The Stranger Beside Me (11 page)

"Hey George!" he called loudly. "What's happening?" The pretty, deeply tanned, girl wearing blue slacks, a white backless teeshirt, and a sheer red. white, and blue top. craned her neck and looked back. She smiled and waved, talked for a moment or two about the Spanish exam, and then, laughing, called "Adios." She turned and headed south toward her residence. He watched her for about thirty feet. Two other male students who knew her recall that they saw her traverse the next twenty feet.

She had forty feet to go-forty feet in the alley brightly lit. Certainly, there were some murky areas between the big houses, filled with laurel hedges, bloomins rhododendrons, but Georgeann would have stayed in the middle of the alley.

Her roommate, Dee Nichols, waited for the familiar sound of pebbles hitting their window: Georgeann had lost her key to the back door, and the sorority sister would have to run down the stairs and let her in. There was no rattling of pebbles. There was no sound, no outcry, nothing. An hour passed. Two hours. Worried, Dee called the Beta House and learned Georgeeann had left for home a little after

1:00 A.M. She awoke the housemother, and said softly, "Georgeann's gone. She didn't come home."

They waited through the night, trying to find some reasonable explanation for why Georgeann might be gone, not wanting to alarm her parents at three A.M.

In the morning, they called the Seattle Police.

Detective "Bud" Jelberg of the Missing Persons Unit took the report, and rechecked with the fraternity house where she'd been seen last, then called her parents. Usually, any police department will wait twenty-four hours before beginning a search for a missing adult but, in view of the events of the

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first half of 1974, the disappearance of Georgeann Hawkins was treated very, very seriously immediately.

At 8:45 A.M. Detective Sergeant Ivan Beeson, and Detectives Ted Fonis and George Cuthill of the Homicide Unit arrived at the Theta House, 4521 17th N.B. They were accompanied by George Ishii, one of the most renowned criminalists in the Northwest. Ishii, who heads the Western Washington State Crime Lab, is a brilliant man, a man who probably knows more about the detection, preservation, and testing of physical evidence than any other criminalist in the western half of the United States. He was my first teacher of crime scene investigation. In two quarters, I learned more about physical evidence than I ever had before. Ishii believes implicitly in the theories of Dr. E. Locarde, a pioneer French criminalist who states, "Every criminal leaves something of himself at the scene of a crime-something, no matter how minute-and always takes something of the scene away with him." Every good detective knows this; this is why they search so intensely at a crime scene for that small part of the perpetrator that he has left behind: a hair, a drop of blood, a thread, a button, a finger or palm print, a footprint, traces of semen, tool marks, shell casings. And, in most instances, they find it.

The criminalist and the three homicide detectives covered that alleyway behind 45th and 47th N.B.-that ninety feet on their hands and knees. And found nothing at all.

Leaving the alley cordoned off, and guarded by patrolmen, they went into the Theta House to talk with Georgeann's sorority sisters and her housemother.

Georgeann lived in Number Eight in the house, a room she shared with Dee Nichols. All of her possessions were there, everything but the clothes she'd been wearing and her leather purse, a tan "sack" bag with reddish stains on it. In that purse she had carried her I.D., a few dollars, a bottle of "Heaven Sentfc perfume with angels on the label, and a small hair brush.

"Georgeann never went anyplace without leaving me the phone number where she'd be," Dee said. "I know she intended to come back here last night. She had one more exam and then she was going home for the summer on the 13th. The blue slacks-the ones she was wearing-were missing 70 THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

three buttons; there was only one left. I can give you one of the buttons like it from our room."

Like Susan Rancourt, Georgeann was very myopic. "She wasn't wearing her glasses or her contacts last night," her roommate recalled. "She'd worn her contacts all day to study, and after you've worn contact lenses for a long time, things look blurry when you put glasses on, so she wasn't wearing them either."

The missing girl could have seen well enough to negotiate the familiar alley, but she would have seen nothing more than a vague outline of a figure more than ten feet away. If someone had been lurking in the alley, someone who had learned Georgeann's name after hearing the youth call to her from the Beta House window, he could easily have used a soft "George-" to call her close to him. And she would have had to walk very close indeed in order to recognize the man who beckoned to her. Perhaps so close that she could have been seized, gagged, and carried off before she had a chance to cry out?

