Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (43 page)

An autopsy would, hopefully, give them more information.

*   *   *

In deep shock, George and Leanne Peterson nonetheless tried to reconstruct for detectives what had happened the night before.

George Peterson told Roger Dunn that he had not seen Dina since the family had dinner together from about 6 to 6:30 the night before. He explained to Dunn that he had left the house after that to take some of his younger sons to basketball practice and do some other errands.

“I got home around 8:30 and went to watch TV about 8:45—but I was reading the paper, too, and I fell asleep. I woke up at 11:30 because the TV was blaring and I turned it off,” he recalled. “Then I woke up at 1:30 in the morning when one of our girls came home from a date. She knocked on the front door to get in. I checked the patio door leading off the recreation room and found it was locked. I looked in Dina’s room, and she wasn’t there. I was worried and a little angry that she was still out.”

George Peterson explained that if Dina had any faults, it was her tendency to stay out longer than she was supposed to. In fact, that was why she was grounded on Valentine’s Day. She’d stayed out too late the previous night, visiting her boyfriend, Tim Diener, who lived next door. It was too easy for Dina to sneak over to Tim’s house; all she had to do was open the Petersons’ sliding glass door in the basement and skip over to the sliding door that went into Tim’s room.

Her dad had caught her on February 13 and grabbed her by the arm. “I was angry,” he said. “I told Dina, ‘You don’t go there anymore!’ ”

When Peterson glanced into Dina’s bedroom at 1:30 
A.M.
on February 15, her bed was neatly made, the bolster pillows in place. But she wasn’t there. He thought she was deliberately defying him.

Her room had looked the same way in the morning just before he found her body.

In any household with teenagers, parents never really sleep well when one of them is out, and Peterson couldn’t get back to sleep by 2:15. He said he’d taken three aspirin and went back to bed, and finally to sleep. At 3:30, Leanne Peterson had gotten up to let their oldest daughter in. Finally, all had been quiet until George got up at 6.

Peterson said he had heard nothing unusual during the night, certainly no cries for help or screams.

Dina’s mother tried to recall for the detectives what had happened the night before. Dina had been grounded for Valentine’s night because she’d stayed out past curfew. She hadn’t done anything shocking; Tim’s parents were home and Dina just forgot about the time.

But her parents wanted to make a point so she wouldn’t do it again.

On Valentine’s night, Dina tried to get her mother to change her mind about the grounding. First, she asked to go to a friend’s birthday party, and Leanne refused—but Dina didn’t seem very disappointed.

Dina tried again. She pleaded to be allowed to go to a basketball game at school and the Valentine’s Day dance that was to follow. Her foster sister was going, she argued, but her mother explained that Dina was the one who was grounded.

She pouted a bit but eventually settled down in the Petersons’ recreation room to watch TV with a girlfriend, and a neighbor boy, Jim Groth, also sixteen, whom she considered a platonic friend. Her sister Marilyn said later that Jim was kind of an old shoe.

“Jim would just show up—and it was hard to get rid of him,” she said. “Dina had no interest in him, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

Shortly after 9
P.M.
, Dina and her girlfriend had begged to be allowed to walk to a nearby restaurant to buy a pizza. They would eat it there, and they promised fervently that they would be back by 10:30.

Dina’s mother finally relented and the two girls joined one other teenager to walk the few blocks to Michael’s Restaurant on NW 195th.

Jim Groth had elected to stay in the basement to watch the end of a TV movie and wait for the girls to return.

Leanne Peterson heard Dina come in the front door about 10:30, relieved that she was home on time, just as she’d promised.

Dina’s sister Marilyn had come home from a birthday party shortly before and she was sitting on her mother’s bed, chatting about the festivities.

Within a few minutes, Leanne and Marilyn heard a little “scuffle” in the backyard of their home and two “playful” screams. It didn’t sound out of the ordinary. There was horseplay in their house and yard often. The motion light in the backyard came on, too.

“We heard something like ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Stop it!’ ” Marilyn said.

