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In each place where a girl had vanished, the officers interviewed the girlfriends, boyfriends, families, acquaintances. They sought known criminals who might have been in the area. They sorted through names of offenders who might have followed a similar mode of operation. They pursued tips by the hundreds. And hunches.
Obviously some mortal force was responsible. Someone had come there in the night when each young woman vanished. Yet, when they walked the ground where the girl had walked, nothing was found.
It was as though they were chasing yesterday’s wind.
“I get the feelin’ that some predatory bastard is sittin’ out there, lickin’ his chops, reading all those stories about the missin’ girls and grinnin’ at us.” The frustrated thought of a Seattle detective was probably shared by investigators in each of the cases.
Nothing plus nothing plus nothing equals zero. That, said Herb Swindler, captain of the Seattle Police Department’s homicide division, was the cumulative total of all the clues in all the disappearances during the early months of 1974. Swindler also played with another math problem:
“That first girl, damned near killed in her bed, is the 4th of January. ... Lynda Healy disappears from her bedroom January 31. ... March 12 is when the little Manson girl goes out of the Evergreen campus. ... Susan Rancourt at Central, over at Ellensburg, is April 17. ... Very, very remote chance that the Oregon disappearance is related, but Kathy Parks, there, was May 6. ... Then there was the other missing person, Brenda Ball. Not a college girl, but about the same age and look. She disappears May 31 outside a tavern southwest of Seattle, around two o’clock in the morning. ... And then Georgann Hawkins, June 11.”
If they were all related, that would be nearly one disappearance a month. Swindler counted the days between the incidents—almost a recurring pattern of time intervals—and he thought of the possibility that some astrological design was being followed in the apparent abductions.
Or, if there were some nut walking around in the night, with an alarm clock of madness in his head, ticking, ready to go off at certain intervals, it could happen again around the end of June or early July—about now, Swindler thought.
* * *
Most residents of the Puget Sound area have developed a sense of humor about their monotonously rainy climate. In fact the drippy weather is used by some of them in wry messages to discourage population growth. One T-shirt message: “In Seattle we don’t suntan. We rust.” Sometimes they dredge up the mossy story about the visitor to Seattle who, after days of constant drizzle, has a question for one of the natives:
“What do you do around here in the summer?”
“If it falls on Sunday, we have a picnic.”
Sunday, July 14, 1974, dawned unmistakably as a vintage summer day, beginning the instant the sun signaled its rise with a red flare behind the Cascades before dawn. Then it climbed into the cloudless sky, turning orange, then white hot. Responding to the beckoning of the day, the people moved early in sports cars, vans, station wagons, and pickup trucks, many trailering boats toward seashores, lakes, and mountains. One direction of the flow was along Interstate 90, eastward out of Seattle, toward Lake Sammamish State Park. The arrivals began filling the parking lot early in the morning. From the cars a mixed crowd, mostly young, carried beach towels, lunches, portable radios, barbecues, and playpens into the park grounds—a stretch of sand beach at the edge of the lake, surrounded by the tree-shaded grasslands of the picnic areas.
Riding her yellow ten-speed bike, Janice Ott pedaled through the crowd to find a sunny place on the sand. A slim blonde with pretty, trim legs, Janice had enjoyed her easy morning bike ride to the park. It was only twenty minutes or so from her little basement apartment in the nearby town of Issaquah.
One of Seattle’s rock radio stations had been promoting the day at Lake Sammamish—a picnic sponsored by the Rainier Brewing Company. Coincidentally, a couple of company picnics were also scheduled for the same day at the park. Before the day would end, an estimated 40,000 people would be there, filling the park’s swimming waters, beaches, and picnic areas throughout the day.
In the crowd, a good-looking young man, wearing all white—T-shirt, tennis shorts, socks, and tennis shoes—engaged a pretty, petite brunette woman, a stranger, in conversation. He asked her if she’d go to the parking lot to help him unload a sailboat from his car. She could see he might need help—his left arm was in a sling. He explained with a smile that he couldn’t manage the boat with just one arm.
“Okay,” she agreed. He courteously assured her he appreciated her help. As they strolled together toward the parking lot, he introduced himself as Ted. She told him her name was Jennifer Rutledge. “How’d you hurt your arm?” she asked.
