No Regrets (25 page)

“Please,” she whispered again. “I need an ambulance.”

She struggled to her feet, only to collapse again.

“You don’t have to come close,” she gasped. “You don’t even have to listen to me. I’ve been beaten up and raped. Just call me an ambulance.”

The man walked close enough to note the address of the apartment house, and muttered, “Okay.” But then he walked away. She prayed that he was going to a phone booth to call for someone to help her. After what seemed like a long time, she heard the wails of an ambulance approaching,
and she allowed herself to sink back into the blackness again, barely aware of the paramedics from the Seattle Fire Department who were working over her.

If you could say that she was at all lucky, she was fortunate to have those highly trained paramedics trying to save her. Dr. Michael Copass’s innovative paramedic program was the gold standard in the nation. This team—Aid Unit 25—was stationed nearby at the Harborview Medical Center, where personnel were fully capable of dealing with everything from heart attacks to gunshot wounds.

Medic One paramedics were used to seeing the results of violent accidents and assaults, but this young woman’s broken body was as horrific as anything they’d ever encountered. It looked as if someone had used her for a punching- and kicking-bag. Her slender form was a mass of purplish bruises, her left breast completely discolored. She might have been pretty once, but they certainly couldn’t tell that now. Her eyes were almost swollen shut, blackened by the force of blows. Her broken jaw wobbled and her cheeks were caved in. Blood leaked from her nose and mouth, and each breath was agonizing.

Although they doubted that she would survive, the paramedics started an intravenous drip with D5W (a dextrose-saline solution to keep her veins open) to stabilize her. They managed to get an airway tube down her throat so they could administer oxygen. Now, they gently lifted her to a gurney and raced to the ER Trauma Unit of Harborview, less than a mile away.

She had no purse, no identifying papers. Nothing. They didn’t know who she was, and she couldn’t tell them; she might never be able to tell them. For the moment, she was a “Jane Doe,” admitted into the ER in extremely critical condition.

Seattle Police Patrol Officers H. J. Burke and R. S. Zuray had arrived at the Melrose apartment building within moments of the paramedics, and Burke had ridden along in the ambulance to the hospital with the victim to write down anything she said. It would be Res Gestae (spontaneous utterances), a virtual deathbed statement that would be admissible in court if she didn’t make it. Burke also photographed her in the emergency room, feeling privately that they were already working on a homicide case, even though the victim was still, technically, alive.

Zuray, along with Officer Dave Malland, remained at the scene, trying to locate just where the attack might have taken place, while their sergeant, Beryl Thompson, radioed in that detectives were needed at the 1520 Melrose address. Before her transfer to Patrol as a sergeant, Thompson worked as a sexual assault detective for years, and she was particularly adept at preserving evidence of rape.

Detective Sergeant Don Cameron and Detectives Duane Homan, Gary Fowler, and Ted Fonis responded at once from the Homicide Unit on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building. They sprinted to their cars and headed up the hill to the scene. Ironically, the victim had been found less than a mile from the Seattle Police Department’s main precinct. By the time they arrived, the street in front of The Melrose was jammed with official vehicles.

The Melrose was a well-maintained relic of an earlier day, having long since ceased to be the fashionable address it once was when Seattle’s high-society members hosted parties there, dancing the Charleston and drinking bootleg liquor. Their sprawling apartments had been sectioned off into smaller units for those who lived in genteel poverty, mostly elderly people living alone. They cooked
on hot plates and watched a changing world through rain-spattered windows with faded curtains. Some of the occupants were younger, working for minimum wage, or getting money wherever they could. When they were drunk or drugged, or involved in “domestics”—fights between husbands, wives, and live-in partners—cops arrived, banging on doors. Every car in the Central District knew The Melrose well. There was no longer anything grand or upscale about the old apartment house.

Next door to The Melrose, overgrown rhododendrons, camellias, lilacs, and laurel hedges were slowly being choked out by ubiquitous Himalayan Blackberry brambles. The thick growth almost obliterated a walkway leading to a deserted old mansion whose windows were boarded over. Just beyond that, there was a car rental agency. The area afforded tenants an easy walk to the downtown district to the west, or, going south, to the hospitals located on Seattle’s “Pill Hill.” It was the kind of neighborhood where residents try not to get involved in their neighbors’ affairs, where fights and screams in the night often go unheeded because people are reluctant to face reprisal for calling the cops.

