by Ann Rule
Numbly, Pearce touched her wrist. It was still warm, but he couldn’t feel any reassuring pulse to show that her heart was still beating. He knew that she needed a doctor, but he could not imagine what might have happened to her. He wondered if she had somehow injured herself falling off the couch. While Arne stood there silently, Pearce ran to the phone and picked up the receiver.
There was no dial tone.
“Stay here, Arne,” he said. “I’ll run next door and call an ambulance.”
Pearce was back within minutes. Arne hadn’t moved. He seemed to be in shock.
“Ted, I think there’s something around her neck,” Kaarsten said quietly.
Pearce looked, but he couldn’t see anything. He had to pull the blankets down and lift Jody’s long blond hair away from her neck before he saw the man’s necktie that cut deep into the tender flesh there. He tried to loosen it, but the garrote had been twisted around her throat so tightly that he could not even get his fingers beneath it.
Suddenly Arne cried out, “I forgot about the baby!” Pearce knew he was speaking of seven-month-old Peri Lynn, whose room was just down a narrow hallway leading from the living area. Arne ran now toward his younger daughter.
“Oh, my god!” Kaarsten’s voice chilled Pearce. “The baby, too!”
Hoping against hope, Pearce ran to the nursery. He found Arne staring down at the motionless baby. “No, no,” Pearce began, “she’s just sleeping.” But then he saw the pink satin ribbon—the kind used to decorate stuffed toys. It was embedded in Peri Lynn’s neck just as the necktie encircled her mother’s throat. Instinctively he reached out to get it off the baby’s neck. But like the necktie, the ribbon was cinched too tightly for him to remove it by hand.
“Quick, get me a knife,” he said to Arne Kaarsten. Understandably, Kaarsten seemed to be too stunned to help much. Instead, he led Pearce into the kitchen and pointed at the cabinets. Pearce rummaged through unfamiliar drawers until he came up with a paring knife. He ran back to the baby and cut the ribbon. Still, Peri Lynn did not move.
Now Pearce returned to Jody Kaarsten. He sliced once, twice, and once again at the tie that was wound three times around her neck. Finally it fell free.
But Jody Kaarsten did not move either.
Pearce knew that they needed all the help they could get. Again he ran home and called the Kent Police. However, the dispatcher determined that the Kaarsten home lay outside the boundaries of the small Seattle suburb and transferred the call to King County Police. He learned that the county police had been dispatched at the same time the ambulance call was logged and were already on their way.
It seemed as though hours had passed, but it had only been five or ten minutes. Ted Pearce returned to his stricken neighbor. He noted idly that Arne Kaarsten wore trousers, a T-shirt, and a bulky plaid robe. Arne kept repeating a litany: “Why did it have to happen to her? Why did it have to happen to her?”
Pearce didn’t know if Arne was talking about his wife or his baby. Despite his neighbor’s pleas that he go next door, Arne was adamant about remaining in his own home. He stared at his dead wife fixedly, as if he could will her back to life.
Two ambulance attendants came hurrying up the front walk, carrying a resuscitator. Skillfully the EMT turned Jody Kaarsten over and fitted an airway into her throat so that they could force air into her lungs. The machine made her breasts rise and fall artificially as air filled her lungs. Arne stood nearby and watched, transfixed, as his wife seemed to have miraculously come back to life.
“Is she breathing? Is she breathing?” he asked sharply.
The EMT shook his head, explaining that the breathing was really just an illusion, dependent on the machine. There were no signs of life at all. Arne sighed deeply.
Neither Jody nor Peri Lynn responded to the desperate efforts of the rescue team to save them. They had been dead too long before their bodies were discovered.
No one yet had asked why or how. It was hard enough just to accept that it had happened at all.
King County Patrol Officer Bill Gorsline arrived at the neat ranch home a moment later, followed shortly by fellow Patrolman Ken Trainor. Both urged Arne Kaarsten to leave his home. Finally he agreed to go next door with Pearce.
