But I Trusted You

by Ann Rule

  When Lorraine Curtis Millroy* and her husband moved into their spacious tri-level home in the Eastgate area near Bellevue in 1954, they looked forward to years of happiness. This was true of many young couples who’d been torn apart by World War II. Millroy had a good job at the Boeing Airplane Company, and Lorraine also qualified for skilled positions during most of their marriage, taking time off to raise a family.

  In September of 1955, they welcomed their first child, a red-headed boy they named Dustin Lex.* Three years later, they had a little girl, Amy.* As the youngsters grew up, the family made many close friends in the tightly knit neighborhood. Millroy rose to higher levels at Boeing, and their marriage was sound.

  It was a good time in America then—a peaceful period between wars. The Korean War was far away. Families barbecued in their backyards, kids had sandboxes and wading pools. It was safe for Girl Scouts to sell cookies door-to-door.

  But the Millroys fell victim to a changing world, a world where family solidarity evaporated when teenagers became part of a heretofore unknown drug culture. Their cozy brown-and-white brick home was torn with dissension, and all their hopes for the future disappeared.

  Thanksgiving 1978 was a bleak holiday for the Millroys. Lorraine’s husband wasn’t at the head of the table; he was working for Boeing in Kansas, but they were separated by more than miles, and he had filed for divorce.

  Dustin Millroy had changed so much that neighbors and even his longtime high school and college friends were stunned by his appearance and his state of mind. The guy who’d always been “mellow” had changed radically. At twenty-three, Dusty was reclusive, erratic, and paranoid. He was convinced that the CIA was out to get him.

  Lorraine had done her best to make the holiday calm and happy, but she was fighting overwhelming odds. Her daughter was home from Bellingham, where she attended Western Washington University. She had brought her boyfriend with her, and they tried to help calm things down. Lorraine cooked a turkey and made pumpkin pies as she always had, and tried to make the day appear to be a regular Thanksgiving.

  But the atmosphere was strained. Dusty remained in his basement bedroom most of the time, refusing to join the group. His sister saw that he had descended further into his weird fantasy life.

  Lorraine confided to her daughter that Dusty’s behavior was getting stranger and stranger. “I’m actually afraid of him,” she said with desperation in her voice. “I want him out of the house. But I don’t know whom to call. I couldn’t do it last time.”

  Dusty had recently had a psychotic episode, bursting from their house and running naked through the streets. His mother had tried to have him committed then, but a law passed in Washington a few years before made it impossible to commit an individual unless he could be declared dangerous to himself or others.

  No one felt that Dusty was that dangerous. Not his physician or the authorities or even his mother. But, on this Thanksgiving Day, Lorraine believed he was dangerous to himself—and she feared he was a threat to others, too.

  The Millroy family managed to get through the holiday without a major scene, Dusty’s sister and her boyfriend headed back to college, and once again, Lorraine was alone with the son she scarcely recognized anymore.

  On Monday, November 27, Lorraine Millroy’s neighbors were startled when they received a call from her supervisor at the research lab where she worked as a secretary. Lorraine hadn’t come to work that morning. She was an extremely punctual member of the staff, and she had never before failed to show up for work without calling to say she was ill or that she had family problems. She always called.

  Several times during that Monday, Lorraine’s neighbors attempted to reach her by telephone, but it rang endlessly and no one picked it up. Then they had gone over to knock on her door. There was no response at all.

  When both Lorraine and Dusty were home, her friends were used to seeing four vehicles parked in the driveway next to their house: two Volkswagen “bugs,” an orange and white Chevy van, and an old Buick that belonged to Dusty. Lorraine was the only one who drove the van; she never allowed Dusty to borrow it.

  Now, it was gone. The beat-up Buick sedan was still there.

  Lorraine’s closest neighbor’s husband came home from work around 4:30. None of the women had been able to locate Lorraine, and they were afraid to go inside. While they held back, Jim Breakey* went next door to try to raise someone at the Millroy residence. He pounded on the door again, and then waited, listening for some response from inside. But, again, no one answered.

  He was worried, too. Everyone who lived nearby knew how deeply Dusty was involved with drugs. They also knew that Lorraine was depressed and concerned about her son—and that she was, as she said, “scared to death of him.”

  It was getting harder and harder to remember the cute little red-haired kid who had once been part of the happy group of children who grew up together. Dusty had lost his way and couldn’t seem to find a path back to sanity—nor did he appear to want to.

  It had been dark for almost three hours, and it was suppertime. At 6:15, Lorraine’s van pulled into her driveway. Peeking through their curtained windows, her anxious neighbors recognized Dusty Millroy in the driver’s seat. They watched him as he walked into the house—alone. And then they walked over and knocked on the Millroys’ front door again. No one answered, so they called his name, trying to persuade him to let them in. They knew he was inside, but he refused to respond to their knocks and calls—nor would he answer the phone when they dialed the Millroys’ number.

