The End of the Dream (42 page)

Now, only the squirrels and the birds perch on its decks. Renters live in the gray house. Seven Cedars is still for sale. In February 1997, Steve Meyers and Mark Biggins entered into a plea bargain agreement with federal prosecutors. In return for the U. S. Attorney’s promise not to file any additional charges on other assaults or robberies, they agreed to plead guilty to one count of Armed Bank Robbery, two counts of Assault on a Federal Officer, and one count of Firearms Violation.

(King County, Washington, prosecutors would not file charges on the assaults on the Seattle police officers. ) In doing this, Mark and Steve gave up their rights to a trial. They were sentenced to twenty-one years in a federal prison. Steve Meyers is serving his sentence at the federal penitentiary in Sheridan, Oregon, and Mark Biggins is incarcerated at a federal prison in Terminal Island, California.

With good behavior, they could be out in another seventeen years, although they are currently seeking a reduction in their sentences to a point where they would have only twelve years to serve.

Lori Biggins visits her father whenever she can. He helps her with her homework still, but over the phone, now. Traci Marsh lives somewhere on the East Coast, and Lori lives with one of Mark’s brother’s family.

Kevin Meyers did his best to help his brother avoid a long prison sentence, to no avail. It was Kevin who went to New Orleans and packed up Steve’s belongings and sculptures.

Then, on Steve’s instructions, he sold the New Orleans house and studio, and banked the money for Steve. But even after all of Kevin’s efforts, Steve was angry with him. They no longer speak or write. The fall of 1996 continued to be a season of loss for Kevin Meyers. Two weeks after Scott committed suicide, Bobby Gray was burning some trash outside his Florida home when a spark ignited the gas can in his hand.

The ensuing explosion knocked him unconscious, and when he came to he was on fire. He rolled down a rock-strewn driveway into a palmetto grove, trying desperately to smother the flames. It was too late, he was terribly burned over most of his body. Bobby Gray lived only eighteen hours, and for the second time in as many weeks, Kevin lost a friend he’d known for more than thirty years. He flew back to Florida to give the eulogy at Bobby’s funeral. It seemed to Kevin that death was everywhere he looked. Kevin and Ellen have stayed together, both of them shell-shocked and grieving at first, although they have come to a quiet acceptance of what they cannot change. After a while, Kevin started painting again. His later work is more spectacular than anything he has ever done. His dearest wish remains, as always, to have a studio that belongs to him, a wish that eludes him, still. Mike Magan went back to duty on December 5. That was the day that Sea first Bank gave a luncheon to honor the officers who caught Hollywood, and his accomplices. Mike had permission to pick up Lisa in a squad car that day. They were headed for the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel to join 150 other Seattle Police officers and FBI agents for a belated Thanksgiving feast when Mike’s radio sounded bank robbery tones. The Wells Fargo bank at 1620 Fourth Avenue had just been robbed. “I kept waiting for someone else to respond, “ Mike said, laughing, “but they were all at the luncheon.
 
Finally, I turned off the freeway at Roanoke to go after the robber.” The radio dispatcher reported that the robber had hopped on a bus headed north, and gave a precise description. At that moment, Lisa Magan looked in the window of a bus just passing them and said, “Mike, there he is! “ The robber gazed back at them from the bus window. There didn’t seem to be any other patrol units around, although Mike could hear the rotors of Guardian One overhead. Over her protestations, Mike stopped and left his wife on the parking strip and then peeled out with siren wide open after the bus. He caught it just as It. Linda Pierce and Captain Dan Bryant also on their way to the Sea first luncheon pulled up. The three of them split up and entered the bus front, middle, and back. They arrested still another bank robber. In the meantime, a patrol car had picked up Lisa Magan and driven her to headquarters to wait for Mike. But when they brought her in, everyone thought she was the suspect.

She and Mike finally got to the luncheon, but they were late.

Mike Magan served three years on the Puget Sounds Violent Crimes Task Force, and he is currently a detective assigned to the Domestic Violence Unit. He still reacts to the “tones” that signal a bank robbery until he remembers that he is in another phase of his police career. Shawn Johnson finished up his eleven years in the Seattle FBI office in September. His next station will be in Wisconsin. Although he and his wife are happy to be going “home, “ they will miss Seattle.

