Kiss Me, Kill Me and Other True Cases Page 8

  Although it seemed that he must have stalked Mary Annabelle, his first January victim, after having seen her and become obsessed with her, Canaday’s recall of Lynne Tuski’s disappearance made it sound as if her fate had resulted from a spur-of-the-moment decision. She was far more a victim of opportunity.

  He admitted that he was looking for a girl again on Saturday night, January 25, three weeks after he killed Mary Annabelle. He described driving slowly through the Sears parking lot shortly after closing time. Once again, it was around nine P.M. on a Saturday night. He spotted a blond girl, he testified, who held her car key in her hand and who was just about to unlock her driver’s door.

  Lynne Tuski had been only seconds away from safety when John Canaday stopped and asked her for directions. She had explained how to get to the road he asked about, and she was very nice to him as she did so, even though it was very cold and she was standing in a heavy snowfall.

  “And then what did you do?” Pat Harber asked.

  “I started to drive off—but then I backed up. I think I got out . . . I think she was walking away.”

  Canaday said he had approached her and said, “Come on. You’re coming with me.”

  “At that time, did you have anything in your hand?”

  “Yes. The knife.” His recollection was that Lynne had been “scared” as he hooked his hand round her arm and pulled her to his vehicle. He had then pushed her into the driver’s seat. She had not screamed. “I think she was too scared to scream.”

  “Did you have your knife in your hand at the time you pushed her into the car?”

  “Yes.”

  Canaday said he had repeated what he had done to Mary Annabelle and tied Lynne Tuski’s hands in front of her. He looked at a piece of rope that had been entered as an exhibit in his trial, and said he couldn’t identify it.

  Harber pointed out that it had been found in his station wagon under the dashboard near the air conditioner. He acknowledged then that he had put it there because “the air conditioner squeaked.”

  “Is there any reason why there should be any hair on any of this rope?” She held it toward him. “See?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “In other words, you knew there was hair on one of these pieces of rope?”

  “Yes.” Canaday said that he had driven Lynne Tuski to Golden Gardens, a waterside park in the Ballard district of Seattle.

  “Did Lynne Tuski say anything to you as you were driving to Golden Gardens? Do you remember that?”

  “She was talking about something, but what, I can’t remember.”

  “Do you suppose that she was wanting to know what was going to happen to her?”

  “If I was in the same situation, I would, yes.”

  Once at Golden Gardens Park, Canaday had parked. Lynne’s hands were still tied, but he denied that she had a gag in her mouth. He testified that he didn’t know why she would have had marks at the corners of her mouth. He remembered that they talked a little bit, but, true to form, his memory was clouded—up until the point where he told her he was going to rape her. “I told her to get in the backseat.”

  How his victim had managed to do that with her hands tied, he could not say. But he had followed her into the backseat.

  “What happened then?”

  “I raped her.”

  “Did she fight you?”

  “She pushed me away.”

  “Do you know if she was a virgin or not, John?”

  “I think she was. Yes.”

  Just as he could not say how Lynne had suffered the abrasions on her mouth, he insisted he had no idea how she could have gotten bruises on her forehead. He did recall that she had crawled into the front seat after her rape.

  “What did you intend to do at that point?”

  “Let her go.”

  “You were going to let her go?”

  But Lynne Tuski had made the mistake of screaming for help. And, of course, John Canaday hated to have anyone scream. He had just happened to find another piece of rope in the front seat of his car as Lynne, like Mary Annabelle, managed to roll down the passenger window and scream.

  “Just an odd piece of rope?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was no loop in either end?”

  “No.”

  “Now, when you put the rope around her neck, what did you say to her?”

  “I think ‘Stop screaming’ or something to that effect.”

  “Did she stop screaming?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “How did that happen, now?”

  “When I let go of the rope, she was dead.”

  • • •

  Mary Annabelle’s body had not been discovered, so John Canaday stayed with his body disposal plan, taking Lynne’s corpse up to the Index area. She, too, was stripped of her clothing and tossed over a snowbank. And, once again, he testified that he had burned her clothing in his parents’ fireplace.

  “Do you remember taking anything off her finger?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Was it because the ring wouldn’t burn that you didn’t burn it?”

  “I didn’t realize I had a ring.”

  “How did you think it got in your drawer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How about the contact lenses?”

  “Not unless I had them in my pockets and I took everything out and threw it in the drawer.”

  “Now, did you feel at the time you had strangled Lynne—did you feel that this was the wrong thing to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sorry for what you’ve done?”

  “Taking any human life, anybody should be sorry.”

  “When did you become sorry, John?”

  “When?” he answered, considering. “Maybe right after I did it—or soon after.”

  “Did you ever think the police would catch up with you concerning this?”

  “Yes.”

  Although John Canaday’s answers during cross-examination were given in a flat tone and showed little emotion, his efforts to appear insane weren’t very convincing. Under the M’Naghten Rule, a criminal must have known the difference between right and wrong at the time he committed the act. When a defendant has planned ahead and armed himself with weapons, and then taken great pains to hide his victims’ bodies and any evidence connecting him to the crimes, the M’Naghten Rule test almost always indicates that he was fully aware that what he had done was wrong.

