Kiss Me, Kill Me and Other True Cases Read online

  As the Stantons waited for her to come back to her apartment, John and his wife were frightened for Connie. It had been dark for two hours and there was no sign of her.

  Stanton called his family in Leavenworth on the slight chance that Connie had decided to ride over there with John Canaday instead. Maybe she had tried to get a message to him that he hadn’t received. But his heart sank when he learned she wasn’t with their parents.

  John Stanton called the police and insisted on making a missing-persons report. Two patrolmen agreed to take the information since the neighbors had said his sister had been gone for more than twenty-four hours. He also called a mutual friend of his and Connie’s to see if he had heard from her. Joe Sternholm* said he hadn’t talked to her at all, but he was so concerned that he drove at once to Connie’s apartment to wait with Stanton and his wife.

  Early the next morning, John Stanton and Joe Stern-holm phoned Canaday’s ex-wife. She hadn’t heard from Connie, either, although she’d expected to see her during her weekend visit in Leavenworth.

  “What kind of car does John drive?” Stanton asked.

  “It’s a white station wagon. I’m not sure of the make but it’s small, and it’s either a ’65 or a ’66. Why?”

  “I think he has Connie with him. She wasn’t at her place when I came to pick her up.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “What’s the address in Seattle where his folks live?”

  She gave him an address near 125th and Dayton Avenue North. It was almost impossible for either of them to imagine that Connie would have gone willingly with Canaday, not when she had promised to wait for her brother. And John Canaday had changed since he’d come back from the service. He wasn’t the boy they had known in high school.

  • • •

  When the landlord let Connie’s worried brother and his wife into her apartment, it was perfectly neat—as it always was. It was so completely normal that, like Mary Annabelle Bjornson’s, it looked as if Connie had only stepped out for a moment. The two women had lived only a few blocks from one another.

  12

  The difference between the two disappearances was that John Stanton knew whom his sister had left with. At least, he had some place to start looking for her, and the police had run John Canaday’s name through the Department of Motor Vehicle Registration so that they had a license number. Stanton enlisted Joe Sternholm’s help so that one of them was watching either Connie’s apartment or John Canaday’s parents’ house around the clock. As close as they could determine, Connie had been missing from her apartment for more than two days without contacting anyone. She was an adult, and it was her own business whom she chose to be with, but they all knew she would never have left with Canaday without notifying someone.

  Still, the Vietnam vet had no police record, so it was difficult to explain to the missing-persons detectives why they were so worried. Had they known the hidden side of Canaday’s life, they would have been frantic—but only he held those memories. As it was, the Stantons and John Sternholm shared a presentiment that something awful was going to happen—or had already happened—to Connie.

  The two men and the Stantons’ uncle not only kept watch, they also continually scanned the streets between Connie’s place and John Canaday’s current residence for a small white station wagon.

  Late on Saturday night, February 22, Joe Sternholm drove past the house on Dayton Avenue North. As he circled the block, he spotted a white station wagon driving toward him. Because the nearby streetlight cast a glow over the vehicle, he was able to see that there were two people in the car—and he was quite sure he recognized Connie sitting in the passenger seat. But then the station wagon passed him, and Sternholm had to make a U turn to catch up with it. As he drove past the elder Canaday’s house again, he saw that the station wagon was now parked in the driveway, and he caught a glimpse of a man and woman on the porch, just entering the house.

  Sternholm looked for a phone booth and called John Stanton. “I think it’s Connie, and it must be Canady I saw,” Sternholm said. “Get here as soon as you can. I’ll sit on the house and block the driveway until you can get here.”

  Stanton immediately dialed the number at the Dayton Avenue house, where there had been no answer for two days. Now a man picked up the phone.

  “Is this John Canaday?” Stanton asked.

  “Yes,” a cautious voice answered.

  “Well, this is Connie’s brother. I understand you have my sister with you?”