  The neighbors felt a cold chill that had nothing to do with the wintry weather. Something was terribly wrong at the Millroy house.

  Realizing they had to do something, they called the King County Sheriff’s Office at 6:39, reporting “suspicious circumstances.” No one knew if Lorraine had left of her own volition, if she was hiding in some part of her home, if she was injured, or, worse, was no longer alive. None of them wanted to speculate aloud on that possibility. Somehow if they said it, that might make it true.

  Deputies Ray Green, J. J. Chilstrom, and Leo Hursh responded, and, after listening to the neighbors’ fears, the officers agreed that they had had good reason to call in.

  The deputies attempted to get an answer to their knocks at the Millroy home, but they had no more response than Lorraine’s neighbors had.

  The Millroy house was blazing with lights on inside, but most of the drapes were pulled. Chilstrom peered into the living room where the curtains didn’t quite close, and he could see two women’s purses and some papers sitting on the grate inside the fireplace. They didn’t appear to be burned, and it looked as if there hadn’t been a real fire there for a long time. He could also see a sleeping bag on the floor of the room.

  Deputy Leo Hursh walked around the perimeter of the house, aiming his flashlight along the ground and toward doors and windows, not even sure what he was looking for. What he found didn’t ease anyone’s mind. On the south side of the house near the carport area, Hursh found dark red stains on the basement doorknob. It could be paint, but it would take a true optimist to believe that.

  The three deputies looked through the windows of the orange van parked in the driveway. There were more red splotches on the van’s interior and on rags and a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood inside. An ax lay on the rear seat of the van, its blade covered with a rug.

  Supervising Sergeant Mike Connally and Detective John Tolton joined the deputies outside the Millroy home. The circumstances were no longer only suspicious; they were ominous.

  Periodically, the sheriff’s men banged on the front door, but if anyone was inside, they didn’t answer. Dusty could have slipped out another door while worried neighbors waited for police.

  None of Lorraine’s friends had a key to her house to use in case of an emergency. They could break a window or force a door, but the deputies didn’t want to do that if they didn’t have to. Connally and Hursh noticed that the front-door lock was the same make as the lock
s on their own homes. It was a long shot, but it was worth a try.

  Connally’s house key went in, but it wouldn’t turn. Leo Hursh’s turned, clicked, and the front door swung open.

  “Police!” they called out, entering the home. There was no reply. With their hands on their guns, the officers moved cautiously through the silent house.

  When they got to the kitchen, they stopped, appalled. The room looked like an abattoir. There was no question at all what the red stains were. Blood was splashed on the stove and on brightly polished pots and pans hanging above it. A mahogany trail snaked across the kitchen floor, ending at the top of the basement stairway. They followed it down the steps. There, they found great quantities of blood on the basement floor and on the carport door. Whoever had bled this profusely had to be either dead or critically injured.

  They peered into a bedroom in the basement. The unmade bed was piled deep with all kinds of junk—clothes, books, remains of food. There were bloody tissues on the nightstand, and the room was generally in disarray.

  Lorraine’s friends told them that this would be Dusty Millroy’s room. She had complained to them that Dusty’s room was as jumbled and full of trash as his mind had become.

  In stark comparison, the tastefully decorated basement recreation room was neat—with one major exception. Someone had piled cushions from the van on top of the couch. They wondered if that person had needed to make room in the van for a large object, a human-sized object?

  It wasn’t cold in the Millroy home, but the searchers felt a chill, feeling as though they were in a horror movie, not a pleasant house in the suburbs of Bellevue. They had found only bloodstains, but that was more than enough. They expected to find the source of those stains in each room they entered.

  But they had yet to find anything—or anyone.

  They came to a locked door: the basement bathroom. It could be locked only from the inside, and they knew someone was in there. Again, they called out: “King County Sheriff—come out.”

  Only dead silence answered them.

  Sergeant Connally and Deputy Hursh picked the lock with a nail, and turned the knob.

  Dusty Millroy was inside. He was seated on the floor facing the door, and he held a small-caliber pistol, aimed right at them.

  “Put the gun down,” Leo Hursh said.

  Dusty stared back at him, his eyes wild—but Hursh could tell he was debating with himself about what he was going to do.

  “Put it someplace where you can’t reach it,” Connally said firmly. “I’m going to count to five.”

  Finally, Dusty tossed the gun behind the vanity sink.

  With his scraggly beard and mustache and his long red hair falling to his waist, Dusty Millroy looked like a crazed mountain man. He wore only a pair of stained trousers.

  The King County officers took him upstairs to the living room and read him his Miranda rights. He said he understood, and initialed the card. He complained of being cold, and he told Hursh where to find his boots and brown corduroy jacket. The boots were muddy, and the jacket had dark blotches on it.

  “Are those bloodstains?” Detective Tolton asked.

  “Naw—they’re just grease spots.”

