The Stranger Beside Me (9 page)

To solve a homicide--and Lynda Healy's disappearance was surely a homicide--detectives must find some common threads, something linking the victim to the killer, a similar method of operation in a series of crimes, physical evidence, links between the victims themselves. Here, they were stymied. There were no connections at all between Lynda Healy and Joni Lenz except that they had both been attacked as they slept in basement rooms in communal houses less than a mile apart. Joni had suffered head wounds, and, from the blood pattern on Lynda's pillow and the stains on her nightgown, it would seem that she too had been struck violently on the skull. But none of the residents of the two houses knew each other; they hadn't even attended the same classes. February slipped into March, and Lynda didn't come home, nor was there even one sighting of the possessions missing with her-the backpack; her peasant blouse; her old jeans with the funny triangular patch in the back; her two turquoise rings, distinctive round flat rings with tiny, turquoise nuggets "floating" on the silver circles on top. THE STRANGER BESIDE ME 55

Just two more quarters and Lynda would have graduated from the University, would have taken a job where she would have been of infinite help to the retarded children whose lives had not been blessed as hers had been with brains, beauty, a loving and nurturing home.

While Seattle Police detectives wrestled with the inexplicable disappearance of Lynda Ann Healy, Sheriff Don Redmond in Thurston County and his detectives were having problems of their own. A female student was missing from Evergreen State College whose campus is just southwest of Olympia.

Evergreen is a relatively new college in Washington with great, soaring precast concrete buildings rising improbably from the dense forest of fir trees. It is a school much maligned by traditional educators because it eschews required courses, accepted grading scales, and embraces a

"do your own thing" philosophy. Students choose what they want to learn-everything from cartoon animation to ecology-and draw up contracts that they promise to fulfill each quarter for credit. Its detractors claim that a graduate of Evergreen has no real skills or educational background to offer an employer, calling it a "toy college." Nevertheless, Evergreen attracts some of the brightest and the best. Nineteen-year-old Donna Gail Manson was a typical Evergreen student, a highly intelligent girl who marched to a different drummer. Her father taught music in the Seattle public schools, and Donna shared his talent and interest in music. She was a flutist, expert enough to play in a symphony.

With the news that a second young woman had undoubtedly come to harm within Thurston County, I drove once again to Olympia and conferred with Sheriff Redmond and Sergeant Paul Barclift. Barclift explained the circumstances of Donna's vanishing to me.

On the rainy Tuesday night of March 12, 1974, Donna had planned to attend a jazz concert on campus. Her dormitory mates recalled that she'd changed clothes several times, studying her image in the mirror before she was satisfied with the red, orange, and green striped top, blue slacks, a fuzzy black maxi-coat. She'd worn an oval brown agate ring and a Bulova wristwatch.

And then she'd set out-alone-to walk to the concert shortly after 7:00

P.M.

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"She was not seen at the concert," Redmond said. "She probably didn't get that far."

Lynda Ann Healy and Katherine Merry Devine had been tall and willowy; Donna Manson was only five feet tall, and weighed 100 pounds. The Thurston County detectives and Rod Marem, Chief Security Officer for Evergreen State College, were not notified that Donna was missing for six days. Donna's lifestyle was such that she often took off on a moment's notice, only to reappear with tales of a hitchhiking trip-sometimes to points as far away as Oregon. When the report on her absence came in from another student, it was only a "Please attempt to contact" request. But the days passed with no word of her, and her disappearance took on an ominous tone.

Barclift began to contact everyone who knew Donna, followed up every possible lead. He talked to her best friend, Teresa Olsen, and her ex-roommate Celia Dryden, and several other girls who had lived in the dormitory with her.