Surely, anyone looking down the alley would have been alerted at the sight of a man carrying her away. Or would they? There are always high jinks during finals week, anything to break the tension, and strong young men frequently pick up giggling, squealing girls, playing "cave man."

But no one had seen even that. Georgeann Hawkins may have been knocked out with one blow, chloroformed, injected with a swift-acting nervous system depressant, or just pinioned in powerful arms, a hand held tightly over her mouth so that she couldn't even scream.

"She was afraid of the dark," Dee said quietly. "Sometimes, we would walk all the way around a block just to avoid a dark spot along the sidewalk. When he got her, I know that she was hurrying back here. I don't think she had a chance."

The sorority sister who had attended the party earlier in the evening with Georgeann, remembered that they'd parted on the corner of 47th N.B. and N.B. 17th. "She stood and waited while I walked to our house, and 1 yelled to her that I was O.K., and she yelled back that she was O.K. All of us kind of checked on each other like that. She went into the Beta House and that's the last time I ever saw her." It was incomprehensible then, and it is still incomprehensible to Seattle homicide detectives, that Georgeann Hawkins

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could vanish so completely within a space of forty feet. Of all the cases of missing girls, it is the Hawkins case that baffles them the most. It was something that couldn't have happened, and yet it did. When the news of Georgeann's disappearance hit the media, two witnesses came forward with stories of incidents on June 11th that were amazingly similar. An attractive sorority girl said that she'd been walking in front of the Greek houses on 17th N.B. at about 12:30 A.M. when she'd seen a young man on crutches just ahead of her. One leg of his jeans had been cut up the side and he appeared to have a full cast on that leg.

"He was carrying a briefcase with a handle, and he kept dropping it. I offered to help him, but I told him I had to go into one of the houses for a few minutes, and, if he didn't mind waiting. I'd come out and help him get his stuff home."

"And did you?"

"No, I was inside longer than I thought, and he was gone when I came out."

A male college student also had seen the tall, good-looking man with the briefcase and crutches. "A girl was carrying his case for him, and, later on, after I'd taken my girl home, I saw the girl again, walking alone."

He looked at a picture of Georgeann Hawkins, but said he was positive she wasn't the girl he'd seen.

At this time, the notation in the Susan Rancourt file in Ellensburg about the man with his arm in a sling was not generally known. Only after publicity about the man with his leg in the cast was disseminated would the two incidents so far apart be coordinated. Coincidence, or part of a sly plan to throw young women off guard?

Detectives canvassed every house on each side of 17th N.B. At the Phi Sigma Sigma fraternity at 4520-just across from the Theta House-they found that the housemother recalled being awakened from a sound sleep between one and two on the morning of June llth.

"It was a scream that wakened me. It was a high-pitched scream ... a terrified scream. And then it just stopped, and everything was! quiet. I figured it was just kids horsing around, but now I wish ... I wish I'd. . . ."

No one else heard it.

Lynda . . . Donna . . . Susan . . . Kathy . . . Brenda ... Georgeann. All gone as completely as if a seam in the

backdrop of life itself had opened, drawn them in, and closed without leaving so much as a mended tear in the tapestry.

Georgeann Hawkins' father, his voice breaking, summed up the feelings of all the desperately worried parents who waited for some word. "Every day, I'm a little bit lower. You'd like to hope, but I'm too realistic. She was a very friendly, very involved, youngster. I keep saying 'was.'