  John Canaday had his knife, his ropes singed on the ends so that they would not unravel, his ruses to put his intended victims at ease, and he certainly covered up evidence after Mary Annabelle and Lynne died, burning their clothing to ashes.

  His own brother and a boyhood friend testified for the defense, but neither of them claimed that he was insane or even mentally irresponsible. He had held down a job and been a satisfactory employee.

  Dr. John Riley, a psychiatrist testifying for the defense, deemed Canaday to be a sexual psychopath, a category of personality disorder, but one that excludes insanity, mental deficiency, or irresponsible behavior. On cross-examination, Dr. Riley agreed that Canaday’s conduct and personality were consistent with sanity.

  Two other forensic psychiatrists—Dr. Richard Jarvis and Dr. George MacDonald—who had also examined Canaday concurred.

  The jury retired to debate, and returned in less than two hours. To the shock of almost everyone, including the prosecution team, they not only found John Canaday guilty of the murders of Mary Annabelle Bjornson and Lynne Tuski, but they recommended the death penalty, even though the State had not sought it.

  The laws regarding capital punishment in Washington State in 1968 at the time of Canaday’s crimes were confusing. Had he chosen to plead guilty to two counts of murder, he would have avoided the death penalty—imposed by hanging. A confession with a sure death penalty punishment would have been construed as the defendant committing suicide. However, since he had pleaded not guilty (
by reason of insanity), and the jury hadn’t believed him, they had the right to impose the death penalty.

  In September 1971, John Canaday’s appeal to the Washington State Supreme Court asked for a new trial. The appeal was based upon alleged “newly discovered evidence.” His attorneys put forth their belief that Connie Stanton would testify that Canaday had demonstrated “an almost uncontrollable anxiety” during their time alone in his parents’ cabin.

  At other times, the defense counsel’s affidavit submitted that he “would become kind and considerate.”

  While it was evidently true—at least from what Connie Stanton had told me—that Canaday occasionally seemed to consider her feelings as he tried to convince her that they were two lovers enjoying a weekend in a cozy cabin in the snowy mountains, he had also strangled her unconscious. Would the supreme court consider that an indication of “uncontrollable anxiety”?

  It would seem more a sign of frustration and, most of all, rage. Moreover, Connie Stanton’s affidavit that accompanied Canaday’s appeal for a new trial recalled how he had tied her with rope and taken her against her will to the cabin where she was held captive. She stated that she had no opinion about his sanity during her captivity, during his trial, or in the two years since.

  I realize now that when I talked with her during Canaday’s 1969 trial, she was only four or five months past one of the most terrifying experiences a woman could endure. She would still have been suffering from post-traumatic stress, and inordinately thankful to be alive. Because he had brought her down from the mountain, she wanted to think that, in a sense, he had saved her.

  By 1971, Connie had allowed herself to face the very real possibility that—if it were not for her brother’s rescue efforts—she might well have died too. She remained a captive in the house where Canaday lived, he still had the knife and the rope garottes, and she had had no idea what he intended to do to her next.

  Faced with an angry John Stanton, Canaday had released her. Now she saw the truth clearly.

  The Washington State Supreme Court denied John Canaday’s appeal for a new trial. In 1972, however, Canaday got a reprieve from the death penalty when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against capital punishment in thirty states—and Washington was one of them. But he was facing sentences that would undoubtedly keep him behind prison walls for the rest of his life.

  He would first serve fifty-five years on one murder conviction, and only when the Washington Indeterminate Sentence Review Board approved the decision would he begin a consecutive sentence of forty-five years, followed by sentences for his lesser crimes.

  16

  Certainly, Seattle Police homicide investigators had noted that John Canaday’s stalking rapes and murders of young women in the early months of 1969 had occurred in the north end of the city, and not too far away from where Sandy Bowman died in December 1968. There were some similarities, and detectives weighed them against the differences among the cases.

  Canaday’s victims had been single girls living alone, and he had abducted them, killing them in his vehicle. Although he had used a knife to threaten them, he had not stabbed them—and Sandy had been stabbed at least fifty-seven times. The knife Canaday had used to threaten his victims was not the knife that killed Sandy. He had left his victims’ bodies in isolated places while Sandy was found in her own bed.

  Sandy’s hands had been bound, however, although her murderer had loosened them, but the bonds had come from her own apartment, cut from her living room drapes.

  There was no physical evidence linking Canaday to Sandy Bowman’s murder. His fingerprints were not among those lifted in her apartment. No one who knew her had ever described anyone who looked like Canaday, and he was memorable looking—big, hulking, with his rough, spiky haircut.

  Who had Sandy talked about who might have come back to kill her? It seemed as though every man in her life had been cleared through alibi and/or lie detector tests. She had told Jim Leffberg, according to Leffberg, that she was afraid of a magazine salesman, but the investigators had never been able to find him.

  John Canaday had used all manner of ruses to coax his victims out of the safety of their apartments or their cars: the broken-down car lie; the asking for directions ploy to bring Lynne Tuski close to his car so he could grab her; the lie about needing Connie Stanton to help him pick up a car. Was it within the realm of possibility that he had pretended to be a magazine salesman to get Sandy to open her door? Had he returned more than once?

