The Stranger Beside Me (10 page)

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Susan had had only one physical imperfection; she was very nearsighted. On the night of April 17th, she had worn neither her glasses nor her contact lenses. She could have seen well enough to make her way around the campus, but she would have had to walk up quite close to someone to recognize them, and she might well have missed a subtle movement in the shadows beneath the trestle.

With the disappearance of Susan Rancourt, other coeds came forward with descriptions of incidents that had vaguely disturbed them. One girl said she'd talked to a tall, handsome man in his twenties outside the campus library on April 12th, a man who had one arm in a sling and a metal brace on his finger. He'd had trouble managing his armload of books and had dropped several. "Finally, he asked me if I'd help him carry them to his car," she recalled.

The car, a Volkswagen bug, was parked about 300 yards from the railroad trestle. She'd carried his books to the car, and then noticed that the passenger seat was missing. Something-she couldn't even say what-had caused the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end, something about that missing seat. He seemed nice enough, and they'd talked about how he'd been injured skiing at Crystal Mountain, but, suddenly, she just wanted to be away from him. "I put the books on the hood of his car, and I ran . . ."

A second girl told a story very like the first. She had met the man with an injured arm on the 17th, and had carried some packages wrapped in butcher paper to his car for him. "Then he told me that he was having trouble getting it started, and asked me to get in and try the ignition while he did something under the hood. I didn't know him. I didn't want to get in his car, and I just made some excuse about being in a hurry and I left."

The son of an Oregon district attorney, visiting on campus, remembered seeing a tall man with his arm in a sling standing in front of Barto Hall around 8:30 on the evening of the

17th.

The reports didn't seem all that ominous; any time a crime or a disappearance occurs, ordinary incidents take on an importance for

"witnesses" who want to help. The statements were typed, filed away, and the search for Susan Rancourt continued.

In this case, as in many others, a minute detail would provide mute testimony to the fate of the missing girls. With

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Donna Manson, it had been her camera left behind; with Susan, it was her contact lenses and her glasses, glasses that she'd probably meant to carry with her to the movie on the night she vanished, and her dental floss. When her mother looked into her medicine cabinet and saw the dental floss, she felt her heart thud. "She was such a creature of habit. She never went anywhere overnight without dental floss ..." Captain Herb Swindler, a massive bulldog of a cop, a veteran in homicide investigations, had taken over command of the Crimes Against Persons Unit of the Seattle Police Department in the spring of 1974. I had known Herb for twenty years; in 1954 he was the patrol officer who had responded first to a complaint of indecent liberties by the mother of a small girl in West Seattle, and I was the most-rookie of policewomen who was called in to question the child. I'd been twenty-one then, and admittedly somewhat embarrassed at the questions I had to ask the little girl about the "nice old man" who boarded with the family. I remember how Herb teased me because I'd blushed--the standard razzing that new policewomen received--but he'd been gentle with the child, with her mother. He was a good cop, and a thorough investigator and he'd moved up rapidly through the ranks. Now, the buck stopped in Herb's office; most of the missing girls' cases had seemingly originated in Seattle, and he was wrestling day and night with the mysteries that seemed to have no clues, no answers. It was as if the man responsible was taunting the police, laughing at the ease with which he'd abducted the women, leaving no trace of himself.

Swindler is a talkative man, and he needed a sounding board. I filled that need. He knew I wouldn't talk to anyone outside the department, knew I'd followed the cases as meticulously as any detective. Certainly, I was a writer looking for the big story; but I was also the mother of two teenaged daughters, and the horror of it all, the agony of the parents, kept me awake nights. He was confident I wouldn't publish a word until the time was right-if ever.

During those months of 1974, I talked to Swindler almost every day--listening, trying to find some common denominator. My territory took me up and down the coast, and I often knew of cases in other cities, cases 200 miles away in

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Oregon, and I reported any disappearance that might tie in to the Seattle Police.

