Empty Promises (38 page)

Their meticulous backtracking eased— if only for the moment— when a man came forward in response to an appeal for information. "I think it's possible that I saw that girl's killer just before it happened," he said. "My son and I were driving along the river at dusk on December 15."
Huebner and Dashnea showed him a photograph of Carole Erickson, and he was sure she was the girl he had seen on the path. But he had also seen a man— a man who was walking several feet behind her. "I doubt that she even knew he was there," the eyewitness recalled. "He was an adult, I think. Over twenty-one, anyway. He was a white man with dark hair combed straight back and a pompadour in front. He wore a long-sleeved windbreaker jacket and 'Beatle' boots that came up over his trouser cuffs. I'm sure he was aware of me because he ducked his head and turned his face away when he saw me."
The man regretted now that he hadn't warned the girl, but he had no idea she was in danger. Working with a Seattle Police Department artist, he described the man he'd seen on the river path. Gradually, a composite sketch emerged. It was done in profile, the angle at which he'd seen the man. That was all he could recall, at least consciously. He readily agreed to submit to a session with a hypnotist in the hope that there was more information locked in his memory that he might be able to tap into. Disappointingly, the hypnosis elicited no further information.
Working on the theory that murderers seldom report for work the day after their crimes, the Renton detectives obtained absentee reports from the Boeing Company for December 16. Their murder investigation took
place well before the computer era. A computer would have made their search much easier, but the principle of winnowing out non-suspects was the same. First, they eliminated all females, then non-Caucasians, and finally individuals whose age didn't match that of the man on the path. The names that were left were matched against the eight hundred library patrons. Names that popped up on both lists were examined and culled. In the end, they questioned more than two hundred individuals and arranged for ten polygraph examinations.
Despite their efforts, the name they were seeking didn't drop out of the mass of information. A sad Christmas passed, and the identity of Carole Adele Erickson's slayer remained a mystery.
All through the spring and summer that followed, the investigation continued with no tangible results. By fall, reports on the investigation of Carole Erickson's murder were relegated to occasional newspaper updates. For everyone but those who had loved her, her murder was old news— but the Renton detectives still followed every possible lead that came their way.
Seventeen-year-old Joann Marie Zulauf, who lived just outside the Renton city limits, felt no trepidation about taking a late Sunday afternoon walk by herself on September 20. The pretty teenager waved to a neighbor before she turned onto a deeply wooded path, one of many that crisscrossed a ravine in the Renton Highlands that led down to Honey Creek. The neighbor watched the blue-jean-clad teenager disappear into the trees, waited a few moments, and then himself headed down one of the sylvan trails. He didn't see Joann, but he didn't think anything about it; the area was a jungle of blackberry bushes, alder saplings, and evergreens as the path meandered down to the creek.
In fact, he didn't think of Joann again until hours later, when her worried parents began to search the neighborhood and asked him if he had seen her. The Sunday dinner hour had come and gone and the tiny brunette girl had not come home. The night passed and the sun rose without anyone finding any sign of Joann. Her mother and stepfather and neighbors searched steadily for twenty-four hours.
King County Police Deputy Les Moffett talked with her family and was convinced that this was more than a typical runaway-teenager case. He talked to his patrol sergeant, George Helland, who agreed that the sheriff's office should get involved. Search-and-Rescue Explorer Scouts arrived in teams, along with search dogs whose handlers would work them in grid patterns throughout the ravine area.
"It was like a maze," one of the searchers said. "The dogs would run again and again to a dead end. Once my dog began to howl and sniff up in the air. I even looked up in the treetops, but there was nothing."
He was relieved that there was nothing there. Experienced search dog handlers know that sometimes dead things on the ground send odors into the trees. When dogs look up, it is usually bad news.
Thirty hours after Joann began her walk in Hidden Valley down to Honey Creek, the search ended. Clyde Reed, a member of the Washington search-and-rescue group, followed his bloodhound's throaty whoops, his mind full of dread because he knew what the sound meant.
Joann Zulauf lay sprawled in a depressed wash area next to the path she had taken on Sunday afternoon. She was naked, but oddly someone had piled her neatly folded clothing on top of her.
