Kiss Me, Kill Me

by Ann Rule

  There were many theories and many suspects between July 1993 and June 2004. Some made sense. Others seemed unlikely.

  A Seattle clinical psychologist announced in 1999 that he believed Mia Zapata had been killed by the Green River Killer, who was, of course, believed to be responsible for more than fifty murders in the eighties. No one knew who the Green River Killer was in 1999, so linking him to Mia’s death wasn’t particularly helpful to the investigation.

  The psychologist guessed that the Green River Killer might well be obsessed with religion and acquainted with Bible lore. He claimed that Mia had been killed exactly eleven years to the day after the first Green River victim, Wendy Coffield, disappeared in July 1982. Since Mia had been found near a Catholic church and her body was allegedly arranged in a crucifixion-like position, the psychologist felt her injuries resembled instructions from the book of Hosea on how a sinful woman should be punished. Many of the Green River victims, the expert said, had been teenage prostitutes, and he claimed they were also placed in the same position.

  His information was wrong and his theories strange, indeed. But they garnered some press because Mia Zapata’s name had never faded from the headlines. Nor had the hopes of her friends, who continued to remind the world that Mia’s killer was still out there somewhere, walking free to kill again.

  Seattle homicide detectives didn’t need to be reminded; they had simply come to the end of the possibilities open to them. It would be eleven years before Mia Zapata’s murderer would be identified. When he was, it was through forensic procedures that once again used DNA comparison.

  Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon studied Mia’s case file, reading it over and over. They noted that their fellow detectives who had processed the crime scene the night Mia’s body was found had routinely used cotton swabs on various spots on her corpse—in the pubic area, on her belly, in her mouth, on her breasts. Those swabs still existed—preserved, hopefully, so that any material left on them would not break down. There wasn’t much, but there was possibly enough for the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab’s forensic scientists to work with.

  In June 2003, Jodi Sass analyzed the swabs and found that one swab, taken from Mia’s breast, held saliva. She was able to isolate two DNA profiles from the minuscule amount of human fluid left behind. One was Mia Zapata’s own. The other belonged to an unknown male.

  The unknown DNA profile was entered into the FBI’s computers to be compared with the two million profiles in the database.

  There was a hit. But it was a hit that seemed too incredible to be true. The man whose saliva had been smeared on the breast of a beloved singer in Seattle, Washington, was Cuban-born Jesus Mezquia, now 48. He lived in the Florida Keys and he was a fisherman. He was married and had a family.

  But Jesus Mezquia had a long rap sheet in Florida and in California. In Florida, he had been convicted of the battery of a pregnant woman in 1997 and possession of burglary tools in 2002. He had also been arrested for soliciting, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and indecent exposure.

  Florida authorities had entered his DNA profile in the FBI computers in November 2002. Seven months later, Jodi Sass’s submission from the Mia Zapata case matched it.

  In Palm Springs, California, Mezquia had been convicted of battery and assault and battery of a spouse, and had been arrested for rape, robbery, and indecent exposure.

  Somehow, this violent man’s path had to have crossed Mia Zapata’s during the early-morning hours of July 7, 1993. It was up to Seattle’s Cold Case Squad detectives to place Mezquia in Seattle on that night.

  They did. Like so many killers, Mezquia was tripped up by police stops for relatively minor offenses. He was a lousy driver, and Gagnon and Mixsell found traffic citations that proved he had been in Seattle at the time of Mia Zapata’s murder.

  A Seattle woman came forward to say that she recognized photos of Mezquia as the man who had exposed himself to her five weeks after Mia Zapata’s murder. She had jotted down his license number.

  Mezquia was extradited to Seattle in January 2004 and went on trial in March. Jesus Mezquia does not speak English, so a translator was provided for the hulking defendant. He glowered at the witnesses and the jurors, but he never spoke and did not take the witness stand. The trial lasted eight days, and the jury deliberated for three days.