He explained he’d injured it playing racketball. “Ted,” Jennifer thought, was a rather debonair man. There seemed to be a trace of a British accent in his speech. In the crowded parking lot, they came to his car, a brownish colored Volkswagen. Jennifer had expected a little fiberglass sailboat hull to be perched atop his car. She noticed only an empty bicycle rack.
“Where’s the sailboat?” she asked.
“Oh,” replied Ted, “it’s up at my parents’ house.” He gestured toward the hillside a few miles away, toward the east. “Over at Issaquah.” He explained it would be necessary to drive there together to pick up the boat.
Jennifer replied she couldn’t take the time to drive there with him; she had to meet her husband and some other people back in the park.
“Okay, I understand,” Ted said pleasantly. He apologized for inconveniencing her. Jennifer returned to the park.
Not long afterward, Jennifer, reclining in the sun, again noticed her friend, Ted. Hmmm, she thought, he’s really hustling. Now Ted, the man in white with his arm in the sling, had begun a cheerful conversation with a slender, pretty blonde in a black bikini. He knelt beside her where the girl sat on a beach towel. Jennifer overheard him asking the blonde to help him with his sailboat. Nearby, in the crowd, a young man also watched and listened. He had earlier cast an appraising eye on the blonde in the bikini. A very foxy lady, he’d concluded. The good-looking guy in the whites had taste.
Those onlookers idly noticed it when, with a smile of agreement, the girl in the bikini arose. She slipped on a white knit overshirt, squirmed into her denim cutoffs, and stepped into her deck shoes. Then, pushing her yellow bike, she walked away with the handsome young man, through the crowd in the sunshine toward the parking lot.
Watching them go, Jennifer smiled to herself. “Ted,” she mused, had apparently found his sailboat helper. And this time he must have improved his technique. Jennifer had heard him explain to the girl in the bathing suit that they would have to drive his car over to Issaquah to pick up the sailboat. The girl had told him, “Oh, I live in Issaquah.” When the girl had wondered about her yellow bike, “Ted” had told her it would fit on his car rack.
When “Ted” and the pretty blonde disappeared into the crowd in the direction of the parking lot, Jennifer thought the time was around 12:30 or so.
The day grew hotter. The crowd increased. The park became a place of effervescing sound and activity. Overhead there was the drone of circling airplanes. From the lake came the steady growling sounds of motorboats, towing waterskiers. Under the eyes of lifeguards, young people splashed and shouted in the water. In the tree-shaded picnic area, amateur chefs fumbled in the blue smoke around barbecues, forking hamburger patties and hotdogs onto paper plates. A camera crew from a Seattle television station moved around the park, filming—gathering some fill-in footage for the Sunday evening news. Sunday was a slow news day.
After drowsing for a while in the sun beside her boyfriend Kenny, Denise Naslund arose from her towel and said. “I’m going to the bathroom. Be right back.” Kenny acknowledged with an “uh-huh.”
Denise, a striking nineteen-year-old with olive skin and dramatically dark hair and eyes, walked away in the crowd toward a distant cement-block public rest room. She was wearing denim shorts, a blue halter, and sandals.
That was perhaps shortly before 4:30 in the afternoon, Kenny remembered.
After an hour had elapsed, Kenny began walking around the park looking for Denise, but she didn’t seem to be anywhere. When he went to the parking lot, he found her 1964 Chevrolet where it had been parked. Denise had driven all of them—Kenny, Bob, and Nancy—out to the park from their homes in Seattle.
As it grew later, Kenny grew more puzzled. Nancy checked all the women’s restrooms and couldn’t find Denise. Kenny asked about her at the first-aid station and talked to a lifeguard. Nothing had happened to anyone in the water that day. By evening, there was no sign of Denise, either in the emptying picnic grounds or in other wooded places around the park.
The sun was lowering, reddening in the haze over the lake when Kenny and the others gave up searching.
* * *
It sure wasn’t easy for Kenny to have to drive Denise’s car to her mother’s home that evening. And to try to explain to her mother that Denise had disappeared in that crowd at the park. Denise’s mother, Eleanore Rose, was a frail, dark-complexioned little woman, who, it seemed to Kenny, was pretty nervous all the time anyway. Eleanore and Denise’s father had been divorced. Then her second marriage hadn’t worked out very well, either. When Denise decided to leave home and live in a little house on Graham Street, Eleanore Rose hadn’t liked it at all. She didn’t think Kenny was treating Denise very well, and Denise, in her mother’s words, was always “my beautiful little girl, my shining star.” Eleanore was of Lebanese extraction. From her mother, obviously, Denise had inherited her dramatic dark looks—and her vitality and passion for life.
