But I Trusted You and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  “Did you ever fire it in the house?”

  “There would have been bullet holes and cartridges in the kitchen if I’d fired it.”

  Frank Chase didn’t ask him why he had said “kitchen,” when he’d been asked about firing his gun in the whole house.

  The investigators at the Millroy home had found all manner of incriminating evidence in Lorraine Millroy’s orange van: bloody rags, blood, a shovel, and the sheet of plywood. That was the most telling physical evidence they’d ever seen. There was a portrait in blood etched into the grain of the plywood sheet; dried now, it formed a grotesque and telling pattern. The outline of a body was as clear as if it had been deliberately drawn with dark red paint. Even the pelvic girdle was perfectly outlined.

  When Lieutenant Chase asked Millroy about the items in the van, he had a ready answer. “I found all that stuff there when I got into the van to take my drive into the mountains. I had a feeling that if I went for that ride across Snoqualmie Pass, it would lead me to my mother.”

  Asked why he had begun to clean up the house where he and his mother lived, Dusty seemed angry. “I shouldn’t have cleaned up anything,” he blurted. “I always get stuck with things.”

  He insisted that he hadn’t dragged anything around through the house—as the trail of blood suggested.

  “Why was the green plastic tarp in the back of your mother’s van?”

  “That was what I used to cover the broken window in my car.”

  Chase drew a sketch of the bloody outline on the plywood panel, but Dusty Millroy had no explanation for that either. “I didn’t see any blood on the panel when I looked into the van. I don’t know how it got there.”

  “Dusty, do you know where your mother is?” Chase asked quietly.

  “No.”

  Dusty’s rambling statements didn’t make sense at all, and they contradicted each other. He alluded to “vibes” he’d received that told him to drive to Cle Elum, thinking he might find his mother there. The vibes had told him that his mother might be near Peoh Point Road, where he had once ridden trail bikes.

  “What else did the vibes tell you?” Chase asked.

  “That she would not be too far off the road.”

  “On top of the ground or in a grave?”

  “It wouldn’t be deep—with rocks on top.”

  “Did you leave anything in Cle Elum?”

  “Nothing. I got stuck twice in the snow up there. Once some guys from Puget Power pulled me out, and the second time, some forest rangers pulled me out.”

  This was true. Detectives had already talked with the crews, who remembered the strange young man with the long red hair who had been silent and truculent as they helped to dig his orange van out of the snow in the wilderness areas near Cle Elum.

  As the lengthy interview continued, Dusty Millroy acknowledged that his mother was probably dead. He said he figured that someone had killed her and taken her away.

  “I was saved only because I was locked in my basement room with my gun for protection all night.” He seemed oblivious to the impression he was making on the detectives. He was young, strong, and if there had, indeed, been a killer in the house, most sons would have protected their mothers. Yet he had saved himself.

  The chance that his story was true was slight, but it was clear he was either lying or was psychotic enough that he believed what he was saying.

  Lieutenant Chase left the interview room; he had been playing the role of the “good cop,” in the time-honored interview technique of good cop/bad cop. While Chase had pretended to be understanding, Hicks had watched him with suspicious eyes.

  Now, Sam Hicks confronted Dusty Millroy, mincing no words. He looked at Dusty with distaste, and the tension in the room was palpable.

  “We believe that you found your mother in the kitchen of your house early Monday morning,” the tall, dark-haired detective said. “You killed her and you drove her body away in her van—”

  Dusty denied everything, but Hicks kept on talking.

  “You dumped her body somewhere in the woods near Snoqualmie Pass—maybe near Peoh Point Road.”

  Millroy fidgeted and finally said, “I may have carried her out—but I didn’t …”

  He stopped before he said the words “kill her.”

  “Why would you ‘carry her out’?” Hicks asked.

  Dusty clamped his mouth shut and refused to say more. Nor would he allow hair samples to be taken from his body. They would have to get a search warrant to do that. They could, but it would take more time.

  At 5:10 p.m., Dusty Millroy was booked into the King County Jail on suspicion of homicide.