Leanne thought it was Dina and one of her friends and the sounds did not indicate at all that Dina was distressed. But her mother was afraid the noise might annoy the neighbors so she’d gotten out of bed, put on a robe, and gone downstairs to the recreation room.

Outside in the dark yard, she’d seen two people in what looked like a playful wrestling match near the rockery. She even opened the sliding glass door in the recreation room and called Dina’s name several times, telling her to be quiet.

There was no answer, but she wasn’t concerned. She let Dina’s little dog out, knowing Dina would bring him in with her. Leanne Peterson locked the door so Dina would have to knock to get in, and then Leanne returned to bed.

When Len Randall asked Leanne Peterson about Jim Groth—who had been waiting for Dina and her friend to return—her mother nodded.

“I found him still down in our basement rec room, watching TV all by himself,” she said. “I asked him what he was doing there, and he said he was waiting for the girls to come back with the pizza. I told him they were going to eat their pizza in the shop, and I sent him home. That would have been about ten
P.M.
”

*   *   *

As the homicide crew worked at the scene in Richmond Beach, the temperature dropped dramatically and now snow sifted over the scene. They hurried as much as they could before the white drifts covered any physical evidence they might yet find.

Dina’s anguished parents tried to think of who might conceivably have wanted to hurt their ebullient daughter. She wasn’t a girl who confided all her secrets to her parents, but then that is standard teenage behavior.

Usually, high school students’ peers often know more about them than their own mothers and fathers do. The detectives hoped to find Dina’s friends, who might know if she had reason to be afraid of anyone, or if she was secretly worried about anything.

Overwhelmingly, the friends who were Dina’s age said she was a good girl, an obedient teenager for the most part, and upset when she broke her curfew. She was very close to her family. Her boyfriend, Tim Diener, was nineteen, out of high school and worked at The Boeing Airplane Company.

“She trusted just about everyone,” one girl said.

Dina Peterson was a “helping” kind of teenager who reached out to people with problems.

“We used to always tell the kids to feel free to bring home their friends anytime. But Dina usually didn’t. We didn’t really know how many friends she had. She kind of collected people with problems. Maybe she had empathy for them. I don’t know,” Leanne Peterson recalled sadly. “Whenever I objected if she brought someone home who seemed like they had too many problems, she would tell me they were beautiful human beings but that nobody understood them.”

The night before she was killed, Dina had baked two pies. In the crusts, she’d pricked out patterns with a fork. One spelled out “Welcome All Strangers” and the other said “Smile—God Loves You.”

Had Dina met a stranger who was not a beautiful person?

But when? She’d been gone to the pizza parlor for only an hour. Had someone deadly followed her home?

Detective Randy Hergesheimer joined the investigative team; he would take over responsibility for the case.

The first thing for the team to do was trace Dina’s movements
after
she left her home at 9:30 on Valentine’s night. The detectives talked to the two sisters who had accompanied her to the pizza parlor. They verified that the trio had called the restaurant, ordered a pepperoni pizza, and then walked there to eat it. They’d started walking home shortly before 10:30 because Dina was anxious to keep her promise to her mom. Halfway home, Kathy Strunk and several friends from school stopped and offered them a ride. It was cold out, and even though they were close to home, Dina and the sisters had climbed into the back of the pickup truck.

When they got to the Petersons’ house, Kathy Strunk said that Dina had gone inside immediately, through the front door. The other teenagers had stayed on the sidewalk in front of her house talking to two of the girls in the truck. They gave the detectives the names of the other two girls.

One of the other girls told detectives that Dina had been so concerned about getting home on the stroke of 10:30 that she’d barely waved goodbye as she ran to the front door.

“We four stood there talking,” Kathy said. “Sometime—maybe about ten fifty—I heard a sound from the backyard of Dina’s house.”

“What kind of sound? A scream, or something like that?” Hergesheimer asked.

“No,” she said. “Not like that. It was like a person hitting the ground after jumping off of somewhere, and then I heard just running steps.”

