by Ann Rule
The young woman was still a “Jane Doe.” An anonymous woman called detectives after she heard a request on television news for anyone who might possibly have information to come forward. Although she had no idea who the dead woman might be, and was afraid to give her own name, she wanted them to know what she had seen the night before: she thought she might have witnessed the victim’s abduction.
“I was driving home when I saw something very, very disturbing,” she began. “It was near the University at the corner of N.E. 40th and 8th N.E. I saw an older white station wagon. It might have been a Ford—I don’t know cars that well. There were two men in it. The passenger had dark hair and the driver had long, curly blond hair.”
Wayne Dorman, the detective on the other end of the line, waited patiently for something that might be connected to the unidentified woman.
“But before they drove away,” the caller continued, “I saw the driver outside the car. He was loading this girl into the back seat, and, ah . . . she looked like she was unconscious or maybe even dead.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well, her legs were spread wide, so wide I could see her panties. They were multicolored and she had on black sandals with two- or three-inch stacked heels. I wanted to stop and try to help her, but the people with me said we could be in danger if we tried to get involved. At least, I talked them into driving around the block to get another look—but by the time we circled back, the white wagon was gone.”
“Could you identify the men you saw?” Dorman asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe the blond one. They were under the street light.”
But when Dorman tried to persuade the woman to give him at least a phone number, he heard the empty click of the receiver falling back on its cradle.
The victim remained unidentified until May 2. And then a University of Washington professor in the School of Architecture called to voice his concerns about a graduate student. “She hasn’t been to class for two days, and her description would be pretty close to the ‘Jane Doe’ in the papers and on television,” he said. “Her name is Hallie Ann Seaman. She’s 25 years old.”
His worries turned out to be well grounded. Hallie Seaman’s sister and Hallie’s boyfriend, a dentist, identified her body. The Seaman sisters had come to Seattle from Idaho, where their father was head of the University of Idaho’s philosophy department.
Hallie was an outstanding student, according to her professors, and she had been given her own “studio” in the basement of the architecture building. It was more of a cubbyhole, really, than a studio, but it gave her her own space where she could complete her designs for her thesis; she was convinced that it was possible to build quality low-cost housing. That was her dream: to provide homes for people who weren’t yet able to afford them. Hallie had been just two quarters away from her master’s degree.
The last person to see her alive had been a fellow student who saw her talking on the phone in her studio at twenty minutes to ten on April 29. She had already put on her light-colored raincoat as if she was on her way out. When he passed her door ten minutes later, she was gone.
There was no sign of a struggle in her workspace. Anyone could have looked in the well window above her drawing board and watched Hallie as she bent over her work. But if he (or they) planned to confront her, it would have been a lot easier to observe her until she left. Other students came and went continually, and there was a popular cafeteria in the basement of the architecture building. Any attack would not go unnoticed. No, it would have been smarter to lurk outside the building. Hallie had to walk a dark path lined by evergreen shrubs to get to her car in the lot outside.
All he would need to do was wait for her. But Sergeant Mike Mudgett of the University of Washington Police Department doubted that the person who killed Hallie Seaman would have done that. To exit the parking lot, he would have had to drive by a security guard kiosk. At that point, she could have cried out for help—unless, of course, someone was holding a knife against her.
Hallie’s apartment was only 1.7 miles north of the campus, but her sister looked around the empty rooms and said she didn’t think Hallie had ever come home that night. It was possible that she had been abducted from the parking lot there.
“She told her boyfriend she was coming over to see me that night,” the girl said softly. “He talked to her at 7:30 and she said she had a class that evening, and then she was coming by my place—but I never heard from her.”
A canvass of people who lived near Hallie’s apartment and the adjacent parking lot—and of the few residents who lived near where the witness had seen the white station wagon—failed to elicit any information at all about screams they might have heard in the night. Whoever Hallie had left with had either taken her off guard or he was someone she knew and trusted.
Hallie’s dentist boyfriend told detectives that she had been known to pick up hitchhikers. A lot of people did in the seventies.
“Yes, she picked up hitchhikers,” he said sadly. “But only a certain type—the student type. She was independent and confident and not likely to be talked into any type of potentially dangerous situations. There weren’t many situations Hallie couldn’t handle.”
That white vehicle turned out to be Hallie’s own car. “She drove a 1965 Ford Fairlane station wagon,” the dentist said. He gave detectives the license number.
The witness who had seen the lifeless-looking woman being loaded into the backseat of the white station wagon had observed that within a half hour of the time Hallie Seaman left the architecture building, and within a few blocks.
But the vehicle itself wasn’t located until May 2. It was three miles south of where Hallie’s body was left, near a storage lot for over-the-road containers owned by the Sea-Land Corporation. The huge containers with foreign products came in on ships and were then loaded onto trucks or railroad flatcars.
But even though the Burlington Northern railroad line kept a switch engine with a 24-hour crew in the area where Hallie’s car had been abandoned, none of them had seen who left the car there.