The next girl to walk away forever lived in Oregon. Nineteen days after Susan Rancourt vanished-on May 6thRoberta Kathleen "Kathy" Parks had spent an unhappy and guilt-ridden day in her room in Sackett Hall on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, 250 miles south of Seattle. I knew Sackett Hall; I'd lived there myself when I attended one term at O.S.U. back in the 1950s, a huge, modern dormitory complex on a campus that was then considered a "cow college." Even then, when the world didn't seem to be so fraught with danger, none of us would ever go to the snack machines in the cavernous basement corridors alone at night.

Kathy Parks wasn't very happy at Oregon State. She was homesick for Lafayette, California, and she'd broken up with her boyfriend who'd left for Louisiana. On May 4th, Kathy had argued in a phone call with her father, and, on May 6th, she learned that he'd suffered a massive heart attack. Her sister had called her from Spokane, Washington with the news of their father's coronary, and then called back some hours later to say that it looked as though he would survive. Kathy, whose major was world religions, felt a little better after the second call, and she agreed to join some of the other residents of Sackett Hall in an exercise session in the dorm lounge.

Shortly before eleven, the tall slender girl with long ashblonde hair left Sackett Hall to meet some friends for coffee in the Student Union Building. She promised her roommate she would be back within the hour. Wearing blue slacks, a navy blue top, a light green jacket, and platform sandals, she left Sackett for the last time.

Kathy never made the Student Union Building. Like the others, all of her possessions were left behind: her bike, clothing, cosmetics. This time, no one had seen anyone suspicious. No man with his arm in a sling. No Volkswagen bugs. Kathy had never talked of being afraid or of receiving obscene phone calls. She had been a girl so subject to wide mood swings that the question of suicide arose. Had she felt so guilty about fighting with her father, perhaps believing that she had caused his heart attack? Guilty enough to have taken her own life?

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The Willamette River, which wends its way near Corvallis, was dragged, and nothing was found. Had she chosen another means of self destruction, her body would surely be located soon, but it was not. Lieutenant Bill Harris, of the Oregon State Police Criminal Investigation Unit, was stationed on the O.S.U. campus and he headed the probe in Oregon. He had had a tragic homicide in Sackett Hall a few years before, where a coed was found stabbed to death in her room, but his successful investigation had resulted in the arrest of a male student who lived on an upper floor. That youth was still in the Oregon State Penitentiary.

After a week-long search, Harris was convinced that Kathy Parks had been abducted, probably seized as she walked between the great masses of lilac bushes blooming along the path between Sackett Hall and the Student Union Building. Gone, like all the others, without a single cry for help.

Police bulletins with pictures of the four missing girls were tacked up side by side on the office walls of every law enforcement agency in the Northwest, smiling faces that looked enough alike to be sisters. Yet only Herb Swindler was absolutely convinced that Kathy Parks was part of the pattern; other detectives felt Corvallis was too far away for her to be a victim of the same man who prowled Washington campuses. There was to be only a short respite. Twenty-six days later, a casual acquaintance of my elder daughter, Brenda Carol Ball, twenty-two, who lived with two roommates in the south King County suburb of Burien, disappeared. Brenda had been a Highline Community College student, until two weeks before. She was five feet three, 112 pounds, and her brown eyes sparkled with her zest for life.

On the night of May 31-June 1, Brenda went alone to the Flame Tavern at 128th South and Ambaum Road South. Her roommates had seen her last at 2 P.M. that Friday afternoon and she told them that she planned to go to the tavern, and mentioned that she might catch a ride afterward to Sun Lakes State Park in eastern Washington and meet them there. She did go to the Flame and was seen there by several people who knew her. No one remembers exactly what she was wearing, but her usual garb was faded blue jeans and long-sleeved turtleneck tops. She seemed to be having a good time, and stayed until closing at 2 A.M. 66

Brenda asked one of the musicians in the band for a ride home, but he explained he was heading in another direction. The last time anyone remembers seeing Brenda Ball, she was talking in the parking lot with a handsome, brown-haired man who had one arm in a sling. . .. Because Brenda-like Donna Manson-was a free spirit, given to impulsive trips, there was a long delay before she was officially reported missing. Nineteen days passed before her roommates became convinced that something had happened to her. They'd checked with her bank and become alarmed when they learned that her savings account hadn't been touched. All of her clothing was still in their apartment. Her parents, who lived nearby, hadn't heard from her either.

