The Stranger Beside Me (14 page)

The hue and cry from the public to produce, and produce some answers quickly, grew every day and the impact on the detectives was tremendous. If there could not be an arrestor many arrests-the layman, bombarded with nightly television updates and front page stories, failed to understand why, at the very least, the bodies of the missing girls could not be found.

For the King County Police, the abductions and probable murders of three girls in the county meant thirty-five percent of their average yearly workload occurring in one month. Although the county population equals Seattle's half million people, it is a spread-out population, most of it small towns, rural, and sylvan, not as catalytic to violent crimes as the crowded city.

There were only eleven homicides in the county in 1972nine closed successfully by year's end; in 1973, there had been five-all cleared. Although the homicide unit in 1974 handled armed robberies in addition to murder cases, a fieldworking sergeant and six detectives had been able to deal effectively with the case load. The disappearance of first Brenda Ball, and six weeks later, Janice Ott and Denise Naslund would force drastic restructuring of the unit.

Mackie was a highly competent administrator. He was not yet forty when he took over as head of the Major Crimes Unit. He had reorganized the jail's administration, and accomplished much, but his background was not heavily oriented toward actual investigative work. The field detectives were headed by Sergeant Len Randall, a soft-spoken blond bear of a man who made it a practice to join his men at major crime scenes.

For the main part, the King County detectives were a young group; Ihe only man in the unit over thirty-five was Ted Forrester |who wore his appellation "Old Man," with grudging good'nature. He handled the southeast end of the county-farmland, old mining towns, woods and the foothills of Mount Rainier. Rolf Grunden had the south end, urban, part of the future megalopolis of Seattle-Tacoma. Mike Baily and Randy Hergesheimer shared the southwest, also princi-90

pally urban. Roger Dunn's sector was the north end of the county-the area between Seattle's city limits and the Snohomish County line. The newest man in the unit was Bob Keppel, a slender, almost boyish looking, man. It was in KeppePs sector that the Lake Sammamish disappearances had occurred-the territory east of Lake Washington. Until July 14, 1974, Keppel had handled only one homicide investigation. In the end, as the years passed, the "Ted" case would weigh most heavily on Bob Keppel's shoulders. He would come to know more about "Ted," more about his victims, than any of the other investigators in the county, with the possible exception of Nick Mackie.

By 1979, Bob Keppel's hair would be shot with grey, and Captain Mackie invalided out of law enforcement with two crippling coronaries. Captain Herb Swindler would undergo critical open heart surgery. It is impossible to pinpoint just how much stress comes to bear on detectives involved in an investigation of the scope of the missing girls' cases, but anyone who is close to homicide detectives sees the tension, the incredible pressure brought on by their responsibility. If a corporation president carries the responsibility of bringing in or losing profits, homicide detectives-particularly in cases like the

"Ted" disappearances-are truly dealing with life and death, working against time and almost impossible odds. It is a profession that brings with it the occupational hazards of ulcers, hypertension, coronary disease, and, on occasion, alcoholism. The public, the victims'

families, the press, superiors-all demand immediate action. The scope of the search for Denise Naslund and Janice Ott drew all of the King County's Major Crimes Unit's manpower into the eastside area, along with Seattle detectives, and personnel from the smalltown police departments near Lake Sammamish State Park: Issaquah and North Bend. In a sense, they had a place to start now-not for Janice and Denise alone-but for the six other girls they felt sure were part of the deadly pattern. "Ted" had been seen; perhaps a dozen people came forward when the story hit the papers on July 15th: the other girls who had been approached, who shuddered to think that they had come so close to death, and the people at the park who had seen "Ted" talk to Janice Ott before she'd walked away with him.

Ben Smith, a police artist, listened to their descriptions and

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drew a composite picture of a man said to resemble the stranger in the white tennis outfit. He erased, drew again, tediously trying to capture on paper what was in the minds of the witnesses. It was not an easy task.