  On November 29, Detective Frank Tennison and Sergeant Dave Urban searched the canyon behind the Millroys’ house for hours. They found no sign whatsoever of Lorraine’s body.

  A search warrant was obtained for the orange van, which had been sealed since the first night deputies were summoned to the Millroys’ house. It had been transported to covered storage on a flatbed truck so that any bits of brush or soil caught underneath wouldn’t be lost.

  Tolton and Hursh processed the van, going through it inch by inch. They found two strands of hair caught in the rear doors. The blood inside the van was type A, but, at this point, no one knew what the missing woman’s blood type was. And, in 1978, DNA identification was years in the future.

  The chances that Lorraine Millroy was going to show up alive and well were almost nil. But where was she? And what had happened through the years to Dusty Millroy that had left him in this rambling, disoriented state?

  Lorraine’s estranged husband was on his way back from Wichita, Kansas, and their daughter was coming from Bellingham to talk to detectives. Hopefully, they could fill in some of the gaps in the macabre story. Amy Millroy talked with investigators Sam Hicks and Frank Tennison. She verified that she and her boyfriend had been home for the Thanksgiving holiday, leaving Sunday night. At that time, her mother had been in a “cheerful” frame of mind, and Dusty had locked himself in his room, a scenario that had become “almost normal” for their home.

  “But it was very difficult for my mother to feel positive about her life,” she added.

  Amy recalled that her mother had tried in the past to get Dusty to move out and start a life of his own. She wanted him to take care of his financial responsibilities. But Dusty hadn’t been able to make it on his own, and he’d soon ended up living in his car.

  Worried about him, Lorraine Millroy had always relented, and allowed him to move back in. Her mother had also tried—in vain—to get Dusty into psychiatric treatment. But he was adamant that he wouldn’t go.

  “My brother has caused so much upheaval in our family,” Amy sighed. She said she blamed him for their father opting out of the whole situation, filing for divorce and accepting a job in Boeing’s Wichita division. “My mom’s been on her own, trying to deal with Dusty.”

  Amy said that Dusty had last worked as a mechanic for a business that maintained fleet automobiles for corporate use. Although he had been talented in many areas and highly intelligent, all that changed when her brother had gotten heavily into LSD about a year before.

  “He uses it regularly on weekends.”

  In the sixties, Timothy Leary and actor Cary Grant, along with many other celebrities, praised the hallucinogenic as a miraculous breakthrough to expand the mind. Lysergic acid stimulated the brain to see fantastic colors and remarkable scenes, along with terrifying delusions. Those who touted it were sure that it was the panacea for all manner of ills in the body and mind. Of course it wasn’t, and Dusty’s brain was only one of thousands that had been overwhelmed by the visions and out-of-body sensations the drug produced.

  “I believe he also tried PCP,” Amy said. “They call it ‘Angel Dust,’ I think.”

  The detectives knew about PCP, which surfaced in the midseventies. It was considered an “elephant tranquilizer”— an extremely powerful drug that gave those who ingested it superhuman strength and badly
mangled brains.

  Amy said that Dusty and his roommate at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, had been so entrenched in the drug world that they were barely attending classes, and they had failed to finish the quarter there. Their experiences were only two among thousands of tragedies that were facing parents all over America.It seemed that Lorraine Millroy’s awful fate might be one of the worst.

  The King County detectives learned the names of several of Dusty’s friends who had ridden trail bikes with him and had a list of possible spots where Dusty might have abandoned his mother’s body. A concentrated grid search with sheriff’s personnel, volunteers, and necrosearch dogs went on for days—netting nothing.

  Sergeant Hicks and Detective Tolton interviewed Dusty Millroy again. Vaguely, Dusty said he thought he had traveled between ten and twenty miles from the area where he had first been stuck in the snow on Snoqualmie Pass, and the second time the van foundered, when he’d been dug out by forest rangers. Even though I-90 cut a fairly narrow path between rock outcroppings that rose steeply on both sides of the freeway, that would be an almost impossibly large area to search for a body in the snow.

