Last Dance, Last Chance

by Ann Rule

  He had just settled into his new post as Sheriff when he and his department were faced with one of the most brutal crimes in county history.

  April 14 was a little early for the true tourist season to begin in Grays Harbor County; the weather was too mercurial, changing from sunshine and blue skies to bitterly cold, windswept storms in minutes. But Tina Jacobsen and Gaelisa (Gael) Burton loved the ocean beaches, and they were prepared to deal with the vicissitudes of Mother Nature. Sadly, they knew a lot more about camping than they did about human aberration, and they headed for the ocean without fear.

  They had graduated together from Vashon Island High School in 1974. Vashon Island is a small community between Seattle and Tacoma, set in the middle of Puget Sound. The only way to get there is by ferry. Most of its graduates find jobs off the island in Seattle.

  Gael had worked a while as an X-ray librarian at Virginia Mason Hospital; Tina still worked there as a dietary aide. At 19, Gael had given up hospital work and the big city. She lived alone on an old 20-acre homestead on Vashon. She was an apprentice in a moccasin and leather shirt business on the island, and she was so talented and hard-working that she had just been asked to become a full partner. It was a very small business, but orders were increasing all the time.

  Gael had some unfinished moccasins in her backpack and intended to sew on them while they were camped out on the beach.

  Gael Burton was only five feet, one inch tall and weighed about 95 pounds. She was a vegetarian, a young woman who deplored violence in either thought or deed. She had long straight dark hair and wore “granny” glasses.

  Tina Jacobsen was five feet, five inches tall and weighed 125 pounds. Her face was as open as a flower, with a smooth high forehead and dark eyes, framed by masses of curly light brown hair that cascaded below her shoulder blades.

  Tina often visited on Gael’s farm, and she knew the Grays Harbor area well, too. She had visited the ocean beach towns several times before and had suggested to Gael that it was the perfect place for an early spring campout. There wouldn’t be a lot of tourists yet, and the weather was warming up.

  The two girls were well prepared for their trip to the coast as they rode the Vashon Island ferry to Tacoma on that Monday in April. From there, they hitched rides. They wore warm clothes and sturdy hiking boots, and they carried backpacks filled with carefully chosen food and equipment. Both of them had maroon sleeping bags, but they had more than enough money for emergencies and a few meals inside, out of the weather, if they needed to.

  As always, their friends and Gael’s mother had cautioned them about strangers, but they felt safe because there were two of them. They promised that they wouldn’t have anything to do with strangers on the beach—they knew better than that. They just wanted to hike and camp.

  They were due home on Thursday, April 17, but they didn’t get back then. Nobody was really worried about them that night, thinking that they had just decided to camp one more day.

  It was close to 5 P.M. on Friday, April 18, when a couple from Seattle walked slowly along the shoreline just inside the border of the Quinault Indian Reservation. They were only a few hundred yards from the small town of Moclips, Washington. They separated as each scanned the sands for interesting driftwood to take home.

  The wife’s attention was drawn to a shelter that looked as though kids had built it by stacking driftwood logs around a center pole. The whole thing was about five by six feet and barely five feet high. At high tide, it would be no more than fifty feet from the pounding surf. But the woman who looked at it didn’t think anyone would actually use it for shelter. The spaces between the driftwood walls wouldn’t afford much protection from wind and waves. It would make an ideal “fort” for kids with active imaginations, though.

  Moving closer, she peered inside—and stepped back hastily in embarrassment. Through a crack in the gnarled logs, she’d seen what could only be someone’s bare buttocks. She thought she’d stumbled across lovers who had taken advantage of the shelter. Somewhat red-faced, she walked back to where her husband stood.

  They discussed what she had seen, and the more they talked, the more unlikely it seemed that anyone would be making love in the nude in such chilly weather. They walked closer to the shelter, called out, received no reply, and finally peered inside again.

