Sex. Murder. Mystery. (87 page)

The back lawn of the English Tudor mansion at 4605 N. Verde in Tacoma, Washington, rolled to a cliff and stopped, dropped sixty feet, and continued on to the icy waters of Commencement Bay, a deep-water port burned at its rocky edges with saw and paper mills. It was nevertheless such a gorgeous setting, that determining a focal point would have been nearly impossible for visitors.

The shimmering waters of Puget Sound? The forested hills of Vashon Island across a mile-wide passage that sliced the waters north to Seattle and South to Olympia? The snowcapped, meringue of a mountain that went by the name Mt. Tacoma? Who could choose?

And yet, when visitors would come to the site of where the mansion once stood some seven decades later, it was true the beauty of the views would take their breath away, but ultimately even the surroundings, splendor and all, would take back seat to what had happened there so long ago. Many only wanted to see where the unthinkable happened, where the mystery started.

Two days after Christmas 1936 when Charles Mattson was held like a spider’s prey in a web of tightly-wound jute, the kid with the prefect grin would vanish from the Mattson estate, leaving only unanswered questions, broken hearts, and the same pretty mirage of a place that his parents once held so dear.

“You have to wonder about something,” said the man who owned the mansion since 1978. He squinted into the sun and motioned toward his grand home. “Had they not lived here, maybe they wouldn’t have been targets for the criminal opportunists that came after Charles? Can you imagine working so hard to build a place like this only to have it be the scene of your greatest tragedy? Your worst nightmare?”

* * *

A dog barking in the night doesn’t usually amount to much in the country where canines run free at all hours and sleep outside, curled up under a porch or in the rusted out back of an abandoned pickup truck. Even so, one winter night long ago, the howling from the darkness of several hungry mutts was the only connection any could make to the most likely moment a little boy’s last was being written.

After an afternoon watching movies with friends at downtown Everett’s Roxy Theatre where “Broadway Babies of 1937” was playing to decent crowds, Gordon Morrow, just 19, returned to the modest home he shared with his father, Charles, and brother, Andrew. The Morrow place was six miles south of Everett, which was the sister town to Seattle, a short highway ride further south. It was Sunday, January 10, 1937. Later, when retracing the events, Gordon Morrow told special agents of the FBI that he’d heard his dog, a Boston terrier named Nick, bark and run from the front window to the door. Gordon was too tired to let the dog outside. He also heard a neighbor’s dog bark around the same time, 9:30 p.m. But Gordon Morrow heard nothing else. No voices. Nor did he hear any crackling brush or the rumbling motor of an idling car or truck. After ten minutes, the dogs quieted down, curled up and, like Gordon, finally went to sleep. A teenager with no job or plans for more schooling, Gordon slept after another day of nothing much on his mind.

The Morrow house was in an isolated area, an out of the way province of chicken and raspberry farmers, sawmill workers and, though decades later few would believe it, the summer country places of the well-to-do of Seattle.

The next morning a pal of Gordon’s, also a teenager, came over to shoot the breeze. Among the topics the pair discussed was how the friend had seen a rabbit jump across the trampled brush alongside the Morrows’ house. After playing cards, reading magazines, and jawing about nothing in peculiar, the friend left and Gordon put on his boots, a heavy, black woolen coat, grabbed the rifle his father had given him for his birthday, and went outside to hunt. The rabbit was on his mind. The air snapped with the January chill of a Puget Sound winter. The snow that had fallen on the previous Friday and Saturday had thawed and re-frozen leaving distinct, almost sedimentary-like layers that broke with a crunch under the weight of the young man’s hurried gait.

In times such as these, there is always a moment where a tragedy takes over; where reality in all of its unforgiving and grim detail converges with hope and hope loses out. For a family 50 miles away behind the gates of a sumptuous Tacoma mansion, it was about to converge on a roadway next to a chicken ranch outside of Everett. Gordon Morrow’s discovery that Monday morning would shock the nation, fuel obsessions, and confound scores of G-men who had descended to the Pacific Northwest to solve the case of a doctor’s kidnapped boy.

Toting his rifle and moving swiftly over the icy terrain, Morrow’s wiry frame slipped between a thicket of bare alders two hundred yards from his front door. His eyes stayed fixed on the rabbit’s meandering tracks as they cut around dromedaries of ferns and knots of brambles as the animal bolted for protective cover. Morrow’s cheeks were red; plumes of warm breath pulsed from his mouth and nose. And just as he’d stepped into a shallow pocket in the snowy earth, the teenager stumbled and fell over something soft in the snow. He’d later say he didn’t recall getting up, horror stricken as he was.

When discovering a human body, some remark how it doesn’t quite look real; that the still form of a dead body is more akin to a child’s doll or even a garden statue in quiet repose. Some don’t allow themselves to accept what their eyes project onto the screens of their minds —the lifeless figure, the brain knows, had once been a person. Gordon Morrow, however, wasn’t one of the people who allowed tricks to vanquish the horror of such a discovery. In fact, he was quite the opposite. He knew what and, remarkably,
who
it was almost the split-second his mind registered what he’d tripped over.

