Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  “I talked to Amy but she didn’t respond, although her eyes were open.”

  Dave Hart interviewed Jill at Valley General Hospital as she awaited surgery. The brave woman knew Amy was dead, but she had tried with all her might to save her. She told Hart that, as soon as their brother was inside, Jager had tried to drag Amy back into the car. He had reached into the bag he had grabbed from their brother.

  “He pulled out a long silver knife. He knew exactly where it was. He was sort of standing alongside Amy and holding her with one hand. He stabbed her in the stomach. We both started to scream. I grabbed for the knife with my left hand and held on as hard as I could. He moved the knife back and forth to get it out of my grasp—”

  Jill had clamped her bare hand around the razor-sharp blade to try to save Amy, and Jager had deliberately sliced the tendons in her hand in his frenzy to kill the woman he professed to love.

  Detective Dave Hart found the red zipper bag in the back of the Fiat wagon. A black leather knife sheath stood upright in the bag. Jager had only to reach in and pull out the knife. He had to have planned that ahead of time, a last-ditch effort if his pleading didn’t convince Amy to leave with him.

  Booked into the King County Jail, Heinz Jager was provided with interpreters from the Seattle Language Bank to inform him once again of his Miranda rights and to ask him questions. He refused to talk to the police or anyone else—he said his attorney was in Switzerland. He whined, however, that he’d been injured by the bystanders who had pulled him off of his dying wife and complained that the jail doctors would not treat his injuries properly.

  In truth, Jager had been taken to a hospital for treatment of his scratches and bruises, which were minor. He insisted that he wasn’t satisfied with the treatment he’d received and complained, “Someone kicked me in the ribs at the airport.” He also said that he was hungry and hadn’t been given anything to eat.

  When he was asked about Amy, he said, “Who is dead? Is she dead? I don’t know if she is dead. I had the knife in my hand. I stabbed blindly. I don’t know how many times. I was blind with rage. I took my knife and hit her many times. Is my wife dead?”

  Amy was, of course, dead. And Jill was undergoing four hours of surgery to repair her injured hand. Their whole family was in despair because all of their efforts to protect their beloved Amy had failed.

  Amy Jager’s autopsy showed that she had suffered eight stab wounds, one of which had perforated her liver and left lung. She had died from massive internal bleeding. For all intents and purposes, the slender teacher who had flown across the world to save herself from just such a fate was dead from the moment of the first vicious knife thrust. Even if paramedics had been there seconds later, they probably couldn’t have saved her from bleeding to death.

  After examining Heinz Jager, psychiatrists declared him mentally fit to stand trial. His trial began in late October 1976. Doug Whalley and Janet George, deputy King County prosecutors, would speak for the State; Carl Hultman, the public defender, would represent Jager.

  Through an interpreter, Jager was made fully aware of all the testimony given.

  Hultman pointed out that Jager had had a disturbed childhood; that he had been abused and had a history of mental problems. He claimed that Jager was abnormal at times and couldn’t stand stressful situations created by problems with women.

  The handsome Swiss had once told a psychiatrist that his wife was his possession, that she belonged to him, and that if he could not have her, no one else ever would either.

  Defense attorney Hultman explained to the eight-man, four-woman jury that his client was totally dependent upon maintaining the relationships he had started with women. There was no argument about his obsessions. Hultman said that Jager always behaved strangely when he feared those relationships were threatened.

  There was no question that he was a stalker, following his love object, spying, and then falsely accusing the woman of being unfaithful until the relationship fell apart.

  His first marriage had ended in divorce; he could not face another parting.

  But was that an adequate defense for murder?

  Prosecutors Whalley and George did not dispute that Heinz Jager was mentally ill; what they did dispute was that he was insane to the degree that he was not responsible for his actions when Amy was killed. Under the M’Naughton Rule, the accused must know the difference between right and wrong at the time of his crime. But it’s almost impossible to determine what state of mind someone was in at a particular time. Jager had clearly placed the knife in his bag where he could grab it. He had wrestled that bag out of Amy’s brother’s hand and carried it back to the open rear window.

  The prosecutors called Jager’s California friend as a witness. He testified that the defendant had seemed sane and rational during his visit just prior to the killing. The State called psychiatrists, who pointed out that Jager had not only prepared for the killing by placing the Buck knife where he had easy access to it but also had acted with complete rationality after the killing, mostly complaining about his own pain and the way he was being treated.

  Prosecutor Janet George was particularly adept at questioning the psychiatric experts. In addition to her law degree, she had a master’s degree in public health and once taught psychiatric nursing at the University of Washington. Intrigued by the interaction between the law and mental health, she left nursing to study law. She was no neophyte as she led the professional witnesses through the finer points of madness.

  Insanity is a handy plea for a murder defendant because the mass of humanity does not think something as violent as killing another person is the act of a sane person. Even so, the insanity defense rarely convinces a jury.

  To kill what one cannot have, just to prevent the victim from ever having another relationship, is an act of consummate selfishness and of inexplicable brutality.

  The photographs of the mortally wounded Amy Jager sickened the jury.

