Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (2 page)
Read Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases Online
Authors: Ann Rule
Copyright © 2011 by Ann Rule
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First Pocket Books paperback edition December 2011
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Cover by Tom Hallman, hand-lettering by James Wang
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ISBN 978-1-4516-4108-0 (print)
ISBN 978-1-4516-4109-7 (eBook)
For everyone who has lost someone they love, never to find them—or learn the reasons they vanished. With my sincere hope that those who are lost will find their way home, or to God.
NORTH TO ALASKA
When I am
asked to choose which murder cases are the most interesting for me to research and write, I always say they would be selected from a relatively recent unit in the homicide divisions of large cities: the “Cold Case” department. There is something infinitely satisfying about finding killers long after they have become confident that they have walked away free. Some have gone on to commit even more violent crimes, while others have lived out their years in “average Joe” anonymity.
And then there are those who enjoy a luxuriant lifestyle after their victims’ lives ended violently because of the killers’ ultimately selfish motives.
Even so, surely they must always be listening for a footstep behind them and sirens in the night, waiting to see the flash of a badge.
North to Alaska
unveils at least two murders and a tangled and convoluted history that often results from weird family trees. Any rational person would speculate that one of the homicides should never have been solved—not after three decades. The single detective who traveled
from Washington to Alaska to New Mexico to Maryland investigating it had virtually nothing going for him at first. Quite literally, the second murder was a “bare-bones” case with a dark secret. That secret probably would never have been discovered if not for the jaws of a bulldozer that dug deep into the earth. But as its operator cleared land for yet another of the ubiquitous strip malls that spring up like mushrooms around America, the remains of a body emerged.
Maybe the bones were those of a person who never wanted to be found.
Sometimes people whose lives are in turmoil step out of their own identities and leave broken hearts, financial problems, and stunted dreams as they seek to escape that chaos. Occasionally, they start over with a different name. Sometimes they commit suicide. If they are peripatetic travelers, as one of the vanished characters in this true case was, the reasons for their disappearances don’t necessarily have to be horrific.
But in this case, they were.
PUYALLUP, WASHINGTON
It was midafternoon
on a very warm day—June 4, 2007—when bulldozer operator Travis Haney paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He’d been demolishing an old farmhouse and leveling the topsoil on Canyon Road East in Puyallup (pronounced Pew-AL-up), Washington.
It was a prime spot for a shopping mall in the Summit district of Pierce County.
The Washington State Fairgrounds were close by, and land surrounding Puyallup was known for its rich soil and never-ending acres of daffodils.
But just as the Kent Valley had been paved over to make room for the burgeoning Boeing Company and the parking lots, apartment houses, malls, and other businesses necessary to meet the needs of a startling influx of new residents, Puyallup’s daffodils were beginning to disappear, along with the small truck farms and strawberry fields in the valley.
It was dismaying to see the rich loam of the area buried under cement. But progress was progress.
The tall yellow home that had once stood on this particular piece of property was probably built more than a hundred years ago. The house had been empty for a while, but even without care, many of the old-fashioned roses, lilacs, and other familiar perennials had managed to survive among encroaching weeds. The house was slowly dying. Its front porch sagged; some windows were broken and seemed like dead eyes staring out as the demo teams moved in.
There had, indeed, been a ghostly presence surrounding the house, which no one wanted any longer. Workers didn’t notice it much in the bright sunshine of summer days, but they certainly did as the sun began to set. In June, in the Northwest, that doesn’t happen until almost 10 p.m.
The house itself was gone by June 4; all the splintered boards and walls with a dozen layers of wallpaper had been hauled away to landfills.
The last thing Travis Haney was thinking about on this Monday afternoon was hauntings and bizarre secrets. He moved the ’dozer close to the fence on the west/northwest section of the lot, idly glancing at the dirt the blade turned up.
And then a black plastic trash bag rose up through the disturbed earth. Haney lowered the bucket again and the next scoop brought up the rest of the bag. He dumped it onto a pile of dirt. He could see that it was torn. Curious, he hopped down from his perch and opened the bag along one side.
There were bones and rotted clothing inside and some tattered twine that might have been used to tie it all up.