And it was useless in terms of evidence. Someone had torched it the night Hallie was murdered. It had been fully engulfed in flames when Seattle Fire Department firefighters arrived in response to a call at 2:40 A.M. the morning of April 30.
Jack Hickam, one of the legends of Marshal 5, the Seattle Fire Department’s arson unit, processed Hallie’s car. He determined that the fire hadn’t started in the engine compartment, but rather in one of the seat cushions, and he got a “probable” reading for flammable liquid when he used a hydrocarbon indicator.
Someone wanted to be very sure that detectives would find no damning physical evidence in Hallie’s car.
And they didn’t, even though criminalist Ann Beaman from the Western Washington State Crime Lab literally sifted through the ashes. She found Hallie’s other shoe with a nylon stocking melted into it, a small charred coin purse, and part of a key chain. The driver’s door handle, thrown clear when the gas tank exploded, was tested for fingerprints but nothing identifiable was found on it.
Although the Seattle Homicide Unit detectives followed dozens of possible leads, they have never been able to find Hallie Seaman’s killer, and thirty years later her murder is still a cold case.
One of her relatives described her as she recalled what a great loss her death was to so many people: “She was a bright, dynamic girl. She was the most dynamic creature I’ve ever seen. Suggest something and it would be done. She had tremendous drive.”
“Hallie was one of the most brilliant students we’ve had,” her professor remarked. “We’ll never know how much she could have done to help low-income families have decent housing.”
• • •
But, three decades later, Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon are working on Hallie’s case. They are inventive detectives, and they employ whatever means it takes to gather DNA samples and fingerprints. In many instances, the unsolved homicide cases involve p
rime suspects where there was never enough physical evidence to arrest them. In others, there were virtually no suspects.
Sylvia Durante was 21 on December 14, 1979. She was a beautiful brunette with huge dark eyes who lived alone in a small apartment in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle. She worked as a waitress in the popular Red Robin tavern, which was located on the Washington Ship Canal beneath the south end of the University Bridge. Mary Annabelle Bjornson’s apartment house had been just across the water beneath the north end of the bridge. In this case, the proximity of the two structures was surely only grim coincidence, because John Canaday had admitted to Mary Annabelle’s murder and detectives who checked found he was still locked up in maximum security in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, and had been for eight years, when Sylvia Durante was killed.
When Sylvia failed to show up for her shift at the Red Robin, concerned friends went to her apartment. She lay partially clothed on her bed. She had been strangled, and both her wrists and ankles bore indentations showing that she had been tied up before that occurred, although the ropes were no longer tight.
A single long-stemmed red rose rested nearby.
Seattle homicide detective Gary Fowler was assigned to be the lead detective on Sylvia’s case. In the beginning, there were several factors that might explain motives behind Sylvia Durante’s murderer.
There was the obvious, of course. She was such an attractive young woman that a stalker might have become infatuated with her. She met scores of men in her job at the Red Robin, and her friendly, vivacious personality could have given false encouragement to someone off balance enough to think she wanted to date him.
Or it could have been a much more sinister motive. The Red Robin had been robbed a night or two before Sylvia was killed. It was a daring robbery, and Sylvia was one of the waitresses who had seen it happen. She would probably be a witness against the thieves if they were found. Would they have followed her to see where she lived so that they could be sure she would never point a finger at them? Maybe—but hardly with a rose in hand. Unless they were devious enough and clever enough to use that ploy to get into her apartment.
The Capitol Hill neighborhood where Sylvia lived drew people from every stratum of society with its booming, lively main street: Broadway. Rockers, singles, gays, and a myriad of alternate lifestyles abounded on Broadway. There were restaurants and clubs where music boomed until two A.M., and sometimes long after. Bronze “dance steps” were embedded there, encouraging pedestrians to literally dance down the sidewalk. Nobody seemed like a stranger, but it could also be a high-crime area. Seattle Police patrolled it on foot and in squad cars.
Would Sylvia have let a stranger into her apartment? Probably not, but she might have welcomed a man she considered a friend—especially one holding a long-stemmed rose.
There was no one special man in her life, although she hoped to find one. And perhaps she had. In early November, Sylvia had written to her cousin that she had recently met an “interesting” man in Portland, Oregon, and hoped to see him when she visited friends there at Thanksgiving. Maybe he had decided to visit her in Seattle.
There was a man who lived near Portland who matched Sylvia’s preferred type: handsome, dark-haired, and muscular. And that man was Randy Woodfield, 28, former Green Bay Packers draft choice, former pinup in Playgirl magazine, former bartender, former president of Christian Athletes on Campus at Portland State University, and an ex-convict who had been arrested on oral-sodomy and robbery charges. He had been paroled in July 1979, only five months before Sylvia Durante’s murder.
Randy was a smooth ladies’ man, who would be convicted of the January 1981 Salem, Oregon, rape/murder of a young female janitor and the rape/attempted murder of her best friend. He would also be a suspect in a half dozen other homicides and many, many sexual attacks along the I-5 corridor from Redding, California, to Lynnwood, Washington, from July 1979 to early 1981.