As soon as the composite appeared on television, hundreds of calls came in. But then "Ted" seemed to have had no particularly unusual characteristics. A good-looking young man appearing to be in his early twenties, blondish-brown hair, a little wavy, even features, no scars, no outstanding differences that might set him apart from hundreds, thousands of young men at the beach. The broken arm-yes-but the detectives doubted that it was really broken. They were sure the sling was off now, thrown away, after it had served its purpose. No. "Ted" apparently was so average looking that he, perhaps, had counted on his prosaic appearance, allowed himself to be seen, and was now taking a perverse pleasure in the publicity.

Again and again, the detectives probed. "Think. Try to picture something special about him, something that stands out in your mind." The witnesses tried. Some even underwent hypnosis in the hope they would remember more. The accent, yes, slightly English. Yes, he'd spoken of playing racquet ball while he chatted with Janice Ott. His smile, his smile was something special. He spoke with excellent grammar; he'd sounded well-educated. Good. What else? Tan, he was tan. Good. What else?

But there was nothing else, nothing beyond the strange way he had stared at a few of the almost-victims.

There was the car, the off-shaded brown VW bug of indeterminate vintage. All bugs looked alike; who could tell? And the one witness who had walked out to the parking lot with "Ted," hadn't actually seen him get into the bug. He'd leaned against it as he explained that his sailboat wasn't at the park. It could have been anyone's car. No, wait, he had gestured toward the passenger door. It must have been his car. No one at all fjad seen Janice Ott get into any car on the lot. I There was Jsmice Ott's ten-speed bike, yellow "Tiger" brand. It wasn't the kind of bike that could be quickly disassembled for ease of transporting. A full-size ten-speed would not fit into the trunk of a VW without sticking out. Surely someone must have noticed the car with the bike-either on a rack or protruding awkwardly from the car. 92

But no one had.

The lakefront park was closed to the public as police divers, looking like creatures from another planet, dove again and again beneath the surface of Lake Sammamish, coming to the top each time shaking their heads. The weather was hot, and, if the girls' bodies were in the lake, they would have bloated and surfaced, but they did not. County patrolmen, Issaquah police, and eighty volunteers from the Explorer Scouts Search and Rescue teams, both on foot and on horseback, combed the 400-acre park, finding nothing. Seattle police helicopters circled over the area, spotters looking down vainly for something that would help: a brilliant yellow bike or the bright blue backpack Janice had borrowed to use on Sunday, the girls themselves, their bodies lying unseen by ground parties in the tall vegetation east of the parking lot.

Sheriff's patrol cars cruised slowly along all the back roads wending through the farmland beyond, stopped to check old barns, sagging deserted sheds, empty houses.

In the end, they found nothing.

There were no ransom notes; their abductor had not taken the women away because he wanted money. It became more and more apparent as the week passed that the man in white was probably a sexual psychopath. The other women had vanished at long intervals. Many detectives believe that the male too operates under a pseudo-menstrual cycle, that there are times when the perverse drives of marginally normal men become obsessive and they are driven out to rape, or kill.

But two women in one afternoon? Was the man they sought so highly motivated by sexual frenzy that he would need to seize two victims within a four-hour time span? Janice had vanished at 12:30; Denise around 4:30. It would seem that even the most maniacally potent male might have been exhausted and satiated after one attack. Why then would he return to the same park and take away another woman only four hours later?

The pattern of attacks had appeared to be escalating, the abductions coming closer and closer together, as if the awful fixation of the suspect needed more frequent stimulus to give him relief. Perhaps the elusive "Ted" had had to have more than one victim to satisfy him. Perhaps Janice had been held captive somewhere, tied up and gagged, while he went back for a second woman. Perhaps he had needed the macabre

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thrill of a double sexual attack and murder-with one victim forced to wait and watch as he killed the other. It was a theory that many of us could scarcely bear to contemplate.

Every experienced homicide detective knows that if a case is not resolved within twenty-four hours, the chances of finding the killer diminish proportionately with the amount of time that passes. The trail grows colder and colder.

