Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (45 page)

That person had his own conscience to live with. Only he knew “why,” and the reasons for Dina’s death. Perhaps those reasons seemed negligible now compared to the pangs of regret over a loving, giving, sixteen-year-old girl’s murder.

And then again, it was possible he
had
no conscience.

*   *   *

As soon as they could, George and Leanne Peterson moved their family away from the house where Dina died. The memories there were too terrible to live with.

The King County Major Crimes Unit had its hands full. They had a number of “cold cases”—although they weren’t called that in 1975. A serial killer called “Ted” had murdered or kidnapped seven young women in King County and around Washington and Oregon. A task force was mobilized to try to catch him before the toll grew higher. Lieutenant Dick Kraske, who oversaw the investigation of Dina’s murder, was pulled off her case and transferred to the “Ted Task Force.”

It wasn’t that the King County sheriff’s crew didn’t care about Dina and her family; they had simply run out of leads. Moreover, they were racing to stop whoever Ted was from killing again. Of necessity, Dina’s case was shoved to the back of their agenda. It wasn’t closed; it was suspended until they had more manpower to follow up information.

Tim Diener joined the service after high school, and Jim Groth moved away, too. Although several detectives still suspected one of them might very well be guilty of killing Dina, there wasn’t enough physical evidence to go further.

Hergesheimer and Kraske conferred with senior deputy prosecutors Michael Ruark and Brian Gain many times about the Peterson case, and all of them tried to construct a case that was strong enough to bring a suspect to trial.

But it was impossible. With today’s forensic science advances, they might have been able to arrest someone and hope to achieve a conviction on murder charges. But there were no DNA matches in the seventies, and the hairs found on Dina’s clothing could not be matched absolutely to a suspect. Those could only be found “microscopically similar in class and characteristic.”

And there were no witnesses who actually saw Dina being stabbed.

*   *   *

Years passed. In 1985, Leanne Peterson said sadly, “They’re never going to solve this.” She and George decided to request Dina’s belongings that the sheriff’s office was still holding in evidence. They were stunned to find that the agency now called the King County Sheriff’s Office had thrown out all of the evidence, keeping only the bone-handled knife.

The Petersons learned that one man—a sergeant—had made the decision to clear out the evidence room to make room for newer items that were coming in on more recent cases. Dina’s clothing, the plaster moulages, hairs and fibers, Tim’s trousers—all of them gone forever.

*   *   *

It was a few years into the twenty-first century and the detectives who had originally investigated Dina Peterson’s murder had retired. But Randy Hergesheimer didn’t live long enough to retire; he was still a young man when he was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver on a Montana highway. By 2006, generations of lawmen had come and gone from the King County Sheriff’s Office in the three decades since Dina perished.

Dina’s family and her friends remembered her, and as her siblings grew older and started families of their own, they missed their sister, the aunt their children would never know. I, too, remembered her murder. It was one of the first cases I ever wrote about back in the days when I wrote for five fact-detective magazines.

She would be forever sixteen years old, a lovable and loving innocent girl. I kept my files on Dina’s case, hoping without much expectation that one day her killer might be identified and arrested.

A day didn’t go by when George and Leanne Peterson didn’t think of the daughter they had lost so brutally, but they had to go on for the sake of the rest of their family. Dina’s loss was saddest on holidays and on her birthday, in mid-July.

And, of course, on Valentine’s Day.

“I could not function for a number of years after her death,” her mother said. “I could not laugh
or
cry.”

Only families who have lost a child to sudden violence can understand the unrelenting pain that comes with that loss. And yet, they do go on.

*   *   *

The King County Sherriff’s Office had a new unit in 2006—the Cold Case Squad. Detective sergeant Jim Allen was assigned to investigate cases that had long gathered dust, far back in files rarely touched. Although the physical evidence was gone, Allen found that Dina Peterson’s case itself still existed on paper: crime scene notes, follow-up reports, lie detector test results, photos of the crime scene.

Curious, he began to read through the file, aware that if Dina had lived she would be nearing fifty, probably a mother, quite possibly a grandmother.

