by Ann Rule
Tactfully Nault questioned Kaarsten further about his marriage. He wondered if it was really the perfect union that Kaarsten had described. And slowly the picture of unblemished wedded bliss began to crumble. Kaarsten admitted that it had not been as idyllic as he had first described it.
Perhaps they had married too young; perhaps Jody had needed to know she was still attractive to other men. He said she had been unfaithful to him—something that he was embarrassed to admit but felt he had to explain, since her adultery might have had something to do with her murder.
Kaarsten said that Jody took a vacation—alone—to Oregon in April of 1965. While she was there she met another man. She spent a weekend with him. Her physical attraction to him was so consuming that she changed from the faithful wife she had always been. It was not like Jody to be unfaithful, but it happened. A week later, Kaarsten said, she flew back to Oregon to meet the man again. Her lover, Jack Kane,* seemed to have an almost hypnotic hold over his wife. In July, Jody actually left Arne and moved in with Kane in Oregon.
But Jody didn’t stay long with Kane. She discovered she was pregnant. The baby would have been conceived in March—before she met Jack Kane; it was clearly Arne’s baby. When Jody told her husband she wanted to come home and try again, he said he welcomed her with open arms. They reconciled, and according to the distraught man in front of Nault, their renewed marriage had been perfect ever since. Peri Lynn had been born six months later.
Nault had to ask an obvious question: “Did you ever think that Peri Lynn might not be your child?”
Kaarsten said the thought had crossed his mind several times. But he had decided it was destructive to worry, so he’d put it out of his mind. Born in mid-December, Peri Lynn was a full-term baby; that meant she had been conceived in March. As far as Kaarsten was concerned, Peri Lynn was his, and he accepted her just as he’d accepted Terry. Once he did so, the marriage had seemed to get better and better.
When he was asked to take a lie-detector test, Arne Kaarsten agreed readily. However, when the polygrapher, Norm Matzke, started to attach the leads of the machine that would register blood pressure, respiration, galvanic skin response, and heart rate, he could see that Arne Kaarsten was much too nervous and emotionally upset for his responses to be registered and evaluated accurately. It was just too soon. They would have to try again at a later date.
Kaarsten told the detectives that the necktie used to strangle Jody had been one of his own. It had to have been a weapon of opportunity. He remembered that he had taken it off, along with his sweater and jacket, when they came home the night before. He had draped the tie and his other clothing on the railing of Peri Lynn’s playpen, which sat next to the couch.
Nault noted that Kaarsten had a Band-Aid on the back of his right hand. “You hurt your hand?” he asked casually.
“Yeah, I was roughhousing with Terry last night, and she scratched me accidentally.”
“Can I take a look at it?”
When Kaarsten took the bandage off, Tom Nault could see that Kaarsten had two deep fresh scratches along the tendons between his middle and ring fingers. He jotted the information down but said nothing more.
It was noon—four hours after the bodies were found—when King County Medical Examiner Dr. Gale Wilson began the autopsies on Jody and Peri Lynn Kaarsten.
Jody was very slender at five feet six inches and 100 pounds. As Wilson had suspected, she had died of asphyxia by ligature. There were cruel bruises and indentations on the flesh of her neck where the necktie had cut in, and she had the characteristic pinpoints of petechial hemorrhages on her face and in her eyes, which were common to strangulation victims. The only other marks on her body were a bruise on the lower left side of her chin and vertical splits in the two middle fingernails of her left hand. It looked as if she had tried to fight off a hand that held the garrote that squeezed out her life. By measuring the degree of rigor mortis, lividity, and loss of body heat, Dr. Wilson determined that Jody Kaarsten had died between midnight and 2:00 A.M. the previous night.
Peri Lynn had died of the same cause, but she had no broken fingernails. She had probably been sound asleep when the ribbon from her teddy bear was placed around her neck and tightened.
The Kaarsten investigation was to become one of the strangest marathons King County Police detectives had ever participated in. They never fell victim to the tunnel vision that affects some departments. They eliminated all possible suspects, winnowing their theories down until there was only one possibility left.
They compiled a thick case file on every aspect in the double murder. They located Jack Kane, Jody’s ex-lover, and Detectives George Helland and Len Randall brought him to Seattle for a secret preliminary hearing. The results of that hearing were announced through local news media, leaving the public even more bewildered than before.
It was a perfectly legal finding, though it was rarely used: “The deceased were killed by person or persons known.” People were accustomed to hearing that victims of unsolved murder cases were “killed by person or persons unknown.” That phrase was often used on television mysteries. If the police and the prosecuting attorney knew who the killer was, why hadn’t they arrested someone?
Not surprisingly, murder cases are the most difficult to try; the defendant’s life—either literally or figuratively—is in the hands of twelve jurors. If he or she is convicted, he will either be sentenced to death or be sent to prison for life. Ideally, the prosecution team wants to have a plethora of physical evidence to show the jury—something they can see, feel, hear, touch, or have explained to them by an expert witness.
