Last Dance, Last Chance Read online

  One of the young women had cashed a large-denomination bill to pay for their lunch of a salad and a hamburger.

  “They were sitting on that big log across the road,” a resident at the Broken Arrow Trailer Park just down the road recalled. “They looked like they were resting. Then they were picked up by a man in a green 1964 Ford or Chevy.”

  William Batten drove such a car, but there were lots of green Fords and Chevrolets. The witness didn’t have a license number or a detailed description of the driver. He had had no reason to be suspicious of him.

  Sumpter learned that Batten had gotten himself into some familiar trouble in Kitsap County two years earlier. In October, he’d been found guilty on three counts of second-degree assault involving three young children. Free on bail after the conviction, he’d been released to undergo treatment at a mental health clinic in Grays Harbor County. His wife was still with him, but her children had been removed from the Battens’ custody.

  It is not the expected progression for a man who victimizes children to turn to attacking adults—but in the world of the sadist, nothing is truly predictable.

  By Sunday night, Sumpter and his crew had gathered voluminous circumstantial evidence that pointed strongly to William Batten. They had learned that Batten was employed at the Saginaw Shake Mill, but that he had not worked during the week of April 14 until Friday, April 18, the day the bodies were found.

  District Court Judge L. Thomas Parker issued a search warrant for the trailer where William Batten lived with his wife and for the adjoining apartment complex where relatives lived. The probable cause request also listed certain vehicles Batten had access to.

  At 7:00 A.M., Lieutenant Clevenger, Sergeant Bob Baldarson, Detectives Nick Johnson and Veryl Hutchinson, Deputies Tom Hranac and Dan Crisp, Sergeant Larry Deason, and FBI agents Shepp and Wick arrived at the apartment complex where the Battens’ 35-foot trailer was parked. They were armed with the search warrant.

  Clevenger searched the trailer; the other investigators searched the relatives’ apartment, grounds, and garbage cans. During his search Clevenger found a pair of stained men’s jockey shorts (which the FBI lab later determined to have probable human blood and semen stains, although the garment had been washed and it was impossible to say positively what blood type the stains were). He found a jackknife atop a television set and, in the second right-hand kitchen drawer, a 10-inch blade, which had been ground down to a sharp edge on one side. A chunk of steel had been knocked off the blade. The suspect’s wife said the knife had not been used in six months—but Clevenger noted that there was paper towel residue clinging to the blade, which appeared to have been left there very recently, as though the knife had been wiped free of some substance. He did not find the missing earring or Gaelisa’s glasses.

  The knife matched exactly the type of weapon used in the double murders. Just as important in evidentiary value were some items of men’s clothing found soaking in a washer full of cold water in the apartment house next door. Clevenger retrieved a pair of brown men’s slacks and a green shirt. Dried, and sent to the FBI lab, they proved to be heavily stained with human blood. Again, the washing process made determination of blood type impossible.

  William Batten was at work at the shake mill while the search was carried out; his wife was very cooperative with the investigators. Thinking back to the Monday night when the crime had probably occurred, Batten’s wife recalled that he had been extremely upset and nervous, but she thought that was because he’d just quit smoking.

  She said that she had asked him to come next door to the apartment house with her to watch television, but he said he was too nervous. He told her he thought he would take a walk instead. When she returned to their trailer about two and a half hours later, he was there.

  Later on in the week—on Wednesday night—Batten left the trailer after she was asleep. She thought he’d gone to a local tavern. This didn’t strike her as unusual at all. Her husband often went for walks at night after she was asleep.

  A relative of the shake-mill worker said that Batten had commented to him that the newspaper pictures of the victims looked familiar—that he thought they were some girls he’d picked up hitchhiking.

  The missing pieces of the case were rapidly falling into place. Gael and Tina had hitchhiked from the Vashon Island ferry to Olympia, Washington State’s capital city, and then along the old highway west, where they had passed through Satsop and McCleary. They had eaten lunch and then been picked up by a man in a green Ford or Chevy heading north toward the ocean beaches.

  At that rate, they should have arrived on the beach where they set up camp long before sunset, which occurred at 6:26 P.M. on April 14. Harold Sumpter mulled over a possible scenario.

  Suppose Batten had given them a ride, left them at the beach, and bided his time until night cloaked the area with blackness? There would have been no hurry; his quarry was waiting, unaware, in the driftwood lean-to. He could return whenever he chose.

  As they discussed whether they had enough probable cause to ask for an arrest warrant, Harold Sumpter kept full-time stakeouts on the mill worker. Rumors were rife around the close-knit community, and Sumpter particularly feared two things: that William Batten might leave the area before an arrest could be effected, or that angry citizens might decide to carry out their own punishment for the horrendous crime if the suspect was not soon put behind bars.

  Batten continued to report to work at the shake mill and to return home to his trailer each night, but he went for no more walks on the beach.