Donna Manson, despite her I.Q., had not been a good student. She had attended Green River Community College in Auburn before she'd come to Evergreen, and had entered with a cumulative 2.2 (C plus) grade point. She had chosen a rather broad curriculum-P O R T E L S (Personal Options Toward Effective Learning Skills). However, Donna had fallen behind even at Evergreen because she consistently stayed out all night, returning at dawn to ask Celia to cover for her in class, and then going to bed for most of the day. This had bothered Celia, as had Donna's obsession with death, magic, and alchemy. Donna had seemed to be weighed down with depression, and her constant scribblings about alchemy troubled her roommate too.

Celia had asked to be moved to another room shortly before Donna vanished.

Alchemy is an ancient pseudoscience: ". . . the preparation of an elixir of longevity . . . any seemingly magical power or process of transmuting." Practiced first in ancient Egypt, it was not the curriculum that might be offered at a more conventional college.

"We thought she might have committed suicide," Barclift said. "But we had her writings evaluated by a psychiatrist and he felt they were not particularly significant for a girl of that age. If she had been afraid of anything specific, he thought

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she would have written it down-and we didn't find anything like that in her writings."

The investigators had found several slips of paper in Donna's room. One listed "Thought Power Inc." A preliminary check by the detectives showed this to be a licensed business in Olympia, located in a neat older home. Seminars on positive thinking and mind discipline were held there. The owners had changed the name to the "Institute of ESP" just before Donna disappeared.

Donna Manson had used marijuana almost daily, and her friends thought she might also have tried other drugs. She had dated four men. They were checked out and all were cleared.

Donna had hitchhiked to Oregon in November, but most of her trips away from campus were to visit friends in Selleck, a tiny mining hamlet located along the road that led up to Lssaquah and North Bend and then connected to the main freeway which wound over Snoqualmie Pass. "We checked with the people there and they hadn't seen her since February 10th." Barclift said.

As caught up as she was in her search for what she termed "that other world you can't explain," Donna had remained close to her parents. She had spent the weekend of February

23-24 with them, had called them on March 9th, and written them a letter on March 10th. She'd been in good spirits and was planning a trip to the beach with her mother.

Barclift drove me around the Evergreen campus. He pointed out the lights that stood next to the pathways, but the campus seemed to retain many elements of the original wilderness it had been. In spots, the winding paths disappeared into tunnels of lowering fir boughs. The forest primeval. "Most of the girls walk in pairs or groups after dark," he commented.

The campus was sodden with spring rains. It had been searched in a grid pattern by men and tracking dogs. If Donna was there-her body hidden in a morass of salal, Oregon Grape, sord ferns, and deadfall firs-they would have found her. But Donna was gone, just as completely as Lynda Healy was. The things she'd left behind in her room-her backpack, her flute, suitcases, all her clothing, even the camera she invariably carried-were turned over to her parents.

In the end the Thurston County investigators were left with 58

Donna's writings on death and magic, and the x-rays they had obtained from her physician of her spine, left ankle, and left wrist. If they found her now, they feared it might be the only way to identify her. 8

During that spring of 1974, I had rented a houseboat in Seattle to use as an office, subletting the creaky little oneroom structure that floated precariously on logs in Lake Union-a mile south of the University District. I was fully aware now that two college girls were missing, that Kathy Devine had been murdered, and I was beginning to sense that police felt a pattern was emerging, but the public remained unaware. Seattle averages about sixty homicides a year, King County vacillates from two or three to a dozen annually, and Thurston County rarely exceeds three. Not a bad percentage for areas highly populated, and things appeared to be normal. Tragic, but normal.

My ex-husband had suffered a sudden grand mal epileptic seizure; his cancer had metastasized to the brain. He underwent surgery and was hospitalized for several weeks. My youngest daughter, Leslie, then sixteen, took a bus to Seattle every day after school to care for her father; she didn't think the nurses were attentive enough. I worried. She was so lovely, looked so much like the girls who were disappearing, and I was frightened to have her walk even half a block alone in the city. She was insistent that it was something she had to do, and I held my breath each day until she was home safe. I was experiencing the kind of dread that soon every parent in the area would feel. As a crime writer, I had seen too much violence, too much tragedy, and I saw "suspicious men" wherever I went. I have never been afraid for myself. But for my daughters, oh yes, for my daughters. I warned them so much that they finally accused me of getting paranoid. »

I gave up the houseboat. I didn't want to be that far away from my children, not even during the daytime hours.