  The fact that Amy had truly loved Heinz Jager with single-minded devotion disturbed them.

  They understood that Amy had done everything in her power to hold the fledgling marriage together. Her loyalty to the defendant permeated the case. The man at the defense table had had the whole world in his grasp, and he had destroyed it with his green-eyed ravings. When he lost it, he hadn’t rested until he destroyed Amy, too.

  On November 4, the jury began its deliberations. Although the defense held that Heinz Jager was insane, the jurors kept returning to one point: The knife was there. It wasn’t buried deep in his luggage. The knife was ready. Jager had held it out as his last method of keeping Amy with him. And he had used it cruelly—again, again, and again.

  At 11:30 p.m. on that very first night of deliberation, the jury signaled that it was ready with a verdict. They found Heinz Jager guilty as charged.

  A sad Christmas passed. On January 10, 1977, King County Superior Court Judge Earl Horswill sentenced Heinz Jager to a term of up to life in prison. Under Washington statute at the time, he had to serve a minimum sentence of thirteen years, four months—plus five more years for the use of a deadly weapon in committing his crime—before he became eligible for parole.

  He could have been released from prison in about 1996, but my research has failed to find him. He may have returned to Switzerland, either by choice or by deportation. Now Heinz Jager would be close to seventy—if he is alive—no longer the silver-tongued and attractive Swiss who could lure and then terrorize hapless women who had the great misfortune to fall in love with him.

  There is one piece of the puzzle still unexplained. Perhaps it is a warning that Amy Jager failed to heed, a warning that this man she was about to marry was not all he seemed to be. Perhaps it was only a lovers’ pledge that they would live and die together. It is a short note, found among Jager’s possessions, dated August 5, 1975, and signed by Amy. Amy cannot say what she meant and Heinz would not discuss it.

  Two months after she wrote it, Amy married Heinz, so she probably
was more in love than she was afraid.

  Or was she living in terror even then? I will always wonder if Heinz forced her to write it and also forced her to marry him.

  In effect, Amy had written her own epitaph:

  I will rest in Switzerland the rest of my life, underground, if I don’t write this letter, with Heinz Jager.

  Amy

  But Amelia Jager does not rest in Switzerland. She was able to come home to rest in her own country, and in the hearts and memories of her beloved family.

  THIRTY YEARS LATER

  Where there is no vision, the people perish.

  But he that keepeth the law—

  Happy is he.

  —Proverbs 29:18

  I cannot count how many times I stepped over this bronze plaque set in concrete just outside the east entrance to the Seattle Public Safety Building (police HQ) as I researched hundreds of homicide cases to write about. Unconsciously, it imprinted its adage on my brain, just like the poem I memorized—and then forgot when it counted—for my third-grade play. I remember that, too.

  Over the thirty-plus years I’ve been writing true crime, I’ve come across a few homicide cases that I never expected to see solved. Most of these were committed by serial killers whose crimes almost always evolve from stranger-to-stranger encounters. Two people who have never met before cross paths, a tragedy occurs, and the one who is left behind can no longer tell what happened. The other disappears, leaving precious few clues.

  Unless a fingerprint is on file with AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) computers, or there is a known suspect, there is no way to link it to anyone. Today DNA evidence can usually be absolutely matched, but before the 1990s, body fluids and hair follicles were only rarely preserved because no one knew everything that DNA could tell us then. But DNA can sometimes be found even on decades-old evidence, a propitious accident.

  The cases I’ve hoped to see successfully closed tend to be those most difficult to unravel. Families are left to mourn but have no answers about why someone they loved very much was killed, and they may never know who the murderer was. It is galling to think of a brutal killer having the last laugh on detectives. But it happens.

  The following cases are true, of course, but they surprised at least two generations of detectives who passed through their assignment to the Crimes Against Persons Unit of the Seattle Police Department. And it certainly surprised me. Many of the detectives retired with a sense of frustration that they hadn’t been able to find out more about the second murder, and, worse, that they had never located the person who killed the first victim.

  Usually, there are patterns of behavior and similarities in victim types that help investigators connect a suspect to different crimes. But not this time.

  I could never have imagined the denouement that came after three decades and made headlines in 2008.

  Unless we live in sprawling apartment complexes or thick-walled condos, most of us think we know our neighbors pretty well. But can we ever be sure? If we were truly able to see inside the convoluted pathways of someone else’s brain, to know all there is to know about his or her inner life, his or her real life, we might realize how mistaken our first perceptions were.

  Julie Costello was one of those people who lived a secret life far removed from her origins: the attractive young woman’s very name wasn’t even her own. If a predator hadn’t ended the world she’d built for herself, her carefully constructed masquerade might never have been revealed. She wasn’t a wanted felon or a fugitive. Not really. She’d harmed no one: She did only what she felt she had to, and her life was happy until a tragic encounter on a warm September night.

  Julie Costello had the great misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and, because she was there, she became prey to a killer.

  She wasn’t really Julie Costello at all, but her abductor didn’t know that, nor did the detectives who carried out the investigation into her fate know—at least, not for a long time.

