Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases Read online

  As the investigators on the scene waited, one of the men standing nearby said his family owned the property. He said his name was Owen Carlson and that he owned the True Value hardware store that was located nearby. Carlson gave Deputy Tate a quick history of some of the myriad tenants who had rented the yellow house over many decades.

  “My family’s had the old place here for years,” he explained. “My sister has been in charge of renting it out since back in the seventies. She leased it to so many people, but she’ll probably remember most of them—at least those families who stayed for a year or so. Myself, I only recall one family offhand. They lived here sometime in the midseventies; as I remember, it was a married couple and their daughter—or, rather, her daughter. They lived here about a year, I guess.

  “There was kind of a strange thing, though,” Carlson continued. “More than a year after they moved out, some women came by my store and asked me if I knew where they might be able to locate the older woman’s husband and the younger women’s father. They was trying to find him because, I guess, he’d just plain disappeared.”

  The store owner didn’t think the women who contacted him were related to the family who had lived there; the little girl whom he’d seen actually living there was much younger than the two sisters, and the grown daughter was years older.

  “They told me that they were from someplace in New Mexico, I believe, and that their dad suddenly quit keeping in touch. Evidently, that wasn’t like him. They wanted to walk through the property because this was the last location they had for him—our old house.”

  “So you took them through it?” Tate asked.

  “Yeah—as I recall, I did, but I couldn’t answer their questions; I just told them that everyone from that family had been gone for a long time. I had no idea where.”

  Asked if he knew the allegedly missing man’s name, the witness shook his head. “It was odd, though …”

  “What was odd?” Deputy Tate asked.

  “One of the daughters said that her father’s new wife was the type of person who would kill him.”

  “Kill him?” Tate asked, surprised. “Was she serious?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know her—never saw her again. Don’t even know her name—but I recall that her first name sounded like a nickname. She could have been exaggerating. My sister would know more, but she’s on a trip and won’t be back until Thursday evening.”

  Forensics chief Steve Wilkins arrived and studied the bones in the black trash bag. He verified that in his opinion they were not animal bones after all. They were human.

  As Wilkins delicately examined the bones, Jason Tate looked down at the ground beneath the excavator, which was about fifteen feet away from the first bone find. He saw that there were several more bones lying there. He pointed them out to Wilkins and they marked their location with evidence flags.

  A Pierce County medical examiner’s deputy—Bert Osborne—agreed with Wilkins’s opinion. Osborne had no doubt that these scattered bones had come from a human being. How long they had been buried in the earth was anyone’s guess; it surely had been a long time as they were all denuded of any soft tissue. It would take a meticulous laboratory examination by a forensic anthropologist to determine if they were male or female, the possible ethnic background of the deceased, along with height, weight, and other characteristics that had existed when they had been part of a living frame.

  Osborne and criminalist Wilkins made the decision to leave the bones where they were. In the morning, they would come back and set up a grid, beginning where the first bones were found and extending throughout the property so they could be sure they had discovered any bones that remained, as well as other items that might give them some clue to who the dead man (or woman) had been. They didn’t know yet if they were looking at what had been a natural death, an accident, a suicide, or a murder.

  If this was a homicide case, the investigators hoped against hope that a killer might have left something behind that would identify him—or her—too.

  It grew late. The sun had set and it was murky dark when the investigators cleared the scene close to eleven. The entire area was sealed off with crime scene tape, and deputies working the Third Watch were stationed around the large lot to protect it until the sun rose and they could work in daylight.

  Until they did, the mysterious bones would remain where they had probably rested for decades. Every single person who had entered the lot—both law enforcement and citizens—had been required to sign the sheriff’s log that began when the first responding deputy arrived.

  Pierce County detectives had virtually nothing to go on at this point. Whatever had happened, it had occurred a long time before and they would need to explore the tangled misadventures of those who had once lived or visited here. They might be seeking the identity of a vagrant who had only bedded down for a time. The deserted house would have been tempting for someone low on cash. It offered protection from the rain and wind. Probably no one asked for rent or even noticed that a so-far nameless man or woman had hidden behind the dark windows.

  Deputy Robert LaTour arrived at the Canyon Road property at a quarter to nine the next morning—Tuesday, June 5—and took over the security watch from Deputy Jim Junge, whose peers called him “Jungle Jim.” An hour later, a man who lived right next door to the bone site walked up.

  He said that he hadn’t talked to any of the investigators the day before, although the land was legally owned by his cousins. Still, he thought he might have something to add that might help.

  “My uncle passed away some years ago,” he explained, “and this property kind of went downhill. I moved in next door—right over there—in 1995. That was after my mother passed. I moved into her house.”

  “Any idea who the person we found might be?” LaTour asked.

  The neighbor shook his head. Unfortunately, he had little to add to the old property’s history or knowledge about who the tenants might have been over the years. By 1995 when he moved in next door, there didn’t seem to be any tenants—at least not any who stayed very long.

