Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

“Yeah,” Jack Atkins said, after thinking about it. “There’s some teenager who’s been pestering her. He’s a big kid, she said, and he’s been coming into the store. I think he has a crush on her, because he keeps slipping her notes. I’ve got one of them here.”

  Holter and Nicholson took the note, carefully preserving it for fingerprint testing. It appeared to be a simple, badly spelled love note. It was signed “Bubba.”

  The investigators asked Rita Longaard if she knew of a teenager named Bubba who had been bothering Julie.

  “Oh, Bubba,” Rita said, rolling her eyes. “Yes. I’ve had to kick him out of the store for bothering clerks. He’s only sixteen, and his name is Bubba Baker.* He has the biggest crush on Julie.”

  Rita described Bubba as over six feet tall and weighing about 250. He was a light-skinned black teenager who was really more of a lovesick nuisance than anyone they’d been afraid of.

  A check of juvenile records showed that a Bradford “Bubba” Baker lived about five blocks from the 7-Eleven. He had a short juvenile rap sheet for minor offenses but nothing violent. At this point in the probe, he seemed the most likely suspect in Julie’s disappearance. But that was because he was the only suspect.

  Patrol officers from the Georgetown Precinct were sent out to canvass the neighborhood surrounding the store in the hope that they might turn up witnesses to any unusual events during the night of September 24–25.

  They didn’t find anyone who had heard screams, shouts, or cars gunning their motors. Nothing. Whatever had happened had been silent and swift.

  Julie was still missing the next afternoon when Jack Atkins came to headquarters to give a complete statement to the detectives.

  Jack had some startling admissions of his own. Detective Maury Erickson was astounded when Atkins told him that he’d lied about being twenty-one.

  “I’m really only fifteen,” he admitted.

  That was hard to believe, but Erickson waited for Jack to say more.

  Jack Atkins said he was a native of Philadelphia, and he’d been raised there. “But I’ve been ‘on the road’ for more than a year now.”

  Jack was short and wiry, and he might possibly have been any age between fifteen and twenty-two, but when the detectives stared at him more closely, and looked at his true ID, they realized he probably was only fifteen. Still, he had an adult, responsible mien about him. At the moment, he was very concerned about his missing girlfriend.

  “I have thought and thought about it,” he said, “and I’ve decided that I have to tell you the complete truth about Julie.”

  Was he about to confess? It sounded like it, but they couldn’t read the emotion on his face. He had tears in his eyes. They didn’t know if these were guilty tears or worried tears.

  They waited.

  “I met Julie at the Carpinteria State Beach in California—it’s between Ventura and Santa Barbara.”

  “When did you hook up with her?” Erickson asked.

  “It was on July 28, 1977, more than a year ago,” Jack said. “And her name isn’t really Julie Costello; it’s Laura Baylis.”

  The robbery detectives realized that this case was getting more and more complicated.

  “Laura’s from England,” Jack continued, “and there was something about her passport or her visa running out, so she had to get some different ID so the authorities wouldn’t send her back. And so she took the Julie name.”

  As unlikely a liaison as it might seem, Laura and Jack had found that they shared a love for travel, and they soon shared a love for each other—despite the eight-year difference in their ages.

  “We teamed up on the beach in California and we began to see the country,” Jack said. “We went to Springfield, Missouri, in the beginning of September 1977, and we stayed there until New Year’s Day. She worked at a café and I worked for a wrecking company while we were in Missouri. Laura became pretty good friends with a girl named Julie Costello at the restaurant, and Julie gave Laura some of her ID papers so Laura wouldn’t have to get deported.”

  Jack said he had lied to Laura’s Missouri employers, telling them that she had run off with another man and left him. Then he had met her at a prearranged spot, and they’d left Springfield together.

  “We hitchhiked to Kansas City and stayed there until May 1978. From Kansas, we went to New England, and then Wyoming, and then we went back to California again.”

  Jack Atkins said they had enjoyed hiking in each state’s mountains, and they’d had enough money because they took odd jobs. They shared their finances and always had enough for food and a place to stay if the weather made it impossible to camp out.

