Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (54 page)

In a moment, Wendy had dashed out of sight.

It was a normal thing, and there was nothing to be concerned about. Wendy would surely come in for her bath in a little while.

“It was just like she had seen someone she knew. I thought she had run off to tell the kids about the berries she’d picked,” the aunt would recall later.

She could see the blue sweater on the ground between the carport and the back door of the house. It was probably going to get dirty, and she wondered why Wendy had dropped it so carelessly. She’d have to speak to her about that when she ran back in.

But Wendy didn’t come in. Wendy never came back at all.

As full dark descended, her family was uneasy but still believed she must be at one of her friends’ homes. They phoned all of them, and she wasn’t at any of the neighboring houses. As the hours passed, Wendy’s parents were frightened. Wendy was an obedient little girl, and she knew the boundaries of her play area. She knew she was always supposed to be inside the house after dark, and that, if she was ever delayed, she was to call home.

Her family members began to knock on nearby doors, but no one remembered seeing Wendy during the evening. It didn’t seem possible that she could have vanished so quickly right in front of her aunt’s eyes, yet she was gone.

The fact that Wendy was an exceptionally beautiful child could not be denied; they tried to fight down their fear that she had been abducted by a sexual offender whose perverted fantasies were directed toward little girls, but it wasn’t easy. They had warned Wendy hundreds of times that she must never get into a stranger’s car, but now they wondered if she’d forgotten. If someone had enticed her with candy or perhaps the promise of a pet, she might have gone with them. She loved animals, and she was, after all, just a little girl.

Long before midnight, Wendy’s stepfather called the base’s Office of Special Investigations and asked for help. OSI investigators went immediately to the family’s residence. Her parents described the clothing Wendy was wearing: baby blue knit pants, and a dark flowered shirt. She was four feet tall, and weighed just sixty-five pounds, and she had long blond-brown hair and brown eyes.

Asked if she might have run away, Wendy’s parents shook their heads. They stressed that she was a happy child.

“We had a wonderful day,” her stepfather said. “Nothing happened that would have upset her or given her the idea to run away. She was here, she was happy, and then she was gone.”

By morning, the whole base knew that a child was missing. While other mothers in the military complex kept their children within eyesight, they checked their own areas, looking for Wendy. They searched storage sheds, discarded appliances, anything that might hide a small girl.

Volunteers, under the direction of the Tacoma Explorer Scouts’ Search and Rescue Unit, marked off an area within a three-mile radius of Wendy’s home. After sniffing some of the clothing she’d worn the day before and her hairbrush, bloodhounds tracked Wendy’s scent to a playfield near the duplex and then they lost it. That might mean she had gotten into a car.

Two hundred searchers combed every inch of the huge circle, and yet they didn’t find one trace of the missing child. Although it seemed unlikely that Wendy would have wandered toward the three lakes in the region so late in the evening, scuba divers searched each one. They were thankful they didn’t find her there.

Each of the nine hundred houses on the air force base was checked in a methodically coordinated plan. Yet Wendy was in none of them, and no one had seen her.

By Monday, the base commander, Colonel Robert H. Campbell, told the press that “an abduction by car has got to be pretty high in our consideration.”

But who could have taken Wendy away in a car? Why hadn’t she screamed for help? Had someone been watching the pretty blond child for a long time, and had that person been waiting for her to come home after the strawberry picking?

Maybe it was someone Wendy knew—or at least recognized—so that she wouldn’t have been afraid to walk toward them. Her aunt said again that it seemed as though Wendy had looked up and appeared to know whoever stood too far from the window for her to see.

Or had it been a stranger, a wicked stranger, who just happened to be driving by as Wendy finished the errands her mother had asked her to do? Probably not, unless that individual had a car that Wendy thought was familiar. She had run off willingly.

Toward what?

Her mother and stepfather tried to think of anyone they knew who acted in a peculiar manner, particularly if they had seemed particularly obsessed with Wendy. But there simply wasn’t anyone.