Allen approached the case with fresh eyes; he was still in school when Dina died, and he had no preconceived opinions about it. As he read, he began to see inconsistencies, things that didn’t add up. The original detectives had focused far more on Tim Diener than they had on Jim Groth. Both of them had initially failed lie detector tests, but Diener was the only one arrested, however briefly.

Allen’s take on the two suspects was weighted on a different scale than his predecessors. Diener had apparently had no reason to want Dina dead. They were in love—at least puppy love—when she died. They got along well, and they had just spent a happy day together. Why would he have wanted to kill her?

Jim Groth, on the other hand, seemed to have been obsessed with her in vain. Dina wasn’t interested in him as anything more than a neighbor kid who kept hanging around. Her younger sister Marilyn confirmed that. Groth was a misfit whom Dina tolerated because she was kind.

And then Allen found a report buried in juvenile files that fascinated him. It involved Dina, and a complaint that had come in eighteen months before her murder. A neighborhood boy had been suspected of peering into her bedroom one night. Was it possible that he’d had some kind of fixation about the pretty teenager? Quite likely. Stalkers could be anyone, of any age. This teenager lived two houses away from the Petersons’ home, and he was questioned. But he denied any knowledge of voyeurism.

That kid had been fourteen-year-old Jim Groth!
He
was the “Peeping Tom” who looked into Dina’s window.

And then there was Groth’s strange behavior after he found Dina’s body. He hadn’t told anyone—or tried to get help for her. He was the one who was afraid he might be linked to her murder. He seemed a far more likely “person of interest.” But earlier detectives’ interest was focused in another direction.

Jim Allen began to try to locate the teenage boys who had been part of Dina’s life way back in 1975. Tim Diener wasn’t hard to find. After he left the army, he had worked for The Boeing Airplane Company at the time of Dina’s death when he was nineteen, and he’d stayed there for thirty-two years, until he retired at the age of forty-nine in 2005. Tim was suffering from liver cancer at a relatively young age. He had a longtime female companion, Charlotte Ressen,* and the two of them hoped to have a few more years to enjoy a home Tim owned in Mexico. There, he could live his favorite outdoor lifestyle and learn to scuba dive.

In the thirty-some years since Dina’s death, Tim Diener had lived under a constant shadow; some of his peers still believed that he had killed her. He lost friends, and he half-expected to hear footsteps behind him and feel handcuffs encircling his wrists.

It never happened, but it blunted his life considerably.

Sergeant Allen discovered that Jim Groth had dropped out of Shoreline High School when he was seventeen and joined the army. After his service years, he had spent much of his life in Alaska, working as a fisherman or a laborer in construction.

The three decades had not been particularly kind to Groth. In 2006, Jim was forty-eight and his wild mane of “hippie hair” had vanished, leaving him bald. He had matured into a surly man who wasn’t the best companion for the women in his life. Jim Allen found that in the intervening years, Jim Groth had been convicted three times for assaulting females.

In 1985, when his former wife had refused to give him a ride, he had punched her so forcefully that emergency room doctors first feared he had fractured her skull.

Groth had two children, but he was estranged from both of them.

When confronted by Jim Allen in May 2006, Groth insisted he had nothing to tell the sheriff’s investigators. Yes, he had stumbled upon Dina’s body, but he had nothing at all to do with her death.

Allen suggested that Jim Groth take another lie detector test. He agreed. This would be Groth’s third polygraph examination in as many decades. And his responses to the examiner’s questions indicated he wasn’t telling the truth. He failed this lie detector test.

Groth had showed deception on the first polygraph. He passed the second. And now he failed again as he answered questions about his knowledge of what happened to Dina Peterson. Two fails out of three exams. What did it really mean?

Allen located several of the students who had gone to Shoreline High. They were now in their late forties to mid-fifties, but they remembered the night Dina Peterson was murdered. Further investigation turned up information that the teenage Jim Groth had made lewd comments about Dina behind her back. The picture of a pubescent youth who was sexually obsessed with a girl he couldn’t have was emerging. Allen wasn’t convinced that Groth was as innocent as he claimed to be.