  Next, a woman approached Deputy LaTour. She was concerned because someone in her family had called her after seeing a TV news report the night before about the discovery of the unidentified remains.

  “She told me to get a ‘good criminal attorney,’” the woman said to LaTour. “And then she laughed because it was a joke.”

  But it wasn’t too funny, now that she thought about it. “We lived on the property for ten years—from 1985 to 1995,” the former tenant explained. “And we had a dog that used to dig up bones in the yard. The dog pen was right over there.”

  LaTour glanced at the area and realized that that was where the black plastic garbage bag of bones and some of the other bones were located. He asked the former tenant what she had done with the bones.

  “Oh,” she said. “I took them away from my dog and threw them in the garbage. I figured they were animal bones—but now that I think about it—they were kind of big.”

  Crime scene investigators (CSIs) Steve Wilkins and Adam Anderson, Clarence “Skip” Mason, and Steve Mell arrived at the bone site five minutes before eight the next morning, prepared to resume digging. With rebar posts and string, they marked off squares measuring two feet by two feet. This would enable them to accurately identify and revisit the location of whatever they might find.

  Ideally, they hoped to find a good portion of the body in a makeshift grave and learn what position it was in when it was buried. Sometimes that made the difference in determining if the person had died of suicide or homicide.

  They worked with trowels as well as shovels. If they found an actual grave, they would use brushes to carefully sweep dirt from bones. Now they began to dig and sift the earth they brought up.

  It was tedious work and the sun was baking hot. When each square had offered up whatever it held, they checked it off on the grid. Throughout the nine hours the investigators toiled, they found several more b
ones.

  But no real grave.

  They tallied up a grim list of what they discovered:

  1. One black plastic bag: containing two pelvic bones, a femur (thigh bone) that appeared to have been cut with some kind of tool, a tailbone (the sacrococcyx), several rib bones, some almost unidentifiable fabric, and several lengths of string.

  2. From the Grid Squares: #14, three ribs; #19, one vertebra; #20, three vertebrae; #21, two ribs and one vertebra; #22, one vertebra, #27, one vertebra, three rib bones, and cloth; #32, a bone fragment; #40, some charred bones; #42, one vertebra and a collarbone; #42, bone fragment; #44, piece of black plastic bag.

  On the west side of the grid, they found more vertebrae and a scapula (shoulder blade). North of the grid on the east side of the backhoe, they located another cut femur and more shreds of the plastic bag. On the east side of the dirt pile they found a small piece of metal, its use undetermined.

  On top of the dirt pile, the sheriff’s searchers collected more rib bones, more vertebrae, clothing pieces, a leather belt, and some twine segments.

  Had any of the body parts been buried in lower ground that often became waterlogged, the searchers might have found what is colloquially known as “grave wax,” where the flesh literally turns to a kind of soap. This transmogrification can remain for decades after death. It is, however, more often found in corpses located in lakes and rivers. The proper term for grave wax is “adipocere,” but these bones were absolutely dry.

  All of the found body parts and debris were packed carefully and taken to the County-City Building evidence room in Tacoma for safekeeping.

  Chapter Two

  By June 6, 2007, Pierce County detective Lieutenant Brent Bomkamp assigned Detective Sergeant Ben Benson as the lead detective on the mysterious case of the unidentified bones. Benson would have to investigate the background of the nameless remains by himself; his usual partner—Denny Wood—was working on another puzzling homicide and had to stick with that.

  In his twenty-plus years in the sheriff’s office, Ben Benson had worked in almost every department there. I met him when he was working undercover, exposing narcotics rings. When Ben was a road deputy and I was a reporter, I once rode in the shotgun seat of his patrol car. We were going more miles an hour than I care to remember through a violent storm during Third Watch on a 911 call. This was long before he was assigned to homicide cases. Along with Ed Troyer—now the media liaison for the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office—and some of the other young deputies, I was a frequent guest on a radio show that was designed to let the public know what their local law enforcement officers were doing to keep them safe.

  Benson, Troyer, and Brian Halquist, the radio show’s producer, even helped me move my furniture into the new house I bought back in 1989. If my neighbors had known that my movers were the narcotics squad helping me out in their off-duty hours, I’m not sure what they would have thought.

  But I never told them.

  Later, Ben Benson piloted fixed-wing planes for the sheriff’s office, photographing the ground below in all kinds of criminal probes. Ed Troyer, along with Benson and many other Pierce County detectives and volunteers, has participated in a number of charitable projects that Troyer organizes. A few years ago, they drove a convoy to Mexico to deliver refurbished ambulances and fire trucks to poverty-stricken areas. After the Japanese earthquake and tidal waves, Troyer collected a warehouse full of donated items to ship to Japan for the disaster victims. What he couldn’t ship to Japan, he personally delivered to Alabama tornado victims.

  Volunteering to help those in need is not, of course, exclusive to the Pierce County officers. Law enforcement personnel all over America are always among those first in line to aid in disasters.