  In the end, they announced that they had found Mezquia guilty of the murder of Mia Zapata. Superior Court Judge Sharon Armstrong’s courtroom was packed with emotional friends and fans who remembered Mia as vividly as if they had seen her only the day before.

  Jesus Mezquia was sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison.

  “He was always looking for a victim,” Dick Gagnon said to 48 Hours producers later. “He was a predator.”

  22

  The biggest hurdle for a homicide detective is a case where the killer and the victim were complete strangers until the moment that the murder took place. Gagnon and Mixsell believed that Mia Zapata had never seen Jesus Mezquia until shortly before she died. He would never talk about the murder, and yet, there was reason to believe he had been trolling on Capitol Hill to find a woman alone—any woman.

  Mia might have accepted a ride, but that wasn’t likely. She would have stepped close to a driver who claimed to be lost, though, so she could give him directions. Her death was clearly a stranger-to-stranger situation.

  From everything the Cold Case Squad detectives could deduce from Sandy Bowman’s 35-year-old case file, her death had also been the work of a stranger. The investigators who had worked Sandy’s case over the years had done a thorough job of eliminating dozens of suspects that Sandy knew.

  They had employed every forensic science technique available to them in 1968. They had canvassed the neighborhood around the Kon-Tiki Apartments, interviewing every neighbor.

  It wasn’t for lack of trying that Sandy Bowman’s homicide was still unsolved. But in June 2004, it was finally Sandy’s turn.

  Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon had concentrated mainly on homicides where the motive had probably been sex. Killers don’t usually bleed at a scene themselves unless the victim manages to wound them. Sometimes the killer’s skin cells do end up under a victim’s fingernails if she has been able to scratch him deeply enough before she succumbs. That is why homicide detectives put bags around the hands of the dead before they are removed by deputies from the medical examiner’s office.

  Sandy Bowman had been taken by surprise and had had no chance to fight. Her nails had been clean and unbroken. There was blood in her apartment but it was all her own type. If Sandy’s killer had had the same type, the state of forensic art in 1968 wouldn’t have been able to differentiate between the two.

  But some evidence remained—even after thirty-five years. Dried semen. Finding Kristen Sumstad’s killer had seemed impossible—but it wasn’t. Finding Sylvia Durante’s killer seemed just as unlikely. And using only a trace of saliva to find a man who lived as far from Seattle as he could be—in the Florida Keys—who had killed Mia Zapata, seemed miraculous.

  Gagnon and Mixsell weren’t batting a thousand, but their score was climbing: twenty cases closed and still going up. They still didn’t know who Hallie Seaman’s murderer was—or Eileen Condit’s. There were other young women lost to unknown killers in the files: a little girl named Gwen, drowned near a dock in Ballard; Rogena Switzer, killed as she walked home from school; a beautiful teenager named Sarah Beth, followed home from a bus stop and stabbed in the bathroom of an abandoned gas station; Carmen Campbell, who simply disappeared.

  I wrote about every one of them, and sometimes I come across their photographs as I sort through the thousands of pictures I’ve saved from my days as “Andy Stack,” the True Detective writer, and wonder where their killers are now. Are some of the unknown murderers responsible for other unsolved cases? Are they dead or alive? Or in prison?

  On June 15, 2004, I was reading my morning Seattle Post-Intelligencer when my jaw dropped: “Seattle Police on Verge of
Solving ’68 Murder.”

  It was a story about a “pregnant newlywed” whose long-unsolved case was about to be connected, at last, to the person who had killed her.

  It was Sandy Bowman.

  King County deputy prosecutor Tim Bradshaw, who has handled a number of the old cases, would not comment on who the suspect was. However, a search warrant had been issued after Gregg Mixsell submitted an affidavit seeking a DNA sample from a man confined in prison. It would be the second DNA test—only to confirm the match that had already been made.

  The first results had linked Sandra Darlene Bowman’s murder to a man who wasn’t going anywhere. He still had decades to serve on his sentence for his crimes in early 1969.