Circumstantial evidence is helpful, but it is most effective as an adjunct to physical evidence. With only circumstantial evidence, the most confident prosecutor may have a few pangs of anxiety. If a defendant is acquitted of a crime, he cannot be tried again—other than civilly, as in the O. J. Simpson case—because double jeopardy will attach. Otherwise, defendants could be tried over and over and over for the same crime, and that would not be fair.
Most prosecutors prefer to play a waiting game, gathering as much evidence—both physical and circumstantial—as possible before they bring charges. Prosecutors often become the target of brickbats from reporters, who respond to a public demanding action.
An agonizing decision had been made in the case of Jody and Peri Lynn Kaarsten. Initially, there was not enough evidence to win a murder case. That did not mean the case was over, however, or that the victims had been forgotten by the detectives who had worked many overtime hours. They knew the name of the “person known,” and they were biding their time until everything came together.
Three-year-old Terry Kaarsten went to live with relatives in another state. Arne Kaarsten picked up the threads of his life. He lost himself in his obsession with racing cars. He soon became better known as a racing celebrity than as the tragic widower who had lost his wife and infant daughter in a double homicide. Driving an English-built Chevrolet-powered Lola Formula A racer that cost $30,000, Arne Kaarsten became well known in racing circles in the Northwest. For true racing buffs, his fame extended to the rest of America. Arne wasn’t the best, but he was good. He was described as a “fierce competitor” but a “temperamental loser.”
The memory of the Kaarsten murders faded from the minds of the public, but not from the minds of King County detectives and prosecutors. George Helland, who had been promoted to lieutenant, often dropped into the Pacific Raceways track, where Kaarsten raced. There seemed to be no overt enmity between the two men. Kaarsten always greeted Helland with a grin and a handshake. If there was something beneath the surface of the greetings exchanged, it would have taken more than a casual observer to detect it.
Four years passed, and county elections brought a new King County prosecuting attorney and a new regime. A grand jury probe took the wraps off a number of cases that had lain dormant and almost forgotten in dusty King County files. The Kaarsten murders were among the cases that were reviewed.
Twenty-nine-year-old Special Prosecutor Richard McBroom and his associates, Gary Wagner and Jack Merrit, now urged that Arne Kaarsten be indicted for the murder of Jody and Peri Lynn Kaarsten. (Tragically, McBroom, a brilliant young special prosecutor, would not live to see the denouement of the indictment he had spearheaded; he died of a rare blood disease a year after the grand jury hearings of 1971.)
Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jim Warme conferred with Lieutenant George Helland, and the two men agreed that they were morally bound to go into trial, even if the King County Prosecutor’s Office had to do so armed only with the circumstantial evidence available.
Physical evidence that would have been invaluable if they were prosecuting a stranger for the murder of Jody and Peri Lynn was useless when the suspect was their own husband and father. Hairs, fibers, body fluids, and fingerprints found at the crime scene and traced to Arne Kaarsten meant nothing. He had lived in the same house with the victims. It was to be expected that he had left traces of himself there. Unless Kaarsten had left his fingerprint in his victims’ blood, it would be of no evidentiary value. And his alleged victims had not bled. They had been strangled.
With his necktie. With the ribbon from Peri Lynn’s own teddy bear.
On August 30, 1971—more than five years after the crimes of which he was accused—King County Detectives George Helland and Ted Forrester arrested Arne Kaarsten. He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder. He quickly posted $10,000 bail (10 percent of the $100,000 bail ordered) and walked away free. Although he was facing the most serious charge possible, Kaarsten would spend most of his time outside jail in the years to come. If he began to feel invincible, it was not surprising.
Arne Oscar Kaarsten’s trial date was set for December 13, 1971.
A huge Christmas tree glittered in the lobby of the King County Courthouse as participants and spectators flocked to Kaarsten’s trial. It was a bizarre trial. The defendant was not led into the courtroom in leg irons and handcuffed. He was not in jail during his trial. Instead, he was free to go to lunch at a local restaurant with his relatives and friends, and free to sleep in his own bed each night. Detectives, reporters, and the defendant often nodded across their lunch plates before returning to the courtroom.
Arne Kaarsten appeared to view his trial on two murder charges as only a slight interruption in his usual pursuits. He was confident and expansive—the very picture of a man who had been placed in a ridiculous position by some accident of fate. His attitude suggested that he would surely triumph. He smiled often and took voluminous notes during testimony. He betrayed neither dread nor sorrow.
The testimony elicited, however, was reminiscent of the classic film noir starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, Double Indemnity. There was a story here—a story far more convoluted than the arguments between a young husband and wife living in a little ranch house in Kent, Washington.
Warme and his fellow prosecutor, Lee Yates, presented Arne Kaarsten in a new light. He was not, they suggested, the poised defendant the jury saw before them, not a man who allowed nothing to ruffle him or anger him. Instead, they described him as a man who was so enraged by his wife’s infidelity that he had vowed to kill her for it. Moreover, they maintained that he had accomplished his revenge with a careful plan to gain financially from Jody’s and little Peri Lynn’s murder.