As soon as Kenny slowed the car on Thirteenth Avenue Southwest, in Seattle’s White Center neighborhood, nosing the Chevy into a parking place in front of the little home, Mrs. Rose came outdoors. Her mouth opened to speak. Her large, dark eyes grew round with wonderment at the sight of Kenny—just Kenny—in Denise’s car. Where’s Denise? was written all over her face.
Kenny explained, in a faltering way, that Denise seemed to have disappeared at the state park over at Lake Sammamish. He began to explain how he’d looked all over. ... That he’d tried, but the police wouldn’t take a report from him, because ...
“Oh, God, no! Dear God, no!” she shouted. There was no gradual dawning of the realization within the tiny woman. Eleanore recoiled, as though she had been struck in the chest—physically—by the blast of fear. “Not Denise! Not Denise!”
Eleanore’s hands welded together in a fist of anguish, and her dark face turned upward in the summer night. She shrieked, turned, and ran into the house, to fumble for the telephone receiver. With stabs of her frantically shaking finger, she dialed the police emergency number. She sobbed out the information to an officer who told her that the police really couldn’t do anything officially until twenty-four hours had elapsed. That was the police rule on missing-persons reports. “But Denise is my whole life,” Eleanore sobbed.
All her life, Eleanore had yearned to have a daughter. Her first child had been her Denise. Later a son, Brock, was born, but Mother and daughter had always had a special, loving, hugging, vital relationship with each other. That’s the way it had been in the Lebanese home where Eleanore had grown up.
“She’s my whole life,” sobbed Eleanore. She was slumped at the kitchen table, gripping the telephone. “Someone has to do something!” In desperation she dialed a local television station, KING-TV. A reporter agreed to have someone come out to the house.
Weeping, trembling, Eleanore stumbled from the telephone, from the kitchen, through the tiny living room, where the floor seemed to sway beneath her feet, outdoors to the curb where Kenny had parked Denise’s car.
There, for an instant, the fantasy replaced her fear.
* * *
Abruptly, it’s daylight. And cold. The tan Chevy Impala is there with a blue ribbon perched on the nose of its hood, where Eleanore had placed it. Denise is aglow with happiness. She and her mother hug. “Thanks, Mom, I love you,” Denise tells her. “See,” Eleanore replies, squeezing her girl, “I promised.” Eleanore always had promised Denise that, when she became eighteen, Mom would get her a car. Eleanore had always worried about Denise’s safety—fearful that, riding on a bus, or worse, hitchhiking, she would be vulnerable to strangers. If she had her own car, Eleanore thought, Denise would be safer. When Denise was just a toddler, Eleanore had begun saving fifty cents here, a dollar there. Gradually, it had added up so that, when Denise’s birthday came around this October, Eleanore had the $400 to buy the ’64 Chevy. Denise pats the hood. Then happily, she bounces around to the driver’s door, opens it, and wriggles her cute little fanny onto the driver’s seat. Sitting there, behind the steering wheel, Denise grins at her Mom and gives Denise’s familiar little-girl wave: arm straight up, there is just the happy movement of fingers together—fluttering like a bird’s wing.
* * *
In the glow of the amber porch light, Eleanore noticed numbly that the Chevy’s surface was dull and dusty. It probably got that way, Eleanore thought, sitting out in the parking lot all day at Lake Sammamish.
When she and Denise had talked with each other on the telephone that Sunday morning, Eleanore had thought, Denise sounded as though she really didn’t want to go on that picnic with Kenny and the others. Looking at the car in the darkness of that warm summer night, Eleanore decided she’d get the little Chevy all washed and polished, so it would look nice and shiny for Denise, when her little shining star came home to her. There probably would never be a day of her life, from that moment onward, when Eleanore Rose could deal with the contradicting certainties which had taken residence together in her mind at that moment: Denise was coming home. Denise was dead. Denise was coming home. Denise was dead.