Woodfield encountered most of his victims where they worked in fast-food franchises near off-ramps of the freeway, and the Red Robin fit generally into that pattern, although it wasn’t as easy to get to as the other restaurants he’d invaded.
Later, investigators tracking Woodfield on other cases found traffic violation records that confirmed he had been in Seattle during the week before Sylvia Durante was murdered. In fact, he had played “Sir Galahad” to a nurse who worked at the University of Washington Hospital, which was located a scant half mile from the Red Robin. When the nurse came off a late shift to discover she’d allowed her gas gauge to drop below empty, Randy Woodfield had driven by in his gold “Champagne Edition” Volkswagen and given her a ride home. He’d asked for a kiss in thanks, and she gave him one, unaware that she was alone with an extremely dangerous predator.
For some reason, Randy didn’t attack the nurse. The question was whether he had been to the Red Robin or ever even met Sylvia Durante.
There was never one iota of physical evidence or a witness who could link them. Randy Woodfield has been in the Oregon State Penitentiary since 1981 and the search for Sylvia’s killer moved on, although it eventually ended in the cold case files when there were no other avenues to pursue.
• • •
Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon wondered if there was any connection between Sandy Bowman’s murder in 1968, Eileen Condit’s in 1970, Hallie Seaman’s in 1975, and Sylvia Durante’s almost exactly eleven years later: Sandy’s murder had been committed on December 17 and Sylvia’s on December 14, 1979. If they caught the killer of one of them, might they also have the answer to the other mystery?
Solving homicides can be all about parallel patterns and coincidences, but those phenomena can also lead the way down a garden path to a dead end.
And then suddenly, amazingly, all the pegs fell into the proper holes and what once seemed impossible was revealed.
19
I had been wrong on Ted Bundy’s connection to Katherine Merry Devine, and I was wrong again when I wrote a book about Randy Woodfield, The I-5 Killer, and noted that Woodfield had been so close to where Sylvia Durante worked at the Red Robin during the week she was murdered. A long time ago, I came to understand why homicide detectives have to fight to avoid tunnel vision. When proximity, timing, and circumstantial evidence all seem to link a known predator with a murder victim, it’s difficult not to leap to conclusions because they want so much to tell the victims’ friends and families that they have, indeed, found the person who killed someone they love.
It is doubtful that Randy Woodfield ever met Sylvia Durante, although he is serving life plus 125 years in the Oregon State Penitentiary for crimes against other women.
The clue to who really strangled Sylvia Durante was there at the homicide scene twenty-five years ago, but there was no way detectives could know how important it was. As they processed her apartment, they dusted furniture, light switches, the undersides and tops of counters and any other surface that might hold the fingerprints of the person who killed her. One of the more innocuous items in her living room was a half-finished project. Sylvia was taking a class in stained-glass art. A lot of people were making lamp shades, vases, framed plaques to hang in windows so that sunlight would catch the colors and shapes, and jewelry. Her latest attempt was there in plain sight.
Its pebbly surface yielded little in the way of fingerprints. It was just something in her living room, something sad because now she would never finish it.
Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon included Sylvia’s murder in their cold case files as one that might be solvable if they could match DNA saved from the 1979 investigation with that of a known sex offender. When you are looking for sex offenders, you don’t begin by getting blood samples from people with no criminal record—although that is not to say that they aren’t sex offenders who have never been caught.
The natural place for the Cold Case Squad to look was among the Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders in Washington State. Computers cross-indexing their names with lists gl
eaned from the victims’ associates and activities can pop up red flags too.
William Bergen Greene, 49, would have been 24 in December, 1979. Whether he and Sylvia Durante ever had a dating relationship—which is unlikely—he had the look she preferred: dark, handsome, and well built. He had thick, wavy brown hair, a mustache, and a “puppy dog” look in his eyes that hid what he was really thinking. He was also intelligent and charismatic—and artistic. Greene was in the same class in stained glass that Sylvia was attending that Christmas season in 1979.
Long after Sylvia was dead, William Greene’s penchant for tying up women and sexually assaulting them resulted in several arrests and confinement in the Washington State Sexual Offender’s Unit at the Monroe Reformatory. He had an explanation for his behavior—he was suffering from MPD: Multiple Personality Disorder. One of the prison’s psychiatrists diagnosed him as having MPD, and he was given a female therapist to help him cope with the two dozen “alters” who kept him confused about who he was.
Most “multiples” have both good and bad personalities, often alters of both sexes and ages ranging from tiny children to adults. Greene said that “Sam” was one of his honest, caring personalities and that “Tyrone” was only four and did pretty much what he wanted to do. He also sometimes came through as a dragon named “Smokey.”
While there probably are people who have correct diagnoses as MPDs, it is also a category of mental illness that is easy to fake, and a favorite with antisocial personalities, sociopaths and psychopaths. People for whom lying is as easy as breathing and who feel no guilt about it are very good at being whoever they choose to be at any given time.