Gorsline glanced around the living room and saw that it was basically clean—the carpet vacuumed, the furniture dusted—but now it was in disarray. A woman’s purse, its contents spilled out, lay on the floor beside the overturned coffee table; the change purse appeared to have been opened and pawed through. A diaper bag rested untouched on one chair, but a can of baby powder lay on the floor next to Jody Kaarsten’s head. A copy of a book, The Hospital War, was on the floor nearby.
As Gorsline and Trainor waited for detectives from the Major Crimes Unit in downtown Seattle to respond, they moved carefully around the house. They saw that the bathroom floor was littered with curlers, bobby pins, and a diaper pin; the bathroom rug was twisted and had been pushed or pulled partway into the hallway.
Ken Trainor posted himself at the front door of the Kaarsten home to keep anyone from contaminating the crime scene. He heard a loud rapping sound and turned around. He was startled to see that Arne Kaarsten had returned to the house and was knocking on the living room window to attract his attention. Fighting exasperation because he knew the distraught widower was probably not responsible, Trainor beckoned to Kaarsten to come outside. But Kaarsten shook his head and signaled for Trainor to follow him.
“I’ve got something important to show you in the backyard,” Kaarsten insisted.
“Look here,” Kaarsten said, as they walked over the damp grass. “I was walking toward the house and I dropped my cigarette lighter. Then I kicked it accidentally, and it slid up against the house.”
Trainor nodded, perplexed, wondering what Kaarsten was trying to say.
“So I bent over,” Kaarsten said excitedly, “and when I looked up I could see the reflection of broken wires in the telephone connection into the house. See?” He pointed toward the lower part of the home’s siding.
Trainor didn’t see. The wires were protected by a cover, and he couldn’t see any break at all. Only when he placed his fingers beneath the plastic box and pulled it clear of the house a bit was he able to discern a break.
“I’ll point that out to the detectives,” Trainor promised, leading Kaarsten away from the home once more. “Now, I think you’ll be more comfortable next door.”
Kaarsten left, but he came back several times, anxious to assist the investigators in their assessment of what had happened. Every time they turned around, he seemed to be in their way. It was a hell of a thing, they realized, for a man to lose his wife and one of his children like this, and he had to be in shock, but neither of them had ever seen a family member so determined to be part of the investigation.
Detective Sergeant George Helland and Detective Robert Andrews reached the Kaarsten home shortly before 9:00 A.M. They saw that the 1,000-square-foot house was built on an open plan: the kitchen, dining area, and living room were actually one large room partially divided by counters. A door to the garage from the dining area stood half open. So did an outside door leading from the garage to the backyard.
A short central hallway led from the living-dining room to the nursery and then to Terry’s room on the right. The bathroom and master bedroom were on the left. Someone, probably Jody Kaarsten, had apparently been sleeping on the convertible sofa in the living room, because it was folded down to the bed position.
The bed in the master bedroom was unmade, and a man’s plaid bathrobe had been tossed across the end. A clock showing the correct time hummed away beside the bed.
Dirty glasses and ashtrays covered the tabletop in the dinette area. A single bowl half full of cereal stood amid the clutter.
Andrews photographed the interior while Helland made triangulation measurements. By measuring from Jody Kaarsten’s body to fixed points in the house, he could establish exactly where the body and pertinent evidence h
ad been found—if he ever needed to do so—even after her body was moved to the medical examiner’s office. The two investigators dusted the exposed surfaces for prints.
They knew already that they were dealing with a case that defied any predictable pattern. A woman and a baby had been strangled in their own home—while an adult male and a small girl slept only a few feet away. While it was certainly possible for an intruder to enter a home and commit such brutal killings, the immediate question dealt with motive. The Kaarsten home was like any subdivision home a young couple just starting out might buy. The furniture was neat but inexpensive. There were no objets d’art, no jewels, furs, stereos, cameras—nothing to lure a burglar. Yes, Jody Kaarsten’s purse had been rifled, but they wondered how much money the young wife could have had?