  Millroy’s explanation for the condition of the home he shared with his mother was vague, if not downright peculiar. He didn’t really know what had happened or where his mother was. He said he’d taken her van and driven east, heading up toward Snoqualmie Pass because he “felt like getting away.”

  “Why did you take the van?” Deputy Hursh asked. “We understand that isn’t your vehicle.”

  “Well, it was raining for one thing and the rear window’s broken out of my car.”

  “Where did you go—exactly?” Tolton asked.

  “To Cle Elum [a small town about forty miles east of the Snoqualmie Pass summit]. I wanted to get out of the city. Besides, I was scared and I felt really weird.”

  “Do you know where your mother is?” Hursh asked. They would phrase this question a dozen different ways, and their suspect always shook his head.

  He continued to deny that he had any idea where his mother might be. It was a mystery to him.

  There was clearly no point in pursuing this line of questioning. If Dusty knew, he wasn’t going to tell them. They arrested him for investigation of murder and transported him to the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle.

  Back at the crime scene, the sheriff’s investigators took statements from neighbors. One woman recalled seeing Dusty arrive at the Millroy home that morning about 9:00. “He was driving his old Buick. He pulled into the driveway, and then pulled it forward. I said hello to him, and he just stared at me, but that wasn’t unusual for him.

  “I went bowling then, and when I got back at eleven I got a call from another neighbor who said no one could find Lorraine. I walked over to her house and saw that Lorraine’s van was gone. Then the van pulled in around six and I sent my teenage son over to see who was driving it. He came back and said, ‘You’re not going to like it, but Dusty was driving it.’

  “My son said that Dusty was staggering as he walked from the van to the house. That wasn’t unusual, either.”

  “What was he wearing at that time?”

  “Jeans, his sheepskin jacket—and cowboy boots.”

  Her neighbors all agreed that the missing woman—whom they’d last talked to on Saturday, November 25—had been in a good mood then. They had the impression that she’d made a major decision in her life and was about to carry out her decision.

  “I think it had to do with Dusty,” the woman who lived directly across the street said. “We all knew he needed to be locked up and have some treatment, but she had a hard time coming to terms with that. She just seemed kind of relieved the last time I talked to her.”

  All of the people who were interviewed—most of whom had known Lorraine Millroy for twenty-five years—were aware that Dusty had had psychiatric problems and that his mother had been terribly worried about him, even to the point of being afraid of him. None of them had heard from her, or had any idea where she was, but as the days went by, they feared for her life.

  A recent photograph of Lorraine Millroy appeared in several papers in Bellevue, Seattle, and other parts of King County, with an accompanying article that asked for any information on her the public might know. She was fifty-one, with reddish blond hair, blue eyes, and she weighed 130 pounds, perfect for her height of five feet five.

  No one came forward.

  At 12:30 on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 28, Lieutenant Frank Chase interviewed Dusty Millroy in his office at the King County Courthouse. Detective Sam Hicks witnessed the interview, which elicited statements that were peculiar, to say the least.

  Dusty said his sister and her boyfriend had stayed with him and his mother all through the four-day Thanksgiving holiday. He had said good-bye to them as they were about to leave to return to Bellingham on Sunday night, November 26.

  “I went down to my room about eight and locked my door,” he recalled. “I ate some popcorn and fell asleep. When I woke up this morning—yesterday morning now, I guess—I walked into the kitchen. There was a mess on the floor.”

  “What did the mess look like?” Lieutenant Chase asked.

  “Goop—a lot of goop.”

  “Goop?”

  “Blood—kind of like blood. But it could have been chicken grease. I thought maybe my mother had killed a chicken in there. I took some rags and tried to clean it up. My mother gets mad at me if I leave a mess—she fines me two dollars—so I cleaned it the best I could.”

  Asked if he ever had arguments with his mother, Millroy said that they’d argued about two weeks before because he hadn’t paid his rent, and he’d been overdue. “She nagged me about it and we did have a fight then.”

  “Did you have another argument yesterday morning?”

  Dusty shook his head. “No—when I got up, she was gone. I figured her boyfriend had given her a ride to work, because all our cars
were still there.”

  “How about the night before? Did you argue then?”

  “No, like I said, my sister was there and her boyfriend—we made popcorn, and I went down to my room and didn’t come up all night.”

  “But you took a trip over the mountains, you say. Why was that again?”

  “I guess when I saw all that stuff on the kitchen floor, I assumed my mother was dead, and that didn’t make me very happy. I had to get out. I was afraid of being killed myself.”

  Dusty Millroy admitted that he’d taken his mother’s purses and, after removing the credit cards, had placed them on the fireplace grate.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  Chase saw that Millroy was searching for answers. Possibly he didn’t know why he’d done whatever he had done. Or maybe he was being deliberately vague. They still hadn’t found his mother.

  Dusty Millroy also admitted he’d had the .22-caliber gun, the one he pointed at the sheriff’s men, for some time.

  “I got it for protection,” he said, but didn’t say who he was afraid of.

  “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.”