On April 17th, it happened again. This time the girl who vanished was 120 miles away from Seattle, far across the

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looming Cascade Mountains that separate the verdant coastland of Washington from the arid wheatflelds of the eastern half of the state. Susan Elaine Rancourt was a freshman at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, a rodeo town that has retained the flavor of the old west. One of six children in a close family, Susan had been a cheerleader and homecoming queen in LaConner, Washington, High School. She differed from the other missing girls in that she was a blonde, a blonde with long hair, blue eyes. She had the sort of stunning figure that most teenaged girls pray for, not to mention teenaged boys. Perhaps her early development had contributed to her shyness and eclipsed the fact that Susan had a superior, scientifically oriented intelligence. When the rest of her family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, it took courage on Susan's part to stay behind to attend college in Ellensburg. She'd known she'd have to pay most of her own way; with five other siblings to raise, her family just didn't have the money to foot all her college bills.

The summer before her freshman year, Susan worked two full-time jobs-seven days a week-to save money for tuition. She'd always known that her career would be in the field of medicine, and her high school grades-straight A's-and her college aptitude scores verified that she was a natural. At Ellensburg, Susan Rancourt was majoring in biology, still getting a straight 4.0 point, and working a full-time job in a nursing home. She was a young woman any family could be proud of. Where Lynda Healy had been cautious, and Donna Manson had been heedless of danger, Susan Rancourt was frankly afraid of the dark, of being out alone. She never went anywhere without her roommate after the sun had set.

Never, until the evening of April 17th. It had been a busy week for her; midterm finals were being held, but she learned of an opportunity open for would-be dorm advisors. With that job, her expenses could be cut a great deal; besides it would give her a chance to meet more students, to break out of her self-imposed shell of shyness. So she took a chance.

Susan was only five feet two and weighed 120 pounds, but she was strong. She jogged every morning and she'd gone to Karate classes. Perhaps she'd been foolish to think she

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couldn't protect herself on a crowded campus even if someone did approach her.

At eight o'clock that evening, she took a load of clothing to a wash room in one of the campus dorms, and walked off to the advisors' meeting. The meeting was over at nine, and she planned to meet a friend to see a German film and then return to the laundramat to put her clothes in the dryer at ten o'clock.

But no one saw Susan after she left the meeting. Her friend waited and waited, and then finally went into the film alone, looking back toward the entrance several times for the familiar sight of Susan's figure. Susan's clothes remained in the washer, until another student who needed to use it impatiently removed them and set them on a table, where they were discovered a day later.

Susan Rancourt's failure to return to her dorm was reported at once. Susan had a boyfriend, but he was far away at the University of Washington in Seattle, and she dated no one else. She just wasn't the type not to come home at night, and she surely wouldn't have missed a final exam; she'd never even skipped a class.

Campus police officers noted down the outfit she'd worn when she had last been seen: gray corduroy slacks, a shortsleeved yellow sweater, a yellow coat, and brown "hush puppy" shoes. And then they attempted to retrace the route she would have taken from the advisors' meeting back to the dormitories a quarter mile away.

The quickest and most common route led up the Mall past a construction area, across a footbridge over a pond-and then under a railroad trestle near a student parking lot.

"If someone watched her, followed her, and meant to grab her," one officer commented, "it would have been here-under the trestle; it's dark as Hell for about twenty feet."

But there should have been something left of Susan there. For one thing, she'd been carrying a folder full of loose papers that would have scattered in every direction in a struggle. And, shy as she was, Susan Rancourt was a fighter, adept at Karate. Her friends insisted that there was no way she would have given up quietly.

Beyond that, the path back to Barto Hall where the film was being shown was the route most students took. At nine at night, there would have been steady light traffic. Someone should have seen something unusual-but no one had.