  He had used “granny knots” to tie the wrists of his victims, and Sandy’s bonds were also tied that way, but it was a common knot that any Boy Scout or serviceman might use.

  In the end, John Canaday had confessed to his crimes, but he had never mentioned Sandy Bowman. With the forensic science tools available in the late sixties, there was no place else to go to try to link him to the murder of the teenage bride.

  Throughout 1969, Al Schrader had continued to get leads on Sandy Bowman’s murder, but most of them came from high-school students who had heard a rumor that came from someone who had heard a rumor from someone else. Many of these rumors were traced back to Bobbi Roselle and none of them shed even a sliver of light over the investigation.

  Only the bare facts that detectives began with remained. Sandy Bowman was alive and happy at 6:30 on December 17 when Lee Wilkins carried her groceries up the stairs to her second-floor apartment. She wrote her husband Tom a note—probably shortly before 7:30. She told him she planned to go to bed at once, but she hadn’t had time to change into nightclothes before someone came to her door.

  She had time to cry out, “Oh . . . no, no, no!” before she was struck on the chin and probably knocked unconscious. According to the Brosnicks next door, they had heard her say that just after 7:30. Within the next hour, her friends had come by and knocked on her door, but she failed to answer and they left the cigarette in the doorjamb. It was conceivable that her killer was still in the Bowmans’ apartment when they had done that.

  Was Sandy killed by someone she felt was safe to admit to her apartment, or had she carelessly left the door unlocked? That seems unlikely because she was afraid to leave her home until she peeked out the door to check the walkway first.

  Somewhere, someone knew who destroyed two lives—Sandy’s and her baby’s—on that horrific night. The Seattle Homicide Unit initially contacted several hundred people in the investigation, and continued to follow up on the diminishing leads that came in. The file on Sandy Bowman grew thick and unwieldy, but it remained close at hand in the “Open” section.

  In time, every detective who had worked on the Bowman case in 1968 retired, including Jerry Yates, Sandy’s uncle. Inevitably, some of them passed away. Even the Public Safety Building where the Homicide Unit was housed for decades was scheduled for demolition.

  And years went by. More than thirty-five years. I would write about more than a dozen unsolved “mysteries” in my True Detective territory. And most of them, like Sandy’s story, remained in the “loser” file, a self-deprecating term homicide detectives themselves used to describe what the media now call “cold cases.”

  Either term meant that they had tried every avenue available to them, followed every lead—no matter how obscure—and still failed to arrest a suspect, much less see one convicted.

  Over the last thirty-five years, I have read hundreds of homicide files. The unsolved cases are invariably many times thicker than those that can be tied up neatly. They represent frustration and even despair on the part of the investigators who worked many, many hours of overtime as they strived to find a killer who remained free to roam and, perhaps, to destroy more lives.

  One case I remember clearly was the murder of a young flight attendant whose name was Eileen Condit. She rented a small house not far from Madison Park near the shores of Lake Washington, some miles east of Seattle’s downtown section. The houses were built very close together there because it was a very desirable location, and her next-door neighbors could see in
to her living room area if her drapes weren’t pulled, which she seldom did during daylight hours. She was a gaminelike girl with a short “pixie” haircut, friendly and approachable.

  But no one saw who attacked Eileen on May 28, 1970. Someone murdered her with several thrusts from a butcher knife—a knife taken from her own kitchen. One neighbor caught just a glimpse of a man running between the two houses, and could remember very little about him except he seemed to be in his early twenties and wore tennis or boat shoes.

  Like Sandy Bowman’s murder, Eileen Condit’s was still unsolved as Seattle rolled over to another century.

  Although neither Sandy’s nor Eileen’s investigations fell into the category, some of the cold cases are marked “Exceptional.” That is a term Seattle homicide detectives use when they refer to murders where they know in their minds and in their bones who the killer is—but they can’t prove it. These are probably the most disheartening challenges of the many they face.

  When 5-year-old Heidi Peterson vanished in a matter of a few minutes from the sidewalk in front of her house in February 1974, Seattle’s heart broke. No child could disappear so fast, but Heidi had. Police and volunteers combed the neighborhood. I remember riding all night with a K9 unit, hoping desperately that the German shepherd accompanying us would help us find her.

  But we couldn’t find Heidi along her tree-lined block of comfortable Dutch Colonial homes with children’s tricycles and bikes on their porches. I remember that it was raining hard and the thought of one little girl lost somewhere close to us was frightening.

  There were rumors and tips. Someone said they had heard a child screaming in a house one street over. But when detectives investigated, there was no indication that Heidi had ever been there.

  It was the next winter when the snows came before anyone knew where Heidi was. On the corner a half block south of her house there was a vacant lot where wild blackberries had towered eight feet or more over the ground for years. But this snow was heavy enough to make the vines break and flatten to the earth. Heidi’s skull was there, and the fractures in it showed the cause of her death—bludgeoning with some heavy object. There was no other evidence left. No clothes. No weapon. Nothing at all that the killer might have left behind.