If the motive had been a sexual attack, surely Jody Kaarsten would have cried out to her husband for help. But Arne Kaarsten hadn’t mentioned hearing screams. At this point, it didn’t look like a rape that had progressed to murder. Jody’s clothing was in disarray, but it had not been removed.
The clutter in the bathroom was odd. The rug rested halfway into the hall, and the curlers had been knocked to the floor, making it look rather as if she had been attacked while she was putting up her hair and then dragged to where she lay.
Even if rape had been the original motive, why would the killer have strangled little Peri Lynn? A seven-month-old baby could hardly have been a threat; she wasn’t even old enough to stand up in her crib, much less crawl out of it. She couldn’t talk. How could she have identified a killer?
Two-and-a-half-year-old Terry would have been more dangerous as a witness, but not much more. Two baby girls. Why would the murderer have killed the baby and left the toddler sleeping? Why hadn’t Arne Kaarsten heard anything during the night?
Helland and Andrews went over the exterior of the home meticulously to see if any doors or windows had been jimmied or forced. None of them bore any marks. Sergeant Helland knelt to examine the cut telephone line. Like Trainor, Helland was unable to see the severed wires until he lifted the plastic cap that covered the terminal ends. As the single lead from the outside wall entered the plastic cap, it split into two segments, each leading to a terminal. One of these leads had been cut a few inches from the terminal. This would have caused the phone inside to go dead instantly.
Helland carefully cut this segment at the terminal end so that the severed end could be examined by the FBI laboratories. Then he made a temporary connection so that detectives could use the phone during their preliminary investigation. It had already been dusted for fingerprints.
The bodies of Jody and Peri Lynn Kaarsten were removed to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office to await autopsy. The detectives stayed behind to bag and label everything in the house that might bear some trace evidence left by their killer.
As the morning progressed, more and more King County detectives spread out over the area, questioning neighbors in an ever widening circle around the Kaarsten home. The Pearces, living right next door, were the first people interviewed. They were almost as shocked as Kaarsten himself; they said they had seen Jody Kaarsten at midnight the night before. They could scarcely believe that she was dead.
“Jody was over last night,” Patti Pearce said. “They’d all gone down to Oregon for the Fourth of July. While she was down there, she had her hair bleached really blond, and she wanted to show us. Besides that, their phone was out of order, and she wanted to report it and call for the exact time because Arne said that all the clocks in the house had stopped.”
It seemed that the Kaarstens’ first day back from the long weekend had been marked by several unusual circumstances. The Pearces recalled Jody saying that Arne had told her he’d seen a man peering through their glass patio door earlier in the day. Arne Kaarsten evidently had not seen the man’s face—only his legs. Then the peeper had run to the fence around their backyard and disappeared.
Patti Pearce said that Jody had arrived at their home about 10:00 P.M. Tuesday night and stayed until midnight.
Detective Ted Forrester was assigned the task of getting a statement from the widower. He offered to drive Kaarsten downtown to King County Police headquarters in the courthouse where he could give a formal statement about the events of the night and early morning. The Pearces volunteered to care for Terry, and Kaarsten rode into Seattle with Forrester.
Forrester is a kind, low-key man, and he was sympathetic to the young husband who had awakened to inexplicable horror. During the forty-five-minute drive to Seattle, Kaarsten spoke over and over about his loss. He explained that he and Jody had had a wonderful marriage. “We were the perfect family,” he said. “I can’t understand why she’s been taken from me—in such a terrible way.”
At headquarters, Chief of Detectives T. T. Nault talked with the grief-stricken young husband. Handsome, almost boyish-looking Arne Kaarsten had thick brown hair combed in a smooth pompadour. He told Chief Nault that he and Jody had been high school sweethearts. He had been nineteen and she a year younger when they married in November 1962. The teenage couple became parents the next year, when Terry was born.
