Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (44 page)

It was tragically apparent that the “friendly scuffle” her mother had observed had been Dina’s death struggle. And that knowledge was devastating to Leanne Peterson, even though she had no way of knowing the truth at the time.

*   *   *

Detective Randy Hergesheimer questioned Jim Groth, the sixteen-year-old boy who’d spent the early part of Valentine’s night watching television with Dina in her recreation room. Groth was nervous—but that was to be expected. He told Hergesheimer that he had remained in the Petersons’ basement after the girls left.

He sat on the couch there until about 10
P.M.
He was watching a movie, titled, ironically,
Murderers’ Row.

“I left by the back—the patio—door, after Mrs. Peterson told me to go home,” Groth said. “I couldn’t figure out how to lock the door from the outside, though, so I left it unlocked.”

Jim Groth recalled that he had then walked to a bowling alley, where he stayed from 10:45 until shortly after 12:30.

“Then I walked home and my mother let me in.”

Groth added that he had stopped on his way home to visit a friend, Tim Diener, who was, of course, Dina’s boyfriend.

“Tim was sound asleep,” Groth said. “In his bedroom—it’s in the basement. So I just went on home.”

Jim insisted that he and Dina had been only friends, and if Dina felt romantic about anyone, it was Tim Diener.

Dina’s friends had already confirmed this, but they also suspected that Jim Groth had a crush on Dina.

Dina’s sister Marilyn believed that. “He was always hanging around, and he would wrestle with Dina. It was the only way he could touch her.”

Jim Groth had some scratches on his arms, but he explained those away—saying they came from bushes with brambles that he ran into in the dark as he took a shortcut through the backyards to his house, which was two doors down from the Petersons.

The investigators also talked with Tim Diener, whose basement bedroom was only about twenty-one feet from the Petersons’ house.
He
was the one most closely connected to Dina—both geographically and emotionally. He seemed shaken and his eyes were red as he told them that he and Dina had been dating since August, and that he was very fond of her.

“Her real name is—
was
—Diana, but we always called her Dina or Dynamo.”

“You two ever argue—fight?”

Tim shook his head. “We never had any serious fights.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“We spent most of the afternoon together on Valentine’s Day. She came over to my house and we visited with some of our friends. I asked her to make some brownies for my family’s dinner, and she did. My folks came home while Dina was still there.”

“When did she leave?”

“It was about a quarter to six. Dina said she had to get back to her own house for dinner.”

Diener said he hadn’t seen her after that. She was grounded at night, so he’d gone to Snohomish County and spent the evening with friends there.

“I got home just before eleven and I went to sleep with the TV on in my room. The TV was off the air and humming when it woke me up at six.”

Diener said he’d heard the commotion outside and seen the police and fire department aid cars outside Dina’s house.

“That was when I found out what happened.”

Randy Hergesheimer and his crew verified that Diener had been with friends during the evening, and they talked with the youth who had driven him home at five minutes to eleven.

One of Diener’s relatives, who lived in a nearby house, said he had seen Tim come home at approximately 10:45 in his friend’s pickup truck. “He went right into his house.”

Tim Diener seemed to have a good alibi with witnesses to back him up. But he failed a lie detector test.

Sheriff’s detectives served a search warrant on Diener’s home, and they found a pair of trousers with blood on them. There was not enough, however, to determine the blood type.

Jim Groth also agreed to take a polygraph test to validate his truthfulness. The results, however, were surprising. The polygrapher viewed the charts and felt that Groth was also being deceptive in some areas.

Now the sheriff’s men had
two
possible killers. Even so, they suspected that Tim Diener was the more likely suspect.

The probe bounced back and forth as they looked at all possible suspicious people.

And then, a few days later, on February 18, Jim Groth admitted to Randy Hergesheimer that he hadn’t told the complete truth in his first statement. He had lied—but only because he was frightened. He had a juvenile record for underage drinking and drug use, and he was afraid he might be tied to Dina’s death.

