Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (35 page)

Even if a husband or other close relative calls the police, the fact is that most departments don’t take missing reports on adults—other than those with handicaps or mental disorders—until the person has been missing twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The vast majority of adults return to their homes safely within that time period, having left for reasons of their own. When there is evidence of foul play, of course, the rules change.

But there were no overt signs that something bad had happened to Carolyn Durall. Her husband certainly didn’t seem concerned when he called the Renton Police Department to report her missing.

He had seen her early Friday morning, he said, as they were both preparing to leave for work, but she hadn’t come home Friday evening.

“When did you see her last?” Detective Gary Kittleson asked.

Bob Durall spoke slowly, as if he was trying to remember helpful details. He said that he had awakened at about 5:45 Friday morning and that he had driven Carolyn’s van down to the shores of Lake Washington, where he went jogging in Gene Coulon Park. After he returned home, he was taking a shower when he heard her call out that she was going downstairs.

“…So she was headed down the stairs from our bedroom, and I assumed she was leaving for work,” he said. “I didn’t know until late afternoon that she didn’t show up at Morgan Stanley.”

The detective noted that Durall seemed very calm, very different from the panicky feelings of his wife’s friends.

Bob Durall said there might be a number of reasonable explanations for his wife’s sudden disappearance, although he wasn’t specific on this Friday night. “I have no idea why she would leave or where she might have gone.”

The Renton police did send out a statewide computer request asking for “an attempt to locate” both Carolyn and her wine-colored van.

When her family compared notes, they realized that the last one to speak directly to Carolyn was probably her brother’s wife, who called her about 8:30 Thursday night. Bob had answered on the fourth ring, sounding “very subdued.”

“He didn’t sound like himself,” she recalled. “He sounded disturbed, and I asked him, ‘What’s wrong? You sound sad.’ He said he was fine but ‘really tired.’ ”

When she asked to speak to Carolyn, Bob said he thought she was probably asleep. She asked him to check. After a long wait, Carolyn came on the line, but she sounded odd, almost as if she “was talking in extreme slow motion.”

“I said, ‘What’s up?’ ”

Maybe she was only sleepy, but her words were very deliberate, and she said that Bob had just mixed her a margarita. Although Carolyn rarely drank, a margarita was her preferred cocktail. However, as far as her sister-in-law knew, Bob had
never
mixed a drink for Carolyn. He disapproved of her drinking
any
alcohol and usually forbade her to drink except to grudgingly allow her to have an occasional drink at a family gathering. He himself drank only beer and that just a few times a year. It was hard to believe that Bob had actually mixed a drink for Carolyn.

Worried because Carolyn was speaking so slowly, her sister-in-law asked her if she was okay. “She just said again that Bob had made her a margarita. She sounded happy enough but very unlike her usual self.”

Asked if she had told Bob about her decision to separate from him, Carolyn said that she couldn’t talk but promised to call her back the next morning.

Gary and Denise Jannusch packed up their children and their possessions and left Lake Chelan early Saturday morning, even though they weren’t due back until Monday. As soon as they got to Renton, they drove to the Durall house, hoping that Carolyn would answer the door. But she didn’t. They walked around the house and peered into the garage but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Both of the family cars were gone. They learned that Bob had left to catch a ferry to his in-laws’ island home to spend the weekend with his children.

That seemed odd: how could he leave when his wife was missing? It seemed that the people who should be the most concerned about Carolyn weren’t even looking for her. Bob certainly wasn’t, and the police had said they could do nothing until Monday. From the very beginning it was Carolyn’s coworkers and neighbors who looked for her.

The Jannusches drove to the property Bob and Carolyn had bought off I-90, planning to eventually build a house. They walked the property, not really sure what they might find. “We didn’t really see anything,” Denise recalled, “except for a wide trail where we could see a car had gone up in it and kind of turned around. We saw a tree where bark had been torn off, and it was fresh, white underneath the bark. And we saw what looked like fresh tire tracks on the property. We tried not to disturb anything, but we took note of it.”

As far as they recalled, the tread on Denise’s van tires were in a straight line and the tires that left marks in the mud were “windey.” But how many people really look at their own tire patterns, much less someone else’s?

For the whole weekend, Carolyn’s friends and coworkers searched for some sign of her or her van. They found nothing.

Spending the weekend with his in-laws, Bob Durall received a call late Sunday night from the Washington State Patrol. The King County Police had located Carolyn’s Ford van parked alongside the road between Renton and Issaquah (a small town further east, toward the mountain foothills). The van was only about two miles from the Duralls’ house. To his host’s consternation, Bob said he would wait until Monday to return to Seattle to check on it. By that time, he couldn’t find it, he told her friends, suggesting that Carolyn had driven it someplace else.

As soon as they got word on Monday morning that her vehicle had been sighted, four of Carolyn’s coworkers went out to look for it, driving slowly along the route where Bob said it was parked. If the van was ever there, it was gone. They called the State Patrol offices, giving them a description of Carolyn’s van and the license number.

The patrol’s radio operator confirmed that it had been seen again. “A citizen reported seeing it this morning at 4:55
AM
on the freeway, headed toward Burien. The car was being driven erratically, weaving in and out of traffic lanes.”

Burien is more than twenty miles southeast of where Carolyn’s van had been parked on Sunday night in the Licorice Fern area. Burien is close to Sea-Tac airport. Her friends were relieved at the thought that she had been seen only about five hours earlier. But that hope was dashed when the driver was described as “dark-haired, slight build.” Carolyn was a blonde. It might have been her van, but it didn’t sound as though she had been driving it early that Monday morning.