At twenty-two, Brenda was the oldest of all the missing women, an adult, who had proved herself capable and cautious in the past. But not now. It seemed that Brenda too had met someone she should not have trusted. Brenda was gone.

But the stalking was far from over. Even before Brenda Ball was reported as a missing person to King County Police, the man law enforcement officers sought was on the prowl again, about to strike audaciously, virtually in full view of dozens of witnesses-and still remain only a phantom figure. He would thumb his nose at police, leaving them as frustrated as they had ever been in the series of crimes that had already both galled and horrified them; many of the detectives searching for the missing girls had daughters of their own.

It was almost as if it were some kind of perverse game of challenge on the part of the abductor, as if, each time, he would come a little further out of the shadows, take more chances, to prove that he could do what he wanted and still not be caught, or even seen. Georgeann Hawkins, at eighteen, was one of those golden girls for whom luck or fate had dealt a perfect hand-until the inexplicable night of June 10th. Raised in the Tacoma suburb of Sumner, she'd been a Daffodil Princess, and, like Susan Rancourt, a cheerleader, an honor student at Lakes High School. She had a vivacious, pixielike quality to her loveliness, glossy long brown hair, and lively brown eyes. She was tiny-five feet, two inches tall, 115 pounds-healthy in a glowing way, the youngest of two daughters of the Warren B. Hawkins family.

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While many good students in high school tend to find the University of Washington's curriculum much more difficult and drop to a comfortable C average, Georgeann had continued to maintain a straight A record. Her biggest worry during that finals week of June, 1974 was that she was having a difficult time with Spanish. She considered dropping the course, but, on the morning of June 10th, she had phoned her mother and said she was going to cram for the next day's final as hard as she could, and she thought she could handle it.

She already had a summer job lined up-with Pierce County in Tacoma-and she'd discussed it by phone with her parents at least once a week. During rush week in September of 1973, Georgeann had been tapped by one of the top sororities on campus, Kappa Alpha Theta, and lived in the big house among several other Greek houses along 17th Avenue N.B. Residents of the sororities and fraternities along Greek Row visit back and forth much more freely than they did back in the fifties when it was strictly forbidden for members of the opposite sex to venture above the formal living rooms on the first floor. Georgeann frequently dropped in to see her boyfriend, who lived in the Beta Theta Pi House six houses down from the Theta House.

During the early evening hours of Monday, June 10th, Georgeann and a sorority sister had gone to a party where they'd had one or two mixed drinks. Georgeann explained that she had to get back to study for her Spanish exam. But, first, she was going to stop by the Beta House and say goodnight to her boyfriend.

Georgeann was cautious; she rarely went anywhere on campus alone at night, but the area along 17th Avenue N.B. was so familiar, so well-lighted, and there was always someone around she knew. The fraternal organizations front the street on each side, with a grassy island running down the middle. Trees, in full leaf in June, do block out some of the street lights; they've grown so tall since they were planted back in the twenties.

The alley that runs in back of the Greek houses from 45th N.B. to 47th N.B. is as bright as day, lit by street lights every ten feet or so. June 10th was a warm night, and every window opening onto the alleyway was open. It is doubtful that any of the student residents were asleep, even at midnight;

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most of them were cramming for finals with the aid of black coffee and No-Doz.

Georgeann did go to the Beta House, a little before 12:30 A.M. on June 11th. She visited with her steady boyfriend for a half hour or so, borrowed some Spanish notes, and then said goodnight and left by the back door to walk the ninety feet down to the back door of the Theta House.

One of the other Betas heard the door slam and stuck Ms head out his window, recognizing Georgeann.