Shawn still regrets that he never got to talk to Scott Scurlock, the man he sought so long who died before he could explain why. No one will ever really know what made Scott Scurlock run. Scores of people thought they knew him well and they were shocked to find that they did not. In death as in life, he remains an enigma. Seemingly, he had every quality it takes to become a success, to be happy, to make the world a better place. He should not have died only halfway through his life. People who loved him still love him, even though they know now his hidden side. As an author who never knew him, I found myself delaying the time when I had to write the end of Scott Scurlock’s story as if, somehow, it might change before I came to the night of November 28, 1996. I didn’t want him to die. All of us want to like someone who is physically beautiful, charming, and fun to be with.

Perhaps we all secretly admire the rascal adventurer. Certainly, we want to believe that, underneath, they really do care about other people. But some of them really don’t. Was Scott Scurlock a man without conscience and a complete hedonist? Probably. He left behind a trail of broken hearts, broken friendships, and damaged lives. He always knew the probable consequences of what he was doing, but he didn’t stop.

Quite likely, he was more afraid for himself when Captain Pat was murdered than he was remorseful. But Scott only changed gears, dropping the manufacture of crystal meth and beginning another illegal activity.
 
Although he was generous to his friends, he had no compunction about robbing them of the things that meant the most to them. In the end, like all sociopaths, Scott seemed unable to feel anyone else’s pain. If he had had the empathy that others possess, he would not have coaxed Steve away from his art.

He would not have taken Mark away from his daughter. And he would not have abandoned his friends as they lay bleeding. But there are degrees of sociopathy, and I think Scott Scurlock was only moderately afflicted, and not a killer. Ironically, it is Sergeant Howard Mont, the Seattle police officer who was the last person in the world to speak to Scott (although he didn’t answer) who denies that Scott was completely without conscience or regret.

“I always wanted to write to his parents, “ Mont says. “He wasn’t all bad. I wanted to tell them that their son had every opportunity to kill me, and he didn’t shoot. I was as good as dead when I went up to that camper door, but he didn’t kill me, he killed himself instead.” Kevin Meyers still misses the best friend of his life. He looks away as he tells of talking with one of the women who used to visit Seven Cedars.
 
“She said to me, You know, Kevinwe’ll never hear the crow calls down there anymore. And she’s right, “ Kevin says quietly. “We never will.

Nothing will ever be that safe or happy again.”

The Peeping Tom

The victim in this case was happier than she had ever been in her life.

All of her dreams were about to come true, she was planning her wedding to the man she loved. Why then did she feel that she was in danger?

There was nothing to substantiate her uneasiness and she knew that it was an irrational fear, but it seemed to her that someone was watching her. Tragically, someone was. Even though I have written about more than a thousand homicide cases over the last thirty years, I remember every one. Some of them are more unsettling than others, and they come back to haunt me at odd moments. They will probably trouble me until the end of my life. This case is one of the saddest of all, and certainly one of the most baffling to solve. When Salem, Oregon, detectives found the key to a seven-year puzzle, they realized that a young woman’s wonderful dream was sacrificed to fulfill the basest of human desires. The identity of the man they finally arrested was a complete surprise to everyone involved. . i Kay Owens was so happy in July of 1971. She was twenty-six years old, and she had the world by the tail. She was in love and about to be married, she liked her job, and she had just been admitted to the law school at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Kay was a classically attractive brunette, tall with a willowy figure. She was also very intelligent, her brilliance and her skill had won her the position as the only female employment analyst in the Oregon State Welfare Department. Kay enjoyed her job so much that she almost hated to leave to go to law school, but she had wanted to be an attorney for a long time. The Oregon State Welfare Departmentlike all state facilities in Oregon was headquartered in Salem, its capital city. Situated in the fertile Willamette Valley, Salem is one of the loveliest cities in the west, and Kay loved living there. Her wedding was scheduled for August, and she was busy making the arrangements, getting ready to move to Eugene with her bridegroom, and working full time. Yet she was haunted by a fear of something unnamed and unknown, something that moved just beneath her conscious awareness. Perhaps it was because she felt her life was too good to be true. Many people are superstitious when their lives get so close to perfect and fear that such bliss can’t last. Kay had lived in the rear unit of a duplex at 1830 Court Street NE in Salem for two years.

