  They picked up the phone in her bedroom and found there was no dial tone. Following the cord, they discovered that the line had been cut.

  Someone had wanted to keep Traia from calling for help.

  Traia’s daughter followed the detectives’ directions as she walked through the house. She looked more carefully than she had earlier. She had been so frightened then that something had happened to her mother. She still was, but she grew calmer.

  “I can see now,” she said, “that there are several things missing. Her clock radio is gone, and she has an old antique radio from the thirties. That’s not here.”

  She pointed to her mother’s dresser top, where necklaces and brooches were tangled together. “She keeps her dresser as neat as everything else—not like this.”

  “Is anything missing?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to go through her jewelry box and the drawers to be sure.”

  Traia Carr had a small safe, which had been pried open. Oddly, the detectives found three hundred dollars in cash still inside. But the money was hidden from view.

  “Someone who wasn’t familiar with this safe could have missed this,” Bruce Whitman said.

  “My mother has a special ring,” Traia’s daughter said. “She keeps it in this safe. It was made especially for her—with the birthstones of all her grandchildren. There isn’t another one just like it. But it’s gone….”

  “What about clothing?” Dick Taylor asked. “Can you look more closely and tell us if anything—anything at all—is missing?”

  She carefully searched her mother’s neat closet, shaking her head. “Nothing’s gone—but wait! Her purple robe isn’t here. That’s her favorite.”

  It didn’t look good. No woman disappears voluntarily wearing only her bathrobe.

  Traia’s daughter had noticed recently that her mother was inordinately cautious about whom she let into her house.

  “She keeps her doors locked—all the time. And she has this chain on it. Even if she’s expecting someone, she always checks through the peephole before she’ll open the door. She would never let a stranger in.”

  “Is she afraid of anyone?” Jarl Gunderson asked. “Has she mentioned anyone to you—by name?”

  The young woman shook her head. “No, no one. But that’s like her; she never wants to worry me. She might tell one of her friends if she’s scared of someone. But she was in such a happy mood yesterday at our picnic. She didn’t seem worried about anything.”

  But perhaps she had been. Searching the outside of her house, they found crushed flowers beneath several of her windows and footprints in the dirt outside her bedroom window. Someone—perhaps a voyeur, perhaps somebody looking for a way to get in—had obviously stood close to her windows, watching her when she didn’t know it.

  The detectives realized that if someone had abducted Traia Carr, it almost had to be someone she knew—and trusted—or she never would have let him in in the first place. Her daughter didn’t think she was afraid of anyone, but she admitted her mother wouldn’t want to scare her.

  Still, Traia was gone. And so was her car and many of her belongings.

  A door-to-door canvass of all the houses in the 3rd Street neighborhood produced negative results. One neighbor said he’d heard loud voices on the night of July 4, but he paid them little attention. With so many teenagers living at the Berrios residence, loud music, shouts, and laughter—even screams—were more usual than unusual.

  Like most small-town cops, Jarl Gunderson knew almost everyone in Marysville. He knew that Traia’s divorce had been friendly and that she and her ex-husband were on good terms. And he knew that Traia had a good reputation; the men she chose to date were primarily those she had known for a long time. Some of them were a good deal younger than she was, but there was no crime in that. She was attractive enough to appeal to men in their forties.

  Gunderson talked with one of her bakery coworkers who seemed to be close to her.

  “Was there anyone who frightened Traia?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say exactly afraid,” she mused. “But she told me about this one guy she’d had trouble with. He was at her house, and he was kind of ‘liquored up’ and I guess…well, he made a pass at her that she didn’t appreciate. She said she pushed him out the door and locked it. She said she wasn’t going to let him come over anymore.”

  The witness didn’t know the man’s name.

  “Was he angry?” Gunderson asked. “Did he ever try to see her again?”

  “Not that she ever mentioned. Traia was pretty firm with him.”

  Traia Carr’s Pontiac sedan was found first. A Marysville police sergeant discovered it at 1:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 6. It was barely half a mile from her house, parked on 3rd Avenue.

  When they found her car, the investigators knew that their fears for her safety were accurate. The upholstery on the back of the driver’s seat was literally drenched in blood, which had now dried completely.

  DNA matches were unheard of at the time, but the Western Washington Crime Lab would be able to compare blood type, enzymes, and RH factors if they could find any samples or records of Traia’s blood values.

  After daylight dawned, Dick Taylor and Bruce Whitman processed the Pontiac for evidence. They found more blood in varying quantities on the hood, throughout the interior, and on the doors. There was so much blood that, if it had all come from one person, they sincerely doubted that that person could still be alive.

  Once again, they surmised that the killer—or attempted kill
er—probably lived close by. He could have easily dumped Traia’s car and walked to one of the many houses that spread out from both sides of 3rd Street.

  There was no purse in Traia’s car, nor her missing purple robe. The two detectives couldn’t find anything that might have belonged to the person whose gun or knife had caused all the bloodshed.

  And they still didn’t know where Traia Carr was.

  They lifted a number of latent fingerprints that might prove to be invaluable if they found a suspect whose prints could be compared to these unknown prints. In 1978, AFIS didn’t exist. The FBI didn’t keep single fingerprints three decades ago—except those that belonged to felons on the Ten Most Wanted list.

  Forensic science has advanced a great deal since the seventies, when computers weren’t yet standard household equipment. Looking back, 1978 CSI techniques seem archaic now.

  There was just one man whom Traia Carr was extremely close to, and he lived in her neighborhood. That was Tom Scott, the ex-lover who had recently come back to her. His apartment was several blocks up the street from her house.

  Jarl Gunderson, Dick Taylor, and Bruce Whitman studied Scott as they questioned him. He appeared to be very distraught and grief-stricken over Traia’s disappearance. They believed his emotions were real and not manufactured tears meant to take suspicion off of him. But they also knew that sociopaths were quite capable of feigning grief when it served their purposes.

  “I’ll do anything in my power,” Scott said, sobbing, “to find out what happened to Traia. I just keep praying she’s still alive, waiting for us to find her.”