  Memorial services were held for Tina Jacobsen at the Island Funeral Services Chapel on Vashon Island on Tuesday, April 22. Gaelisa Burton’s services were held the following day at the Vashon Island Episcopal Church. It was a poignant last goodbye for two young women on the brink of life who had expected to find three days of tranquility and meditation on a quiet beach. Instead, their bodies had lain undetected in the windswept shelter as the ocean changed from green to blue to angry black in its ageless ebb and flow while the gentle folk of Moclips went about their regular routines unaware.

  At least, all but one of them were unaware.

  As the week progressed and constant surveillance was kept on Batten, the case investigators continued to question townspeople and county residents about the movements of the dead girls and Batten on that fatal Monday. They finally located a truck driver who corroborated the story told by the witness who had seen the girls get into a green Ford near the Burgess Motel. But their trail ended there. No one who could recall seeing Gaelisa and Tina after that.

  On Friday, April 25, William Batten was arrested at his home, and the green Ford was impounded. Two deputies drove him to Olympia, where Washington State Patrol Major John Kendersei, one of the Northwest’s foremost polygraphists, awaited. Kendersei had been apprised of the evidence and facts of the case.

  Batten, 28, was a big man with wildly tousled dark hair, a muscular six feet tall. He seemed a little antsy as he was ushered into Kendersei’s office. He was informed of his rights and asked to take a lie-detector test, but he changed his mind, intimidated by the wires and needles that can winnow truth from lie.

  He muttered, “I’d never pass it.” Instead, the suspect said he would write out a statement in his own hand. He scribbled over six legal-size pages and then did it over. Although he was not satisfied with the first statement, both accounts were similar in detail.

  Even though witnesses had seen Batten pick up two girls matching Gael’s and Tina’s descriptions only 2 miles north of Hoquiam (and about 28 miles from where their bodies were found), he insisted that he had picked them up much closer to the beach—at the Copalis Crossing. He said that he had given them a ride because he knew what it was like to hitchhike himself, and that he’d thought they were about 15 or 16. They had told him they were headed for Moclips or Taholah. He had asked them if they minded if he drove to Moclips via Pacific Beach—and that, he said, was fine with them.

  He wrote that h
e had pointed out some campsites to them, but they weren’t interested, and he’d assumed that they were planning to meet someone in the area. If that part of his statement was true, Tina and Gaelisa may have only pretended that they were going to meet someone as a protective, discouraging ploy with Batten.

  According to Batten, he dropped the two young women off in Moclips, and they walked away. Then he went to the mobile home that he shared with his wife.

  He wrote that he was nervous because he’d been laid up after an accident at work and because his mental health counselor had moved away, and he couldn’t relate well to his new one.

  That Monday night, he said, he told his wife he was going for a walk and invited her to come along. “She asked me to wait and she’d come with me—but I was too nervous. So I left.”

  He said he’d left, telling her he’d be gone an hour and a half to two hours.

  Because it was chilly, he’d put on a pair of coveralls over his shirt and pants; he wrote that he headed first for a tavern and then changed his mind and walked out toward Moclips River. When he got out to the end of the tracks, he said he’d seen a campfire burning near the driftwood huts. He expected to find some of the “beach kids,” or at least someone to talk to.

  The investigators had never found any indication that the victims had built a fire on the beach.

  Batten wrote that he had walked close enough to the fire to recognize the same girls he’d given a ride to. He joined them, and they talked.

  As always, in a homicide situation, only the suspect’s statement can be given. The victim has no voice at all, and Batten’s version of what occurred demanded scrutiny.

  He recalled that he had told the girls he was married and told them his wife’s name. He insisted that they had invited him inside the hut because the spray was up and it was cold. He then wrote that the girls had attempted to seduce him (a common fantasy in confessional statements) and that they had taken off their clothes.

  Since Tina and Gaelisa had been bound before an attempt was made to remove their clothing, this statement had to be a blatant lie.

  Batten’s fantasy confession continued: he wrote that he started to leave, and the girls threatened to tell his wife that he had been intimate with them even though he had not. He said he had then been forced to tie them up with some twine he found in his jumpsuit pocket.

  He said that he had tried to leave again, but the girls had laughed at him and said they could holler for help and say that he tried to rape them and that their bound hands would be proof. So then he’d been forced to cut gags from a shirt.

  He admitted that he had gagged Tina and then Gael, when he heard a scream. As he turned around, the knife still in his hand had “just happened” to stick into Tina.

  And then he had panicked because he thought he had killed her, so he had to do the same to Gael, or she would tell on him. He stabbed each of the victims several times and had turned to leave when Tina made a sound. It was then that he’d turned around and stabbed her in the back.

  He said he had become nauseated then and had thrown up in the river. Then he had headed home to get advice from his wife about what he should do, but she hadn’t been there. So he had washed his hands, wiped off the knife, and put it back in the drawer. By the time his wife returned, he’d been too “shook up” to talk.

  For almost four days, the victims had lain undiscovered. He denied that he had returned to the beach after he left on Monday night.

  Batten was taken back to the Grays Harbor County Jail and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Judge Parker set his bail at $2,000,000 and appointed a local law firm to defend him, as he had no funds for an attorney.

  Sheriff Sumpter was concerned that the suspect might attempt suicide, and even thought a lynching attempt might be mobilized against him. He kept an around-the-clock watch on Batten in his high-security cell, both with a special guard and with closed-circuit TV.