  Jack said his parents knew he was with Laura. “They figured she was dependable and they knew they couldn’t stop my wanderlust. They felt like she was taking good care of me—but it was mutual. We make a good team—”

  “When did you get to Seattle?” Erickson asked.

  “August tenth, this year. We both got jobs, rented our apartment, and we opened up a joint savings account. We have about three hundred and fifty dollars saved in the bank.”

  “You two ever have arguments?” Erickson asked.

  The youth shook his head. “Not really. Oh, sometimes about money. We’ve decided to get separate checking accounts, so if either of us wants to buy something, we can use our own money. We thought that might be more fair.”

  “Do you feel”—Maury Erickson chose his words as tactfully as he could—“that maybe Laura might have just gotten tired of the situation and left?”

  “Not Laura. She’s very responsible, and she would never leave me like this. We really get along.”

  The detectives exchanged glances. Jack Atkins was very earnest and sure of Laura/Julie’s love for him, but they knew there was always the chance that a fifteen-year-old boy was simply naïve. Laura could have met a man her own age. They could have robbed her store and simply taken off together.

  It was obvious that Jack Atkins didn’t know that much about Laura’s background before they’d joined up to hitchhike across the country fourteen months earlier.

  He knew that Laura had relatives in England, and perhaps in Missouri, but he didn’t know any of their addresses. The peripatetic couple had lived in the moment, and he’d never asked Laura for specific names and addresses of her family.

  “What was Laura wearing when you walked her to the bus Sunday night?”

  He answered quickly. “Tight blue Bullitt jeans, a blue parka with a red lining, reddish-brown shoes—kind of like earth shoes—two thin gold necklaces. One was plain, and one had a small star, and she has pierced ears with small gold loop earrings.”

  Nothing that Jack Atkins was saying served to explain why Laura Baylis might suddenly have decided to clean out the cash register where she worked and run away. Rather, everyone they had talked to said that Laura was a very stable young woman.

  Although he was only fifteen, Jack seemed older, and he clearly loved the missing woman. And she seemed to have loved him. The detectives could not see him as a viable suspect. Nor could they picture her as a thief.

  Besides, if Laura had decided to cut and run, taking the money from the cash register, why hadn’t she taken the envelope full of large-denomination bills from the back shelf? There was a lot more in there than in the till. (Rita Longaard said that they were all trained to periodically take the “big money” out of the till and put it in a safe place.)

  No, Lieutenant Bob Holter and his crew felt that something had happened to Laura. She hadn’t come back to her young lover because she couldn’t come back.

  Neither Laura nor Jack had a record of felonies in any state; their only contact with police had been two stops for hitchhiking in states where it was forbidden.

  Jack Atkins said he didn’t know anything about Laura’s reasons for leaving her home in England. “We don’t talk about the past,” he said softly. “We are our relationship. Our relationship is now.”

  The robbery detectives didn’t have the heart
to remind him that “now” might be gone forever.

  Jack pulled out a picture of Laura Baylis. It showed a pretty girl with large blue eyes, a shy smile, and masses of curly blond hair.

  The detectives had seen her before. They’d gone over the film from the security camera in the 7-Eleven with a magnifying glass. This was the same girl they had seen in those photos.

  But, in those pictures, Laura wasn’t alone. Laura, dressed in blue jeans and a navy blue shirt, was at the cash register, and she held a brown paper bag in her left hand. Her expression was deadly serious.

  There was a man in the later photos. He was a tall black male dressed in an olive green jacket, and he wore a blue billed cap and glasses. As the film frames moved forward, the man appeared from the back and from the side—as if he were glancing around to see if anyone was approaching. He had a mustache and a scraggly beard. It was impossible to tell if they were real or stuck on with spirit gum.

  If he held a weapon, it was hidden.

  “Is that Laura in the picture?” Larry Stewart asked Jack Atkins.

  “Yes. I think it’s her,” Jack said, his voice trembling. “It’s not real clear—but it has to be her.”