The days and weeks passed without any new developments. The investigators didn't even have the victims' bodies. Denise and Janice could be anywhere-100, 200 miles away. The little brown VW had only a quarter of a mile to travel before it reached the busy 1-90 freeway leading up over the mountains to the east, or into the densely populated city of Seattle to the west. It was akin to looking for two needles in a million haystacks.

On the chance that the women had been killed and buried somewhere in the vast acres of semi-wild land around the park, planes went aloft and took films with infrared film. It had worked in Houston in 1973

when Texas investigators searched for the bodies of teenage boys slain by mass killer Dean Coril. If earth and foliage have been recently overturned, the already dying vegetation will appear bright red in the finished print, long before a human eye can detect any change at all in trees or bushes. There were some suspicious areas, and deputies dug delicately, carefully. They found only dead trees, nothing beneath them in the ground.

Film taken at several of the big company picnics held at Lake Sammamish on July 14th was quickly developed and detectives watched the subjects in the foreground-but mostly what was going on in the background, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man with his arm in a sling. They didn't smile at the laughter and playfulness on the screen, the happy faces; they kept watching for the man who might have been just out of focus. He wasn't there.

Reporters checked out Lake Sammamish State Park on the Sunday following the abductions. They found, in spite of the spectacularly sunny day-a day much like the Sunday of a week before-thbt there were few picnickers or swimmers. Several of the women they talked to who were there pointed out guns hidden under their beach towels, switchblades, whistles. Women went to the restroom in teams of two or more. Park Ranger Donald Simmons remarked that the crowd was about a twentieth the size he expected. 94

But, as the weeks passed, people forgot, or put the two disappearances out of their minds. The park filled up again, and the ghosts of Denise Naslund and Janice Ott didn't seem to be haunting anyone. No one that is, but the King County Police detectives. Cases Number 74-96644; 74-95852; and 74-81301 (Janice, Denise and Brenda) would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Dr. Richard B. Jarvis, a Seattle psychiatrist specializing in the aberrations of the criminal mind, drew a verbal picture of the man now known as "Ted," a profile based on his years of experience. He felt that, if the eight missing girls' cases were interrelated, if the girls had been harmed, that the assailant was probably between twenty-five and thirty-five, a man mentally ill, but not the type who would draw attention to himself as a potential criminal.

Jarvis felt that "Ted" feared women and their power over him, and that he would also evince at times "socially isolative" behavior. Jarvis could see many parallels between the man in the park and a twenty-four-year-old Seattle man who had been convicted in 1970 for the murders of two young women, rape and attempted rape involving other girls. That man, designated a sexual psychopath, was currently serving a life term in prison.

The man Jarvis referred to had been a star athlete all through school, popular, considerate and respectful of women, but he had changed markedly after his high school girlfriend of longstanding had rejected him. He later married, but began his sexual prowlings after his wife filed for divorce.

A sexual psychopath, according to Dr. Jarvis, is not legally insane, and does know the difference between right and wrong. But he is driven to attack women. There is usually no deficiency in intelligence, no brain damage, or frank psychosis.

Jarvis' statements made an interesting side-bar in the Seattle paper that ran the story; later, much later, I would re-read that story and realize how close he had come to describing the real killer. During the very few moments when detectives working on the cases had time to talk, we tossed back and forth possible evaluations of who "Ted" might be. He obviously had to be

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quite intelligent, attractive, and charming. None of the eight girls would have gone with a man who had not seemed safe, whose manner was not so urbane and ingratiating that their normal caution, all the warnings since childhood, would have been ignored. Even though force-and probably violencecame later, he must have, in most of the cases, gained their confidence in the beginning. It seemed likely that he was-or had recently been-a college student; he was apparently familiar with campuses, and the way of life there. The device used to gain the girls' trust-beyond his appearance and personality-was certainly his illusion of comparative helplessness. A man with one arm broken, or a leg in a full cast, would not seem much of a threat.