No Regrets (29 page)

Before the crime scene search began in earnest, they cordoned the area off, and uniformed officers were stationed at key points to prevent curious passersby from entering the woods.

Although the body was naked, the investigators found several items. There was a red ski jacket, with yellow and orange stripes around the sleeves, waist, and collar. It was a mass-produced item, with a “Made in Hong Kong” label. There was a hooded, yellow cotton shirt trimmed in white with a front neck zipper and a pocket-pouch in front, also zippered. A pair of blue jeans with a twenty-seven-inch waist. White tube socks. A white bra with a J.C. Penney label. There were no panties.

It appeared to be standard attire of an average young woman, and not distinctive enough to aid in identifying the body in the woods. Still, the clothing would be carefully dried and photographed on the slight chance that someone would recognize the items.

Dr. John Eisele of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office arrived to do a preliminary examination of the victim. He could give only a “ballpark figure” as to the time of death. “Two, three months ago—possibly longer.”

The cause of death would be harder to determine. Much soft tissue had been lost to the elements, the burning sun of late summer and early fall, and then rain and snow in November and December. There were animals in the woods, too, mostly small. Eisele could not immediately isolate any cause of death. “I’ll be able to tell more at the postmortem,” he said.

Roy Gleason and his fellow detectives worked through the long, chill December afternoon, first with the rays of
pale sunlight that cut through the trees, then with auxiliary lighting as the sun set. In December, that occurred well before four. They bagged and labeled the dead woman’s clothing for evidence, and did the same with soil and leaf samples.

They took careful measurements, triangulating them with trees, and photographed the remains and the scene. At length, the fragile remains were removed for autopsy, and the Bellevue investigative crew cleared the scene.

The woods were now as they were before.

She had lain there for so long. There was no point in hurrying, but they were back in the woods and the adjoining neighborhood as soon as the sun rose. They canvassed the nearby homes, but their questions netted nothing helpful. Most people don’t recall noises or out-of-the-ordinary incidents that happened months ago—not unless there is something on which to peg a hidden memory. Sherwood Forest residents were accustomed to a lot of foot traffic through the woods, and the less welcome roar of motorbikes and cycles.

“Who was she?” was the question that kept niggling at them. Would they ever be able to find that out from a few bagfuls of mouldering clothing? They had found some of her teeth, but they had fallen out and landed in the wet, yellowed peach leaves. It wasn’t as if they had an intact jaw that a forensic odontologist might use for identification. The separate teeth had probably been knocked out in a violent struggle. There might be enough of them left in the skull for a forensic dentist to make a positive comparison—if they could locate the dental records of the dead girl. It was a vicious circle. Unless they had some inkling about her name, they wouldn’t be able to locate her dental records.

Was there someone, someplace, who missed her—who would read of the discovery in the lonely orchard woods and call in? The Bellevue detectives knew that was their best hope.

Bellevue itself had no reports of women who had gone missing in the last six months, but the Seattle Police Department and the police of Lynnwood (a small town along I-5 north of Seattle) shared open files on a missing case, one that had baffled them since July 9.

Stacy Sparks, eighteen, had had no reason to run away. The recent high school graduate had a new job she liked, a ticket already purchased for a dream trip to Hawaii, and a steady boyfriend. She had lived with her mother and stepfather in the Ballard section of Seattle, apparently in complete harmony. Aware of the Sparks case, the Bellevue detectives thought first of the pretty blonde who had vanished so inexplicably on that Monday night. No one believed that Stacy had left of her own accord.

And yet, no one had seen Stacy Sparks since she left the Raintree Restaurant in Lynnwood at 9:30
P.M
. on July 9. She had promised to pick up her boyfriend from his job in south Seattle, and she had been driving her prized Plymouth Arrow hatchback with the white racing stripe.

Five months now, and they had found nothing of Stacy Sparks—not even her distinctive car. The first opinion of those most familiar with her case was that this unidentified body in Sherwood Forest would prove to be Stacy’s.

