Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  In April 1976, Amelia Jager accepted that her dreams of happiness were doomed to failure. She still cared for Heinz in a way, but not as she had once loved him. She was too frightened by his strange moods and his collection of sharp weapons. She hurriedly packed a few possessions and then slipped away from their house while he was out.

  Her note of April 9 displays the compassion she still felt for him and also her sadness:

  Dear Heinz,

  I wanted to say “Goodbye” in person, but I thought it would be too emotional a scene.

  I feel so sad and empty that our marriage didn’t work. I always loved you more than anyone. You were my “dream man.”

  It seems that everything in our marriage has gone downhill instead of improving and it’s really better to stop now instead of fighting a losing battle. I will be filing for divorce in America.

  I really liked Switzerland and thought being married to a foreigner would enrich both our lives. But you beat me down in my attempt to adjust to life here. Simply trying to learn German turned out to be a major catastrophe. Police, attorneys, running away, were never a part of my life and I have really lost self-respect in facing these situations weekly.

  I think that counseling and therapy would have been our only chance but when you’re threatening me and irregular about it, I even lost faith in that.

  I hate leaving our apartment garden and good times together, but I can’t take any more horrible scenes with knives, swords, yelling, and screaming. Saying “I’m sorry” and repeating the same things doesn’t help.

  I hope you will not do anything drastic because of my leaving. Your new job sounds like a good start in the right direction.

  Please don’t hope I’m coming back. I will be starting a new life for myself in America.

  Love,

  Amy

  P.S. I put some clothes in the yellow sack in the kitchen that might fit Sonia [a Swiss friend].

  It was the farewell letter of a rational woman who had taken all she could bear. A rational man might have accepted her decision. But Amy Jager was not dealing with a rational man. She realized that, but even she could not guess the lengths to which Heinz would go to keep what he considered his. She allowed herself to feel somewhat safe after she talked with officials at the American embassy in Switzerland and begged them not to give him a visa—on the slight chance he would attempt to follow her.

  They assured her they would not. Anyway, Heinz had no money; she felt he would not leave Bern. In time, she thought, he would come to accept what had to be.

  Amy Jager came home to her family. She couldn’t find a teaching job in Washington in the middle of the school year so she obtained a position as a secretary. She took back her maiden name and made preparations for filing for divorce. After a few weeks, she began to smile again. She was only twenty-seven; her life wasn’t over, and there could be better days and years ahead. Letters to friends showed that she was once more becoming the optimist she had been before her marriage.

  She had seen the love of her life turn into ashes, but she did not burden those around her with her sorrow. She was determined to go on with her life.

  On May 11, 1976, the doorbell rang at Amy’s family home. It had been only a month since she’d left Switzerland, and she’d assured her relatives that Heinz wouldn’t be able to get a visa to follow her.

  But he had. They were shocked to find Heinz Jager standing there. Somehow, some way, he had obtained a visa and enough money to fly to Seattle.

  He had come, he said, to convince Amelia that they should continue their marriage. They were meant to be together, and Heinz was insistent that Amelia would understand that if he just had a chance to talk with her alone.

  They feared him and the chaos he might cause, but he wouldn’t leave, and it took a call to local police to persuade him that he could not stay with Amy’s family. They found him a motel room, paid for it, and waited anxiously to see what he would do next. They didn’t want to see him on the street, and they felt compassion toward him. They also felt apprehensive.

  They were a gentle family and could not understand this man who had flown halfway around the world to seize the woman he had married and take her away again.

  Amy understood him, though, and she was very afraid.

  On May 18, Amy wrote to Senator Henry Jackson and demanded to know why Heinz had been given a visa to America. She said it would not expire until June 21, more than a month away. In the meantime, she and her family felt like hostages to a madman. She asked that he never be given a future visa.

  What Amy didn’t know was that Heinz Jager had no intention of leaving America—ever. He had disposed of all his possessions in Switzerland and arrived with the few belongings he had left, only his skis and some clothes.