* * *
Listening to a reporter at the other end of the phone line, Bob Monahan, working at the city desk of The Seattle Times, muttered the words again: “Bizarre. Absolutely bizarre ... Just a minute,” he told the caller. “I’ll getcha someone for dictation.” The assistant city editor looked around the newsroom, across the desks where reporters sat typing, then transferred the call to an available typist.
Other editors and some reporters had gathered around Monahan’s desk to learn the latest in the strange, developing page 1 story. Monahan gazed up at them, with a look of astonishment on his round face. “Apparently, some guy kidnapped one girl out of a crowd of forty thousand people over at Lake Sammamish sometime around noon Sunday. And then he comes back in the afternoon and, around four-thirty or so, takes out another girl.”
“My God,” murmured a reporter. “Were the girls together?”
“No.”
“What’s the deal? Have the cops got the guy?”
“No, not yet.”
“Christ, what a weirdo.”
“One girl in the morning. Another in the afternoon. He must have some kind of appetite.”
It was Tuesday and, though details were still sketchily falling together, it was certain two more girls were gone. Monahan was handling information coming in from reporters who were tracking developments in the peculiar story—talking to detectives, trying to piece together what had happened, covering the search. Scores of volunteers were moving through the wooded areas and fields around Lake Sammamish. Skin-divers had begun searching the waters of the lake. A helicopter was making an air search. Men in jeeps and on horseback were combing the nearby foothills.
Denise Naslund, eighteen, 5 feet 4, 110 pounds, dark hair and eyes, had been reported missing immediately. It had taken longer to discover that Janice Ott, twenty-three, had also vanished. Janice had failed to show up Monday morning for her seven o’clock tennis game with Betty Jo Stover. Then Janice failed to appear for work at the King County Juvenile Court in downtown Seattle, where she was a caseworker and counselor.
When Betty Jo had telephoned Janice’s apartment in Issaquah, there was no answer. Growing concerned, Betty Jo notified police, then drove to Janice’s residence—a tiny white frame house screened away from the businesses of Issaquah’s Front Street by high shrubbery and overhanging tree branches. Betty Jo met a police officer there. On the front door they found a characteristically cheerful note which had been written by Janice and obviously left for her roommate: “I am at Lake Sammamish sunnin’ myself.” The note had been hanging there, apparently, for more than twenty-four hours. The roommate, for whom the note was written, had been gone all weekend.
Inside, in Janice’s basement apartment, they found everything in order. The only things missing were Janice’s black bikini, her denim shorts, and a sweatshirt. And her yellow ten-speed bike.
Two girls vanished, one after the other, in bright sunshine, from among a crowd of tens of thousands of people. The news shocked the Pacific Northwest.
The latest disappearances had occurred in the rural county area, so the investigation fell to the King County police. The county’s chief of detectives, J. N. (Nick) Mackie, appealed for information. There was a heavy response. Hundreds of people who had been in the Sunday crowd at the park began telephoning.
Jennifer Rutledge reported her encounter with the charming young man named “Ted”—the man with his arm in a beige sling. She told how he had asked for her assistance with his sailboat. She recounted the other details—their walk together to the parking lot, the Volkswagen (she thought it was a metallic brown), his accent, his explanation that he’d hurt his arm playing racketball.
She identified Janice Ott as the bikini girl who, pushing her bike, had eventually walked away with “Ted.”
Seattle’s first “Ted” headlines began: POLICE SEEK “TED” IN MISSING-WOMEN CASE.
* * *
Beyond the mountains, at Ellensburg, the shocking news of the Lake Sammamish disappearances jogged the memory of a woman student at Central Washington University. She went to Al Pickles, the campus police chief.
“That man wearing his arm in a sling over at Seattle reminded me of something I heard about here last spring,” she told him. “Some girl—and I can’t remember who she was—mentioned that the same kind of thing had happened to her. Over by the library here on campus.”
“When was this?” asked the chief.
“It seemed to me it was right around the time that Susan Rancourt disappeared here. As I remember it, some guy had his arm in a sling, and he got her to carry his books for her. It was at night. And she got kind of scared of him.”
“Thanks very much,” said Pickles. “We’ll see if we can’t find her somehow.”
Pickles issued an appeal through the campus newspaper:
Campus police would like to talk to a female student who helped a young man carry some books from Bouillion Library to his car.