However, there were things that didn’t fit: Stacy wore a yellow cotton shirt the night she disappeared, but hers was a T-shirt with a rose appliquéd on it—not a hooded sweatshirt. The jeans were right, but the blouse wasn’t. Of
course, there was always the possibility that Stacy had stopped somewhere to change her clothes before she either encountered someone dangerous or, less likely, chose to run away.

Stacy had yellow-blonde hair and the hair near the skull in Bellevue was more a “mousy” blonde, more brown than Stacy’s appeared in the missing posters that still clung to fences and utility poles, faded and tattered now.

The possibility that this victim might be Stacy Sparks proved unlikely after the postmortem examination. Dr. Eisele performed the autopsy on the nameless young woman. Detectives Marv Skeen and Gary Trent attended the postmortem, and listened intently as Eisele outlined many of the facts that can be elicited from forensic pathology.

“She was very young,” Eisele said. “Probably about thirteen to fourteen—possibly as young as eleven—or as old as sixteen. Caucasian. She was between five feet one and five feet, five inches tall—slender—and she had medium length light brown hair.”

“Cause of death?” Trent asked.

Eisele shook his head. “There’s no way to tell. I can only tell you that there’s been no fracturing of her bones. No trauma to any bone, not even the skull. The internal organs have decomposed. If she was shot or stabbed, it penetrated the soft tissue—and that’s gone. If she was strangled—same problem.”

The dead girl could have succumbed to a bullet, a stabbing, a strangling, or suffocation, but there was no way left to say absolutely what had happened.

The motive for the killing was obvious, grotesquely apparent. Her skeleton had been found in the “classic” rape position, on its back with legs spread wide. Dr. Eisele found that a branch had been savagely shoved into the
vaginal vault, effecting both a symbolic and a legal act of rape.

It’s not unusual to find all manner of foreign objects in the vaginas of women who have been killed by someone in a sexual rage: bottles, umbrellas, sticks, and branches are “signatures” of impotent killers or of rapists so full of anger that they are not satisfied just to violate the bodies of their victims. They are also compelled to leave something behind to demonstrate to the person who discovers a body or to the police how powerful they are. It is an act hard for the normal mind to comprehend. In this case, any residual semen that might have been deposited during forced intercourse was, of course, gone, lost to the rain, wind, and processes of decomposition.

Following the autopsy, Roy Gleason gave information to local newspapers describing the clothing found with the victim, and her very general description. They were looking for a missing girl whose dental records might be compared with the teeth of their victim. Without the help of the public, there would be no place else to go with the case. The scant information that the detective team had managed to put together about the victim was broadcast to the thirteen western states—and then more widely—through NCIC (National Crime Information Center) computers. Bellevue police were soon inundated with responses. As there always are, there were hundreds of teenage girls missing in the United States. They received queries from as far away as New York State, as well as from California, Oregon, and other counties in Washington State.

Frantic parents whose teenage daughters had run away, or been taken away, had filed missing reports on girls who, at least on the surface, resembled the unknown victim. None of them matched Bellevue’s unknown victim.

On the morning of December 10, a call came in from the mother of a teenage daughter named Nancy Dillon.* The family lived in the Bellevue area.

“I’ve read the article in the paper,” she began, “and I think you should talk to my daughter. Nancy has a friend, a girl named Teresa Sterling. Teresa was a runaway from Georgia. We haven’t seen her for a couple of months.”

The Bellevue detectives were about to get a tremendous boost from some rebellious teenagers, a group who often resent the police. Roy Gleason assured Nancy that she and any of her friends who were willing to talk to him could be assured that his main—and only—concern was a homicide investigation. For the time he worked to find the answers about why a teenager had ended up dead in the woods, he would not ask witnesses about their drug or alcohol use, shoplifting, truancy, running away, or any other offenses. He had to gain the trust of his informants, or he might as well quit. And he was not about to do that. He had a feeling that the dead girl was Teresa Sterling, but he couldn’t prove it by himself.

Nancy Dillon was most cooperative. She said she had been worried about Teresa Sterling after she seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth without telling anyone she was leaving.

“Tell me a little about Teresa,” Gleason began. “Try to go back and fill me in on her lifestyle, her friends.”