  He had a knife, too, but the family didn’t know about that. The year 1976 was long before airport security teams made thorough checks for weapons in luggage.

  As they waited out what they thought would be thirty-three days, Amy’s family guarded her, shepherding her to work and protecting her in their home at night. They tried to be as gracious to Jager as they could, taking him on a well-chaperoned sightseeing trip to the mountains of Washington. Because they were kind, they hoped that Heinz would have good memories of his last visit to see his about-to-be-ex-wife and leave them alone once he was back in Switzerland.

  Heinz made no preparations to leave the United States. He seemed to have no plans beyond the day.

  After a few weeks, Heinz said he was going to California to visit a friend. He seemed calmer, and the family dared to hope that he would return to Europe and leave Amy alone. His friend in California welcomed Jager and assumed that he was accepting the fact that his marriage was over. He encouraged Heinz to make a new start.

  But Jager had plans. He returned to Seattle on June 5, a Saturday, and surprised Amy’s sister Jill at work. He said he’d just arrived by bus from California and needed a place to stay. Jill arranged for him to go to the YMCA and surreptitiously listened on a phone extension as he placed a call to Amy.

  She heard Amy explain to Heinz that she had purchased a plane ticket for him and made reservations for him to fly out of Sea-Tac Airport the next day. His destination would be his home in Switzerland.

  Jill was at a disadvantage because she could not understand the language Heinz spoke as he talked to Amy. But she could discern easily that he was angry and upset. Still, he left to stay at the Y without commenting to Jill about his phone call with Amy.

  Amy and her family spent the night with ambivalent feelings—anxiety mixed with relief that Jager’s visit was almost over. They agreed that Amy, Jill, and the girls’ brother, who was a golf pro at a local country club, would all go to the airport with Jager. That should prevent a terribly emotional good-bye. Even so, Amy’s brother—who had never owned a gun in his life—was worried; he arranged to borrow a small handgun, a .32 automatic, and placed it under the driver’s seat of the family’s green 1973 Fiat station wagon just in case, although he prayed he would have no reason to use it.

  Heinz’s moods were like clouds sweeping across the Alps. Amy had explained to her family that he was always like this—sunny, cloudy, stormy, calm, bleak, and back to sunny again. She herself had come to a point where she didn’t really know who he was, but the doctors in Switzerland had diagnosed him as bipolar and manic-depressive.

  Sunday morning, June 6, dawned bright and clear. By 8:30 a.m., the green Fiat, loaded down with Jager’s skis and belongings, stopped to pick up Jill for the trip to Sea-Tac Airport fifteen miles south of Seattle. Amy sat in front next to her brother, and Jill climbed in the backseat with Heinz. She could see that he was very upset and had been crying. As they backed out of the driveway, he continued to plead with Amy, saying that he could not go back without her or everything would go “kaput.”

  That word Jill understood and it frightened her.

  Heinz asked Amy to switch places with Jill and come sit in the back with him, but she refu
sed, giving him one excuse after another. They didn’t have time to stop and change seats because they’d left a little late. As they neared the airport, Heinz became more and more agitated.

  Sea-Tac Airport is a huge complex that sprawls over hundreds and hundreds of acres in the South King County area. With its shops and restaurants, and with the thousands of travelers who pass through its gates every day, it is a small city in itself. The Port of Seattle Police Department had ninety-six officers in 1976 and was the fourth-largest municipal police department in the state of Washington. It was the law enforcement agency responsible not only for the airport but also for the shipping docks along Puget Sound and Elliott Bay. Then headed by Chief Neil Moloney, onetime assistant chief of the Seattle Police Department, the Port of Seattle Police Department was kept busy with cases much like those of any big-city police department: burglaries, forgeries, stolen cars, narcotics, sex crimes.

  Even in the midseventies, the Port of Seattle Police Department didn’t handle the minimal airport security that existed then; that was the province of private airport security firms hired by the airlines, although, in case of trouble, Port of Seattle officers assisted.

