Mortal Danger (33 page)

While Tando fielded the plethora of tips coming in, patrolmen and Crimes Specific officers fanned out more widely in the neighborhood where Sara Beth lived and near the remodeled gas station where she was found. They would eventually talk to almost three hundred households—and still glean pitifully little that might help find her murderer.

One man near the alley where her clogs and purse were found recalled hearing a “shout” after midnight and a car revving up its motor and driving away immediately after.

A woman a few blocks from there discovered that some old mattresses in her garage had been uncovered and disarranged. But they had no blood stains on them.

Several homeowners said their dogs had barked frantically at something in the middle of the night. But anyone who owns a dog knows they bark at myriad things—from other dogs to raccoons, to the wind, to actual intruders. The list is endless.

One young woman told a patrolman that she had been out with her boyfriend on the night Sara Beth was killed. “We ran out of gas at Eighty-fifth and Twentieth. I waited
alone in my boyfriend’s car for him come back with the gas, and this weirdo came out of the dark and tried to get in.”

The man, who appeared to be in his twenties, had approached the car and tested all the locked doors. Then he proceeded to masturbate at the window next to her, while she cowered inside. After he ejaculated on the window, he disappeared. This had happened at about ten minutes to one.

Another bus driver—on the alternative Ballard run—said he’d passed by a huge beer party going on near 85th and 15th. It had lasted for most of the night, with scores of young people in all stages of sobriety wandering around. “My last run through was about twelve thirty p.m. and they were still out there then.”

On July 4, a resident living at 86th and 22nd NW reported that he’d found a large knife caught in the tall laurel hedge that bordered his yard. The knife had dried dark stains on the blade and handle. Mike Tando picked up the knife, only to find that laboratory analysis showed that the stains were food and animal blood. It had been washed, so the possibility that it had once had human blood on it wasn’t ruled out. The criminalists were doing further tests.

Sara Beth’s funeral was on July 6. Mike Tando and other detectives mingled unobtrusively among the mourners, watching for someone who looked out of place or whose emotions seemed inappropriate. But there was no one there who raised their antennas.

A few days later, Tando talked at length with Lynne Carlson in an effort to find something, anything, that might
point to her daughter’s killer. But he learned nothing that could help the investigation.

Sara Beth and her mother had had a warm relationship. She had never run away or balked at her family’s house rules. She was happy. She would never, ever have gotten in a car, or gone with someone she didn’t know. Her mother confirmed Minda’s opinion that Sara Beth was frightened of alleys after dark. She wouldn’t have taken a shortcut home after midnight, but she would have fought hard for her life if someone grabbed her and dragged her into an alley.

Sara Beth had planned a trip on Sunday, July 2, with the Aldalotti family, and their sons Benny and Frankie, the two brothers she dated casually. Frankie had come by to pick her up on Sunday morning. Told that Sara Beth was missing, he had decided to go on ahead to his parents’ lodge on the Olympic Peninsula. The Aldalottis had called later that day to see if Sara Beth had returned safely. Her mother told them that she was dead. They were stunned and saddened.

Mike Tando was a little put off that Frankie Aldalotti hadn’t initially been very worried when he heard Sara Beth was missing. Perhaps some of the young men Sara Beth considered to be platonic friends didn’t see it that way. Jealousy has always been a motive for murder.

Still, Sara Beth’s mother and sister confirmed that her current romantic interest was Nouri Habid, the Iranian student who was currently visiting in his native country. And she hadn’t dated Ricco Sanchez for a month or more.

Sara loved to go dancing at I. Faces, but she usually went there with her girlfriends.

Mike Tando answered tips and offers of help that continued to pour in. As time passed, however, they grew stranger. As it happens with most high-profile murder cases, real and self-styled psychics offered to help with the case.

One man insisted that he’d had a remarkably clear dream where
he
had experienced Sara Beth’s feelings as she was being killed. He had his dates wrong, and he was under the impression she had been shot. Tando sighed and put this “tip” into the “220 File.” (This is Seattle police language for mentally disturbed people; in the early 1900s, officers were paid a $2.20 bonus when they were dispatched to this kind of often dangerous call. In California, the code is “51/50” for someone mentally off balance.)