According to the prosecution, Jody Kaarsten’s affair with Jack Kane was not as brief as Kaarsten had said it was. It was far from over when she returned to Kaarsten in June of 1965. Arne Kaarsten had been consumed with rage toward the couple who had cuckolded him. During a period when the Kaarstens had separated again, Jack Kane had the effrontery to come to Washington and actually spend several days with Jody in the home Kaarsten had provided for her. When Arne Kaarsten found them together, he was enraged, and he shouted, “One day I’ll get you both!”
Even after Jody had returned to Kaarsten, ostensibly for good, she met with Jack Kane one last time, and they made love. By carefully backtracking her movements in 1965, the King County detectives had uncovered this information. Whether Kaarsten had found out about this final tryst before he learned of it in his murder trial was a moot question.
Had he ever forgiven Jody for betraying him? Warme and Yates suggested that he had not. He was, they said, a man who could put on a mask—a mask that hid his real feelings so flawlessly that Jody believed they had begun their married life again with a clean slate.
But Arne Kaarsten had wanted something far more than he wanted Jody. And the prosecutors said he had left a paper trail that detailed a meticulous plot to achieve two goals.
On March 27, 1966—little more than three months before Jody and Peri Lynn Kaarsten were murdered—Arne had answered an ad in a Portland, Oregon, paper. The ad offered a 1957 300SL Mercedes-Benz for $3,500. On March 29, Knute Martin, Kaarsten’s racing sponsor, took out a note to buy that car. The car was for Arne, who would somehow have to come up with the money to pay off the note.
Ten days later, on April 6, Arne Kaarsten bought insurance policies on the lives of his wife and two daughters. Jody was insured for $7,500 and the youngsters for $15,000 each. The insurance was double indemnity. In case of accidental or other violent death, the policies would pay off twice as much.
During that period in 1966, Arne Kaarsten made slightly over $700 a month as a draftsman, adequate in that era to support a small family. But a salary of $9,000 a year could not satisfy a taste for expensive cars. And Arne Kaarsten had come to care for flashy cars far more than he cared for Jody.
On June 24 he attempted to borrow $3,800 from a bank. He explained to the loan officer that he wanted the money to exercise an option on a piece of property. As collateral, he listed a 1957 Mercedes-Benz, the car that he did not yet own. His listing of his assets continued as a work of fiction. He confided that he was being groomed for the presidency of his company, a blatant lie, and that he was a partner in another business, which had netted him $9,400 in 1965—another lie. To cinch the loan, he explained that he would receive a large bonus from his company within a month and could pay off the loan then—yet another lie.
The loan was denied when the bank found that the Mercedes did not belong to Kaarsten. Indeed, he wanted the loan to buy the car.
Twelve days after Kaarsten attempted to borrow $3,800 and three months to the day from the time he bought the insurance policies on their lives, Jody and Peri Lynn Kaarsten were dead.
An old friend of the Kaarstens testified for the prosecution. She had known Arne and Jody Kaarsten since they were newlyweds. They had been very happy then. Arne had been in her home, the woman said, on the day he found his murdered wife. He’d had a handkerchief folded over two deep scratches on his hand, which were still bleeding. When she asked what had happened, he told her that little Terry had accidentally scratched him. The next day Kaarsten had asked this female witness not to talk about the case to anyone but his attorney. She had found this request oddly troubling.
Even more troubling, however, was a conversation she had with Arne Kaarsten on the evening after they had attended the double funeral for Jody and Peri Lynn. Arne had suddenly pulled his insurance policies out of his coat pocket and said, “Hey, I didn’t know it was double indemnity.”
The witness had been shocked that he would actually be carrying the policies in h
is suit jacket when half of his family was being buried. She was even more shocked when he seemed so elated to find that they had double indemnity clauses.
Arne Kaarsten had filed his claims quickly and had collected an initial payment of $16,722.26 in insurance money.
Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Warme spoke to the jury and reconstructed the murders as he had deduced the sequence of events from the investigation.
“Jody Kaarsten returned from her neighbors’ at midnight and went to the bedroom where Kaarsten slept,” Warme explained. “She took off her dress, put on a robe, and then went to the bathroom to fix her hair. In the small bathroom a man came up behind her. She didn’t scream. That man put Arne Kaarsten’s necktie around her neck. She reached up with her hands to save her life—she split two fingernails fighting to breathe. She fell then…striking her chin, probably on the vanity….
“Then she was possibly dragged or carried to the living room and covered with blankets. Maybe she was already dead; maybe she was still unconscious and dying. Seven-month-old Peri Lynn Kaarsten slept in her nursery. Someone’s hand took a pink ribbon from a stuffed toy and put it around that baby girl’s neck and strangled the life from her body.”
The young deputy prosecutor didn’t name names; he didn’t have to—every eye in the courtroom was on Arne Kaarsten. But Kaarsten remained serene. When he looked up, he could see the photographs of Jody’s and Peri Lynn’s bodies; prosecutors had pinned the pictures to a corkboard at the front of the courtroom. Still, he continued to smile and chat with his coterie of supporters during breaks.