It was located in a neighborhood mostly comprised of rental property, probably because it was so close to the state office buildings.

She shared her meticulously clean duplex with her two cats. She had an understanding landlord, she could walk to work, and her living quarters were so close to other units that she knew if she ever needed help, her neighbors were only a few steps away.

Kay’s fiance, Dan Stone, * was an attorney who lived in Eugene, sixty miles south of Salem, but he spent as much time with her as he could.

He stayed over with her Wednesday nights and every weekend. Before long, they would be together all the time. But, for the moment, Kay was all alone with her cats four nights a week. She had never been ill at ease before, but as spring passed into summer, Kay Owens’ niggling fear became more specific. She was disturbed by her sense that someone was watching her when she was alone at night. If she had tried to verbalize her premonition, it would have sounded too bizarre to be believed. How could she convince anyone that she was being watched when she’d never seen anyone, never heard a quiet footfall in the cedar chips outside her bedroom window? She only sensed that someone was there. Kay was a most rational woman who hated to admit that she was frightened by shadows in the night, but she finally told her fiance about her fears. =_. He tried to comfort her, assuring her that she wouldn’t be living in her apartment very long.

Oddly, it was only when Kay was in her apartment that she was frightened. She often had to work late but she was never scared there.

Nor was she uneasy about walking home alone even if she left her office after 11,00 P. M. The well-lit streets of Salem didn’t scare her at all.
 
It was almost as if she knew that the thing she feared waited for her at home. Kay took precautions, she locked her doors tightly at night and placed dowels in her windows so that they couldn’t be opened more than a few inches.

She kept her blinds closed as tightly as she could. On Thursday, July 29, 1971, Kay Owens left her office shortly after five.

Dressed in a navy blue jumper and a white, long-sleeved blouse, her long, dark hair caught up in a bun, Kay strode home along streets whose parking strips were ablaze with roses. It would be daylight until 9:00 P. M. , and Dan would be coming up the next night. Her fears faded on this sunny afternoon. Kay stopped to talk to the elderly woman who lived in the other half of her duplex. She said she was going to drive to the store to buy cat food and asked if she could pick up any groceries for her neighbor.

Other neighbors recalled hearing her laugh. “You couldn’t mistake Kay’s laugh, “ one of them remembered later. “It was such a musical laugh.” It was a quiet Thursday night. Kay must have come home and put away her groceries, but no one saw her. On Friday morning, Kay Owens didn’t show up for work, nor did she answer her phone when her supervisor and one of her fellow workers called to see if she was ill. They watched the clock anxiously.

Maybe somebody else might decide to take a day off without reporting in, but not Kay. She was as dependable as the seasons.

Kay’s friend Cindy Clark* waited an hour before she left work and walked the short distance to Kay’s apartment. She knocked gently and then pounded on the door. There was no answer. Cindy went to a neighbor who had a spare key to Kay’s front door. The key slid in, the tumblers meshed smoothly, and the door opened. It was very quiet.

Feeling like an intruder, Cindy stepped inside. She would be really embarrassed if she found Kay and Dan asleep in the bedroom. She almost backed out, but then she turned resolutely and walked through the living room, calling softly to Kay. Kay had recently installed bifold doors so that she could close off the bedroom from the living area, but now Cindy saw that they were open. And then she saw two long, slender legs on Kay’s bed. She forced herself to walk toward the bedroom. Kay Owens was there.

She was naked, sprawled on the bed with a pillow over her face.

Cindy rushed to pull the pillow off, but Kay didn’t move. Her face was swollen and suffused with a bluish-purple tinge. Almost unconsciously, Cindy placed the pillow over Kay’s pubic area to protect her friend from strangers’ eyes. And then she stumbled back to the elderly neighbor’s duplex, crying, “We need an ambulance! We have to call an ambulance! “ The two women were so distraught that they couldn’t find the number of an ambulance and called the Salem Police Department instead. But Cindy had yet to accept a terrible truth, she told the police dispatcher that there was an “ill woman” at 1830 Court. It was 9:44 A. M. , and Patrolman R. D. Marsh was dispatched to the scene.