The story that came out was tragic, but not unfamiliar. Teresa Caroline Sterling had been born on December 14. As her friend described her to Gleason, he realized that in four more days, Teresa would have celebrated her sixteenth birthday.

Nancy said that Teresa had come from a large family, and that she was the youngest of five children. “She grew
up in some little town outside Atlanta, Georgia. She was kind of ‘country.’”

“What did she look like?” Gleason asked.

“She was a tomboy—a skinny little kid with a lot of freckles, but she was pretty, too. She looked kind of like Jodie Foster, the movie star. She wasn’t very interested in school, but the only trouble she ever got into was kid stuff—just mischief.”

“When did you meet Teresa?” Gleason asked.

“Well, they moved from Georgia two years ago,” Nancy said. “Teresa’s dad worked for some kind of freight company for an airline and he got transferred to Salt Lake City first. Then, that same year, they moved to Bellevue. That was in July. They rented a house out by Crossroads. That’s when I met her.”

Gleason learned that Teresa had been enrolled in the eighth grade at Odle Junior High School. Faced with two moves in one year and having to start again in two schools where she didn’t know anyone, Teresa had felt lost at first. Life for teenagers in Bellevue was very different from what it was in the little town in Georgia where she had lived her whole life. Most households in Bellevue had a higher standard of living, and street drugs were plentiful. Even in junior high, a large number of students had experimented with them.

“I know Teresa tried marijuana,” Nancy told Gleason. “And she probably tried other drugs, too.”

Teresa was becoming a young woman during her years in Bellevue. She was caught somewhere between the win-someness of childhood and the promise of maturity. She still wrote to teachers she’d liked back in Georgia, but she wasn’t as interested in sports as she had been. Her school-work suffered when she began to run away from home.

“I really don’t know why she ran,” Nancy said. “All of her friends could see that she was getting in the habit of leaving her house, staying a few days with us or with other friends, and then she’d go home. Her parents really tried to keep her home, but no matter what they did, she would run away. Last March, her family finally moved back to Georgia. They just packed up, and they all went back to Fayetteville—everyone but Teresa’s older sister.”

Nancy felt that Teresa’s parents had hoped to get her away from the lifestyle in the group she ran with in Bellevue, and that, once back home, she would settle down. But it was too late for Teresa. “She didn’t want to live in Fayetteville any longer. She wrote to me and said she wanted to live in Bellevue, and be free to come and go when she wanted. She came back here about the middle of June,” Nancy recalled. “I’m not sure just how she got here. Sometimes, she said she hitchhiked, and sometimes she said she flew or took a bus. But she just showed up here again just before the end of school.”

“Where did she live?”

“With different people. She just stayed with different people.”

Nancy Dillon said that she herself had gone to California on vacation during the summer, and that Teresa had planned to join her down there.

“But she never showed up. And when I came back, I didn’t see her either. My mother called in about Teresa because she read that description of the cotton, hooded shirt found next to the girl’s body,” Nancy said with a tremble in her voice. “I gave Teresa a shirt a lot like that about a year ago. It was yellow with white trimming and it had a zippered pocket.”

Gleason asked her to sketch the shirt that she had given
to Teresa Sterling. When she handed the sketch to him, he saw that it was exactly like the victim’s clothing. He pulled out some photos of the clothes found at the crime scene, and held them out for Nancy Dillon to look at.

She gasped. “That’s the shirt—the one I gave to Teresa. I bought it in California. Does that mean that it’s Teresa?”

“We’ll have to check some more,” Gleason told the upset youngster. “But, yes...it may be that it was Teresa’s body found in the woods.”

When Bob Littlejohn—the first patrolman at the body site—heard that they had a tentative ID on the skeletonized body, he was as shocked as Nancy Dillon was. He knew Teresa Sterling, too. He had spent a lot of time trying to counsel the Sterlings about their problems with Teresa.

The Sterlings had been afraid that Teresa was smoking marijuana, and possibly using LSD. They had been at their wits’ end trying to stop her from running away. Littlejohn had talked with Teresa—to no avail—before her family moved back to Georgia.