Finding bones wasn’t particularly unusual for crews who were demolishing buildings and houses and rearranging dirt. Haney mused that these bones must have been in the bag for a long time. They could have been the bones of a dog or even a small farm animal. The presence of shreds of cloth, however, made him wonder if whatever had died here might have been a human being.
Travis Haney called his father, Matt Haney, who was the chief of police of Bainbridge Island just across Puget Sound. Matt told his son to call 911. There was probably an explanation that wasn’t ominous, but Travis’s discovery should be reported.
Just in case. Because you never know.
Pierce County deputy Jason Tate responded to the address on Canyon Road, arriving at twelve minutes to four in the afternoon. As he headed toward the man standing next to the excavating equipment, he saw that construction had begun on some commercial buildings in one section of the property. There were a few people standing by, apparently curious about what Travis Haney had found.
Deputy Tate peered into the bag of bones. He wasn’t an expert, but he suspected they might very well be human bones. He contacted the Pierce County sheriff’s dispatch and requested that the forensic unit respond.
Adam Anderson arrived first. After studying the bones, he tended to agree with Tate. The remains
did
appear to be human. Anderson’s supervisor, Steve Wilkins, headed out to the scene as the afternoon slipped into evening. On the way, he contacted the Pierce County medical examiner’s
office. They needed all the experts they could summon to establish the bones’ species.
As the investigators on the scene waited, one of the men standing nearby said his family owned the property. He said his name was Owen Carlson and that he owned the True Value hardware store that was located nearby. Carlson gave Deputy Tate a quick history of some of the myriad tenants who had rented the yellow house over many decades.
“My family’s had the old place here for years,” he explained. “My sister has been in charge of renting it out since back in the seventies. She leased it to so many people, but she’ll probably remember most of them—at least those families who stayed for a year or so. Myself, I only recall one family offhand. They lived here sometime in the midseventies; as I remember, it was a married couple and their daughter—or, rather,
her
daughter. They lived here about a year, I guess.
“There was kind of a strange thing, though,” Carlson continued. “More than a year after they moved out, some women came by my store and asked me if I knew where they might be able to locate the older woman’s husband and the younger women’s father. They was trying to find him because, I guess, he’d just plain disappeared.”
The store owner didn’t think the women who contacted him were related to the family who had lived there; the little girl whom he’d seen actually living there was much younger than the two sisters, and the grown daughter was years older.
“They told me that they were from someplace in New
Mexico, I believe, and that their dad suddenly quit keeping in touch. Evidently, that wasn’t like him. They wanted to walk through the property because this was the last location they had for him—our old house.”
“So you took them through it?” Tate asked.
“Yeah—as I recall, I did, but I couldn’t answer their questions; I just told them that everyone from that family had been gone for a long time. I had no idea where.”
Asked if he knew the allegedly missing man’s name, the witness shook his head. “It was odd, though …”
“What was odd?” Deputy Tate asked.
“One of the daughters said that her father’s new wife was the type of person who would
kill
him.”
“Kill him?” Tate asked, surprised. “Was she serious?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know her—never saw her again. Don’t even know her name—but I recall that her first name sounded like a nickname. She could have been exaggerating. My sister would know more, but she’s on a trip and won’t be back until Thursday evening.”
Forensics chief Steve Wilkins arrived and studied the bones in the black trash bag. He verified that in his opinion they were not animal bones after all. They were human.
As Wilkins delicately examined the bones, Jason Tate looked down at the ground beneath the excavator, which was about fifteen feet away from the first bone find. He saw that there were several more bones lying there. He pointed them out to Wilkins and they marked their location with evidence flags.
A Pierce County medical examiner’s deputy—Bert Osborne—agreed with Wilkins’s opinion. Osborne had no
doubt that these scattered bones had come from a
human being
. How long they had been buried in the earth was anyone’s guess; it surely had been a long time as they were all denuded of any soft tissue. It would take a meticulous laboratory examination by a forensic anthropologist to determine if they were male or female, the possible ethnic background of the deceased, along with height, weight, and other characteristics that had existed when they had been part of a living frame.