In December 2007, King County investigators decided it was time to talk with Jim Groth again. Tim Diener had had several witnesses who placed him just where he said he was on February 14, 1975. The only connection Diener had with the murder was that the fatal weapon
had
belonged to him. Diener had told detectives in the seventies that the knife was stolen from his room, which had had an unlocked door leading to his backyard. Most of the teenagers in the neighborhood had known the bone-handled knife was there.

Diener had never wavered in his recall that he had gotten home in time to watch the NBC local newscast on Valentine’s night. He was hoping that Dina might be able to sneak out of her house and run over to his door for a quick visit. But he was tired as he waited to watch the Johnny Carson show, and he’d fallen asleep.

The Tonight Show
began at 11:30
P.M.
, and Dina had probably died around 10:20 to 10:40. At that time, Diener hadn’t arrived home yet. He probably missed the fatal attack on her by fifteen or twenty minutes.

Tim had been very upset and grieving for his girlfriend at the time he failed the polygraph test. Emotions can affect lie detector results. Tim Diener said he would be willing to testify in any trial of a yet-unknown defendant who might have murdered Dina. He was confident that he had been leaving another county at the time she was killed, and he still had witnesses who would vouch for him regarding that.

Tim said that Jim Groth had stopped talking to him after Dina died, and that the students of Shoreline High spread theories like wildfire—theories that named Groth as the killer.

On December 21, 2007, Jim Allen decided it was time to reinterview Jim Groth. The second suspect wasn’t far away; he was in jail—serving time for domestic abuse. Actually, he was three days away from being released after serving an eight-month sentence for assaulting his girlfriend.

Mary Lou Coates,* who had been dating Groth since 2003, was sorry that she had ever called the police on Groth. After he was questioned in May 2006, she said they had had a long talk.

“He told me then that he didn’t kill Dina Peterson. And he felt better when he talked to the police. He thought he had finally been cleared as a suspect in her murder.”

She had believed him. “He wouldn’t do something like this,” she offered. “He told me that they were just good friends.”

Mary Lou denied that Groth had physically assaulted her, insisting that he was only verbally abusive to her, and that was what the domestic violence charges against him were about.

“I blame myself for his arrest. I never wanted him to go to jail—to be locked up,” she said softly.

Even given Jim Groth’s history of violence toward women, he must have said some pretty bad things to his girlfriend. That made no sense at all. It’s quite possible that he threatened her. But now, as so many abused women do, Mary Lou was feeling very sorry for Jim.

“He’s the nicest person in the world,” she emphasized to
Seattle Times
reporter Jennifer Sullivan.

*   *   *

Jim Groth didn’t get out of jail in December 2007. He was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the long-fallow case of Dina Peterson.

“What will I tell my girlfriend?” Groth asked. “I’ll never get out of jail.”

On January 9, 2008, Groth pleaded not guilty to the murder charges.

Judge Laura Inveen’s King County Superior Court room was crowded with observers, among them the Peterson family, who had not seen Groth for more than thirty-two years. Leanne Peterson looked at the stocky, bald man and realized he didn’t look at all like the teenage boy who used to be their neighbor.

“I never thought this would happen,” she told Sullivan of the
Seattle Times.
“We are grateful to the cold-case people.”

Leanne had been hopeful that Jim Groth would plead guilty to the charges against him, so that she and her family wouldn’t have to relive the pain they had felt in 1975. That didn’t happen.

Sheriff’s spokesman John Urquhart told reporters that Jim Groth had been under intense scrutiny by current detectives and prosecutors for more than a year. Although Groth was a “person of interest,” Urquhart acknowledged that there were no DNA matches.

The single piece of physical evidence was Tim Diener’s bone-handled knife, and even forensic science of the new century could not isolate DNA or blood on it.

On May 12, 2009, after another seventeen months’ delay, King County senior deputy prosecutor Carla Carlstrom was prepared to present a case based on circumstantial evidence to the jurors selected. It certainly wasn’t the easiest case to prosecute. Nor was Groth an easy defendant to represent. Julie Lawry, Jim Groth’s public defender, however, felt confident that she could raise enough doubt in the jury that her client would go free.