Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (31 page)

Judy was far more sad than angry, and she was frustrated because she could no longer discuss what had happened with her husband. I suspect that in the long run the aborted trip to the Cayman Islands would have been only a blip in an otherwise solid marriage.

Judy decided that it wasn’t time yet to write a book, and I promised to set it aside. As it happened, I waited sixteen years. Like Larry Sturholm’s coworkers and friends, I struggled with my own ethics. Should I tell this remarkable story or let it go? Abiding by Judy Sturholm’s wishes, I let it go—until I learned that William Pawlyk was trying to have his sentence commuted and until I met a woman to whom he confessed.

Cindy Versdahl, who was in her early thirties, had never been to a trial before, but she had been one of Larry Sturholm’s devoted viewers, and she was saddened to learn that he had been murdered. “I was stunned,” she said. “And then I was curious about why anyone would do that.” When she learned that William Pawlyk was going to trial on two charges of aggravated murder, she decided to watch the legal system at work.

“I took the bus down to the courthouse in Seattle. It was standing room only, and they wouldn’t let me in, but finally someone left and I found a seat.”

Cindy went to Pawlyk’s trial twice, fascinated by the testimony she heard. But she was disappointed when a defense attorney objected to a witness, and the judge cancelled the afternoon sessions on the second day so they could debate the problem. After taking a day off work, the long bus ride, and waiting to get into the trial, she had the whole long afternoon free.

“I was mad,” she admits, “and so I decided to go over to the jail and talk to Pawlyk.”

She wasn’t intimidated by the fact that she knew nothing about procedures for jail visitors. She handed a note to the bailiff in the courtroom, asking what to do. She was told she could go over to the King County Jail and ask to see Pawlyk. It would be up to him and his jailers whether to grant her a visit. And that was what she did, taking the elevator to the floor indicated. Cindy waited for several hours then was led into a visitor’s area. Bill Pawlyk came out to take a seat on the prisoner’s side. He wasn’t wearing the business suit he wore in court; he wore a bright orange jumpsuit, the kind reserved for “high-risk” prisoners locked up for major crimes. He was curious, too, about this stranger who had come to visit him.

“Who
are
you?” he asked her.

She explained that she wasn’t a reporter or anyone special, just someone who wanted to understand him.

He didn’t have many visitors, he told her, and he’d decided to see what she wanted. He spoke with what seemed to her to be a “New York accent.”

“I understand who the victims were,” she began, “but I wanted to know why did you kill Larry Sturholm? How could you do that?”

“I wasn’t expecting to see him,” Pawlyk said, as if that were a clear enough answer.

Pawlyk told Cindy Versdahl that he had traveled every weekend to see Debra. And she had betrayed him. His marriages had failed, and his children didn’t communicate with him. He had known what he had to do. He said that even though his lawyers were basing his defense on insanity, that wasn’t true.

“I’m not insane,” he said firmly. “It was premeditated. I planned the whole thing. I did it consciously.”

She stared at him, temporarily speechless.

“It’s over and done with now,” he said easily. “No use talking about it.”

He wanted to talk instead about his own life. He was born in New York City and had been raised in the “projects.” He had one brother and a daughter and a son. He graduated from the Naval Academy and had expected to eventually become an admiral in the Naval Reserve. He had the distinction of having had two meetings with Admiral Hyman Rickover.

Pawlyk dominated the conversation and jumped from one subject to another, although he didn’t seem crazy to Cindy. He liked to talk about books and advised her “Go up to Tower Records in Belltown [a district on the north end of Seattle’s downtown area] and you can get cheap books there.”

Bill Pawlyk asked Cynthia for her phone number, explaining that he could only call out of jail with collect calls. She was reluctant to give it to him but finally relented. He didn’t seem at all interested in her as a woman, and he wasn’t going anywhere. He wouldn’t be showing up on her doorstep.

“He only called me once,” she remembers. “And he talked steadily for half an hour—all about books. I could barely get a word in. He was very intelligent, and you could tell he knew it.”

