Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (36 page)

Memory is not infallible, and it can be influenced by many factors.

When Gary Kittleson talked with Bob Durall on August 11, Bob never mentioned that he had been notified that Carolyn’s van was found two miles from their home—or anywhere. Kittleson didn’t say anything about that, but he did ask Bob where he thought it might be. He speculated that it could be parked somewhere near Sea-Tac airport.

Two days later, on August 13, Kittleson called Bob Durall and asked him if the two of them could check his residence to determine if Carolyn had taken any extra clothing with her when she left. Durall said he would call back later in the day.

Then Bob Durall, aware that he might be placed in the category of suspect because he was the closest person to his missing wife, decided to hire an attorney to represent him. When detectives asked to do a “walk-through” of his house, his antennae went up. He didn’t like the idea of strangers swarming all over his home. He hired one of the most successful criminal defense attorneys in Seattle, John Henry Browne. The flamboyant, six-foot four-inch Browne had long flowing brown hair and a luxuriant mustache, and he rode motorcycles. Looking more like a renegade biker than an officer of the Court, he was in great demand. He often seemed to be the patron saint of lost causes, taking on the most difficult defense cases. More than twenty years earlier, it was Browne, then a public defender, who counseled Ted Bundy after his first arrest in Utah and during Bundy’s trial in Miami.

Now Browne told the media that subjecting a worried husband to a search of his house would only add to his stress. There was no indication that Carolyn had met with foul play. In fact, Browne said, his client had reliable witnesses who reported seeing her alive and well on Saturday, August 8, and again on August 10, after she had supposedly vanished. He was speaking of the convenience-store clerk and the woman who saw the swerving van in the wee hours of Monday morning.

While Bob Durall continued to suggest that Carolyn had simply chosen to leave him and their children, no one who knew her well could accept that. She was much too loving a mother to do that. She just wasn’t the kind of woman who would walk away from her responsibilities no matter how unhappy she was at being trapped in a cage-like marriage.

Carolyn’s friends could not wait around for some word of her. They made hundreds of phone calls and continued to pass out fliers with her picture on them asking for information.

They organized search parties. Drawing a grid map with the Duralls’house in the center of a circle, they began a methodical search for Carolyn and her van. Sea-Tac Airport is a fifteen-minute drive southwest, and Bellevue approximately the same distance to the north. Within twenty miles they would come to the foothills of Snoqualmie Pass, where thousands of acres of national forest land, thick with fir trees, crept up to the I-90 freeway.

The volunteer search party began by driving slowly through the scores of parking lots outside hotels and motels, restaurants, and the airport. Carolyn’s van was big and blocky, and its wine color would make it stand out even if it was hidden in the woods.

They looked in back of buildings and in private driveways. They found some similar Ford vans, but none was Carolyn Durall’s.

On Wednesday, August 19, almost two weeks after Carolyn Durall was last seen, a party of volunteers searching for her turned into the parking lot of the Radisson Hotel at the corner of Pacific Highway, and South 170th. The hotel had parking on all four sides of the sprawling grounds. As they drove slowly around the hotel, they checked the scores of vehicles parked there, not really expecting their search to be any more successful than the previous sweeps of parking area. But this time, they spotted Carolyn’s van.

It was parked next to the laundry area in the back of the hotel, just east of the north runways of the airport and the frontage road. The wine-colored van had plates whose number they had long since memorized: 166 CWI. It had obviously been there a long time: its windshield and roof were covered with leaves and twigs.

Their hearts in their throats, they peered into the van through its dusty windows. It looked normal enough, and there were no signs that anything violent had taken place there. They hoped fervently that Carolyn had taken the hotel van to the airport a quarter mile down the road and flown off to some tropical paradise but they knew that she probably hadn’t. The only thing unusual they could see in her van were some bags of clothes marked for the Salvation Army.

They showed Carolyn’s photo to the desk clerks, but no one recognized her. They notified the Renton police investigators, who had the van placed on a flatbed and taken to their headquarters to be processed. Later, detectives asked to check the registration log from August 6 to the present. Unless she registered under an alias, Carolyn had not stayed there.

Denise Jannusch wasn’t surprised when she heard where Carolyn’s van had been found. “The Radisson lot is where she and Bob used to park when they flew somewhere. It was cheaper than parking in the airport garage.”

Carolyn hadn’t used a credit card, made or received calls on her cell phone, accessed her bank account, bought a plane ticket on an airline flying out of Seattle, or contacted anyone who knew her.

She was simply gone.

That her husband didn’t want them to look through the family home for any clues to her disappearance made the police look upon Bob Durall with unusual suspicion.

The consensus, as hard as it was to accept, was that Carolyn Durall was dead. On August 21, 1998, Gary Kittleson prepared an affidavit citing probable cause to obtain a search warrant for the green house on Hoquiam Court. Renton detectives, accompanied by criminalists from the Washington State Patrol crime lab, served the warrant and entered the last place Carolyn was seen alive.

John and Linda Gunderson stared at the CSI van from the Washington State Patrol as it turned into the Duralls’ driveway. Linda had been distraught ever since Carolyn’s disappearance, but as John admitted later, “Until I saw that CSI van, I didn’t really believe that anything bad had happened to Carolyn; at that point, I had to wonder if Bob might really have done something to her.”

