Kiss Me, Kill Me and Other True Cases Page 11

  Dr. L.,* Greene’s therapist while he was incarcerated in the early nineties, believed him to be a true multiple, and she was sympathetic to him. Most of the personalities she saw were gentle, dependent, and confused. It was hard for her not to care about Greene; he didn’t seem at all like some of the hardened sexual offenders who ended up in the Monroe program. He did so well in therapy that he was released from prison in 1994. He moved to a small apartment near Everett, a city twenty-six miles north of Seattle.

  As it happened, Dr. L. resigned her job at the prison soon after and opened a private practice in Everett. She continued to treat Greene. He came to her office for therapy sessions. However, in 1994, she became concerned when he threatened to commit suicide. Thinking that he might have to be hospitalized, she went to Greene’s apartment to evaluate his condition.

  By this time, Dr. L. was sure that Greene was a classic MPD and she wasn’t afraid of him. She felt she recognized all the characters who moved in and out of his conscious mind and knew how to deal with each of them.

  She was wrong. Alone with Greene in his apartment, she became the target of a three-hour sexual attack. He ripped off her blouse, tied her up, and fondled her sexually. She assumed that it was the unpredictable 4-year-old Tyrone who had taken control, but she could not dissuade him.

  Once, Sam appeared and Dr. L. was sure he would protect her, but he disappeared quickly. Finally, she was able to break free of her bonds after Greene stole her car and drove off. She wasn’t able to call for help because he had ripped his phone out of the wall before he left.

  Dr. L. went to a nearby hospital emergency room to be treated for her cuts and bruises and called police from there.

  William Greene was arrested and went to trial on charges of kidnapping and indecent liberties. He was found guilty in 1995, but that judgment was set aside on an appeal by Greene’s defense team. They asked for a new trial because the original judge refused to allow the MPD defense into the trial.

  In November 2003, Greene’s second trial, which lasted five weeks, also ended in a guilty verdict, even though William Greene said he couldn’t be held legally responsible for something one of his personalities had done.

  Snohomish County Prosecutor Paul Stern and his deputy prosecutors put forth their belief that Greene wasn’t crazy at all, but a charismatic psychopath who had manipulated Dr. L. into providing him protection for his crimes.

  The jury agreed, and found Greene guilty of kidnapping and indecent liberties once more. He also faced what convicts call “The Big Bitch”—life in prison—under Washington State’s “three strikes, you’re out” statute. He was subsequently sentenced to life.

  Dr. L., while grateful that her long ordeal was over, was heartsick about the sentence. She still believed Greene to be mentally ill and felt he should be in a mental hospital, rather than in prison. Other experts disagreed, especially after William Bergen Greene’s DNA profile was compared to the semen left at Sylvia Durante’s murder site. There was no longer any question about who had raped and killed her. Nevertheless, he pleaded not guilty to her murder on December 2, 2003.

  Would Sylvia have let William Greene into her apartment on that other December twenty-four years earlier? Probably. She knew him from the stained-glass class, and he had never seemed at all dangerous.

  Sylvia’s parents had waited a long time for some kind of justice for her. Her 77-year-old mother, Joan Durante, said, “She’s never been out of our minds, of course. We’ve never been able to put this to rest. We didn’t know who or why, but we never gave up hope.”

  20

  The balance of the scales of justice was shifting, ever so gradually, and the “good guys” now had the tools they needed to crack cases that no one ever believed would be solved.

  Thirteen-year-old Kristen Sumstad was long thought to be a victim of the elusive Green River Killer, largely because her murder occurred during his prime killing time—in November 1982. She had been strangled just as the first Green River victims were in July and August. But Kristen was so young and so small that she seemed a child. She weighed only eighty-seven pounds. Her body, nude from the waist down, was discovered in a large cardboard box behind a Magnolia Hi-Fi store.