This time, Jim Groth said that it was true he had gone to the bowling alley after he left the Peterson home. But he had stayed there only until shortly before 11
P.M.
It really
was
true that he planned to visit Tim Diener but found him asleep.

To reach his own house, Jim Groth said he cut through backyards. Now he hesitated and drew a deep breath.

“I want to tell you the real truth now,” he said. “As I passed through the Petersons’ yard, I stumbled across Dina’s body in the dark. She was lying facedown with her arms at her side and her legs out straight. I could see the knife in her back. I think the knife belonged to Tim.”

Groth recalled that he’d been “really scared,” and he had nudged Dina with his foot. But she hadn’t moved at all.

“What time was this?” Hergesheimer asked.

“Pushing eleven. I ran all the way to my house. I sat around smoking cigarettes at the park on the beach for a while, trying to think what to do.”

It was confusing that both Tim Diener and Jim Groth had failed the first lie detector tests they took. Relieved now by “telling the truth,” Groth agreed readily to another polygraph exam. This time he passed it, with no evidence of deception on questions concerning guilty knowledge in the death of Dina Peterson.

The running footprints cast at the scene had been Groth’s and a bit of promising evidence was now rendered useless.

But something rankled Hergesheimer. Why hadn’t Jim Groth called for help for Dina? Perhaps she was only unconscious; it seemed grotesque that the teenager would wait all through the freezing night, knowing that Dina lay outside. Alone.

Randy Hergesheimer talked with a neighbor whose home’s backyard abutted the Petersons’ backyard. She recalled that she’d fallen asleep at 9:30 that evening and wakened around 10:30 or 10:35 because she heard what sounded like “children’s” voices in distress. It sounded like whimpering.

“By the time I was fully awake, the noises had stopped,” she said. “I felt like the voices were coming from the Petersons’ house. I fell back to sleep around eleven and I didn’t hear anything else.”

Roger Dunn and Randy Hergesheimer talked to dozens of Dina Peterson’s friends at Shoreline High School. Not one of them could recall any threats on her life, or come up with anyone she was even afraid of. She had never been in any trouble and was considered a popular and perpetually cheerful girl.

Still, the rumors circulated wildly. One girl said she was afraid of Tim Diener and that she had heard he “killed animals.”

Many students believed that Tim Diener was guilty of stabbing Dina.

At length, Tim was arrested, but he was soon released because the lawyers in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office didn’t think there was enough evidence to charge him with murder.

One of Jim Groth’s acquaintances had a discomfiting encounter with him in April 1975, but the homicide investigators didn’t know about it because his complaint had gone to the Juvenile Unit by mistake.

“I was working at my dad’s newspaper hut, and Jim showed up and started hassling me for some reason,” the youth said. “When I told him to leave me alone, he said, ‘I’ve killed a girl before—and I’m not afraid to do it again.’ ”

Groth might only have had a macabre sense of humor or enjoyed showing off by scaring people. Kathy Strunk, Dina’s friend who gave her a ride home just before she was killed, also had a scary encounter with Jim Groth.

“It wasn’t too long after Dina died,” she recalled a long time later. “Jim came up behind me and put a knife close to my back. He said ‘Gotcha!’ when I jumped. He didn’t hurt me because he slid his hand down the blade so that it wouldn’t go in my back—but that was an awfully bad joke to pull on someone who had just lost her friend.”

Each of the teenagers Jim had pretended to threaten believed that he was just making sick jokes at their expense. They didn’t really think he was dangerous.

*   *   *

A pall fell over the neighborhood at Richmond Beach.

In his grief and rage, George Peterson walked down to the beach on Puget Sound and shouted into the wind and the roar of the tide coming in, “God! How could you do this to us?”

The Petersons suspected it was Tim Diener who killed Dina, but the investigators couldn’t corroborate that.

George found himself crying at unexpected moments. “I couldn’t cry,” Leanne said. “If I started, I knew I could never stop.”

Leanne, who was a petite and kind woman, sometimes found herself filled with a need for revenge.

“I was peeling potatoes,” she said, “with this little paring knife, and I thought if I knew Tim killed our daughter, I could cut his heart out with it . . .”