  It was John Canaday. John Canaday, who left the frozen bodies of Mary Annabelle Bjornson and Lynne Tuski in the snowdrifts of Stevens Pass a month after Sandy was stabbed sixty times just before Christmas 1968.

  Although he admitted to killing them, and to raping “B.B.,” he never mentioned the petite 16-year-old pregnant girl, surprised as she wrapped presents.

  But he left something of himself behind, something that would come back to connect him to her so many years later.

  Canaday is 59 years old now, locked up for most of his life. One can only be relieved that he was caught before he continued to kill at the pace he had set for himself. He might well have rivaled Ted Bundy—who came along six years later—in terms of the loss of innocent human lives.

  • • •

  On September 2, 2004, John Dwight Canaday was formally charged with murder in the death of Sandra Bowman. When Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon told him that his DNA profile in the nationwide database matched the sperm found in Sandy’s body, he reportedly sighed and threw up his hands, admitting, “I attacked her. I stabbed her.”

  Canaday insisted that he hadn’t known Sandy Bowman before the attack, and he had “randomly knocked on her door.” He blamed his actions on “a lot of anger at myself and immaturity.”

  King County Deputy Prosecutor Tim Bradshaw filed the charges, and said that Canaday could receive a third life sentence. In the end, though, it wouldn’t extend his time in prison. But it will serve as long-delayed justice for Sandy Bowman.

  • • •

  John Canaday has grown old in prison. His shaggy head is bald now, his face etched with deep wrinkles.

  His “immaturity” and rage destroyed many lives, and it is a positive thing that he will never be free to hurt anyone else.

  The Postman Only Killed Once

  The murder of another 16-year-old wife had a few similarities to Sandy Bowman’s case.

  This case was solved within a short time, possibly because Pam Carrier’s killer was not a stranger to her. And the romance that had begun with love and promises ended with what can only be called lust.

  The Carrier case stunned jurors in a friendly hometown community in Eastern Washington, a town I visited initially to research the Carrier case, and many years later for my 2003 book Heart Full of Lies. Actually that title would have fit either case, although the details were not at all similar.

  The sexual fantasies of human beings are as diverse as any other appetite. If private and unspoken secrets could be read, some eavesdroppers would be shocked, many titillated, and a few might just laugh out loud. While both men and women may pretend to have tremendous interest in sex, a lot of them do so only because they think it is expected of them. In reality, they couldn’t care less.

  Others put on a facade of morality, but what lies beneath their saintly masks is pagan and ravenous. Most humans fall somewhere in between, but trying to peg an individual’s true sexual appetite by the way he or she talks, dresses, or looks is apt to be way off the mark.

  That was certainly valid in the case of the pivotal figure in one of the most shocking homicides ever to surface in the prison town of Walla Walla, Washington. He didn’t appear to fit the role of the classic satyr. Actually, he looked more like a studious candidate to become a certified public accountant than he did a dedicated student of sex. Yet, as an intensive investigation by the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Office poked into the dark corners of his life, this man’s activities in and out of bed began to read like a modern-day Boccaccio’s Decameron.

  And if no one had died, his amateurish approach to homicidal violence might well have been laughable. As the story played out, it became increasingly peculiar.

  The case began on August 7, in a ditch southeast of the Walla Walla city limits. Two teenage boys who were looking for a way to beat the pervasive August heat that blankets Walla Walla when the sun is high in the sky had set out on their minibikes long before six in the morning. It was a beautiful morning, and they encountered little traffic as they buzzed along the Russell Creek Road. Fields of grape arbors, pea vines, and popular “Walla Walla Sweets” onions edged the parched ditches on each side of the road.

  The teenagers had already whizzed on past the still, pale form in the ditch before they realized what it was. At the same moment, they hit their brakes and skidded to a halt.

  “Hey . . . ,” one teenager began. “I saw something.”

  “Me too. We’d better go back.”

  What had registered in their mind’s eye had been correct. A woman, completely naked, lay on her back amid the dry weeds of the ditch. She did not appear to have any injuries, but her complete stillness frightened them. Later they would tell police, “We both knew she was dead, and we tore out to get some help.”