  The bags of sunflower seeds were on the counter in the picture, but there was also a small bottle of orange juice. The bottle had been gone when police arrived.

  The man in the picture was clearly not Bubba Baker. He was older and bigger. Holter and his men felt a chill as they perused those pictures. They sensed that they might be seeing Laura Baylis during the last few moments of her life. The pictures flipped rapidly as the mindless camera had clicked every few seconds, until they became almost “moving pictures.”

  The men watching experienced an eerie feeling, as if what they were seeing was happening in the present, right in front of them. They watched Laura Baylis as she obeyed the man standing behind her. She had obviously cooperated with him and given him the money in the cash register.

  But where was she now?

  The detectives took on the tedious task of searching through 911 calls for Sunday night. Buried in hundreds of calls, they found a brief report of trouble at the Beacon Hill 7-Eleven at 11:30 p.m. But it wasn’t Laura Baylis who had made the call; the clerk who worked the shift just before hers had called Seattle Police to report a shoplifter. The thief wasn’t a tall black male. Not at all. It was a teenage girl who’d tried to make off with a large jug of wine.

  Detectives Al “Beans” Lima and Myrle Carner interviewed the clerk in the shoplifting incident. That had been fairly routine, but she was still in shock over Julie/Laura’s disappearance and tried to remember anything that might help the detectives.

  “Julie came in for work at eleven p.m. She wore blue jeans, blue shirt, her blue ski parka. Everything was normal,” the clerk said. “She was in a good mood. She almost always was. All I know about her was that she lived with Jack, and she traveled back and forth between England and the U.S.”

  Eventually, the Seattle detectives would talk to all of the missing woman’s coworkers. Of course, they all knew Laura Baylis as Julie Costello. They were aware that Bubba Baker had been annoying her, but they’d felt she could handle him.

  “He’s a little off upstairs,” the four-to-eleven checker said. “But he’s more inclined to shoplift and get goofy crushes on the younger girls here. I’ve never thought of him as capable of harming anyone.”

  Bob Holter’s team tried to pinpoint just when the robbery had occurred. The liquor cabinets were supposed to be locked, by Washington State law, at 2:00 a.m. They had been locked when Rita Longaard arrived. The store’s two clocks had been stopped at between 3:40 a.m. and 4:13 a.m. They were electric clocks and they had stopped because someone had tripped the sixteen-circuit breaker.

  It would appear that Laura Baylis had been taken from the 7-Eleven around 4:00 a.m. Myrle Carner and Al Lima dusted the circuit breaker box for prints, then removed the clocks to put them into evidence. Although they carefully searched the alley behind the store, they didn’t come across anything that seemed to have evidentiary value.

  Patrol officers, who continued to canvass the neighborhood, finally came up with a possible witness. A woman who lived just across the street from the 7-Eleven said she had gotten up in the night to use the bathroom, and she’d seen all the store’s lights go off sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m.

  She was shown the suspect from the security camera, but she didn’t recognize him as anyone she’d ever seen before. Disappointingly, none of the other neighboring residents recognized him either.

  Jerry Trettevik talked to Bubba Baker’s mother, who said that her son did have a “mental problem.” Bubba himself was eager to talk to the detective. He admitted that he’d been in the store on Sunday night.

  “But I left at one fifteen a.m.,” he said.

  “Were you there any other time that night?”

  Bubba nodded. “I was in the store around eleven thirty p.m., just when Julie came to work. I saw a big, black man there. He was very dark-skinned—not like me.”

  Trettevik showed Bubba the hidden camera’s pictures, and Bubba nodded his head vigorously.

  “That’s the man I seen at eleven thirty.”

  “Do you know him? Ever see him before?”

  “No, sir. I never seen him before.”

  The canvassing and interviewing spread out, casting a wider net over the neighborhood. Myrle Carner and Al Lima talked to patrons in nearby taverns. They showed the photo of the man in the fatigue jacket and cap to customers at the Jolo Tavern. Some of the regulars said the man was “vaguely familiar,” but no one could put a name to the face.