The sheriff's deputies and detectives were summoned from where they were combing other areas of the ravine. Les Moffett arrived first. Knowing that it was useless, he nevertheless checked for signs of life and found Joann's body "very, very, cold." He backed away and summoned Homicide Detectives Ron Sensenbach and Robert Schmitz.
It was full dark now, and the detectives had to use their flashlights to see the dead girl. The sweep of the lights gave them enough illumination to see that her face was grotesquely swollen and purple. In all likelihood, she had been strangled. They could see bruises on her forehead and dried blood in her hair on the right side of her head.
It was after midnight in the tangled woods and there was little they could do in the pitch-black ravine but guard the scene and wait for the first rays of daylight.
Deputy Michael Temcof stood by the body all night in the chill rain. It was a bleak and lonely vigil. The roped-off area had to be kept sacrosanct; they didn't dare risk missing some vital bit of evidence that even the high-powered auxiliary lighting might have missed.
At dawn, the King County detectives processed the scene thoroughly, searching it literally inch by inch. But they found no leads to the slayer's identity. They cut blaze marks into the surrounding trees for the triangulation measurements that would allow them to pinpoint the precise site of the body long after it was removed.
The postmortem examination of Joann Zulauf's body seemed to substantiate the detectives' first impression. The autopsy indicated that she had succumbed to asphyxiation, probably manual. Like Carole Erickson, Joann had sustained an injury from some
force behind her. Dr. Gale Wilson discovered a V-shaped laceration on the back of her head just below her right ear.
Although Joann had been a virgin with an intact hymen, the pathologist noted bruising at the vaginal entrance where rape was attempted. She had apparently been dragged for some distance, probably by the arms, just as Carole had. It wouldn't have taken much effort to drag Joann: she was only 5 feet 2 and weighed 113 pounds.

* * *

Now, eight months after the investigation into Carole Erickson's murder, another urgent plea went out to the public; the police needed information— anything, even if it seemed unimportant. And again there were precious few useful responses. Some tips verged on the bizarre. A woman called Renton detective Wally Hume to say that she had talked to a mystic on a Puget Sound ferryboat on the afternoon of the Sunday Joann disappeared. The man had suddenly become very agitated. "Then he told me that there had been another murder in Renton!" she reported.
The man might have been clairvoyant, or he might have been putting on an act to impress the woman. Or he might have been a 220, as Seattle area detectives call mental cases. At any rate, the man was many miles away from Renton when Joann Zulauf was killed. There was no way he could have committed the murder himself, and the woman on the phone didn't even know his name or how to find him.
Homicide detectives grow weary of psychic reports that come in after the details of sensational crimes have been published in the newspapers. While most good detectives will consider
any
avenue that might help, it is
the rare seer who is able to offer precise details that will allow them to find a killer— or a body.
King County Police Sergeant George Helland was placed in charge of the investigation. He talked to Joann's relatives and friends, but he could find nothing at all in her life that might have marked her as a target for violence. She was only seventeen; she had no enemies; she'd been in no arguments. She was a lovely young woman, all alone in the woods.
That
was probably what had made her a target for someone who hid and watched her from the shadows. She had the great bad luck to have crossed a murderer's path when he was in a killing phase of his aberration.
Joann's mother went through the ordeal of checking the clothes found with her daughter's body. The clothes she had been wearing when she left for her Sunday walk were all there, but her watch was missing. It was her sixteenth birthday gift— a white metal watch, with the brand name Lucien Perreaux. Her mother was positive Joann had been wearing the watch when she left for her last walk. She never went anyplace without it.
Helland issued a bulletin to area pawnshops in an effort to locate the missing watch. It did not turn up.
The investigation continued— just as the Erickson investigation had never really stopped. All of the police agencies in King and neighboring counties pooled their information on the two cases but their leads ended in midair.