With neighbors peering nervously through their blinds, the detectives and crime-scene specialists walked into the two-story home. It looked neat enough, although it had a stale smell of trapped air, a house left empty of its occupants for a long time. Bob Durall and his children had been living at his mother’s house in Seattle while he waited for word of Carolyn.

They were armed with a search warrant signed by King County District Court Judge Robert McBeth that allowed them to search the Durall home, the Aerostar van, and the Nissan Pathfinder for cell phone records, weapons, trace evidence (which included blood, hair, fibers, latent prints, financial records, correspondence, diaries, journals, notes, calendars, computers and their electronic files, floppy discs, hard drives, etc., answering machines, and chemicals or appliances that might have been used to clean the vehicles or the residence). There were no signs of disarray in the downstairs portion of the house; the rooms looked as if someone had simply stepped away for a moment or gone to work, expecting to be home for supper.

They moved upstairs and into the master bedroom. It looked normal, too. But the carpeting under the bedside tables looked peculiar. The wall-to-wall carpet and the pad beneath had been cut out then patched with rectangles of the same color and weave. When they looked into the children’s playroom, they saw that a piece of furniture was placed at an awkward angle. They lifted it and found bare subfloor; clearly, this was where the patches came from.

They returned to the master bedroom. Without speaking, they pulled up the patched section. Now they could see the reason for the repair job; the plywood subflooring was stained a dark mahogany, the color of dried blood. The crime lab technicians did a test on the spot and found the stain positive for human blood. Obviously, there had been so much blood that it soaked through the carpet and the pad and into the plywood beneath.

Next, they scanned the walls and saw almost invisible spots and streaks. By spraying the walls and baseboards with a substance called Luminol, crime-scene investigators can bring out bloodstains. Reacting to the chemical, every drop, streak, or swipe of blood glows blue-green. Even when someone thinks he has scrubbed all vestiges of blood away, it isn’t really gone. Luminol will detect a tiny scintilla of blood.

The investigators counted more than a hundred blood spatters. The stains were not in a spray pattern, which would have indicated the victim had been shot; it was medium-velocity blood that had probably flown out from someone’s body or, more likely, head, after they had been struck by a heavy object. Tediously, they drew a circle in pencil around each drop that sprinkled the bedroom wall and attached a numbered sticker.

They found more stains and streaks of blood leading from the bedroom to the bathroom, mostly along the baseboards. Someone had been dragged from the bedroom to the bathroom. More blood streaks appeared when Luminol and special bright lights were used as the investigators worked from a doorway of the house into the garage.

Several sections of the Duralls’ home were actually sawed away so that they could be used as physical evidence if a trial ever took place.

There was no bedding on the bed in the master bedroom. When Denise Jannusch and Linda Gunderson heard this, they had an eerie premonition. About a week before she disappeared, Carolyn had told them that she had purchased a lovely new matched set of linens: bedspread, pillow shams, and sheets. None of them were found in her house.

The blood in her home was Carolyn Durall’s type and, if necessary, DNA testing could be done to absolutely ascertain that it had come from her. If she were still alive, which was increasingly unlikely, she had lost so much blood that she would have been critically injured when she was taken away. She would have needed to be in a hospital ER, so paramedics would have been called by anyone who cared about her. But there were no Jane Does in any area hospital or at the morgue in the Medical Examiner’s Office.

After the lonely green house on Hoquiam Court had been searched, tested for physical evidence, and cleared for the family to take possession, several of Carolyn’s friends moved slowly through it. What they had not wanted to accept, had fought to deny as impossible, was all too clear to them when they viewed the disfigured walls, the cut-up carpeting, the faint blood spots marked by stickers. They had seen crime scenes on television shows, but this was real. Carolyn had been here, but her spirit was gone from the house that she had tended so carefully. Seeing her makeup and hair-care products left behind in the master bathroom almost made the women cry. They knew she didn’t need them any longer.

On August 22, 1998, Gary Kittleson went to Robert Durall’s mother’s home. There, he told Durall that he was under arrest. The suspect didn’t seem to be upset or even surprised; he didn’t even ask Kittleson what he was being arrested for. He was arraigned, pleaded not guilty, and was held without bail. He was charged with second-degree murder.

Durall, appearing for his arraignment in the orange coveralls of a high-risk prisoner and without his toupee, looked much diminished as he stood at the rail in the Regional Justice Center of King County. His mother did her best to rally their friends, his coworkers, and members of the church, where he had recently become an elder, to stand behind him and write letters attesting to his good reputation.

It was impossible not to feel sorry for this elderly woman whose life was nearly destroyed by her son’s situation and who also grieved for the daughter-in-law she loved and for her three grandchildren who were being cared for by Carolyn’s family. She could not even imagine that her boy could have done anything to hurt anyone.

The ripples that spread out from violent crime always wash over innocent people.

Durall wanted to get out of jail as soon as possible. Two King County deputy prosecutors, Patricia Eakes and Jeff Baird, asked that if bail were set for Bob Durall, it should be high.

“The State requests bail in the amount of $1 million. The defendant went to great lengths to conceal this crime. He has disposed of his wife’s body and attempted to destroy the evidence that existed in the family home. For more than two weeks after his wife’s disappearance, he continued to mislead people, including police, about her death. Given the nature of the crime, the potential for extended incarceration, and the defendant’s actions, and the fact that his wife’s body has not been recovered, he should be considered not only a danger to the community but a flight risk.”