  In the beginning, hers was a murder case that seemed easy to solve. Her circle of friends were from her neighborhood, and she was usually with them, close to home. The pretty little girl with her shag haircut and undeveloped figure didn’t match the Green River victims at all, but her name stayed stubbornly on the list of victims for a few years. One or two of those dead girls had been almost as young as Kristen was, but none of them had vanished from the Magnolia neighborhood.

  Kristen had been seen and then she was gone in the flicker of a smile or the blink of an eye. Years later, when they were adults, I met women who had known Kristen when they were girls. They said, “We think we know who killed Kristen, but we can’t prove it. It was this boy who liked her.”

  The Cold Case Squad had heard the same thing, but they couldn’t prove it either—not at first.

  Although criminals are known to tell all manner of lies and devise hoaxes to trick the innocent, detectives aren’t usually expected to pull tricks. They have, always, the need to avoid the accusation of entrapment. I have written about wives who hired hit men to kill their husbands, who screamed “Entrapment!” when they learned that they had really “hired” detectives who turned around and arrested them after money changed hands. Police officers pretend to be prostitutes and arrest johns, and detectives who don’t even smoke shave their heads, grow beards, get fake tattoos, and become “drug dealers.”

  One of the best ways to cast a net out for scofflaws who owe big money for back traffic tickets or who evade arrest warrants has been for police departments to send them letters saying that they have won money or vacations or television sets. The idea is designed to get them all together in a warehouse or office building.

  And it works, although those felons and miscreants who show up are very, very annoyed when they get arrested instead of winning prizes.

  When Cold Case Squad detectives Dick Gagnon, Gregg Mixsell, and Linda Diaz needed to get DNA from a likely suspect in the rape and murder of Kristen Sumstad twenty years after her death, they came up with their own variation of creative approach.

  They had looked at statements given by teenagers in the Magnolia neighborhood and found several mentions of a 14-year-old boy who’d been seen several blocks away from the television/radio store pushing a hand cart—a dolly—the night before Kristen’s body was found.

  Some of those interviewed said he had a cardboard box on the hand cart. Detectives had talked to the boy—John Athan—and asked him about it. He looked nervous, but he explained why. “It wasn’t a box—I’ve been stealing firewood from the neighbors.”

  Athan was a friend of one of Kristen’s sisters, and he’d been part of the gang of kids who knew the four Sumstad girls. Some of them said he’d had a crush on Kristen and he stared at her all the time. But he was just a kid. And so was she. His story about the hand cart was suspect, but John Athan stuck to it doggedly. Detectives couldn’t picture a boy that age being capable of the violence done to Kristen. And even if they could, they had no way of proving it.

  But someone had raped Kristen and left body fluid in the form of ejaculate behind.

  Several years later, criminalists in the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab took some of the semen and attempted to isolate DNA from it. But it was too soon, and the process wasn’t refined enough yet to risk destroying all the semen. But, on their second try in 1992, they succeeded.

  Now Gagnon and Mixsell went looking for a way to get John Athan’s DNA. His DNA profile was entered into national data banks in computers that held DNA information on thousands of state and federal felons. But apparently he hadn’t been arrested, at least for anything more than a misdemeanor. Moreover, the detectives weren’t even sure where he was. He would be an adult—almost 35 years old.

  The Cold Case S
quad investigators found John Athan. He was living in Palisades Park, New Jersey, where he ran a contracting business. They had his address, but the question was how were they going to get his DNA? They didn’t have probable cause to obtain a search warrant to demand a blood sample.

  Criminalist Bev Himick of the State Patrol lab assured them that while a blood sample would be ideal, all she really needed to test against the DNA in the semen left behind by Kristen Sumstad’s killer was some saliva. Just a little spit, basically.

  Gagnon and Mixsell came up with a marvelously devious plan. If John Athan didn’t use one of those little damp sponges to moisten a stamp and seal an envelope, they thought of a way they could get their DNA sample.

  They had to offer him something tantalizing enough to use as bait in a solicitation by mail. A simple advertisement wouldn’t do it. Athan would probably toss out a consumer survey questionnaire. Most people did. But millions of people entered sweepstakes come-ons that came in their mailboxes, hoping they would be the one who got flowers, balloons, and a check for a million dollars. There were commercials about that on television all the time. Forget that there is no free lunch.