* * *

Fall and winter passed and by the third week in April trilliums, forsythia, and dogwood dominated the woods and fields of western Washington. April 20 was a school holiday in Renton due to a teachers' confer
ence. In the southern end of town, two six-year-old boys, who were fast friends and spent most of their waking moments together, began their day. Bradley Lyons got up at eight and ate the bacon and eggs his mother prepared for him. He rode with her and his sister to the lumberyard to pick up some boards for a home project. Then he changed into black rubber boots and a quilted green jacket and headed for his friend Scott Andrews's house.
Scott, who had wanted only a bowl of Alphabits for breakfast, waited impatiently for his socks to come out of the dryer. Then he too donned black rubber boots and a jacket much like Bradley's and headed out to play. He was back in at eleven to ask for cookies "for the kids," then left again with a handful of them.
The boys played for a while on a dirt pile near Scott's house and then left to go to the Lyons's backyard. It was a fascinating yard for six-year-old boys because it disappeared into a woods rife with trails, potholes, and marshy areas.
A little before noon, Scott's mother called Brad's mom to ask her if she had seen the boys. Their laughter had carried on the air all morning, and their mothers had watched them from their kitchen windows, but now they were nowhere in sight. The mothers looked around the usual spots, but they were not frightened yet; they both expected Brad and Scott to come running around the corners of their houses at any moment. Theirs was a family neighborhood full of kids who ran between the streets and cul-de-sacs all the time. They were a long way from fast roads and commercial areas.
But the boys didn't come home for lunch. Now neighbors passed the word that they were missing, and those who were home hurried out to help look for them.
Before long the police were notified and a full-scale search was organized.
Once again, the Explorer Scouts, tracking dogs, helicopters, and police and sheriffs' patrols gathered. They combed six square miles for the missing boys. Residents in the neighborhood were asked to check boats and trailers, car trunks, sheds, abandoned refrigerators— anyplace where the youngsters might have become trapped. Along with a growing number of civilian volunteers, forty members of the Spring Glen Fire Department joined the massive search.
But that Tuesday night passed without a trace of Brad or Scott, and the search teams continued around the clock. Wednesday and Wednesday night went by and the first graders were still missing. There is no way to even imagine the terror in their families' hearts. The friendly woods seemed menacing now. The spring storms had flooded swamps and potholes deep enough so that a child could drown. Even though Brad and Scott had been warned over and over not to go near creeks and ponds, the searchers checked virtually every deep puddle, with negative results.
Two days after the boys were last seen and two miles away, weary searchers came upon a child's clothing: shirt, jeans, undershorts, and socks, but their frantic parents could not identify the clothing as belonging to either Bradley or Scott. Next, someone spotted small footprints leading to an abandoned gravel pit a mile away. And yet, when the flooded pit was dragged, they found nothing at all.
Much of the search area was choked with wild evergreen ground cover: salal, sword ferns, vine maple saplings, huckleberry bushes, and deadfall logs encircled with bindweed and blackberry vines. Just beyond
the recently constructed homes the woods were almost as impenetrable as they had been when the pioneers first came to the Northwest. It was tough going for volunteers but none of them quit as the days dragged by at an agonizing pace.
It was early evening on Thursday, April 22, when a volunteer fireman spotted something that made him catch his breath; it was what they had all feared. A small boy clothed in a striped T-shirt lay as if asleep in a shallow dip in the woods. The firefighter called his team leader, who signaled the group to stay back as he walked carefully around the depressed area. Both of the missing boys lay in front of him, partially covered with ferns and soil. He felt the youngsters' chests for any signs of life. There were none.
The firefighters secured the area and put out a radio call to both the King County Police and the Renton Police Department. Sheriff's Deputy Richard A. Nicholiason arrived first, followed shortly by Sergeant Helland. The gully where the boys lay was determined to be within Renton city limits and the Renton detectives who had investigated Carole Erickson's death responded. Don Dashnea, Arnold Huebner, Harold Caldwell, and I.D. expert Joe Henry hurried to the tragic scene in the woods.
Both bodies were partially nude. Bradley Lyons lay on his back, the striped T-shirt pulled up under his chin, his trousers lying across his chest. A venetian-blind cord, used as a ligature, was knotted tightly around his neck.