Military investigators located Wendy’s birth father, who was living in a southern state. He said he hadn’t seen her in years, and her mother verified that. Moreover, he was just as worried as everyone else, and he had witnesses to prove that he hadn’t left Florida.

That was a blow, because finding out that her own father had taken her away would have been the only “safe” reason for Wendy to be gone. He loved her.

Although Wendy’s parents knew nothing about an earlier case, the similarities chilled Pierce County sheriff’s officers and Tacoma police. They remembered Anne Marie Burr. It had been a long time ago, but that case haunted them.

In the summer of 1963, Anne Marie Burr was a pretty, dependable, strawberry-blond-haired child. She lived in a home in Tacoma with her parents and younger brothers and sisters. Sometime during one summer night, Anne Marie had wakened her parents to tell them that her little sister was complaining that the cast on her broken arm itched so much that she couldn’t sleep.

And that was the last time anyone ever saw Anne Marie.

When her parents woke in the morning, they found the child gone. None of her clothes, beyond her night clothing, were missing. There was no sign of a struggle, no blood, nothing. Only a window in the front of the house left slightly open.

The search for Anne Marie was just as massive as the search for Wendy, but no one ever found her. It was the worst possible tragedy a family could endure, never knowing. Many theories were put forward. Some thought the Burr child had been kidnapped by someone who just wanted a child to raise, someone who had taken her far away and brainwashed her until she no longer remembered who she was or where she had come from.

Others pointed out the fact that nearby streets had been torn up and excavated at the time Anne Marie had vanished. They suspected that the child had been killed and hidden in one of the deep holes, her body covered with tons of dirt and pavement as the street work was completed.

And there are many who still believe that Anne Marie was the first victim of Ted Bundy, whose uncle lived close to the Burr family.

At the time Wendy disappeared, if she
were
alive, Anne Marie Burr would have been a grown woman in her twenties.
If she were alive
.

No, Wendy’s family didn’t know about Anne Marie, and no one wanted to tell them. They were already experiencing profound anguish.

*   *   *

Monday passed, and it was Tuesday with no word of Wendy. Helicopters hovered like giant dragonflies over the bases, hoping to see something from the air that they could not see on the ground. Just a glimpse of blue, or golden hair gleaming in the sunlight. Police and military police, search dogs, volunteers on foot, soldiers
and
airmen, all of them tromping through underbrush, woods, and along dirt roads from dawn until almost midnight.

They feared they were no longer trying to find a living child, although no one would admit that out loud; instead, they searched for a body. Wendy had been gone for almost four days. If she was lost, there were homes, barracks, and businesses close to where she disappeared. Unless someone was holding her captive, the chances were great that Wendy was dead. The weather was warm, but the nights were cool and she needed food and water.

Some feared that she might have been dead within minutes of the time she ran laughing out of her aunt’s line of vision.

If she had been taken away in a car, as so many searchers believed, she could be anywhere, even thousands of miles away in four days. If she was still on the base at McChord or Fort Lewis, there were so many hiding places for a small girl, living or dead; acres of forest edge Fort Lewis, deliberate wilderness used for war games and to buffer the fort from nearby property.

Wendy’s mother, stepfather, aunt, and little brother waited in their home on Juniper Street, unable to believe what had happened. It was as if Wendy had walked through a hole in the curtain of eternity and it had closed up behind her, leaving no trace. She had been so safe, so happy, so closely guarded and yet she was gone.

It was 10
A.M.
on Wednesday, July 14, when engineer Howard Churchill, guiding a Burlington Northern train toward the little town of Rainier, glanced idly beside the tracks. He saw something there, something that looked like a store mannequin.

And then he wondered if he had actually seen a naked human body. When he reached Rainier, Churchill reported what he had seen to Garth Jones, the town marshal.

Jones called McChord with word of the report. There was a miscommunication, however, and he was told that that section of tracks ran through Fort Lewis, not McChord.

“You should call the military police at Fort Lewis,” the man on the other end of the phone line said. “Your report should be made to them.”