  The twenty-three-year-old blond woman’s Seattle acquaintances knew her as Julie Costello. She worked as a clerk at a 7-Eleven on Beacon Hill, one of Seattle’s oldest neighborhoods, where families of myriad ethnic heritages live—usually in harmony.

  Julie worked the graveyard shift, alone, from 11:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m. Clerking in a small neighborhood wasn’t considered very dangerous, but that all changed with the advent of stores that were open around the clock. 7-Elevens and other chains open twenty-four hours soon became tempting targets for armed robbers. Since they are usually the only businesses open in the wee hours of the morning, and they usually have a lone clerk on duty, robbers find them vulnerable and easy targets.

  The corporation that owns the 7-Eleven where Julie Costello worked has taken steps to avert attacks on their clerks. I don’t want to lay out a blueprint of security systems for those plotting to steal from all-night markets. I will say only that those steps have proved very effective.

  Julie took the bus to work from her apartment on Capitol Hill, and it was full dark at 11:00 p.m. when she began her shift. During the winter months, the sun didn’t rise until hours after she headed for home. She wasn’t afraid. She was, at heart, an adventuress, and she had been in any number of situations more perilous than traveling across the city in the hours of darkness or working alone all night when most people were asleep. She knew a lot of her customers, and the police patrolmen working Beacon Hill during Third Watch often stopped in for coffee.

  But on Monday morning, September 25, 1978, none of the security measures helped Julie. When the store manager, Rita Longaard,* arrived to relieve her shortly after 6:00 a.m., she was startled to find the front door locked, the lights out, and no one on the premises. The store was supposed to be open, and Julie should have been on duty.

  Because the store was never empty, the changing of the guard didn’t necessitate having a key. Rita Longaard hadn’t brought one with her, so she went first to the home of her assistant manager to see if she knew anything about what was going on. She didn’t.

  The two women drove to Julie’s home on Capitol Hill. Maybe she’d gotten sick during the night and just locked up and gone home. That wasn’t like her; she was very dependable and would have called one of them, but they avoided talking about what might have happened.

  Rita had been puzzled at first, and then a little angry with Julie, but now she was alarmed. There was no answer to their knocks on her apartment door.

  There was nothing left to do but go back to the store and call a locksmith to open the front door. When they gained entrance, the women switched on the lights and carefully walked up and down the aisles. They were all empty. The only sound was the buzzing of the neon lights. At the checkout counter, they found that the cash register’s drawers were open—and empty.

  Yet when they walked toward the back of the store, they found an envelope stuffed with cash on a counter. That was where it was usually left while clerks worked the combination on the lock of the floor safe, preparing to deposit their shift’s receipts into it. Why hadn’t Julie finished hiding the money in the safe?

  The safe hadn’t been tampered with. As the two women moved nervously into the back storeroom, they saw Julie’s purse in the spot where she always left it during work hours. Everything was basically normal.

  Except that Julie was missing.

  Rita Longaard checked the hidden surveillance camera. If clerks were concerned, they could trigger it surreptitiously. In the event of a robbery, the thieves’ photos would show up on the film. Rita wasn’t positive, but she thought the camera had been activated.

  She called 911.

  Detective J. D. “Jimmy” Nicholson arrived first. Nicholson’s special area of expertise was security cameras. They had proved invaluable to police in store and bank robberies. He verified that the camera had indeed been set off, and he retrieved the film and marked it carefully for evidence. If something had gone wrong during the night, the investigators might just be fortunate
enough to find it recorded on film.

  Lieutenant Robert Holter, commander of the Robbery Unit, and his detectives—Sergeant Joe Sanford, Larry Stewart, and Jerry Trettevik—arrived shortly after Nicholson. It appeared that they were dealing with a possible robbery-kidnapping. The investigators glanced around the store. Nothing was out of place or knocked over. There were no signs of a fight, no blood spots anywhere. Either Julie Costello was somehow involved in the theft from the cash register, or she’d been frightened enough that an intruder hadn’t had to subdue her to get her out of the store.

  Two bags of salted sunflower seeds were lying on the counter. They were wrapped in cellophane, and that was a good surface for fingerprints. The detectives also took Julie Costello’s brown leather purse.

  Larry Stewart rushed the film from the camera to the photo lab for immediate processing.

  Bob Holter and Jimmy Nicholson drove to Julie’s apartment, but they didn’t find anyone home either. A neighbor told them that Julie’s live-in boyfriend, Jack Atkins,* worked at a restaurant nearby. “It’s right across from Group Health Hospital,” the woman said. “The one that serves foreign food—and [has] a really good bakery. The docs from Group Health eat there often.”

  The two detectives found Atkins at work. He seemed as mystified as everyone else that Julie was missing. He was also very worried.

  “I walked her to the bus stop last night about ten—I always do—and saw her off to work. I haven’t heard from her since, but then I haven’t expected to. Sometimes, we’re like ships passing in the night. I usually leave for my job before she gets home from the store in the morning.”

  “Was Julie afraid of anyone?” Holter asked. “Had she said anything to you about trouble at work?”