It was Monday, August 10, and Carolyn hadn’t been seen since the previous Thursday at three
PM
. She hadn’t talked to anyone since six hours after that. Back in the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter offices, her coworkers did what she had asked of them. They weren’t intruding on her privacy; they were carrying out her wishes. She had told them what they should do if she disappeared, “If I don’t come back…my whole life is in my desk.”

Still, they felt uneasy about looking through the drawers of her desk. Taking a deep breath, they went ahead, hoping there might be an address or a phone number—something—that would help them find her. They discovered that Carolyn’s whole life was indeed in her desk, including her private financial records and her poignant writings about her failed marriage. They found a copy of a letter she had either sent to Bob or planned to send or give to him, perhaps on Thursday night.

“Our marriage was a mistake from the beginning,” Carolyn had written. “I love you too little, and you love me too much.”

Carolyn said that for years she had been “unhappy, guilt-ridden and humiliated. I am dying inside. There is so little left of who I used to be. My spirit is crushed. I feel that you are too controlling and obsessive and jealous.”

There were numerous notes and a journal that told the same story, written by a woman who was being emotionally suffocated.

Carolyn had left the PIN for her private bank account in her desk, too. The balance was something over nine hundred dollars. A call to her bank showed that nothing had been withdrawn recently. If Carolyn had left of her own accord, surely she would have needed money to live on. She had noted that she had no independent access to the couple’s credit cards or to Bob’s bank account.

Carolyn’s friends called the Renton police again to beg for an all-out search for her. Now she was officially a missing person but not classified as a possible homicide victim, something her friends feared she might be.

Only if her disappearance were reclassified as an urgent matter could the police call out Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts and their reserve officers.

On Monday night Bob Durall called Gary Jannusch and asked to meet with him at a local pizza parlor. Gary agreed, and the two men drove to Gene Coulon Park, where they sat and talked. Gary noticed that Bob’s conversation wasn’t about how worried he was about Carolyn; instead, his remarks were more derogatory toward her. At one point, Bob said, “Do you know that she
smokes?”
in a tone that suggested she was a scarlet woman. He stressed that Carolyn “yelled at the kids, too.” It was as if he was building a case for himself as the injured party in their marriage.

Bob asked if he could move in with the Jannusches “temporarily,” but Gary said they really weren’t set up to have a guest. If Bob Durall had done anything Monday, it was all about himself. He went to work for a while. He mentioned that he had seen a doctor earlier because he had injured himself lifting one of his sons into a swing. “I’ve got a torn biceps,” he said, “and I’ll need surgery.”

A torn biceps muscle is a severe injury, one that would require delicate surgery to reattach the ends of the muscle so the arm wouldn’t atrophy. It seemed unlikely that lifting one small boy into a swing would do so much damage, especially to a man who took pride in keeping in shape.

Bob also dropped into Morgan Stanley and spoke with a few of Carolyn’s coworkers, women who weren’t as close to her as Denise, Maria Benson and Tari Scheffer. Again, he spoke negatively about his missing wife. The women were both surprised and distressed.

It was Tuesday, August 11, when Detective Gary Kittleson met Bob Durall for the first time. Kittleson now knew about the information Carolyn had left in her desk and that she had planned to ask for a divorce the night she disappeared.

As he faced Durall, he found a man who was remarkably calm considering that his wife and the mother of his three children had been missing for five days. In fact, he wanted to tell Kittleson how disappointed he had become in his wife’s behavior. He said he had “confronted” her about his suspicions that she was unfaithful in 1997. In his version, she confessed that she met men in a chat room on America Online and rendezvoused with many of them. Bob Durall was convinced she had had at least one affair with some man she met online.

In early 1998, Durall said, he found that Carolyn continued to communicate with men in chat rooms, and he became even more suspicious about her fidelity. He found women’s underwear that he didn’t recognize in their clothes hamper. He thought he detected semen on the garment.

“I thought she was having another affair,” he said, “but I didn’t confront her about it.”

That didn’t appear to upset him very much, either. Apparently he had dealt with it, and the marriage was intact.

When he was asked about the previous Thursday night, Durall said that he had taken Carolyn out to dinner and that nothing untoward had happened. “It was just a normal night.”

He certainly had no hint that she planned to leave him or was about to run off with someone else.

“Which vehicle did you take to the restaurant?” Kittleson asked.

“Her van, the Aerostar.”

“And you got home at what time?”

“About 8:40.”

Carolyn’s van had been spotted being driven erratically between Renton and Burien at about six on Monday morning. As Kittleson interviewed Bob Durall the next day, it was still missing. Noting that Durall was quite slender and had dark hair, he wondered if he was the one driving his missing wife’s van.

Linda Gunderson, watching the Durall house, had seen Bob drive up in his Nissan Pathfinder about 7:30 on Monday morning.

Witnesses living in the Licorice Fern neighborhood said that they first noticed Carolyn’s van there sometime Thursday evening and that it remained there through Sunday. Who left it there and who moved it was anyone’s guess. Perhaps Bob had left it there. He was an experienced jogger and could easily have run the two miles to his house. Or he could have run from his house to the van on Monday morning and driven it toward Burien, then gotten back to his Nissan Pathfinder, possibly by taxi.

Or if Carolyn herself had left her van two miles from home, maybe someone had picked her up and driven her away.

It was very confusing, particularly when a clerk at a minimart and gas station in Bellevue was sure that she had seen Carolyn alive and well there on Saturday, August 8. After she saw Carolyn’s photograph on one of the hundreds of fliers her friends distributed, the clerk said she remembered her as the pretty blonde who had smiled at her.

Had she seen Carolyn Durall or another blonde woman? If she had indeed seen Carolyn, was it on August 8—or on August 1, the Saturday before?