How on earth could anyone at McChord Air Force Base be unaware of the missing girl? The grim series of misunderstandings continued. The Fort Lewis police understood Jones to say that a naked man, a streaker—a popular fad in the seventies—was running beside the tracks. They drove to the area and failed to find the man, despite a thorough search of the surroundings.

It wasn’t until three hours later, when a second train crew spotted the still form beside the tracks and reported it, that a clear message came through. Military police located the body of a young girl lying facedown beside the tracks.

Oddly, that area had been searched many times over, and no one had seen her before. Had someone placed her body there recently? Or was it because the undergrowth was almost impenetrable there?

“It’s really thick brush in there,” an army official commented to a reporter. “It would have been real easy to miss finding her.”

The three hours wouldn’t have mattered. The child had been dead for four or five days. Wendy’s aunt sobbed as she positively identified the dead child as her niece.

Pierce County coroner Jack Davelaar announced in a breaking news flash that Wendy Ann had died of strangulation—a cord used was still tightly wound around her neck when she was found.

OSI detectives and FBI agents cordoned off the area where her body was found. Engineer Howard Churchill told them that he had made the same run the day before, and that he hadn’t seen the body then.

“I guess I could have been looking in the other direction,” he said. “She could have been there yesterday and I didn’t see her.”

The investigators couldn’t find any of Wendy’s clothes near the railroad tracks, but they located a sheet and a bedspread close by. The bedding was quite new and it appeared to have been in the area only a short time; it wasn’t faded by the sun or mildewed by rain. Rather, it looked as if someone had wrapped the tiny victim in the bedding to transport her to the spot beside the railroad spur line. An adult body wrapped in a shroud of bedding might well have drawn notice, but a sixty-five-pound child would have made a very small bundle, and could have looked like somebody’s laundry.

Special agent Ray Mathis, a spokesman for the FBI in Seattle, announced that the federal agents were working around the clock on the case and that twenty special agents would assist military police in tracking down clues and leads.

Wendy’s autopsy report confirmed that she had died of strangulation by ligature. And she had been sexually assaulted. Her time of death would have been sometime between Saturday night or early Sunday morning.

There would be no more agonized waiting for Wendy’s family, nor was there any hope left. They had the slight comfort of knowing where she was, that she had not been held captive or molested for very long. That wasn’t much to cling to as they wondered
who
could have killed her and
why
.

Over and over again, the FBI agents and the military police asked about the happenings of that fatal Saturday. There might be something, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, that would give them a lead in a case where there were no leads. It might not have seemed unusual at the time, perhaps a casual encounter that would be vital only in retrospect.

Wendy Ann’s family and neighbors tried their best to remember the moments and hours of the day. There were so many other dependent children on base who might be in danger; Wendy’s killer had to be found fast. They wouldn’t wish their grief on any other family.

Her stepfather searched his mind, trying to remember. Saturday morning had been taken up with building the picnic table.

“Any visitors?” an MP asked.

The sergeant shook his head. “Well, my wife’s sister, of course. And one of our neighbor’s brothers came by. He was looking after Sam’s place—Sam’s our next-door neighbor—and he was out on bivouac for a couple of days.”

“What’s his name? Sam’s brother?”

“Larry—Larry Mayo. He’s about twenty-three, I think. He came over and was watching me put the table together, and then he pitched in to help. He’s a sheet-metal worker but he’s a pretty good carpenter, too.”

After they finished with the picnic table, the Smiths left for strawberry picking.

“Anyone go with you—did you talk to anyone when you were out in the fields?”

“No, nobody.”

“Was Wendy afraid of anyone? Did she talk about anyone bothering her or teasing her?”

“No. I asked my wife, and she can’t remember anything like that. We warned her, of course, about strangers—and she knew about that. She never said she was scared of anyone.”

That made sense. Wendy had apparently seen someone she knew Saturday evening. If she had been afraid, she wouldn’t have looked up and smiled and then run over to someone she apparently trusted. If that person had no part in her death, why hadn’t he (or she) come forward? The news of Wendy’s disappearance and finding her body was on the front page of every paper from Olympia to Seattle, on every television news broadcast.