  The role of police officers at Sea-Tac had evolved from what had once been essentially “tour guides” to full-time law enforcement work. Homicide, however, wasn’t something anyone expected to encounter in the airport.

  On this Sunday morning in early June, the airport was alive with travelers and airline personnel, and every few minutes or so a huge jet taxied down one of the runways and took off for Portland, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Juneau, Denver, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and other hubs of the major airlines.

  At the passenger drop-off area just in front of the revolving doors to the Northwest Airlines ticket counter, Amy’s brother maneuvered carefully into a spot next to the curb. He pulled on his parking brake, grabbed one of Heinz’s bags and his skis, and headed into the airport. Annoyingly, Heinz followed him, snatched his bag back, and took it to the car, placing it just inside the open tailgate window.

  The two sisters had quickly exited the Fiat and remained outside the car. Amy looked beautiful, clad in light slacks, a sheer blouse tied at the midriff, and platform sandals, with her dark chestnut hair flowing over her shoulders. Jill wore a similar outfit. Both young women were nervous but were determined to carry off the good-byes with a minimum of emotion.

  Frustrated by all of Heinz’s delaying tactics, Amy’s brother discovered to his chagrin that he had been successful in making them arrive too late to board his scheduled flight to London.

  The jet’s doors were closed, the steps rolled away, and it was already taxiing out toward the runway. The ticket agent explained firmly that they could not call it back at this point.

  Amy’s brother stepped to another desk to try to get Heinz on one of the next flights that would end up in Switzerland. There would probably be several hours’ wait, and he worried that his determined brother-in-law might leave the airport and make his way back to their home, looking for Amy. He didn’t want that to happen. If need be, he would wait at the airport with Heinz, after sending his sisters someplace safe.

  At two minutes after 9:00 a.m., the dispatch switchboard in the Port of Seattle Police headquarters at the airport began to light up. The first call came from a maintenance man who said someone had yelled, “Help! Attempted murder!” The man was so excited that he failed to give a location.

  One minute later, a Northwest Airlines ticket agent called the radio dispatcher to say that there was “a fire” right in front of the building and requested an ambulance.

  The profusion of calls tumbled one after the other—all requesting either an aid team or an ambulance to respond to the area just outside the Northwest Airlines entrance.

  The dispatcher requested that Sergeant L. L. Quein and officers J. E. Baertschiger and D. G. Krows respond to the scene of a “possible fire.” They arrived in two minutes, expecting to find a car fire. There was no smoke visible, or even flames. Instead, they saw two men struggling to pin a third man to the pavement in the middle of the five-lane passenger loading road. One of the men said that the subject on the ground had just “stabbed someone.”

  The tall, bearded man on the ground was still struggling as the officers separated the tangle of arms and legs. He wore a light jacket, soaked with bright red fluid, and they recognized the metallic smell of blood. He did not appear to understand English, and he didn’t stop fighting them until the officers had handcuffed him.

  Officer Krows looked toward the railing near the curb. He gasped as he saw a pretty young woman sitting there, half doubled over, holding her abdomen. Her breasts and midsection were stained crimson. Nearby, a taller woman held tight to her own left hand, which Krows saw was almost cut in two.

  It was difficult to take it all in—they had come to fight afire and instead found two terribly injured young women and a battling foreigner who seemed unable to understand what they said to him.

  The bearded man, whom many bystanders insisted was the attacker, was taken to a holding cell. The officers on the scene were given a large bloodstained Buck knife by Sergeant Quein, which they bagged into evidence.

  There was no time to find out just what had happened; the witnesses assured the officers they would wait in the squad room until the victims had been rushed to the hospital.

  Baertschiger and Krows rode with the ambulance carrying Amy and Jill. Valley General Hospital in nearby Kent had already been alerted that a red-blanket case was coming in, and Jill ignored her own wounds to try to comfort her sister. The ambulance crew administered lactated Ringer’s solution to Amy to keep her veins open, but they silently shook their heads. She had no blood pressure and a fluttering rapid pulse. Her pupils were already beginning to dilate.