  “Tell me again why you left your house on Monday morning?” Hicks asked.

  “How would you feel if your mother had just been murdered in the house? I was afraid,” Dusty said morosely.

  Lorraine’s employer told detectives that Lorraine had been a close friend as well as an employee, and they had shared confidences. “She was afraid of Dusty. She wanted him out of the house.”

  The hunt for Lorraine Millroy’s body now extended into adjacent Kittitas County, east of the King County line. A crew from that sheriff’s office reported that they had found nothing at all in any of the spots Dusty Millroy had been known to frequent in the past. Nor were there any indications that Lorraine’s body had been in either of the locations where the orange van had been stuck.

  Sergeant Sam Hicks’s search for Lorraine’s blood type was just as frustrating. He checked back through all her places of employment, all her health insurance companies, physicians, dentists, and hospitals, but he found that, for one reason or another, either her blood type had never been recorded or some of her files had been lost.

  Lorraine’s health was good; her biggest problem was the agony she suffered emotionally as she tried to deal with Dusty. Her most recent doctor verified that she had asked for help in getting Dusty to a psychiatrist and that a referral had been made.

  But Dusty never went.

  Hicks received a phone call from Amy Millroy. She and her father had returned to the Eastgate home and found several items that disturbed them. Lorraine’s bedroom slippers were there, and as far as they could determine, so were all her other clothes.

  Amy believed that her mother had probably tinted her hair sometime after Amy and her boyfriend left the Sunday night after Thanksgiving to return to college.

  “She usually did that in the morning. We found the shower cap she used for that in Dusty’s room.”

  They had also found some clothing—Dusty’s—that had been washed and left to molder in the washing machine. Faint reddish stains were still apparent on the sleeve of one shirt.

  It was now the first week in December, and every possible area where Lorraine Millroy’s body might be hidden had been searched by the King and Kittitas County detectives and volunteers.

  She was simply gone.

  She could be buried under the deep snow that began in the foothills a few miles east of her home or perhaps somewhere farther up on Snoqualmie Pass. If this was true, it would be spring before the great snowbanks began to thaw and slough off. Until then, no one would be able to find her body.

  Lieutenant Chase and his investigators conferred with the King County prosecutor’s senior trial deputy, Lee Yates, and Yates agreed that there was enough evidence to go ahead with a formal charge of second-degree murder against Dusty Millroy. In his affidavit to the court, Yates stated, “Despite the lack of a body, the evidence is consistent solely with the fact that Millroy killed his mother and disposed of her body.”

  To substantiate his argument, Yates cited the voluminous blood that had been found in at least six different locations in the Millroy home. Although they had yet to establish Lorraine Millroy’s blood type, the blood in her van and the blood in her house were both type A. Yates referred to the body shape imprinted in dried blood on the plywood sheet in the van, the bloody plastic tarp, and ropes and rags found in the van. He was fully prepared to pursue the state’s case—even if Lorraine Millroy was never found.

  “No one has seen Lorraine Millroy since the night of November 26,” Lee Yates told Superior Court Judge Frank Roberts, “nor has any paper trail turned up.”

  Roberts agreed with Yates’s assertions. Dustin Lex Millroy, twenty-three, was charged with second-degree murder on December 6. Christmas trees and bright lights adorned the courthouse, while office holiday parties spilled the sound of laughter into the marble corridors.

  But not at the empty house in Eastgate. Thanksgiving, however awkward it had been, had undoubtedly been the last family celebration for the Millroys.

  On December 18, two elk hunters were slogging through the snow near the Taylor River Road east of North Bend, Washington. It wasn’t far from where I-90 begins its climb to the summit of Snoqualmie Pass, and close to the road—just as Dusty Millroy had once visualized where his mother’s body was, according to his account of nightmares.

  The hunters recognized coyote tracks and followed them to what at first appeared to be the carcass of a deer.

  But as they peered closer, they saw that it wasn’t a deer or any other wild animal.