Zuray and Malland had looked around the area before the homicide men arrived and felt that the actual crime scene was probably at the abandoned house at 1516 Mel-rose. They pointed out what they had found to the homicide crew.

Jagged shrubbery was broken down along the walk leading back twenty-five paces from the street. Worn marble steps led down into the basement of the house. Nearby, a pair of tan knee-length nylons lay twisted on the walk. There were scuff marks on the sidewalk three feet from those steps as if a mighty struggle had taken place there.

The basement door appeared to have been forced open, and women’s clothing had been thrown into the stairwell leading to the cellar.

“We found the coat over here,” Malland said, pointing to a white leather coat with a fake-fur collar. “And blue slacks with blood on them. There’s a bottle of Tylenol pills, too. None of it looks like it’s been here long.”

Two rusty nails that extended from the basement window casing had strands of long chestnut brown hair caught on them. It appeared that the victim had been dragged forcibly to the cellar entry, her clothing ripped off as she went.

The detectives moved into the concrete room at the bottom of the steps. Even though it was full morning light outside, the room was shadowy and dark; as a prison for a helpless girl, it would have been just what her attacker wanted to drown out her cries. Now it looked like something out of a horror movie, with fresh blood splashed on the walls and rubble-strewn floor.

A pair of black high-heeled sandals, a bra, and a T-shirt—all bloodied—were on the floor. Crimson-stained panties rested next to a bundle of kindling.

The detectives knelt to look at a length of yellow rope, which had been tied into a loop.

“She had rope burns around her neck,” Malland commented. “It looked like someone dragged her by the neck.”

Blood and hair marked all four walls of the tiny basement prison. The victim’s attacker had literally bounced her off the walls in the savage attack. The picture in the probers’ minds wasn’t pretty: The girl had apparently been dragged from the street like an animal, with the rope around her neck, forced into this deserted room, stripped naked, and come very close to death. That she was alive at
all seemed incredible, given the amount of blood that glistened on the floor and walls.

The only thing that the sadist had left of himself was the rope—and possibly an empty pack of Salem cigarettes that might have been his on the floor. Oddly, the detectives found two one-dollar bills wedged into a pipe that ran beneath the smudged window on the south wall.

Beryl Thompson approached the detectives with information she’d received from Officer Burke and the paramedics. “We’ve got a tentative ID on the victim and a very sketchy rundown on what happened to her. Her name is Arden Lee, and she has a home address in West Seattle. She can’t talk very well because her jaw is broken and her tongue is swollen, but Burke was able to find out that she came here with an Indian male—longish black hair, upper teeth missing—whom she knew as ‘George.’ She said that he beat and raped her.”

There were probably five hundred Indian males in Seattle who would fit the description, but it was a start. Detective Pat Lamphere, of the Sexual Assault Unit, left the crime scene and went to Harborview to see if she could find out anything more about the suspect from the victim.

A police radio operator reported that they had had two calls from the area during the night. Nearby residents reported hearing a woman scream. “We sent a car at about 11:45 and again at 2:20
A.M.
,” the dispatcher said. “The officers checked the whole area, but they couldn’t find anything, and there was no screaming by the time they got there.”

Apparently, the victim had lapsed into unconsciousness in the dark corner of the basement both times the patrol officers were checking, and in the dead of night it would have been almost impossible for them to locate her.

Pat Lamphere and a social worker from the hospital attempted to question the victim, but it was very difficult. She was almost comatose and couldn’t talk to them with much lucidity. She did, however, respond to the name “Arden,” and she nodded when they asked if that was her name.

“Who did this to you?” Lamphere asked gently.

“George . . . Indian... teeth ...gone...” the girl gasped.

“Did you know him?”

Arden Lee shook her head weakly. “Not really...met him . . . at the Korea Tavern... the bartender... introduced us.”