  The bikers rode hard until they found a farmhouse. When they told the farmer what they had seen, he called Sheriff Arthur Klundt’s office and reported what might be a dead body to the radio dispatcher. It was also possible that it was just a matter of two kids with active imaginations, but someone in authority had to check it out.

  Klundt was out of town on business on that early Friday morning, so the dispatcher called Chief Criminal Deputy Scotty Ray at his home. Ray recalls the morning wryly: “I’d been up all night with an acute kind of flu and wasn’t even sure I could make it into the office when the call-out came.”

  However, manpower in a small law enforcement department is limited. At the time, the Walla Walla Sheriff’s office had only ten deputies to handle any problem that might come up in the 1,267 square miles of the county. Ray, a ten-year veteran in the sheriff’s office, was one of the most respected crime scene processors in Washington State—he’d had a lot of practice. He fought back his queasy stomach and instructed the radio operator to send patrol deputies Frank Lucas and Frank Nemec to the body site. “I’ll be there as soon as I get dressed,” he said with resignation, hoping devoutly that it would turn out to be only a scarecrow or a deer lying in the ditch so he could turn around and go home.

  But it wasn’t.

  Noting the location of the alleged body, Ray realized that it had been located a mile and a half outside of Walla Walla—but the possibility existed that she had actually been killed inside the city limits. He had called Walla Walla police chief A. L. Watts and asked that their two departments cooperate in the investigation. The chief had agreed and directed Captain Alex Dietz to Russell Creek Road. Washington state trooper Roger Gerow was also on hand to aid his fellow lawmen.

  There was no question that the young bike riders had, indeed, come upon the corpse of a naked woman—a teenage girl, probably, from the way she looked. How she came to end up there was a puzzle for all of them.

  Even as the investigators meticulously worked to gather evidence and photograph the crime scene at 6:30 in the morning, the promise of blistering heat as the day progressed hovered. It had been eighty degrees at nine the night before, so the sun already had a head start.

  Ray looked at the dead woman. She was young, perhaps early twenties—probably even younger. She was not a small woman, however; he judged her to be about five feet seven and thought she probably weighed about 140 pounds. Young and strong. She looked healthy enough, but he knew you couldn’t determine that just by looking.

 
And that raised a question: If she had died of natural causes, why on earth would her body have been disposed of this way?

  And, if she had been murdered, why hadn’t she resisted? Even if she hadn’t succeeded in saving herself, surely a woman of this size would have inflicted some marks on her killer. And, in resisting, it would seem that she would have defense wounds on her own body. Torn fingernails. Scratches. Bruises. Something.

  Ray and Dietz were in agreement on one point: the dead woman had not been killed where she lay. The field grass in the ditch was two or three feet high and dry as dust. Had there been any struggle there, the grass would be broken and trampled. But this wasn’t the case. The only crushed vegetation was underneath the body and along a path from the road.

  “Something bothers me,” Ray mused. “I get the feeling that the killer wanted us to find her here. Look. There’s a culvert running under the road only a few feet from the body. If he wanted to hide her, the obvious thing would have been to put the body in there. Then we might not have found her for weeks, or even months.”

  The other officers nodded. Certainly, putting a nude woman beside a well-traveled road could not be construed as hiding the body.

  Something else nudged at Ray’s mind. The position of the girl’s sprawled body and her nakedness suggested that the motive behind her murder had been sexual. Again, he wondered if that was what her murderer wanted him to think. At this point, it was only a hunch. It would take a postmortem exam to know whether she had actually been raped, or if rape had been attempted.

  One thing was certain: the young woman who lay before them in death had been alive the night before. Rigor mortis, the rigidity that seizes the body’s muscles soon after death, was almost complete. Full rigor generally begins in the jaw and shoulders and grips the entire body within six or seven hours after death, keeps the corpse frozen for a time, and then gradually recedes.