Lee Yates and Jeff Baird, senior deputy prosecuting attorneys for King County, represented the State in the case against William Pawlyk. Yates had been with the prosecutor’s office for many years, and he had successfully prosecuted a number of high-profile cases. Baird had been there fewer years, and he went on to be the lead prosecutor many years later in the Green River Murder case. They made a very strong team for the State.

This courtroom was full of tension. Debra Sweiger’s siblings were there, as was Larry’s brother, Phil Sturholm, a constant presence as he took voluminous notes. Phil and Larry had been extremely close, and it was tremendously difficult for the older brother to hear details of Larry’s murder.

The gallery was packed day after day with court watchers who could not imagine why anyone would kill the genial television star who had seemed like a friend to them.

Pawlyk had been examined by two eminent forensic psychiatrists, paid for by the State because he claimed that he was indigent. One, Dr. Emanuel Tanay, who had examined any number of nationally known high-profile offenders, including Ted Bundy, flew to Seattle to interview Pawlyk. He was the second psychiatrist the Defense hired. Tanay diagnosed Pawlyk as having suffered a psychotic break during which he killed Debra Sweiger and Larry Sturholm. Tanay opined that Pawlyk was legally insane at the time of the double murder and his attempted suicide.

Dr. Christian Harris, who was also hired by the Defense, found just the opposite. Harris, too, had many, many years of experience in evaluating murder defendants. It was his opinion that Pawlyk had been fully aware of the difference between right and wrong when he carried out the savage stabbings and was cognizant of the nature and quality of his acts. The Defense had been aghast when they read Harris’s report. So they hired Tanay. Satisfied with his report, they attempted to scratch Harris from the witness list. His diagnosis would be far more beneficial to Baird and Yates’s prosecution than it was to Pawlyk’s case. They wanted the jurors to hear only Dr. Tanay’s analysis. Yates and Baird argued that both psychiatric evaluations should be heard.

The Court refused the Defense motion.

Just how bizarrely had Bill Pawlyk behaved on the fatal Monday of July 31? He purchased the hunting knives expressly for the occasion. He brought a gun for backup. Apparently his 200-mile drive from Richland hadn’t been erratic, or he would undoubtedly have been stopped by Washington State troopers.

King County detectives traced his movements back to the time he left Richland and headed for Debra’s house for a final showdown. They learned to their amazement that he was in her home, twice on the day of the murders. Apparently, he got hungry while he waited for her to come home so he drove back to the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge, a luxurious resort known for its fine cuisine, particularly its huge farm breakfasts.

There, Pawlyk ordered and consumed the lodge’s seven-course breakfast. Sixteen years ago, the thirty-dollar charge for breakfast was the priciest in the area, but diners agreed that it was well worth it. Reservations for Sunday breakfast had a waiting list that was several weeks long, but this was a Monday. Pawlyk dined on fresh fruit, oatmeal with clotted cream, bacon, ham, eggs, waffles, and pancakes, the latter items part of a ritual at the lodge where waiters pour syrup from several feet in the air until it curls over the pancakes.

The investigators even located the waiter who had served Bill Pawlyk and learned that he ate his meal with gusto. The server had detected no overt signs of disorientation or despair in the man he waited on. Rather, he found him quite cheerful.

Then
Pawlyk drove back to Issaquah to lie in wait for Debra’s return home.

The defendant had an extensive lineup of impressive character witnesses, including the mayor of Richland, who extolled Pawlyk’s service to the community in the Tri-Cities area. According to his friends and coworker, Pawlyk must surely have been out of his mind when he carried out the two murders. Yet the man sitting at the defense table looked eminently sane. Bill Pawlyk was relying on the not guilty by reason of insanity defense, but his actions before the stabbings seemed much too deliberate for a man who had lost touch with reality.