Seeing their parents so desolate, the Petersons’ surviving children decided they couldn’t talk about the loss of Dina without making their mother and father feel even worse.

There was a miasma of fear combined with their grief. The three surviving Peterson daughters, twenty, fifteen, and ten, and their foster daughter who was Dina’s age, as well as the four sons—twelve, ten, and the eight-year-old twins—were no longer free to come and go. They all had to check in and out—and none of them went anywhere alone.

“It’s sad when you have to tell children they can’t walk to the grocery store alone in broad daylight,” Leanne Peterson commented. “But we were so afraid for them.”

It was impossible to believe Dina could have been stabbed in her own yard—and that her killer was still out there somewhere. Without knowing his motivation, they didn’t dare risk the lives of their other children. In fact the entire neighborhood was frightened. It had been a street of houses where families had many children, and the yards, sidewalks, and streets were always rife with youngsters. No longer. Now it was a quiet, shuttered area.

A resident who lived several blocks away reported a strange incident that occurred at his home on February 8. He’d heard a prowler at one in the morning and confronted a youth who asked to see “Dan.” There was no “Dan” living there and the intruder said he was sure Dan lived on 192nd.

The teenager walked away, but fifteen minutes later, the homeowner heard noises that indicated he was back. The prowler was trying to steal his car and the owner ran out and chased him away. Another neighbor had some stereo tapes stolen from his car on the same night.

The complainant told deputies that he’d seen the same stranger later, walking what appeared to be a large yellow Lab—although he wasn’t exactly sure of the dog’s breed. He was positive the dog was the same animal who had attacked his own small dog a month before and ripped his tiny pet’s throat open.

“The guy wasn’t very old—probably in his teens,” the tipster said. “White—with dark hair, about five foot six to five foot eight.”

He had no idea where the teenager lived. And, realistically, car prowling was a crime far removed from murder.

On February 18, another neighbor told deputies that a car had driven up her long driveway on Valentine’s night. Her three Afghan hounds had begun barking frantically and continued to bark for two hours. But this had occurred after two in the morning and all indications were that Dina was already dead by 11
P.M.
The woman said that there was a lot of foot traffic in the woods near her home—woods that extended almost to the Peterson home. Officers checked the woods and found a fire pit, liquor bottles, and signs that the area had been a gathering place for juveniles.

There were other scattered reports—from areas that were increasingly farther away from the spot where Dina died. One man reported that he’d seen an injured white male at a 7-Eleven store in the north end not too far from the Richmond Beach area. It had been late on Valentine’s night.

But there were no signs that Dina’s killer had been injured. Only
her
blood had been found, and the lack of defense wounds showed that she hadn’t had a chance to fight her attacker.

Many of the witnesses interviewed marked the time of their activities by what they were watching on television on the night of February 14. They’d been viewing either
Murderers’ Row
or
Police Woman
, the TV show starring Angie Dickinson, the episode titled “Nothing Left to Lose.”

Hergesheimer’s crew fit possible witness testimony into every component of time on Dina’s last evening. Finally they had a matrix that made sense. It indicated that she had been killed while there were many people around. Her friends stood on the sidewalk talking in front of her house. Neighbors were home in adjacent houses. Her own mother saw her wrestling or tussling with some faceless person.

She had entered her home at 10:30 without saying goodbye to her friends. And, almost immediately, she left by the back door. Had she planned to meet someone, someone she loved and trusted? Or had she gone to the basement to watch TV and glimpsed someone in the backyard and gone to investigate? She was the girl who felt everyone was basically good, and fear for her own safety was simply not part of her emotional makeup.

The time charts worked, but there was still one glaring blank space. Who was Dina’s murderer and why had he taken her life so brutally?

Perhaps a sexual attack had been the killer’s motive, and he had been frightened away when he heard Leanne Peterson calling Dina’s name.

Detectives were quite sure that Dina was killed by someone she knew, someone with whom she felt completely safe in the darkness of that February night. When she turned away from him, that someone plunged a knife deep into her back.