  What could they offer John Athan that would make him write back to them? Not a million dollars. It had to be something more believable.

  Using the letterhead of a nonexistent law firm, Mixsell and Gagnon informed Athan that he was eligible to join a class-action lawsuit against the City of Seattle by people who had been overcharged for parking tickets. Everyone had a parking ticket or two in their history. With interest and other money the city owed, the “law firm” suggested that Athan could benefit handsomely.

  All he had to do to join in the lawsuit was send back a letter saying he wanted to participate.

  It took a few weeks, but the letter from New Jersey came in. Now Bev Himick had plenty of saliva from which to extract a DNA profile. When she looked at the blurry dots on the printout, she saw that they lined up perfectly with the sampler that had been preserved for twenty years. John Athan’s DNA matched the DNA left in Kristen Sumstad’s body.

  The odds against the match being absolutely accurate, Himick said, were “One in fifty-nine quadrillion.”

  Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon went to Palisades Park and talked to Athan. Knowing that they could ask only a few questions, they planned their interrogation very carefully. To get the answer they needed, they proceeded cautiously.

  When they asked Athan about Kristen Sumstad, if he denied having had intercourse with her, they had him—because they knew his semen had been in her body. Athan could defuse that easily, however. All he had to say was that he and Kristen had experimented with sex, and their case against him would be weakened. If he had ejaculated into her vagina with her willing cooperation, they wouldn’t have a motive for murder.

  But when they asked Athan about Kristen Sumstad, he said, “I know very little about her.” He said he had no idea whom she might have had sex with.

  Dick Gagnon recalled, “He played right into our trap. If he’d have said, ‘Oh yes. We were boyfriend and girlfriend and I’d had sex with her once a week,’ it would have been difficult at that point. But he says, ‘Barely know her.’ ”

  If Athan had reacted like most suspects who had just been arrested, he would have shown some emotion. They expected him to question why they were there talking to him after two decades. But he didn’t. John Athan was angry, but he didn’t make any attempt to explain or deny what had—or not—happened in 1982. He didn’t say he was innocent.

  Returned to Seattle for trial, John Athan hired one of the city’s outstanding criminal-defense attorneys: John Muenster. Muenster attacked the two Cold Case Squad detectives for tricking his client, insisting that they had only proven Athan had sex with the petite seventh-grader—not that he had strangled her.

  But the jurors were more impressed with Bev Himick’s testimony on the DNA match than they were put off by how the defendant was caught.

  In spring 2004, after only four hours of deliberation, they found John Athan guilty of second-degree murder in the case of Kristen Sumstad, and he was sentenced to ten to twenty years in prison. Because he had been only 14 at the time of Kristen’s murder, his sentence was relatively light.

  21

  The years were passing, a torrent of time that left Sandy Bowman further behind. But she was not forgotten; Gregg Mixsell searched for every FIR (Field Investigation Report) of people who had been interviewed in connection with her death, and combed files to find any information that might have been lost. The Cold Case Squad was unaware that I still had the article I had written about Sandy way back in December 1970, and I didn’t know that her case had been reopened. I was sitting in trials in Orange County, California; Olathe, Kansas; Wilmington, Delaware; and San Antonio, Texas. And even if I had known, I’m not sure that what I had written would have helped them much, beyond giving them an overview of the case as it unfolded. I knew what the physical evidence was on December 17, 1968, but it had been tested then and found wanting.

  But the original case file on Sandy Bowman was being meticulously rebuilt so that Mixsell and Gagnon would have every bit of information they might need to finally solve a case that had gone so long without a last chapter.

  They were also working on a more recent case, one that made headlines all over America: the murder of 27-year-old Mia Zapata on July 6, 1993. When Mia was killed, Mixsell and Gagnon had just been promoted to detectives, but the Cold Case Squad was still a long way in the future.