  By the time Amy Jager arrived at the emergency room, she was in severe shock, near death, and she no longer had any pulse at all. She was breathing only in sporadic gasps. She had no heart sounds. ER doctors inserted an airway and tried everything in their power to bring Amy back, but their efforts were in vain.

  Five minutes later, Amelia Jager was pronounced dead at the age of twenty-seven.

  Jill, who was left-handed, had suffered lacerated tendons in that hand. Her cuts were so deep that she could not flex her fingers. She would require extensive surgery to try to bring her hand back to any kind of normal functioning.

  The Port of Seattle Police Department had four detectives, and Detective Sergeant Dave Hart was on call that Sunday morning. Hart, who retired as a lieutenant from the Seattle Police Department to join the Washington State Patrol Drug Control Assistance Unit, came to Chief Moloney’s department with a wealth of experience. Now he would try to piece together the events leading to the incredible stabbing that had left one woman dead and another terribly injured.

  He talked to an airport shuttle driver who had seen a tall, bearded man struggling with Amy. Before this witness could react, the attacker had suddenly stepped behind the dark-haired woman and placed his left arm around her neck while he grasped a large knife in his right hand. Pulling her tightly against him as the shuttle driver watched, horrified, he had made a sweeping left-to-right movement across her stomach and the driver saw blood gushing out. The driver had leaped from the bus and called for help on his walkie-talkie as he raced to stop the awful struggle. By the time he reached them, the woman was down on the pavement, while the man still held her around the neck.

  “He was kneeling, still trying to hurt her,” the driver recalled. “I jumped on his back but I couldn’t get a good grip. I grabbed his left arm and we both fell backward. I pinned his left arm and pinioned his legs with mine. Then a soldier ran out to help us and he started choking the guy. Both of us together couldn’t get him off her.”

  Heinz Jager had continued to fight them, and the soldier had growled, “Knock it off!”

  There had been no lack of good Samaritans trying to save Amy Jager. The soldier was Sergeant John Dimsdale of North Carolina, w
ho had been sitting inside with Sergeant Leonard Tatum of Georgia. Dimsdale told Dave Hart that he had watched the silent tableau through the window.

  The women standing there were both pretty, both dressed in slacks and light blouses. “I saw the man try to kiss the smaller woman, and she stepped back away from him.

  “He grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her toward the car. The other woman came to help and both women tried to push him away. He hit the little one with the flat of his hand. When I rushed out, I saw the knife had blood on it. The shuttle driver ran to help and I grabbed the guy’s throat and held him till the police came.”

  Sergeant Tatum had somehow managed to extricate Amy from the struggle and had led her to the sidewalk. She could walk at that point, but he’d seen the blood just above her navel and between her breasts.

  “Another guy grabbed the knife,” Tatum said, “and threw it out into the middle of the road.”

  Amy’s brother told Dave Hart of his sister’s attempt to escape her life with her jealous husband.

  “We all went to the airport to protect Amy. Heinz was talking to her in French. He was crying and pleading with Amy, grabbing her by the shoulders and begging her to go with him, saying he couldn’t live without her.

  “I was afraid to leave Amy with him near the car but there were so many people around that I chanced it.”

  He had made what seemed to be the best decision, and he agonized that he hadn’t stayed with his sister to protect her. But he was trying to get Jager on another plane and out of their lives for good. Suddenly, he’d heard the screams and had run out to see Amy and Jill and Heinz grappling on the pavement.

  “Amy was on her back and Heinz was choking her while she tried to pull his hands away. I helped the others to pry Jager’s hands off Amy’s neck.”

  Heinz had seemed to have the strength of three men. Crazy strength, as he was determined to destroy Amy if she wouldn’t go with him.

  Finally, Amy and Jill had been helped to their feet and walked over to the curb, where passersby tried to comfort them. He was unaware that his sisters were grievously injured.