They say it’s possible that she could provide them with some important information in the investigation of several missing persons, including Susan Rancourt, missing from this campus since April 17. ... The young man was wearing a cast on one arm. Because of the cast, he seemed to be having difficulty handling the books he carried. ...
Campus Police Chief Al Pickles ... said he thinks it is possible there is a connection between that incident, the Rancourt disappearance and the Lake Sammamish disappearance(s). ... Police feel the cast could be an excellent ruse for an abductor to use in gaining the confidence of young women who are normally cautious of strangers. ...
Two young women students, who had been on the Central campus that spring, suddenly remembered events which they had previously dismissed—events which had happened at night, the previous April.
One girl, Janet Carstensen, wrote a report for the campus police:
About 9 P.M. I walked out of the library to go back to my apartment. Right outside of the main entrance a man carrying a large stack of books was having difficulty. ... A castlike bandage was on his arm. He dropped the books and was making a noise [pain] as though his arm was hurting him. I went over to offer some assistance. I picked up the books and handed them back to him. But then I said, “Would you like me to help you carry them?” He said, “Yes.” ... We walked past Black Hall and walked under the railroad crossing. ... I asked him how he hurt his arm. He told me it was a skiing accident. He [said he had] hit a tree. ... He was grubbily dressed, with a dark wool hat on, and dark, long hair. ... When he looked at me, it sort of bugged me—two big eyes staring at me weirdly.
As they walked on Chestnut Street, beyond the railroad underpass, she continued, they came to a darkened place where his car was parked. It was a Volkswagen. She thought the VW was yellow, but the light was poor.
But I remember the passenger’s seat wasn’t in the car. ... It was gone. When we were standing next to the car, he started complaining about his arm: “Oh, my arm hurts.” He opened the door and told me to start the car. I stood there and said, “No.” He then said, “Get in.” I said “No.” I dropped the books, turned around, and ran back to my apartment.
She remembered that the cast or bandage on the man’s left arm looked amateurish—“something he could do himself.”
The second Central coed reported an almost identical happening about that same time in April. She, too, encountered such a man. His arm was in a sling. He persuaded her to help carry his books from the library to the same darkened place near the railroad tracks. At the side of his Volkswagen, he dropped his keys. He told that girl to bend down and pick up the keys for him. She placed his books on the Volkswagen and fled in the darkness toward her residence hall.
Pickles relayed his new information to the King County police in Seattle, and for the first time, police had a reason to believe that the disappearances could be connected. Descriptions of the suspect varied, but his age—middle or late twenties—was always the same. And his MO was the same—pretending to have an injury, soliciting the help of his intended victim, luring her to his Volkswagen.
Dr. Donald E. Blackburn and his wife, Janice Ott’s parents, had traveled to Seattle to help, if they could, in the search for their daughter around Lake Sammamish. Blackburn was a former staff man for the Washington State Board of Prison Terms and Paroles. Inspired by her father’s work in the field of corrections, Janice had become a caseworker for the courts. Her father, who had later become an administrator in the Spokane school system, spoke of his daughter and the way she had apparently been lured from the park: “All her life she wanted to please us and others. She had a burning desire to help. ... It doesn’t surprise me a bit that she would agree to help someone in need.”
King County police interviewed hundreds of persons who had been in the state park that Sunday. They examined film taken of crowds in the park by amateurs and by the television crews who had been there, in the hopes of finding, in the background, an accidental picture of a young man with his arm in a sling. But July ended and August passed, and police had no solid lead pointing toward the “Ted” in the park, the man with a Volkswagen.
* * *
Just east of Lake Sammamish, near Issaquah, Interstate 90 spears between two steep foothills as it begins its rise toward the higher mountains. On one of those foothills, on a Saturday morning in early September, two grouse hunters made the discovery.
Lying in tall grass on the steep hillside above the highway was a human skull, attached to a spinal column and a rib cage. Some long dark hair was still attached to the skull.
Their telephone call to police caused an explosion of activity. Several police agencies dispatched cars and men to the scene, and officers swarmed to surround the hillside, to establish a security line to keep news reporters, photographers, and curiosity seekers out of the area.
When Eleanore Rose heard the news on the radio, she went to the scene as quickly as possible. At the bottom of the hill, an officer restrained her. “But I’m Denise’s mother,” she cried. “I have to know if it’s Denise up there.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” said the officer. “You’ll have to wait here.”