A group of psychics offered to hold a séance and promised to get back to Tando with whatever “clues” they turned up. Evidently they didn’t find any because he never heard from them again.

Because Sara Beth’s killer could be
anyone
, there was an invisible veil of panic in Ballard. Women of all ages who were approached by men they didn’t know expected the worst and called 911. Patrol units were kept busy. Most of the incidents turned out to be friendly, would-be pickups, but everyone was running scared.

A receptionist at the Asian Services Center reported that she’d received a call from a youth who’d rambled on and finally confessed that he’d “killed a girl in Ballard.” But he had the details of Sara Beth’s case all wrong.

Hers was the kind of murder case that pulled kooks out of the woodwork.

Two patrol officers were in the area of the tire store a
few nights after the murder. Shortly after 11:00 p.m., they watched a man loitering near the restroom. He was drunk and sobbing, and they were somewhat surprised when he asked them for a flashlight.

“He told us he was Sara Beth’s neighbor, and he said he’d found her shoes.”

The man was Sven Olsen—the thirty-five-year-old son of Lorraine Olsen, who had found Sara Beth’s purse and clogs! They wondered what he was looking for in the place where her body had lain.

It was enough to make detectives look more closely at Olsen. He was showing excessive sorrow over her death. They learned that, twice, he had attempted to see her body at the mortuary. When they talked with him, Olsen agreed that it was he who had found Sara Beth’s shoes and purse and brought them into his house. He’d felt very guilty ever since, wondering if she died because of inaction on his part.

“I thought I should call someone, but I didn’t know who. I went to bed instead,” he said, wiping away a tear. “Maybe I could have saved her somehow.”

Sven Olsen had known both of the Lundquist girls since the time he’d clerked in a 7-Eleven in the neighborhood.

It was hours later—on Sunday afternoon—when he showed the clogs and purse to his mother, and she called Lynne Carlson.

Sven Olsen’s coming home about the time Sara Beth was murdered and his overwhelming emotional reaction over the death of someone he didn’t know
did
make him a likely suspect for a while. Still, further investigation showed only that he was an unhappy man with a drinking problem, employed, somewhat ironically, as a bartender.

Detective Mike Tando talked with patrons at the Blue Gill tavern where Olsen worked. Those who were there on Saturday night were positive that Sven had never left the tavern between the time he came on shift in the early evening of July 1 and 2:00 a.m., when it closed. Whoever had seized Sara Beth had to have attacked her within five or ten minutes of when she got off the bus at twenty minutes after midnight.

Tando was hitting all the catch-22’s that go along with murders with no obvious suspects. Anything was possible, and it was always a question of how far he should go on which tips. In retrospect, what is essential to solving a murder seems obvious. From the other end, it isn’t that easy.

A photographer who worked at I. Faces called in. “I take slides of the dancers, and then we project them on a giant screen at the disco,” he said. “I’m sure that Sara Beth and Minda were at I. Faces both Friday and Saturday nights. I have pictures of Sara to prove it.”

But he didn’t. Mike Tando looked carefully at all the slides in question and failed to find any photos of Sara Beth, although he saw a few that resembled her.

“We weren’t there,” Minda insisted when Tando asked her about the previous weekend. “We went out for a Coke on Friday night at a restaurant in the north end, and then we talked to some boys we knew in a park. And on Saturday night, we went to the movie, but you already know that.”

Another promising lead ending nowhere.

It wasn’t that people weren’t trying to help. Seattleites had taken Sara Beth to their hearts, even though they hadn’t known her. The slightest change in ordinary behavior
alerted them. Neighbors even reported one man who’d been seen washing down his back porch and steps the morning after Sara Beth was murdered. That wasn’t really guilty behavior, but Tando talked to him anyway. “I’d washed all the windows in the back and got dirt on the porch,” he said. “So I just decided to wash it.”

His housemates verified this. “He was home with us all of Saturday night.”