  “No—no,” Canaday stammered. “I dropped her off in the University District last night.”

  “You’re a liar,” Stanton said evenly. “Someone just saw you take her into your house.”

  “Just a minute—” Canaday said. John Stanton could hear the sound of voices in the background, but he couldn’t tell who was talking or make out their words. It sounded as if Canaday had put his hand over the receiver.

  Finally, Canaday came back on the phone. He admitted that Connie was there with him.

  “Let me talk to her—right now!”

  “Just a minute.” There was another long stretch of waiting while the voices murmured somewhere in the room. “Okay,” Canaday said. “Here’s your sister.”

  And then Stanton heard Connie. She sounded frightened and she spoke very softly. He asked her if she was all right, but before she could answer, John Canaday grabbed the receiver away from her and said roughly. “She’s okay.”

  Stanton was not at all convinced of that. “I’m coming out to get her,” he told Canaday.

  “Okay—but be sure you come alone.”

  John Stanton had no intention of coming alone. Joe Sternholm was already there, watching the house, and Stanton brought his uncle with him. They had no idea what condition they would find Connie in as they sped north. It took them only ten minutes to get to the house where she was.

  As they pulled up, the front door burst open and Connie came running toward them. She was crying, her eyes were red, and as she got closer they could see that she had purple bruises on her mouth and face, and rope burns around her neck.

  “Be careful,” she warned them. “He’s got guns and rifles in there.”

  She was so close to hysteria that the men who rescued her didn’t bombard her with questions, but they all feared she had been raped. Connie told her brother that Canaday had held her prisoner for two nights in a mountain cabin at Rainbow Springs up on Stevens Pass, and that he had then forced her to come back to Seattle with him to his parents’ house. John and Joe helped her into John’s car. It was well before cell phones were invented, but one of the men sprinted to a phone and called the Seattle police to report that they had found Connie and she had been kidnapped and was injured.

  Within minutes, they heard the sound of sirens. Patrol officers Robert Bender and Charles Lindbloom listened to Stanton’s explanation of his desperate efforts to find his sister. They could see the bruises around Connie Stanton’s mouth and noted her disheveled appearance. She wasn’t able to tell them much more about what had happened, but she warned them that the man inside the house had guns.

  If John Canaday did have weapons in the house, he hadn’t fired at Connie’s relatives and Joe Sternholm. He’d simply slammed the door behind Connie as she fled. She was still sobbing so much that she couldn’t give her brother or the police any information about where she had been since Thursday or what had happened to her.

  John Stanton had the feeling that if they hadn’t found her just in time they might never have found her alive. Canaday had abducted her—for whatever bizarre reason. Why, then, would he have taken the chance of bringing her back to his parents’ house? He must have known that she would tell them what had happened to her.

  Maybe he hadn’t meant to let her go at all, but Canaday had little choice once he realized that there were witnesses who knew that Connie Stanton was with him. They had feared that he might try to kill her. Now that they saw how battered and bruised she was, and the ugly rope burns on
her neck, they realized that their worst imaginings probably weren’t far off. She was shivering, not from the bitter cold, but from shock.

  They watched tensely as Bender and Lindbloom approached the house, expecting to hear the sound of a gunshot inside, convinced that Canaday’s behavior had turned irrational enough that he would either kill himself or the policemen. But there was only quiet—until the two officers pounded on the door and then stood back, one on each side, guns drawn.

  And then the front door opened and they saw Canaday’s silhouette outlined against the lights inside. He wasn’t holding a gun. Instead, he stood aside as he let the two officers in.

  John Canaday put up no resistance when he was informed that he was under arrest for assault and for suspicion of kidnapping. They advised him of his Miranda rights and handcuffed him.