I shouldn't say that. It's a job raising kids. You steer them along, and we figured we had both our kids over the hump." Any homicide detective who has ever tried to cope with the anguish of parents who realize intuitively that their children are dead, but have not even the faint comfort of knowing where their bodies are, can attest to the fact that this is the worst. One weary investigator commented to me, "It's rough. It's damn rough, when you have to tell them that you've found a body, that it's their kid. But it's never over for the parents who just don't know. They can't really have a funeral, they can't know that their children aren't being held and tortured someplace, they can't face their grief and get it over. Hell, you never get over it, but, if you know, you can pick your life up again, somehow." The girls were gone, and each set of parents tried to deal with it, brought in the records that would mean the identification one day, perhaps, of a decomposed body. Dental records, all the years of paying for fillings and orthodontics so that their daughters would have good teeth to last a lifetime. The x-rays from Donna Manson's broken bones, set clean and strong again. And, for Georgeann, x-rays taken when she'd suffered from Osgood-Schlatter's Disease as a teenager, an inflammation of the tibia near the knee. After months of concern, her legs had grown long and shapely, marked only by slight bumps just below the knee. Any of us who have raised children know, as John F. Kennedy once said, that "to have children is to give hostages to fate." To lose a child to an illness, or even an accident, can be dealt with during the passage of time. To lose a child to a predator, an insanely brilliant killer, is almost more than any human should have to bear. When I began writing fact-detective stories, I promised myself that I would always remember I was writing about the loss of human beings, that I was never to forget that. I hoped that the work I did might somehow save other victims, might warn them of the danger. I never wanted to become tough, to

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seek out the sensational and the gory, and I never have. I have joined the Committee of Friends and Families of Missing Persons and Victims of Violent Crimes, at the invitation of the group. I have met many parents of victims, cried with them, and yet I have somehow felt guilty-because I make my living from other peoples' tragedies. When I told the Committee how I felt, they put their arms around me and said, "No. Keep on writing. Let the public know how it is for us. Let them know how we hurt, and how we try to save other parents' children by working for new legislation that requires mandatory sentencing and the death penalty for killers." They are far stronger than I could ever be.

And so, I kept on, trying to find the answer to the awful puzzle, believing that the killer, when he was found, would prove to be a man with a record of violence, a man who should never have been allowed to walk the streets, someone who must surely have shown signs of a deranged mind in the past, someone who had been let out of prison too soon.

1

I

I happened to be sitting in Captain Herb Swindler's office one afternoon in late June of 1974 when Joni Lenz and her father came into the Homicide Unit. Herb had a montage of the victims' pictures on his wall; he kept them there as a reminder that the investigation must continue with no let-up in intensity. Joni had volunteered to come in and look at the other girls' pictures, to see if she recognized any of them, even though their names were completely unfamiliar to her.

"Joni," Herb said gently. "Look at these girls. Have you ever seen any of them? Maybe you've been in a club together, worked together, had a class or something with them."

With her father standing protectively beside her, the victim of the January 4th bludgeoning studied the photographs. The slender girl was still recovering from the brain damage she'd suffered, and she spoke with a hesitancy, a vagueness, but she was trying very hard to help. She moved closer to the wall, studied each photo carefully, and then she shook her head.

"N-n-n-o-o," she stuttered. "I never saw them. I didn't know them. I can't remember-a lot of things I can't remember, but I know I never knew the girls."

"Thank you, Joni," Herb said. "We appreciate your coming in." It had been a long shot, the slight possibility that the one living victim would prove to be a link. Herb glanced at me, and shook his head as Joni Lenz limped out of the room. If she had known any of the others, so much of her memory of the past year had been battered out of her brain cells.

Now, in the early summer of 1974, the reading public knew of the pattern of missing girls; it was no longer a matter that concerned only detectives and the principals involved. And the public was terrified. Hitchhiking among young women dropped sharply, and women from fifteen to sixty-five jumped at shadows.

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Stories began, the kind of stories that can never be traced directly to the source. I heard variations on the same theme a dozen times. But they always came from a friend of a friend of a friend of someone whose cousin, or sister, or wife had been involved.

Sometimes the attacks were said to have happened in a shopping mall, sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes a theater. It went like this: "This man and his wife (or sister, daughter, etc.) went to Southcenter Mall to shop, and she went back to their car to get something. Well, she didn't come back for a long time, and he got worried and went looking for her. He got there just in time to see some guy carrying her away. The husband yelled, and the guy dropped her. He'd given her some kind of shot that made her pass out. It was really lucky that he got there in time, because, you know, with everything that's been happening, it was probably that killer."