The girl managed to tell them that she’d met “George” again the night before at about midnight and that he’d invited her to his house “for a drink.” She’d gone with him, thinking he was okay because a friend had introduced them.

“Did you have a purse with you? We haven’t been able to find it.”

“No, no purse. Just a key—a ring with a key attached.”

“Do you know what else you left at the house... where they found you?”

“Can’t remember—” was the soft reply, and then Arden lapsed back into a coma.

The trauma team of physicians who had worked on Arden Lee informed Lamphere that her condition was extremely critical and the most optimistic thing they could say was that she might survive—if infection didn’t set in, or a blood clot didn’t break free and travel to her lungs. “She’s in shock; she’s been beaten as badly as anyone we’ve ever seen,” one doctor said. “The neurosurgeon’s going to check her now for brain damage.”

And Arden Lee had been violently raped and sodomized.
She had clearly been trapped by a man whose sexual desires and need to hurt someone were almost beyond the comprehension of the normal mind. One trauma doctor commented that her body was far more damaged than those of most murder victims at autopsy.

Despite her broken teeth and jaw, Arden managed to tell Pat Lamphere that the man who had hurt her had had no weapon beyond the rope which he’d carried in his pocket. She had seen him pull the rope out, and before she could stop him, he slipped it over her head. And then he’d cinched it tightly around her neck to make her obey him.

The only link between Arden and her attacker appeared to be the Korea Tavern. Pat Lamphere and Detective John Nordlund started there. They had to wait until the daytime bartender came on shortly before noon. The woman behind the bar said that her brother was the night bartender, and he was proably the one who knew Arden. “I’ll call him at home and have him come down,” she said. “But I can’t think of any ‘Indian George’ who comes in here. There’s only one ‘George’ who comes in, and he’s not Native American. Maybe my brother will know more.”

Yung Kim agreed with his sister. There wasn’t any “Indian George,” only a man named George who was employed as a bouncer at the Exotica Studio at Seventh and Pike. Nordlund and Lamphere exchanged glances. The Exotica was a thorn in the side of the Vice Squad; it operated just on the edge of what was legal and often crossed the line. There were a number of “businesses” in the area that were not what they purported to be, using facades to disguise what really went on beyond their doors. Most were massage parlors. Others offered “mattress demonstrations,” and the Exotica claimed to be a dance studio, with dance “lessons” performed by the women who
worked there. Almost all of the storefront businesses were thinly disguised houses of prostitution. There were always women and runaway teenagers desperate to make money just to pay their rent and buy groceries. The owners of the sex-oriented businesses assured them that their tips would more than make up for the minimum hourly wage they got. But it didn’t turn out that way. The men who managed the tawdry enterprises kept any big money that changed hands.

The Exotica practiced a kind of bait-and-switch policy. Many male customers left without ever getting what they thought they were paying for.

Even though patrol officers working along Pike Street kept a close eye on the Exotica, its windows stopped traffic day and night, because garishly made-up young women undulated behind the glass, beckoning to the men who walked and drove by to stare at them in their tight, short, transparent clothing. However, once the men were enticed inside, they were told that it would cost them forty dollars to view a “program” in one of the private rooms. They were promised “interpretive dancing.”

“What’s that?” one potential customer asked.

One of the dancers explained: “It’s however you interpret it.”

Borrowing from the old carny routine where the rubes were asked to pay more and more for each new revelation, the men who were gullible enough and had enough cash to get as far as the private rooms were given a new price. “The forty dollars goes to the house,” the women were told to say. “We make our living from ‘donations.’ They begin at fifty dollars.”

Some of the customers balked at that point, but many put up more money. They were then allowed to disrobe if
they liked—and to lie on a couch to watch. The dancers stripped then to their bikini underwear and performed their interesting—if untrained—dancing.

But that was all there was. Ostensibly there was no touching. When the “program” was over, the customers were left as unsatisfied as they were when they came in. Some were only disappointed, but most of them were very angry. Many of the women were frightened at the rage that erupted. To keep them from quitting, the Exotica managers grudgingly installed a thick pellucid screen between the plate-glass windows and the half-naked dancers.