  He watched silently as Bender and Lindbloom searched his station wagon. Under the front edge of the driver’s seat, they found a trench knife and two pairs of gloves. They found several lengths of rope on the backseat and on the floorboards in the rear. They moved into the house, where he showed them his room. Canaday did not object to their search or demand to see a search warrant. They found another glove there, a gray blanket that was identical to one in his vehicle, and a Navy peacoat with his name sewn inside. The actual crimes where he was a suspect—kidnapping, abduction, and assault—had ended only a few minutes earlier and the possible evidence the two officers found was fresh and connected to the charges. If they didn’t seize it and mark it into evidence, it might very well disappear.

  The battered young woman with recent rope burns around her neck waited just outside. If the crime had been in the past, the officers would have had to get a search warrant, but when a law officer literally steps into the middle of a crime that, in essence, continues, a search warrant is not required. Thanks to the stubborn efforts of Connie Stanton’s brother and her friends, she was alive.

  The consensus was that she surely had suffered a sexual attack, but she denied that she had been raped. And when she was taken to a hospital emergency room for treatment of her injuries, doctors verified that Connie was still a virgin, and she didn’t have the bruising on the inner sides of her thighs commonly found in women who have been forcibly raped.

  She was, however, in deep shock and seemed very confused. She asked what was going to happen to John Canaday. Connie remembered him as the top athletic star of her high school. He had gone with one of the most popular girls in school for a long time, and then been morose and inconsolable when the girl broke up with him. Connie had known nothing at all about his secret side—at least, not until he’d forced her to go to the cabin with him. Sometimes it seemed to her as though she might have agreed to go with him. Her mind would not focus.

  Connie Stanton had, in all likelihood, been subjected to brainwashing. First, John Canaday had been her friend in high school, and then her good friend’s husband, and recently a heartbroken divorced man—or at least he had told her that—and then her captor. But he hadn’t killed her. She kept reminding herself that he could have killed her while they were alone up in that isolated cabin, but he hadn’t done it.

  She thought that he must be a decent person underneath all the violence and anger.

  But that was part of the brainwashing. Although in the sixties few laymen understood what would later be called the Stockholm syndrome because the most infamous case where it was employed—the kidnapping of Patty Hearst—was years in the future, it was a potent psychological technique. A captive must pass through four phases of terror before he or she begins to be confused about who the “good guys” and who the “bad guys” are. And Connie Stanton had done that. She had been ripped from the place and the people where she felt safe; suffered a profound psychological shock when her “friend” became her captor; been programmed to believe what he told her because he repeated what he wanted her to believe over and over and over; and, finally, been promised a “reward.” In her case, as in most cases of deep programming, John Canaday had held out the promise that he would spare her life if she did what he told her to do.

  While Canaday was incarcerated and questioned by detectives, Connie Stanton struggled to cope with what had happened to her. She was physically exhausted and emotionally damaged. It was probably fortunate that she had no idea of the depth of Canaday’s depravity.

  Even Seattle police detectives had no idea what a big fish they had caught when they responded to John Stanton’s call for help on February 22. Canaday admitted taking Connie Stanton away from her apartment against her will and holding her captive in the mountain cabin, although he denied raping her. He surprised detectives, however, when he suddenly admitted to raping another young woman. To protect her privacy, she would be known in court files only as “B.B.” He had used a knife to threaten “B.B.” into submitting to a sexual assault, but he had let her go.

  This, he said, had occurred a short time before he kidnapped Connie Stanton. The difference between “B.B.” and Connie was clear: he knew Connie, while the other girl had been a stranger. Charges for rape and assault were filed against John Canaday in the attack on “B.B.” on March 1, 1969.

  His life was rapidly collapsing around him. He wasn’t the first man who longed for a wife and children and the home where he was no longer welcome but Canaday seemed to have been the kind of guy who could snap back. He had been a football hero in high school, he was tall and husky and quite handsome in a rugged way. There were many young women who would have been pleased to go out with him, but he had become morose and sorry for himself.