  A lot of people who have never visited Seattle still picture it as the farthest outpost in the United States, half forest and orchards, part rodeo, part Boeing, and a lot of Microsoft, a place where it rains all the time. And, of course, the center of the universe for serial killers.

  It is all of those things and none of them. Still, it did seem an unlikely city to become the jumping-off place for the “grunge” movement of popular music, negative caterwauling to those born before the sixties, but inspiring and connecting to the angst of younger fans who understood the message sent by Kurt Cobain and his group Nirvana and by Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains.

  Mia Zapata was the lead singer in a punk rock band called the Gits, and while they weren’t as big as Nirvana and weren’t really grunge but rather punk rock, the Gits had first a huge local following, then wildly enthusiastic fans who crowded their concerts on the road, and soon a lucrative record deal looming ahead. By 1993, they were on their way, about to finish their second album and preparing to leave on a European tour. That spring and summer their tour of the West Coast exceeded even Mia’s expectations.

  Seattle was home to Mia Zapata, and Capitol Hill was her stomping ground. She had never had it easy, and she worked at Piecora’s, a pizza restaurant there, to get by until the Gits began to succeed. At 16, she probably couldn’t have visualized that her name and the band’s name would be familiar to punk rock devotees in countries far across the sea.

  Mia wasn’t classically pretty. She had a real face, a slim figure, and wore her light hair in dreadlocks. She once told a reporter for The Seattle Times that she strived to make her song lyrics appeal to everyone. “When people twice my age and half my age can relate to us, we must be doing something right.”

  In early July 1993, Mia confessed to one of her band members that she had a premonition about returning to Seattle. She considered herself intuitive, someone who got psychic feelings both good and bad about the future, and what she was feeling was something dark looming ahead.

  One of the songs in the Gits’ new album had lyrics that were eerily prophetic: “Go ahead and slash me up / Throw me all across this town / Because you know / You’re the one that can’t be found.”

  Mia was a feminist who lived her life independently, fearlessly—just as she seemed in her music. She was strong, flawed, sometimes a little over the edge, good-hearted, beloved by her fans, and full of deep emotions. She often walked alone through dark streets, almost daring anyone to bother her or endanger h
er.

  On July 6, Mia attended a gathering of friends at the Comet Tavern, located up one of Seattle’s steep hills from the downtown area, near 9th and Pike. It was Tuesday night, after the long Fourth of July weekend. The Comet was one of Mia’s favorite hangouts and she had lots of friends there. July 6 was the one-year anniversary of the death of a musician friend, and the mood of the crowd was somewhat reflective and nostalgic as they raised their glasses to the memory of old friends.

  Mia was a little intoxicated when she left the Comet Tavern. She was upset about an ex-boyfriend that night and muttered that she was going to find him and have it out with him. He lived nearby and it would have been like her to walk farther into Capitol Hill. She was at home there day or night.

  She didn’t find her ex. He was with another woman in the early hours of July 7, a woman who would supply him with a solid alibi—which he would soon need.

  Mia went to another friend’s apartment and hung out there until around two A.M. She said she was going to look for a cab, but she left walking. An hour and ten minutes later, Mia’s body was found near a curb in a dead-end street more than a mile away. She had been strangled with the cord of her Gits sweatshirt.

  Her body was “staged,” according to some who saw it, in the shape of a cross, arms extended, feet together.

  Mia Zapata, who had both distrusted the world in her lyrics and trusted her fellow man enough to walk dark streets alone in the wee hours of the morning, had met someone monstrous. She had suffered internal injuries severe enough to be fatal even if she hadn’t been strangled, and she had been raped.

  Thousands of people, many who had never known Mia Zapata, mourned her death and demanded justice for her. The Gits broke up soon after her death. Fellow feminist musicians raised money to found Home Alive, which offers affordable self-defense classes for women.

  In 1996, a benefit concert was held to help fund the classes and to hire a private investigator who might help unravel the mystery of Mia’s unsolved homicide. Members of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Foo Fighters, and Pearl Jam were among the headliners.