  What they saw was so shocking they couldn’t believe it at first. There was no love-making—nor any life at all—inside. Pale light filtered in and cast shadows over two bodies. As their eyes adjusted to the dim light, they saw that there was blood everywhere.

  With their feet sinking in the beach sand, they ran clumsily toward their truck and drove to a phone.

  Sheriff Sumpter and Undersheriff Gene Niece led a crew of officers to the beach in Moclips. It was almost 40 miles from Montesano. The caravan of sheriff’s units driven by Sergeant Larry Deason, Detective Nick Johnson, and Deputy George Sepansky tailed Sumpter’s speeding vehicle. Even so, daylight disappeared as the sun dipped into the ocean.

  The body site was only a few hundred yards from the houses and mobile homes that huddled near the sea in the tiny town. It wasn’t easy to get to the driftwood hut. The investigators drove to the end of a narrow dirt road, and then they had to walk along a trail leading past a dump site for sawdust and shakes to the beach. Only the rising moon and their flashlights guided them. The Moclips River cut through to the sea near them, and the huge, jagged rocks marking Point Grenville were silhouettes against the last muted colors of sunset as they rose from the ocean to the north.

  Sumpter knew that the Moclips River was within feet of the boundary that divided his county from the Quinault Indian Reservation. There was a very good chance that the shelter and the bodies inside were actually on federal property. He would probably have to coordinate his probe with Indian tribal police and with FBI agents. He had worked with them before, and it made a difficult case easier.

  Even as the officers’ flashlights sent cones of light through the beach grass and brush that separated the overgrown path from the beach, a storm gathered in the ocean. High winds and torrential rain bore down on the investigators, and the surf crept closer to the driftwood shelter. The waves were black now, capped by snowy foam, and the warmth of the day’s sunshine was only a memory.

  Grays Harbor County’s prosecuting attorney, Curtis Janhunen and his deputy, David Edwards, were only 15 minutes behind the sheriff’s party, and they joined the men on the beach. So did John Siemers, a criminal investigator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  The weather and the dark night cast the whole crime scene into grim flickering shadows as they peered inside the pile of gray wood. It wasn’t a couple inside; they saw two young women who were obviously dead. They lay atop sleeping bags, the bags so saturated with blood that their life fluid had soaked through into the sand beneath.

  The taller girl was facedown, her hands apparently tied in front of her, her feet effectively hobbled by her jeans and panties, which had been pulled down around her ankles. She wore a plaid shirt, and it and her bra had been pulled up to her shoulders. Even a cursory exam showed them that she had been stabbed several times.

  The second girl lay on her side, her hands tied behind her with bloodstained twine. She was a tiny girl, with dark hair pulled into a ponytail. As with her companion, her clothing had been yanked both down and up until she was almost nude, her T-shirt and red-and-green plaid work shirt high above her breasts, her ankles pinioned by her jeans.

  Both of the victims had been gagged with strips of the plaid material sliced by a very sharp knife from their own shirts.

  As they listened to the roar of the surf and shouted to make themselves heard, the investigators commented that the gagging couldn’t have been necessary. Any cries for help would never have carried back to town, even though the lights of houses seemed close enough to reach out and touch.

  The smaller girl had been stabbed, too, again and again around the throat and chest.

  Oddly, no sign of a prolon
ged struggle was evident inside the cramped shelter. The girls’ hiking boots had been neatly placed upside down to keep them dry, and some wet clothing was spread out to dry. Their orangy-red backpacks had barely been opened, and their cooking utensils and food supplies were not disturbed. It looked as if they had arrived at the beach late at night and had been too tired and wet to do anything but change into dry clothing, crawl into their sleeping bags, and go to sleep.

  If their killer came upon them while they were swaddled in the cocoon-like sleeping bags, he could have immobilized them and bound them before they ever had a chance to fight back.