  They had better luck at the 19th Hole tavern at South Columbia and Beacon. The female bartender there remembered that a husky black male had been in on September 24 at 11:00 p.m.

  “He sat at the counter and ordered wine. I’d never seen him before. He left but he came back about forty-five minutes later and bought a bottle of beer to take with him.”

  “What’d he look like? How was he dressed—beyond the jacket?” Carner asked.

  “He was about five feet eleven and weighed more than two hundred pounds. I’d say he was maybe thirty-five. Had a full mustache and a goatee.”

  Shown the photo, the woman nodded. “Yes. I’m positive that was the man who was here on the twenty-fourth.”

  The stranger hadn’t seemed nervous or angry or in a hurry. He hadn’t been back since that Sunday at midnight.

  Now more witnesses were forthcoming. Another tavern patron recalled a black man wearing a jeans jacket—but he was with another man. “I had the impression that the two men were together. The second guy wore a fatigue jacket and a blue cap with a bill. He had a goatee, mustache, glasses.”

  Carner showed him the security camera photos, and he quickly identified the man shown. “He was the second man that I saw here at the 19th Hole.”

  Larry Stewart and Jerry Trettevik received information from two patrol units that had worked First Watch on Sunday–Monday. They had been dispatched to the 7-Eleven on Beacon Hill at 4:00 a.m. Monday morning, shortly after they’d begun their shift.

  “It was a ‘suspicious circumstances’ call,” one officer said. “A passerby phoned it in. When we got there, the store was dark, and we saw no activity in or around it. We assumed that everything was all right. We figured they’d just closed up early on Sunday night.”

  Detectives located the man who’d called the police. He said he and a friend had gone to the 7-Eleven a little before 4:00 a.m. to buy cigarettes and found nobody behind the counter and the lights mostly off.

  “I walked in anyway, and this black guy wearing a green fatigue jacket and a cap came out of the back room to tell me the store was closed.

  “I told him all I wanted was a couple of packs of cigarettes, and he grabbed them and gave them to me. He charged me a dollar a pack. When I got home, I got to thinking about it, and it seemed really strange. I called 911 and asked for somebody to go by and check it
out.”

  Shown the photos, both the complainant and his friend agreed that the alleged robber was the man they had seen in the store—but they hadn’t seen Laura Baylis at all.

  “The guy kept his right hand in his pocket the whole time, and he was really nervous. He kept looking back at the back of the store. The big store sign was out then, but the store lights were still on.”

  Citizens were trying to help. They searched their memories for anything peculiar or disturbing that might have happened on Sunday night–Monday morning. A Beacon Hill resident called Trettevik and Stewart to say that he, too, had gone into the 7-Eleven between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. “I picked up a couple of bags of sunflower seeds and put them on the counter. I looked around, but I didn’t see anyone. Then this black guy came out from the back room and said the store was closed. I saw that the till was open and empty, so I left the seeds on the counter and walked out.”

  If Laura Baylis had been in the rear of the store—and she certainly must have been—she was either too frightened to call for help, or bound and gagged—or unconscious. In the worst case scenario, she might have been dead. And yet detectives hadn’t found one drop of blood in the place, not one indication of a struggle.

  The robbery detectives wondered again if there was another side to Laura’s personality. Was it possible that she’d been in cahoots with the man in the fatigue jacket?

  No. They agreed that was impossible. She and Jack had been too happy, and all her acquaintances said she saw no one but him. She always went straight home from work.

  Where was she?

  Laura Baylis’s picture appeared in all local papers, as did the picture of the unknown man in the cap and jacket. If someone out there knew more about the baffling case, no one called the police.

  Jerry Trettevik and Larry Stewart went door-to-door in the area, trying to find someone who had seen something else that night, and they came up empty-handed.

  Holter and his detectives tracked down the real Julie Costello in Missouri. She admitted that she given Laura Baylis some ID but said she hadn’t heard from her since she’d left Kansas City.