Eleanore slipped around the restraining line and began climbing the small mountain, through the tall grass and underbrush. Higher on the hillside, another officer stopped her. A skull had been found, he said, but he assured her, “It looked to be about the age of a fourteen-year-old. It can’t be your daughter.”
Still worried, Eleanore retreated to the bottom of the hill to await word. In the confusion of rumors, she received more encouraging news. The skull with the long dark hair had no dental work in the upper teeth. That meant it couldn’t have been Denise.
With tears streaming down her cheeks, Eleanore’s face was radiant as she spoke to news reporters. “I’m so very glad. So relieved,” she said.
Atop the foothill, King County Detectives Bob Keppel, Roger Dunn, and other officers organized a controlled ground search for any human remains. It was a tangled area of tall grass, scrubby trees, and nettles. The isolated spot could have been reached by a vehicle climbing a steep, faint roadway from the highway below.
The skull, spine, rib cage, and two leg bones—all remains of one human—were found September 7. Next day the second skull was found. At first the searchers reasoned that the remains could not have been those of Denise and Janice, the girls from Lake Sammamish—the remains were too badly deteriorated.
Gradually, though, the detectives realized that coyotes, wild dogs, other predators, had been at work on the bodies. They had quickly become skeletons.
Gently, the detectives asked Eleanore Rose for Denise’s dental records. She provided them. The officers, too, wanted to know if Eleanore could provide a sample of Denise’s hair for comparison. Sensing the worst, the mother retrieved a few strands from Denise’s curling rollers.
Within hours, the positive identification was made. The remains were those of Denise Naslund and Janice Ott, the girls from the state park. When the bones were taken to Dr. Daris R. Swindler, a University of Washington anthropologist, he concluded that there had undoubtedly been a third victim on the hillside, too. One small section of an articulated column had been found, which included some lumbar vertebrae—an extra skeletal part. There was also a leg bone which didn’t belong with the two skeletons. But no skull or jawbone remained to help identify the third victim.
At one place in the tall, weedy grass, the searchers found telltale “grease spots”—places where the soil had been impregnated with oils, as though three bodies had once lain there, within a few feet of each other.
An inch-by-inch search of the hillside went on for days. A few more bones were found—mostly animal—plus scraps of rotting fabric and some items of clothing. But the latter all appeared to have been there for a long time. No garment of any of the girls was discovered. There wasn’t enough left of the victims to determine how they died, but there were jaw and skull fractures.
The detectives could speculate, though. How “Ted,” with his Volkswagen, could have driven his victim from the park onto the freeway, turned left toward Issaquah, and after about a ten-minute drive left the highway via a side road, to a tree-shrouded turnout at the base of the foothill. From there the Volkswagen could have ascended the hill on a faint, overgrown almost-forgotten roadway.
Then it would have been another ten-minute drive back to the park.
Denise’s remains, the detectives explained to her mother, would have to be kept in an evidence locker. As tenderly as they knew how, they led Eleanore to an understanding that it had to be that way. There was a need to preserve the evidence in the event the killer was caught. The tiny woman, emaciated by her grief, seemed to understand.
* * *
Eleanore Rose stood there in her cold reality, looking at Denise’s empty bed, and repeated: “I always wanted a daughter real bad, ’way back, years ago. I was afraid I might never have a little girl. But I had Denise. Long before Denise was born, I had a closet just full of little girl’s clothing. I, really, you know, wanted a daughter so bad.”
The priest told Eleanore that she should now reconcile herself to the fact that her daughter was gone, that she should take comfort in the knowledge that Denise was at peace and was happy now and there was no more pain.
“Well, I understand that,” said Eleanore, groping for her thoughts and words. She was a good Catholic and all, and she knew what the priest was saying. “But Denise was peaceful and happy when she was here. She was happy here. She was planning her life.” Her voice trailed upward, as though she were asking a question.
The closet remained filled with Denise’s clothing. It would be untouched. Outside, on the street in front of the little house where Eleanore lived alone, Denise’s car was left parked at the curb. Now and then someone came to the door and knocked, asking if the brown ’64 Chevy were for sale. Eleanore always told them, “No, I’m just going to keep it for Denise.”