  It was obvious that the girls’ hands had been bound before their upper garments were pulled up; that would account for the fact that they still wore clothes. The twine knots would have made it impossible to slip their shirts off past their hands.

  Rape was the most probable motive, but it would take lab tests to determine whether the victims had actually been sexually attacked. Robbery was ruled out when Sumpter’s men found a good deal of cash in their backpacks. They also found drivers’ licenses and various kinds of identification.

  According to their identification, the victims were Tina Jacobsen and Gaelisa Burton, both 19 years old, with addresses on Vashon Island, Washington. Now, they knew who the young women were, but they had no idea who had killed them, and it would take a medical examiner to estimate the time of death.

  Harold Sumpter had a terrible feeling he had seen them before: two young women walking happily down the road a few days earlier, their orange-hued backpacks on their shoulders.

  Undersheriff Niece set about measuring and diagramming the area while the other detectives looked for evidence at the scene. It was one of the most difficult crime scenes they had ever worked. The winds keened and howled, flapping the plastic tarp they had tied atop the shelter, while the rain only increased in intensity. They didn’t even try to keep dry, but they wanted to preserve any evidence that might be there.

  Sheriff Sumpter and his men and the investigators from the Bureau of Indian Affairs were battered by the storm for four hours before the bodies were removed. They would come back to search again in the daylight; now they had to find as much as they could before the heedless wind blew precious clues away.

  It was 11 P.M. when Deputy Sepansky and Indian agent Charlie McBride were posted to secure the scene until morning. Sumpter would not be going home for three days and nights; he set up headquarters at the Tradewinds Lodge in Moclips.

  Sumpter contacted the FBI, and Special Agents Pete Shepp and Bob Wick headed toward the tiny oceanfront town of Moclips. Bureau of Indian Affairs Officer Siemers confirmed that the girls’ bodies had been found 200 feet inside the Quinault Indian Reservation, but said the case would be totally under tribal jurisdiction only if the killer or killers proved to be of Indian heritage. At this point, there was no way to determine that,

  Sumpter had a hunch. He’d felt it the first time he’d seen the twine knots that were cut carefully off the victims’ wrists. He’d mentioned it to Niece, but he knew he had to have a lot more to go on. There were advantages to being a lawman who had worked an entire county for so many years. Sumpter had a memory like a computer, and he’d worked on a troubling case in February eight years earlier, a case that came back to him now.

  Several young boys had been abducted while they were playing in a nearby town. A dark-haired man about 20 years old had threatened them with a knife to make them go with him. The frightened youngsters were then tied to trees or hung by their wrists while their tormentor threatened to emasculate them with his knife.

  Although none of them was actually cut, their terror had seemed to be enough to sexually satisfy the sadist who taunted them.

  Sumpter had been assigned to that case, and he remembered the distinctive configuration of the knots, which had been saved by one father who rescued his boy from a tree in the woods. There were five twists, looping under and over: a variation on a square knot—like something a Boy Scout might have learned.

  The knots on the dead girls looked to be identical.

  The man arrested for tormenting the schoolboys was 20-year-old William Calvin Batten, a sometime shake-mill worker. On February 10, 1967, Batten had been found guilty of indecent liberties, and he had been sent to Western Washington State Hospital’s sexual Psychopath program.

  He was released shortly thereafter.

  Sheriff Sumpter determined to find out just what William Batten had been up to in the intervening eight years. He’d heard that Batten had moved back to the west county area after living near Bremerton, Washington, for a while. Apparently he had kept out of trouble in Grays Harbor territory.

  When the full crew of county, federal, and tribal investigators assembled on the beach at dawn, only the bloodstained sand remained to show that Tina and Gael had died there in the driftwood shed. The storm had passed, and the sun shone.

  The victims’ bodies were awaiting autopsy; their sleeping bags and backpacks were drying out back at sheriff’s headquarters in Montesano. Hopefully, the postmortem exams would add information that would help find their killer.