  Now his secret life was being revealed. Detectives working on the disappearances of Mary Annabelle Bjornson and Lynne Tuski only a month before Connie was abducted certainly noted where John Canaday had been living: he was very close to the Sears store on Aurora Avenue and only a few miles north of the University District, and when he visited Connie, he had been just a few blocks from Mary Annabelle’s apartment.

  But she and Lynne Tuski were still missing. If they were indeed dead, their bodies might be found one day. For the moment, there was absolutely nothing in the way of evidence that would connect Canaday to either of them. Yes, Mary Annabelle had described a man in a pea jacket and one had been found in Canaday’s room—but a lot of men who had been in the Navy had pea jackets.

  Rapists are violent criminals, but the majority of them don’t move on to commit murder.

  13

  On March 13, a Seattle Community College student named William Kramer was walking alongside the Index River Tract Road near the hamlet of Index in Snohomish County, the county that lies north of King County. The region, an hour’s drive from Seattle, is in the foothills of Stevens Pass on the west side of the mountains. After one of the stormiest winters in years, the deep winter snowbanks had just begun to melt a little on Washington’s mountain passes. As Kramer glanced at the diminishing drifts beside the road, he saw something that didn’t compute in his brain, and he couldn’t identify what he saw. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck as he moved closer to get a better look.

  At first, he thought someone must have tossed a store mannequin into the snow, and yet the part of it that he saw was so lifelike, even though it was marbled and blue. He gasped as he realized that he was looking at a human body.

  Lynne Tuski was no longer lost. Her nude body was perfectly preserved, frozen solid in the snowbank where she had lain for almost two months. Although Snohomish County and King County authorities were able to move her body from her icy grave, any postmortem examination would have to wait until her remains slowly thawed out. None of her clothes were retrieved from where her corpse had lain.

  It took several days before the medical examiner was able to do an autopsy on the body of Lynne Tuski. He found that she had died of strangulation by ligature, the weapon obviously a rope. She had been raped. Her forehead was bruised and there were abrasions on either side of her mouth, as if she had been gagged.

  Because she had been left in the
snow, it was impossible to tell how long Lynne had been dead. And, in 1969, only the blood type of her rapist and killer could be identified from the semen left behind, and that depended upon whether he was a secretor—someone whose blood type could be gleaned from body fluids such as blood, saliva, and semen.

  Lynne’s body had been found in the same general vicinity of the cabin where John Canaday had held Connie Stanton captive, close to Highway 10, where motorists headed east from Monroe, through Sultan, Startup, Gold Bar, and Index. And Canaday had used a rope around Connie’s neck to control her. He had actually come close to strangling her with it before he loosened his grip.

  On March 17, Donald Priest, who was a Snohomish County deputy prosecuting attorney, interviewed John Canaday in the King County jail. Initially, Canaday denied that he had any knowledge about the murder of Lynne Tuski or the disappearance of Mary Annabelle Bjornson. Two days later, Canaday had a change of heart after he spoke with his attorney, Phil Mahoney. Through Mahoney, he sent a message to the Seattle homicide detectives and to the King County Prosecutor’s Office that he might be able to shed some light on what had happened to the two young women who had vanished in January.

  On March 20, the first day of spring, John Canaday gave a detailed oral confession to Seattle Police Lieutenant Dick Schoener; Captain T. T. Nault, head of the King County Sheriff’s Office’s Major Crimes Unit; and deputy prosecutors William Kinzel and Patricia Harber of longtime prosecutor Charles O. Carroll’s staff. As Mahoney witnessed this meeting, Canaday told them what had happened on the nights of January 4 and January 25. He also admitted that he had raped the girl known only as B.B. at knifepoint two days before he encountered Lynne Tuski.

  The group of investigators from the Seattle Police Department and King County Sheriff’s Office and prosecutors followed Canaday’s directions to the icy foothills of Stevens Pass. He knew exactly where he was going and directed the driver of the lead car about where to turn and what markers to look for.