The nude, battered figure of a brown-haired and brown-eyed little boy was stretched out on his back in the shallow pocket, the place where Gordon Morrow had been sure he’d shoot an elusive rabbit. He hoisted himself up, spun around and tried to catch his quickening breath. His eyes moved from the ghastly figure and all around it. Stumps topped with snow and the frosty fans of Oregon Grape and the lime-shaped leaves of salal formed the bones of a natural fence along a roadway traversed with tire tracks. Footprints crunched clearly into the white field of the newest snowfall. Some of the footprints led to the body. A pattern, visible even to the young rabbit-hunter, revealed how the body had been dragged. A Douglas fir stump left from a years-ago logging effort rose from the soil adjacent to the boy.

In two minutes time, or so it seemed, Gordon was back in his little house calling for his father. The young man had seen a ghost and his fear and the cold weather had turned his face as white as the wintry landscape. Charles Morrow, part-time chicken rancher, full-time mill worker, knew instantly something had gone awry.

“I found a kid out there dead,” the younger Morrow blurted in an excited staccato caused by the horror of what he’d seen and the fact that he was out of breath from the sprint across the snowy terrain. His long face and youthfully handsome features were a clean slate for his shock. “The body looks like he’s about ten years old —it might be the kidnapped boy. The boy is naked. It looks like him.”

Instinctively, Charles Morrow looked at the wall clock to note the time of day because he knew such information would be important. It was 10 a.m. A few moments later, on the edge of the thicket of blackberries and burned out stumps, the older man, his pulse quickening, confirmed what his son had seen. It was the naked body of a child that he’d know anywhere, even in the terrible, brutalized condition in which his son had found him. He, too, thought it was probably the Mattson boy. The Morrows got into their new Chevrolet truck and sped to the nearest telephone —at Westerberg’s General Oil Filling Station on the Everett-Seattle Highway— to notify the Snohomish County Sheriff. Owner C.A. Westerberg dialed the number. The sheriff and a deputy were about to report the tragic conclusion of the FBI search for a little boy, a case called “Mattnap.”

“It was a horrible sight,” Gordon Morrow told reporters later that afternoon as more than a dozen of them circled him and called out questions. Photographers’ flashbulbs popped like cross-wired Christmas lights in front of the Morrow place, and inside the family’s tiny front room, and finally, at the site where Gordon found the frozen body.

“I was so frightened I guess I nearly fainted… He looked awful,” the teenager recounted. “I didn’t stay to look any further. I just ran right home and shouted at my father.”

The Boy Who Haunted America

Every author seeks a story, a neat package of truth, tragedy, redemption —all things that make a tale worth telling. But things are not so easy. The stories worth writing are almost always more complicated,
messier
, than that. A clipping sent to me about a little boy lost from his family forever spurred my interest years ago. It was about an enduring mystery, a tale of a doctor’s son, just ten years old, taken from his Tacoma home just after Christmas of 1936. I made a trip to the Tacoma Public Library’s Northwest Room and found a folder on the case. Tear-sheets from newspapers inside told me there was an incredible and untold story, though one without an ending —at least one that had yet to be discovered. I studied a photograph pulled from the yellowed and brittle files. It was the smiling image of Charles Fletcher Mattson. He sits on a pony with a gap-toothed grin so wide that if it weren’t for his cheeks, bulging with joy, there’d be no end to his smile. A cowboy hat rests like a crown on his head, a vest, chaps and cowboy boots make the ensemble storybook complete.

The boy is telling me:
Don’t forget me.
By all rights, in a better world, the smile in the photograph, I knew, would belong to someone’s grandpa by now.

But, of course, it didn’t.

Not long after I first looked into the Mattson kidnapping tragedy, my father, a Depression era kid who grew up in Nebraska at the time Charlie posed so charmingly on that little horse, asked me what I was working on. My dad, at 79, is about the age Charlie would be if he hadn’t been snatched and murdered.

“Several things,” I answered, “one involving a doctor’s kidnapped and murdered son from Tacoma in the 1930s.”

My father didn’t miss a beat. “You mean the Mattson case?”

The mention of the name brought a jolt to my spine. I wondered how my father, who didn’t read much, didn’t study history (unless it was related to World War II), didn’t really care about much beyond a good game of golf and my mother, knew the boy’s surname. I hadn’t mentioned it. How was it that he knew? I asked.

“Everyone knew about that kid and what happened to him. It was in the newspapers for years. It was second only to Lindbergh’s son.
Everyone
,” he said, “knew about that boy.”

The next day, I telephoned Charlie’s older brother, Bill Mattson, to see if he’d talk about the case so many years ago. I found his number in the Tacoma phone book.

An old man got on the line and gruffly told me to let sleeping dogs lie. “Leave it alone,” Bill Mattson said curtly. “I don’t want to talk about it. Some things shouldn’t be revisited.”

“What about your sister?” I asked, trying to keep him on the line.

“I hear I have a sister,” he said.