  Lieutenant Larry Clevenger, one of Sumpter’s sharpest investigators, was at the scene now. Ironically, on one of his rare days off, Clevenger had been fishing in the ocean the day before, not far off the very beach he now surveyed.

  The detectives were looking for some specific items as well as other evidence that might have been left behind by a killer. Gael’s glasses were missing; relatives said she was very nearsighted and would never have gone on a trip of several days without them. When Tina was found, she wore only one earring, long before it was fashionable to wear a single earring. And the murder knife might be buried somewhere in the sand.

  The searchers found neither the glasses nor the earring, but they did find a ball of twine, which appeared to be the same as the bloodstained bonds on the victims’ wrists. And they found something considerably more damaging to a suspect: buried about four inches beneath the sand at the corner of the shelter was a bill from the public utilities department.

  It was addressed to William Batten. There was also an envelope from a place called Futures Clear, addressed to his wife. The address listed was in Moclips, and it was that of an apartment that faced the ocean only a few blocks south of the driftwood shelter. The possibility that the items could have blown onto the beach and been buried there from the dump farther inland was most unlikely; the prevailing wind blew off the ocean, not toward it.

  While Harold Sumpter traced William Batten’s movements and any recent police contacts or arrests, his men, aided by every officer available from the Hoquiam Police Department, fanned out in a door-to-door inquiry in Moclips and along the route the dead girls had probably taken to reach the lonely beach where they had met their killer.

  Disappointingly, although the teenagers would have had to walk right through Moclips to reach their camp, no one in town recalled seeing them. They hadn’t shopped at the one local grocery store, or gone to the Tradewinds Lodge for coffee or a meal. This only seemed to further indicate that they had been killed shortly after coming to town. That probably would have been Monday in the hours after dark. Monday was the day they had left home for their trip. No one expected them back for a few days, so no alarm would have been raised.

  The autopsy reports from Dr. Arthur Campbell indicated that the victims had succumbed to multiple knife wounds. The most immediately fatal were two deep penetrating wounds on each body to the right carotid artery in the neck. Hemorrhaging would have been profound. Gael had superficial wounds on the neck and chest. Tina had a stab wound to her right flank and a deep wound in her back, a wound that had penetrated a piece of plastic found on top her body.

  Surprisingly, neither of the victims had been raped or sodomized. No semen was present, nor any evidence of trauma to the victims’ vaginas or rectums. However, this did not eliminate a sexual motivation in the double murders, as suggested by the seminude condition of the girls’
bodies when they were found. The killer might have panicked as he prepared to rape the helpless girls, or he might have been a sadist whose gratification came through his victims’ terror rather than through an overt sex act.

  He might even have had a premature sexual climax in the excitement of stripping his victims naked, and then been unable to achieve another erection. Then, too, he could have been impotent—a man who raped symbolically, with a knife.

  Dr. Campbell estimated that the missing death weapon was a long knife, sharpened on one side only, with a blade two and a half to three inches in width: a butcher knife.

  The time of the victims’ death was much harder to determine. When the girls were found, rigor was present only in their upper arms and jaws. This area is the first to stiffen after death, and it is also the last to be affected as rigor mortis leaves. The bodies had been preserved almost perfectly by the refrigerated air of the chilled beach. Campbell’s final assessment was only that they had been dead more than 48 hours.

  Sumpter and his judge friend had seen two girls hitchhiking on Monday; other witnesses had seen a similar pair on the following Wednesday. Were they the same girls? Despite requests for information, the girls allegedly seen on Wednesday were never located.

  One possibility to set the time of death was identifying the stomach contents of the victims. Gael had eaten salad for her last meal, and Tina a hamburger. Tracing back along the probable path the victims had taken to Moclips, detectives contacted employees at the popular Colonial West Restaurant and Burgess Motel on Perry Avenue running north out of Hoquiam. The day staff recalled that two teenage girls with backpacks had eaten lunch there on Monday.