  On April 29, William Batten pleaded not guilty to the murders before Superior Court Judge John Schumacher. At that time, he was denied bail.

  On June 3, Batten appeared before Superior Court Judge Jay Hamilton in Kitsap County and was sentenced for his three earlier convictions on the second-degree assault charges involving the three children. He was sentenced to three concurrent 10-year terms on those charges, and returned to the Grays Harbor County Jail.

  William Batten’s initial defense was that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. It proved useless when he underwent psychiatric examination and the results did not establish mental illness that would meet the requirements under the M’Naughton Rule. Under M’Naughton, the killer has to have been unaware of the difference between right and wrong at the time of the crime, and to have made no attempt to escape or to cover up his crime. Batten knew that what he had done was wrong, and he told an elaborate story to take the blame off himself.

  During the second week in September 1975, William Batten appeared before a jury of seven women and five men. Prosecutor Janhunen told the jury that the crimes were vicious and premeditated, and he scoffed at Batten’s version of the fatal encounter wherein he asserted that the women had made sexual advances to him. Instead, Janhunen painted a picture of two young women stalked and taken by complete surprise.

  He surmised that Tina and Gaelisa were trapped in their mummy-type sleeping bags when Batten’s husky body loomed over them in their shelter.

  “I suggest to you that a decision was made by two 19-year-old girls not to fight.”

  Pinned in their sleeping bags, Tina and Gael could have been quickly subdued if the heavy defendant had merely lain across those bags.

  Prosecutor Janhunen pointed out that the girls’ desperate ploy of nonresistance meant “submitting to being tied up and gagged and going along with everything until the stabbing began.”

  Major Kendersei’s testimony regarding Batten’s oral and then written confession was one of the most damaging in the trial. That, combined with the profusion of physical and lab evidence gathered by Sheriff Sumpter and his men, convinced a jury. It took them only two and a half hours to find Batten guilty on two counts of first-degree murder. Batten showed no emotion as the verdict was read.

  On October 10, Batten was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison, plus the compulsory deadly weapon charge—meaning that he could not hope to be out of prison for more than 30 years.

  The investigation carried out by Sheriff Sumpter was a classic melding of old-time seat-of-the-pants lawman’s savvy and the utilization of modern forensic science. His detectives talked to hundreds of people, racking up more overtime hours than a small county’s budget could ever hope to reimburse. They knew that, but it didn’t matter to them. They found a killer, and they found him before he could harm anyone else. Prosecutor Janhunen’s courtroom expertise did the rest.

  Gaelisa Burton’s mother, Grace, had raised her as a single parent, and much of Gael’s gentleness and philosophies about life came from her mother. After she buried her daughter, Grace Burton became active in Washington State’s first group to support the rights of victims: Families and Friends of Victims of Violent Crimes and Missing Persons, volunteering to help other parents who had suffered similar losses. She worked at her full-time job as a caretaker for the ill and the elderly in their homes, and then gave many hours a week to Families and Friends.

  Harold Sumpter was named National Police Officer of the Month for his work on the Burton-Jacobsen case as well as for other successful investigations and service to the public in Grays Harbor County. He died of a heart attack in 1999.

  William Batten is still incarcerated in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, and his first possible release date is in 2043.

  The Desperate Hours

  There haveprobably been dozens of movies about killers on the run who burst into the homes of strangers and hold them hostage. It is a terrifying thought, particularly with the current rise of so-called home invasion robberies in cities. What would you do if
you opened your door to find a man with a gun? Even worse, what would you do if you were a woman home alone with your three small children?

  That ultimate nightmare happened to Patricia Jacque five days before Christmas. December 20 is the beginning of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. On that day it doesn’t get light until after eight and the sun disappears well before four in the Northwest.

  The Jacques’ house in Maple Valley, Washington, was set far back from Wax Road in a forest of tall fir trees. Usually Pat didn’t feel isolated; their property was ideal for raising children. Now her three—Steve, 7; David, 5; and Diane, 3—were wired with excitement over having a Christmas tree with packages underneath. Patricia had managed to corral them and sit them in front of the television to watch cartoons.

  Hoping she had a free fifteen minutes or so, she headed for the kitchen to fix supper. When she glanced out the window it was so dark that it might as well have been midnight. The rain lashing at the windows made it seem as if their house was in a black cocoon. In the daytime, it was easier to see neighbors’ homes, although they were a good distance down Wax Road. When it got dark, she sometimes felt as if they were all alone. Still, Pat was never afraid. The very fact that they were so far from heavily populated areas helped to keep street crimes and burglars away.

  Pat was reaching into the refrigerator when she was startled to hear a loud knock on the front door. Her first thought was that something had happened to her father-in-law. He lived several hundred yards down—and across—the road, and he had recently had a stroke. They all worried about him, and she hurried to answer the door, thinking maybe he was in trouble.

  “A man was standing there,” she said. “He said there had been an accident and he needed to use the phone. I didn’t open the door right away, but he just pushed his way inside. That was when I saw that he was carrying a rifle.”