As it was, Bill Pawlyk had already escaped the most severe penalty for aggravated first-degree murder; the death penalty had been taken off the table. By mutual agreement between the State and the Defense, if he were found guilty, he would face life in prison with no early parole or commutation of the sentence. Once the death penalty was dropped, a life sentence would have no teeth if it could be softened and adjusted as the years went by.

But first, the jurors had to decide whether Bill Pawlyk was guilty of the over-kill of two human beings who were taken completely by surprise after he carefully planned the details of the murder of Debra Sweiger.

Lee Yates and Jeff Baird summed up the shocking case in their final remarks and rebuttal. Of all the murder cases they had prosecuted, this was one where they expected a quick verdict, although they had long since learned that no one, not even experienced judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys can truly read a jury by studying their faces and body language during a trial.

Juries who come back in a short time do, however, tend to vote for conviction. As their deliberation stretches into days, the likelihood of an acquittal grows.

There was no quick verdict. Indeed, the jurors in the Pawlyk trial deliberated for five days. But in the end, Yates and Baird and the evidence unearthed by the King County sheriff’s detectives convinced them that Pawlyk was indeed guilty of a carefully choreographed plan to commit the murder of Debra Sweiger.

They believed that when he found Larry Sturholm in her house, Larry became expendable to Pawlyk. Did they actually have an initially friendly conversation? Pawlyk insists they did, but experts doubt that.

When William Pawlyk was found guilty of two counts of aggravated first-degree murder, he was sentenced to life in prison. No one—not even the prosecutors—knew of his frank confession to Cindy Versdahl. But the brutality of the murders could not be denied, nor could Dr. Christian Harris’s opinion that Pawlyk was neither currently insane nor had he been insane under the law or medically on the night of July 31, 1989.

Pawlyk was sent first to the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla. There he proved to be an ideal prisoner; there was no question that he was a brilliant man. He tutored prisoners who attended community college classes in basic math, calculus, science, and physics but worked mostly with those who were either trying to earn their GEDs or high school diplomas. He oversaw a small reference library and worked in preproduction for an in-prison television station.

He was president of the prison military service veterans’ group; he had always been active in navy reserve activities. Pawlyk had many supporters, so many that he had to decide whom to trim from his visitors’ list, as he was allowed to have only ten people cleared to visit him. He received many letters and cards. To keep up with his correspondence, he often had to write a single letter and make duplicate copies. He sent Christmas cards to scores of friends.

Several television stations requested interviews. He weighed the advisability of doing them. He was reluctant to grant those that emanated from Seattle. The third anniversary of the murders in Issaquah brought a number of requests in mid-1992. “I’m more reluctant to do those,” he wrote to Cindy Versdahl, “because of the personal emotional drain and the stirring up of memories and emotions for people in Seattle.”

He wanted people in Seattle to forget the double murder. He was working hard on an appeal of his sentence. The premise of his appeal was that he had not received a fair trial because the jurors heard Dr. Christian Harris say that he was not insane at the time he killed Larry Sturholm and Debra Sweiger.

Pawlyk and his court-appointed attorneys took that tack for a decade, moving to higher and higher courts. The man who wrote to friends and supporters was perfectly sane, civilized, and even courtly in his correspondence. He said that his jurors were “good folks” and that three of them had even written to him.

It was almost as if he had been able to erase his responsibility for the murders of two people who had been much loved. When one of his jurors was quoted as saying (about Pawlyk) that “everyone can be driven to that edge [where they snap]” and that she would now “gladly invite him into her living room,” it was very difficult for the victims’ family members and for those of us who knew the details of what happened during that “snap.”

Pawlyk remained in the Walla Walla prison for six years. Then his request to be transferred to the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe was granted. He was exhilarated; his appeal was headed for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, just one step below the Supreme Court.

At the reformatory in Monroe, a medium-custody institution at the time, he shared a nine-by-six-foot cell with another prisoner. He had put on weight from the starchy diet served in prison and developed high blood pressure but otherwise was doing well.