The owner of Michael’s Restaurant recalled that the three girls had been in his pizza place around 10
P.M.
“They called in to order a pepperoni pizza,” he said. “They split it three ways and ate it here. It would have cost $2.84. I remember them especially because they all dug in their jeans to come up with enough nickels and pennies to pay for it.” He identified a picture of Dina Peterson as having been one of the girls.

Detectives still had dozens of teenagers and neighbors to talk to. But first, they attended the postmortem exam of the sixteen-year-old victim.

Dina had been completely clothed when her father found her, wearing the same clothes she wore to the pizza parlor: blue jeans, all of the buttons—even on the inner waistband—buttoned, an emerald-green long-sleeved sweater, a blue full-length coat, white bra, pink panties, red socks, and brown suede shoes.

There was a single rip in the back of the coat and a corresponding tear in the sweater—both caused by the knife in her murderer’s hand.

Dr. Patrick Besant-Matthews, the King County medical examiner, performed the autopsy. The forensic pathologist took blood samples, vaginal smears, hair samples, fingernail clippings, and a few soil samples. Even a couple of stray hairs that still clung to her clothing were preserved. They were probably from her own head, but no one could be sure of that.

It was 1975, and no one had heard of DNA matching at the time. However, if the hairs still had “tags” at the scalp end, they might be able to ascertain blood type.

Dina Peterson was petite at five feet, two inches and she weighed only 117 pounds fully clothed. Besant-Matthews found one puzzling factor as he surveyed her body. The lividity pattern on her corpse was not in keeping with the supine position of her body when Dina was found.

When the heart stops beating and pumping blood, the life fluid drops to the lowest part of the body. If the victim is moved before this pattern—called lividity—is set, there will be a second staining on the new bottom body portion. Only it will be much lighter: pink instead of purple.

Dina Peterson had
two
patterns of lividity. Besant-Matthews and the detectives attending her autopsy could see that she had lain on her face for some time after she died. But someone had turned her body over during the night. The striations of bright purple livor mortis were on the front of her body; lighter pink areas marked her back.

Few laymen understand livor mortis, or, for that matter, rigor mortis. Nor do they understand how accurately these postmortem changes can tell time and manner of death, and if the victim has been moved after death.

The King County detectives had questioned everyone on the scene carefully. Her father had not turned Dina over; he had only touched her face and then covered her with blankets. Even so, they asked him if he owned any knives. Chagrined at what they seemed to imply, he led them to his workshop. All of his tools, including knives, hung from their labeled spots.

Homicide detectives
do
often have to ask difficult questions, and they explained that to Dina’s father.

Patrol officers recalled that the priest who’d administered last rites had not touched her at all. The EMTs had merely looked for a pulse and noted the rigor in her jaws.

Who, then, had turned Dina over?

The autopsy continued. There was blood in Dina’s right ear, nose, and mouth. Her legs were skinned and bruised. She had some facial bruises and scratches, which might have been sustained as she fell, or they could have resulted from being hit in the face.

It seemed probable that she had struggled for her life—if even for a short time—but she was tiny and would have been very easily subdued by a larger attacker.

Dina’s cause of death was, however, the single knife wound nine inches above her waist. The bone-handled knife was only one and five-eighths inches to the left of the midline of her back. It had pierced her back almost five inches deep and penetrated her left lung, causing rapid death from hemothorax—blood hemorrhaging into her lungs. The thrust of the knife was downward, suggesting her attacker was taller than she was. She could not have lived very long before she drowned in her own blood.

There were no defense wounds at all on Dina’s hands. That was interesting. She must have been taken by surprise, perhaps by someone she completely trusted.

A homicide where there is only a single knife thrust is very unusual. Pathologists and detectives are far more likely to find victims who have been stabbed again and again in a frenzy of anger or passion.

What did just one wound mean? A killing done on impulse? A cold-blooded murderous erasure of someone the killer wanted to get rid of?

An accident? No, not an accident—not when a knife had plunged so deep.

Dina’s stomach still contained barely digested bits of pizza. Dr. Besant-Matthews estimated that the time of death would have been between 10:30 and 11:30
P.M.