  Lorraine Millroy had been found.

  Sickened, the two men rushed to the CB radio in their truck and called the King County Sheriff’s Office. It was 3:15 in the afternoon when Detective Tolton arrived, followed shortly by Sergeant Roy Weaver, Detective Frank Atchley, and several deputies.

  It was close to the shortest day of the year, and the sun was already descending at a little after three o’clock. The sheriff’s men raced against time as they examined the ruined remains of what had probably once been an attractive woman. Her body was nude, save for a bra and a turquoise robe partially wrapped around her head. Her hair was freshly colored a light red and it spread out brightly over the snow.

  Wild animals had savaged the body, stripping the flesh completely away from the right arm. Many internal organs were missing from her right side. At this point, cause of death would be impossible to determine, although it looked as if she had suffered at least one severe stab wound to her neck. Animal scavengers tend to enter a body at points of injury.

  By 4:30, those at the crime scene had completed triangulation measurements, from where the woman’s corpse lay, to trees, rocks, and other permanent markers. They could always return here and pinpoint where the victim was found. When they were finished, the corpse was placed in a body bag for transfer to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.

  The next morning, Dr. John Eisele performed the postmortem exam on the body found in the lonely woods. She had not suffered only a single wound; she had been stabbed again and again in the neck and chest area, and animals had carried off her right lung, heart, liver, gall bladder, esophagus, and stomach. Consequently, there was no way of knowing how much damage those organs had suffered in the attack. There was, however, evidence of severe hemorrhaging in the jugular vein. Although Eisele wouldn’t be able to state the exact cause of death, he estimated that Lorraine Millroy probably had died quickly of internal bleeding after a savage attack.

  Looking at her hands, Dr. Eisele opined that she probably had had little, if any, warning. “See,” he said to detectives. “Only her left hand bears any sign of a defensive wound.”

  Her blood type was A—as expected. And her fingerprints matched samplers of Lorraine Millroy’s.

  With her daughter’s assistance, it was possible to reconstruct Lorraine Millroy’s last day on ear
th. She had probably risen early on Monday morning—November 27—so she could dye her hair before going into the kitchen to fix breakfast. She must have been in the kitchen in her robe when an argument with Dusty began. And it had proved to be the last argument for a woman who had done her best to find help for a son whose brain was so seared by drugs that he exhibited classic signs of paranoia.

  Lorraine’s husband and daughter had found a knife in her dishwasher, a knife that Lorraine always washed by hand to preserve the wooden handle. The knife’s measurements were consistent with the depth and width of the wounds Lorraine Millroy had suffered. There was human blood on the knife—but not enough to determine the blood type, since her killer had run it through the steaming hot dishwasher cycle.

  Dusty Millroy’s story was like that of many of his peers. He had been raised strictly and rebelled. As a teenager, he wasn’t allowed to wear his hair long or have it cut like the Beatles’ hair, the way some of his classmates wore theirs. Now it hung almost to his waist.

  In high school, Dusty got drunk on beer and smoked marijuana. Still, he’d always had an even temper then, and he’d never been given to rages.

  Dusty went on to Bellevue Community College, earning an associate degree in music and poetry—not a curriculum that would prepare him to make a living, unless he went on to get higher degrees.

  His teenage friends had considered him “an ordinary, average guy” until 1975, when he went to Evergreen State College. There, everything changed. Evergreen was an avant garde college that fit with the seventies, a school oriented to “doing your own thing,” and where personal growth was equally as important as something so prosaic as grades. This approach worked extremely well for highly intelligent students who were self-starters and could manage their own lives, but it wasn’t the best college for others, and drugs weren’t rare on its campus.

  And it was a beautiful woodsy campus where there was no dress code, but many brilliant educators.

  Dusty Millroy was one of those who gravitated to hard drugs. As he took more and more, he began to be afraid, convinced that CIA spies were watching him constantly. At the same time, he refused to believe that his constant ingestion of LSD had anything to do with his paranoia and delusions.