Scott Andrews was lying facedown, his Jockey shorts twisted around his ankles. A bloodstained T-shirt had been knotted around his neck. What looked like knife wounds marked his chest and neck. It was apparent the boys had been dead for some time.
As daylight faded, floodlights were brought in. Dashnea and Caldwell removed the items of clothing found at the scene and placed them in sealed plastic bags. Joe Henry took a series of photographs leading from the entrance to the trail down to the body site.
Assured that searchers had not approached the bodies closely except for the team leader's one cautious check for signs of life, the detectives were intrigued by a set of large footprints left in a distinctive circular pattern around the bodies. They immediately made moulages of the prints.
They began an intensive search for a knife or other weapon that might have been used on Scott Andrews, but neither their eyes nor metal detectors located one.
Early the next morning, the detectives from Renton attended the postmortem examinations on the small victims. The investigation of the murder of a child is always the hardest assignment any homicide detective can have. The cops braced themselves and tried to think clinically, fighting back the normal emotions that any father would have felt in the same situation.
Six-year-old Bradley Lyons had died of asphyxia secondary to ligature from the venetian blind cord. He also had bruises on his lips. Based on the contents of his stomach and the progression of rigor mortis in the body, Dr. Wilson estimated that Bradley had died between 12:30 and 1:30 P.M. on April 20, the last day he was seen. Although there were no overt injuries to his genitals, Dr. Wilson found a twig and a hair in the rectum.
Scott Andrews had contusions on his forehead, left cheek, and lips. There were fabric imprints on his neck from the knotted T-shirt, but the underlying tissue had neither hemorrhaging nor constriction enough to cause suffocation. He
had
sustained three knife wounds. One,
just beneath the left collarbone, had penetrated only 1.5 centimeters. The other two wounds, however, were fatal wounds where the knife had slashed through the lung and heart to a depth of 4½ inches, ending at the vertebrae just below the skin of the boy's back.
Death would have been virtually instantaneous. There was no evidence that Scott had been sexually molested. Like Brad, he had been dead since shortly after noon on Tuesday.
With the massive media coverage that followed the discovery of the two six-year-olds, tips flooded in. Doctors in the ER at Valley General Hospital in Renton reported that a rather bizarre forty-year-old man with a long beard had presented himself to the emergency room on the afternoon of April 20 and asked for help with mental problems. He feared that he "might harm children" and told a rambling story where he compared his emotional problems to Charles Manson's.
ER personnel said the man had numerous scratches on his arms, lower legs, and forehead. He explained that he had scratched himself while running through the brush. Still, at the time, he seemed harmless enough. He was released from the hospital and he vanished. Was he the killer or was he just another compulsive confessor?
After yet another request for help from the public, Renton detectives learned that the bearded suspect had asked for a drink of water at a home and at a business some three to five miles from the body site around 4:30 P.M. on April 20. Then he had checked into the ER at 5:22 P.M.
He seemed the perfect suspect in a pedophiliac homicide. Detectives located him in Tacoma. His name was Antoine Bertrand,* and he was forty years old. Bertrand was interrogated about the murders of Brad
and Scott, but either he truly knew nothing about them or he had experienced a complete memory block. He looked baffled and said he had no idea what they were talking about. He hadn't seen any little boys.
The King County prosecutor's office charged Antoine Bertrand with two counts of murder, based on a mass of circumstantial evidence, his proximity to the crime scene at the time Scott and Brad died, and his own feeling that he might hurt children. However, any prudent prosecutor wants physical evidence, and there was nothing concrete linking Antoine Bertrand to the young victims.
The search for the knife that had caused Scott's death continued. On April 28, an Explorer search-and-rescue scout, Emmett Husa, age seventeen, combed the ravine on his hands and knees some 150 feet from the spot where Scott and Bradley were found. And there it was— a bowie knife with a heavy curved blade— nestled beneath the salal and vine maple leaves. The handle of the knife was wrapped with black friction tape.
Renton detectives examined the handle. They could barely make out a name scratched lightly into the surface. They contacted the young man whose name was on the knife.
"Yeah, I used to own that knife," he said. "I bought it for a dollar fifty and kept it until August of 1970. Then I sold it to a friend of mine."