“When was Peri Lynn born?” Nault asked.
Kaarsten looked down and bit his lip. “She was born on December 16, 1965. Last year.”
Kaarsten said he was employed as a draftsman for a concrete conduit company. His avocation and his main interest, however, was race-car driving. Although he could not afford to own one of the expensive cars he raced, he said he drove for the president of a manufacturing firm who owned several cars.
Nault asked Kaarsten to recall the events leading up to the murder of half his family. Kaarsten sighed and began.
He recalled that the weekend just past had been particularly pleasant for his family. They had rented a car so they could drive to southern Oregon to spend the Fourth of July with Jody’s relatives. The trip had been relaxing and fun, and he said he had been pleased when one of Jody’s relatives bleached her hair for her. He said he loved the way she looked as a strawberry blonde.
They had driven home on Monday because Kaarsten had to work Tuesday. That afternoon—July 5—Jody had phoned her husband at work and asked him to pick up some supplies at the drugstore and bring them home on his lunch hour. He had gone to pick up Terry first, made the pharmacy trip in fifteen minutes, and come home to find that the door was locked.
“Locked?” Nault said.
Kaarsten nodded. “This was strange. Jody never locks the door in the daytime.” He went on to say that she was very frightened. While he was gone, she had seen a man “in his twenties” and wearing work clothes prowling around outside their home.
Kaarsten said he went at once to the sliding patio doors to the backyard. He caught just a glimpse of a man’s legs outside the patio doors, but the man disappeared before Arne could get outside and give chase. Pressed for more details, he shook his head. The glare of the sun on the glass doors had kept him from seeing more than the prowler’s legs.
“Did you go back to work yesterday afternoon?”
“No, Jody was frightened, and both she and the babies were sick,” Arne Kaarsten said. “I decided to take a half sick day from work so I could stay home and take care of them.”
Later in the afternoon his wife and daughters apparently felt better. Kaarsten said they visited relatives, ate supper at a restaurant, and did some shopping at a discount store before returning home around 10:00 P.M.
It was only then, he said, that Jody had picked up the phone to call her family in Oregon and discovered the line was dead. She decided to run next door to the Pearces’ and report it.
Kaarsten was struggling to recall the evening before in sequence. “I began to feel sick myself at that point,” he said. He and Jody had agreed they would get a better night’s sleep if he slept alone in the bedroom and she slept on the fold-down couch in the living room. They thought they had probably picked up some kind of twenty-four-hour flu while they were in Oregon.
“You hear anything last night?”
Kaarsten shook his head. “Nothing. I even slept past my usual wake-up time of six forty-five. I didn’t wake up until a quarter to eight. Usually Peri Lynn wakes us at six forty-five.”
But of course Peri Lynn did not wake up. Kaarsten said he had been half asleep when he wandered down the hall toward the living room. He had seen the pile of blankets on the floor, but he didn’t immediately register what he was seeing. Only when he saw the blond hair poking out of the bedclothes did he realize that Jody was underneath.
He said he pulled the blankets back, then panicked at what he saw. “I grabbed Terry and ran next door to get help.”
Nault wondered why Kaarsten had not grabbed Peri Lynn, too. Maybe he’d been afraid that Terry would wander out of her bedroom and find her mother dead. Maybe he just hadn’t been thinking straight.
Arne Kaarsten told Nault that he was quite sure burglary had been the motive; Jody had had $100 in cash in her purse, and it was missing.
Nault wondered aloud why burglars had neglected to take Jody’s diamond ring and her expensive watch. She was still wearing both when detectives arrived.
Kaarsten said he had no idea. None of this made much sense. But he was sure it had to do with the prowler who had been watching Jody though the patio doors. “I saw him,” he said again. “I saw his legs. If only I’d managed to catch him…”
Arne Kaarsten thought the voyeur must have been the one who cut the phone line—so no one could call the police if he was caught inside the house. But the grieving widower was at a loss to understand why a burglar had picked his modest home.