With more leads coming in almost hourly, Mike Tando was astounded at the number of weirdos who apparently resided within the tightly populated, circumspect community of Ballard. It was as if someone had lifted the roofs off scores of houses, and the secrets once safely hidden inside were exposed for everyone to see.

But that holds true for
any
area; everyone has hidden, private things—some more peculiar than others.

The mother of a teenager in Ballard called to say that her fifteen-year-old daughter and a girlfriend had been terrified during a recent bus ride. A man in his twenties chose a seat across the aisle from them, and then he’d removed a long knife from his waistband.

“He was enjoying how scared they were,” she said worriedly. “He kind of pantomimed how he could hide the knife in his work glove and up his sleeve.”

“Did they know him?”

“No. They never saw him before. Now they’re afraid to get on a bus, and I’m afraid, too.”

She agreed to call Tando if they saw the man again, or if anyone knew who he was.

The homicide file on Sara Beth’s case grew thicker every day. Detectives got a call from the manager of a
motel on Aurora Avenue North. The area was becoming low rent, but it wasn’t yet a regular stroll for teenage prostitutes that it would become one day.

“One of our maids started to clean a unit,” the manager said excitedly, “and she said it was ‘awash with blood.’ That’s just how she put it!”

When investigators arrived, however, they found only isolated spots of the dried brownish-red. The manager and the maid had exaggerated. Now that he was calmer, he admitted that he’d just learned that a family had had a drunken free-for-all in the unit over the weekend.

A special agent with the FBI, assigned to Seattle, was much more believable. He reported that he regularly commuted downtown on the same bus run in Ballard that Sara Beth and Minda had taken on Saturday, July 1. His position made him more observant than most people, and he’d become concerned.

“On several occasions, I’ve noticed a dirty white car following close behind that bus,” he said. “I’ve tried to get a license number, but the tag’s always covered with mud. I’ll keep watching for it.”

A thirteen-year-old junior high student found a knife in the street near 83rd and 24th NW. Unfortunately, he played with it for a day before calling the police, contaminating most of the evidence that might have been on the knife. Even so, like the other found knife, it was retained for lab tests.

Many readers of mysteries and true crime know that an unknown killer is usually someone who moves in the same circles as the victim—a lover or spouse, a relative, friend, coworker, classmate. Good detectives do start with those
closest to the victim and work their way through ever-widening possibilities.

Sara Beth had been quite close to the Aldalotti family, and was said to have gone out with both their sons. Benny, the younger brother, said he had seen Sara Beth the night before she was killed. “And I talked to her on the phone several times. We were mostly talking about how she was going to ride to our cabin on Sunday with Frankie.”

Frankie Aldalotti, nineteen, was living in another state, but he flew home to visit his family on Saturday evening, July 1. He was the brother who had planned to pick her up the next morning for the vacation trip and who first learned that she was missing.

Benny Aldalotti wouldn’t speculate on who might have killed Sara Beth.

“But she seemed nervous about something when I talked to her in front of her house Friday evening,” Benny said. “She told me she really wanted to go up to our cabin for the Fourth of July weekend, but she didn’t think it would look right for us to date.

“I asked her, ‘What are you talking about?’ ’Cause it wasn’t a date. She seemed confused about where we stood. Maybe she felt like she’d be cheating on Nouri. I know Sara Beth hadn’t dated Ricco Sanchez for almost two months.”

Frankie Aldalotti had to be interviewed by phone; he’d already flown back home.

Detectives wondered about the location of Sara’s Beth’s rich boyfriend from Iran. Had he
really
left America? They checked with customs in both countries and verified that
he had, indeed, left the country on June 28, arrived in Iran, and hadn’t yet returned to the United States.

The only other boyfriend that Sara had seen regularly in the months prior to her death was Ricco Sanchez. Mike Tando found that Sanchez worked at a Black Angus restaurant when he was dating Sara Beth. He didn’t own a car, so he had picked her up in a taxi for their dates. A check at the Black Angus revealed that Sanchez had quit his job. His last day was either the Wednesday or Thursday after the July Fourth weekend.

Detectives Duane Homan and Paul Eblin went to Sanchez’s address and talked with his mother. She promised she would have him contact detectives as soon as possible.