Officers Wally Hume and Jim Phelan talked to the friend. He said he owned the knife for only a couple of months. "I traded it to this guy."
"Who?"
"Some guy. He gave me a pea coat for it."
Wondering how long this trail was going to be, Hume and Phelan located yet a third teenager.
"Yeah, I had a bowie knife," he said. "But I only had
it for about two weeks. Around Christmas of 1970 I left it in my friend's truck."
"What's his name?" Hume asked wearily.
"Gary Grant. He gave me a ride and I absentmindedly left it on the seat of his truck. When I asked him about it, he said his father had found it in the truck and put it in his room and that he couldn't get it back right away. I never did get it back."
On April 30, Hume and Phelan drove to the trailer park where nineteen-year-old Gary Grant lived with his parents. Gary wasn't there. His mother said he was getting a haircut.
"We want to talk to him about a knife he owns."
"He'll be home pretty soon. You can wait for him if you want to."
It wasn't long before a pickup truck pulled in front of the mobile home. A tall, skinny teenager stepped out and walked toward the detectives.
"You're Gary?" Jim Phelan asked.
"Yes, sir."
"We understand a friend of yours left a bowie knife in your truck not too long ago," Phelan said.
Grant nodded a little nervously. "I had it, but I guess I left it out in the woods— out back of the park here."
He was neither cooperative nor antagonistic, but the pimply-faced teenager wasn't sure if he would be able to find the knife in the woods. He did, however, agree to go to Renton Police headquarters to talk with the detectives about it.
Once there, Phelan pulled out a photograph of the bowie knife where it lay in the underbrush near the crime site.
"That look like yours?"
Phelan and Hume watched the suspect's face as he
stared at the photo. "It looks like that knife I had," he said finally.
Gary Grant was wearing tennis shoes. Jim Phelan tried to appear casual as Grant rested one foot on his knee and the sole came into view. It had a circular pattern that was very similar to the prints found surrounding Brad's and Scott's bodies.
The configuration was close enough for Phelan to ask Gary Grant to take his shoes off so they could be compared to the moulages locked in the evidence room.
Wally Hume advised the quiet teenager of his constitutional rights and asked Grant if he recalled April 20. Grant said he remembered it because it was a school holiday. Odd that he would recall that, since he was no longer in school himself. He said he worked that morning at his part-time job at a Renton golf course. "After that," he said, "I stopped in to see one of my girlfriends."
"After that?"
"I went looking to buy some shoes. I must have been to about three stores. Didn't find what I wanted."
From there Grant said he walked along the Cedar River. Wally Hume studied Grant. He was kind of an ungainly kid, slow-talking and average-looking except that he slicked down his dark hair with water or hair cream and combed it straight back from his forehead without parting it.
Grant said he also remembered that day in April well because he had a close call. "I was standing close to the river to watch the salmon, but it was really muddy on the bank and I slipped and fell in. I floated down the river for about forty feet until I could get my footing and climb on shore. I was soaking wet and I stopped at the grocery store and called home. I wanted
a ride, but my mom said my dad was taking a nap and told me I had to walk home. So I did."
Wally Hume was a thirteen-year veteran of the Renton Police Department. Amiable and soft-spoken, he was a deceptively low-pressure interrogator. He talked to Gary Grant about why they were interested in his lost knife, quietly moving closer and closer to the vital questions. Approaching the subject from varying angles, Hume asked Gary Grant four or five times if he knew anything about the deaths of the two boys.
Gary Grant was adamant that he did not. He insisted that he was very fond of children and would never hurt them. He didn't even know Brad and Scott and he seemed shocked that anyone would think he would kill two little boys.
They were at an impasse. Hume asked Gary if he would be willing to take a lie detector test, and he said he would.
Dewey Gillespie was respected as one of the most accurate polygraphers on the West Coast. Called at his Seattle Police Department office, he told Hume that he would give Gary a polygraph examination if they would bring him into the city. Wally Hume, Jim Phelan, and Gary left at once for Seattle, but when they got there, Gillespie sent word that he would be tied up in an emergency session for some time.