  Ben Benson was the one who was assigned to investigate this case of the buried bones single-handedly.

  In that first week of June 2007, Benson knew within a few days after the unearthed bones surfaced that they were human. Now he learned that Dr. Katherine M. Taylor of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office—the only forensic anthropologist in Washington State—had determined that the dead person was a male. She was able to determine his sex by studying the pelvic morphology, noting that the narrow subpubic angle and the sciatic notch were those of a man and did not demonstrate the wider pelvis women have that enables them to deliver babies.

  In addition, Dr. Taylor saw that the heads of the thigh bones and other bony processes were “robust,” something seldom found in females.

  The few pieces of skull told her that the cranial sutures were firmly closed, and the vertebrae bore signs of a man who was almost certainly over forty.

  Dr. Taylor couldn’t really determine how tall this man had been; there weren’t enough complete long bones to estimate that. The same was true of the nameless man’s ethnic ancestry. Forensic anthropologists use cranial, facial, and dental uniqueness to indicate racial and other ancestral signs. But these remains had no face or teeth, and only a partial skull.

  Although there was no skull per se, she was able to examine the occipital rim on the back of the head, forehead, and upper jaw. She could not tell, however, if there was any solid evidence of foul play.

  “There are some cracks in the pieces of skull,” she pointed out. “It’s possible they were caused by a gunshot to the head—but they could have been caused by other things, too.”

  Dr. Taylor laid out all of the bones on an examining table, forming a partial skeleton. She then drew a chart showing the bones that were missing in white and shading in deep black those that had been found. (You can see this chart in the photo section.)

  There was no evidence remaining of possible trauma and no soft tissue that might have once held a bullet, but Katherine Taylor looked at the spots where some bones had been truncated. She could discern that someone had used a very sharp instrument—most likely a power saw—to dismember this body. The breaks were too clean—too smooth to be the result of after-death drying and weathering. Someone had used the saw to slice through the bones at the thighs, upper arms, tip of the chin, and the shoulder blades.

  Benson felt that it was unlikely that the body was that of a transient who’d taken shelter in the empty house. Why would anyone have gone to so much trouble to dismember a stranger? No. Someone had surely killed this nameless man and made sure that all identifying characteristics were separated from the rest of the bones.

  Benson had no identification yet; he knew only that whatever had happened had taken place more than ten years earlier—quite possibly decades before. He believed the victim had been a middle-aged male and deduced that someone had wanted to hide his death and any connection he might have had to the old house on Canyon Road East.

  But why? Motive has so much impact on whether a homicide can be solved. The detectives had no idea what human emotions and interactions had fanned flames hot enough to motivate someone to commit murder. And they undoubtedly wouldn’t have until they could identify the disassembled body.

  The information gleaned from Katherine Taylor’s report narrowed down the parameters of positive identification, although there were still more questions than answers. Many tenants had come and gone from this house and acreage. Which of them—if any—might have had reason to commit murder and hide all signs that it had occurred?

  Certainly the killer or killers must believe by now that they had, indeed, gotten away with murder. The Pierce County detective wondered if those responsible lived nearby and if they might not be feeling more and more anxious as the news of the body find accelerated on television and in the local papers. Unearthed and unidentified bodies are almost always good fodder for the top of the nightly news.

  Lieutenant Bomkamp sent Benson out to find everyone who had once occupied the tall yellow house.

  Or had reason to visit there.

  Fortunately, some of the extended family members who owned the property in the Summit district west of Puyallup had remarkable recall. Over the years, Owen Carlson’s sister Marilyn
Miller had been mostly responsible for renting the house. She and her husband were reported to be on their way back from a trip to Kansas City. Her brother was confident that she would be able to trace rental records back many years.

  While Ben Benson waited to interview Mrs. Miller, he reread the statement from the woman who had lived in the rental house from 1985 to 1995.

  “We moved into the house on Canyon Road in 1985,” she’d written. “I was seven months pregnant. When we moved out in 1995, our niece and nephew moved in and lived there for a few years before they built their first home. Then my brother-in-law and his family moved in. After that the Carlson family decided to sell the property, and the house has now been empty for some time.”

  Ben Benson realized that no one had officially lived there for six or seven years. He shook his head as he read the last comment on the former tenant’s statement: “There is something we were told and we’re not sure if it is a fact! A family lived there at some time and they had a nephew who had sex with dead bodies—so you might want to check that out …”

  Was this an urban myth that had begun long ago? Deserted old houses often are the subjects of totally specious “ghost stories.”

  Or could it possibly be true? Benson was inclined to think it was probably the former, but he would follow it back to its beginning, as good detectives always follow every clue—as unlikely as they might seem.

  In the end, he found no confirmation that the family of former renters had harbored a necrophile.

  But even in the bright warmth of June days, there was something about the property that gave many of those who investigated the mystery shivers up and down their spines.

  A rabbit running over their graves? Or just the knowledge that someone’s violent death had been hidden here for so long?