Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  “Okay. Go ahead,” Holter said. “We’ll wait right here.”

  Williams bowled his remaining three games, but he was distracted and his performance dropped with each frame. When he was finished, he submitted meekly to his arrest on suspicion of murder, kidnapping, and robbery. He was advised of his rights and booked into jail on $100,000 bail.

  With a new search warrant, and his Doberman locked safely away, detectives and criminalists searched Clarence Williams’s home. It was just three structures away from the vacant house where Laura Baylis’s body was found, and one mile from the 7-Eleven where she had last been seen alive.

  It was within the realm of possibility that Clarence Williams had forced Laura Baylis to walk from the store into the darkness of the wee hours. Even if he didn’t have a car, she might have been so frightened by a knife against her body that she didn’t dare scream. Lights would have been out in most houses along the way to the empty shell of a house where she was found. It was chilling to picture her walking to her death, while all the time frantically thinking of some way she could escape the tall, powerful man who held her captive.

  The investigators carried out bags and boxes of possible evidence from Williams’s rented house: a dark cap with a bill, a box containing numerous knives, jeans with a belt that held a knife sheath, a box of ten pairs of safety glasses, a .38-caliber revolver, a pair of boots bearing dark red stains, and two bank bags similar to the bags used at the convenience store to carry cash to the bank for deposit.

  Williams’s locker at the shipyard yielded a khaki fatigue jacket and more safety glasses. And finally, they found a billed cap that was identical to the cap the kidnapper/killer had worn when he was caught by the security camera. It had been stashed in an empty locker six spaces away from Williams’s own.

  On the advice of his attorney, Clarence Williams changed his mind about taking a polygraph examination. He had trimmed his facial hair so that it no longer matched that of the man in the photo.

  In a lineup held on October 23, Clarence Williams was identified by the man who had gone there to purchase cigarettes.

  “Number three is the person I saw in the 7-Eleven store on the morning of September twenty-fifth,” he said.

  The bartender at the nearby 19th Hole tavern picked Williams as the man she had poured wine for around midnight on the 24th. A patron who was in the tavern that night picked Williams out of the lineup, too.

  They obtained a search warrant for Mercina Adderly’s car. The woman who had driven him to work most days had lent Williams her car on several occasions during the vital time period when his own car was inoperable. She couldn’t remember exactly which days he had asked to borrow it but said she would try to think back.

  As they processed her car, they found some long, blondish-brown Caucasian hairs in the trunk. Mercina was black, and so were Clarence Williams and his wife. Criminalists, using a scanning electron microscope, found that these hairs were alike in class and characteristics to Laura Baylis’s hair. This made them a probable match—but not a positive one.

  Again, in 1978, DNA was still a brave new world in forensic science.

  Mercina Adderly told detectives that Clarence had been suffering great emotional upheaval after his wife left.

  “He said things that worried me,” Mercina said. “Just before that girl disappeared, he was very distraught and he told me he wanted to ‘hurt someone.’ I didn’t think he meant it literally, and I finally put it down to his state of mind.”

  “How long before?” Hank Gruber asked.

  “It was summertime—I remember that—but I couldn’t say if it was August, or even July.”

  It was fitting perhaps that it was Halloween when formal charges of first-degree robbery, first-degree kidnapping, and first-degree murder were filed against Clarence Williams in the Laura Anne Baylis homicide.

  The man who’d once wanted to buy a seemingly haunted house didn’t see the irony in his being charged on the spookiest holiday of the year.

  The first problems the prosecution would face at trial were the blurry security camera photos. The State had to convince a jury that they were of Clarence Williams, and they were sure the defense would quibble over that.

  Professor Daris Swindler of the University of Washington’s Anthropology Department studied pictures taken of Clarence Williams and compared them to the photographs of the man caught by the camera. Swindler often helped police identify victims or suspects, sometimes working with only a skull denuded of all flesh and tissue.

  Now he took meticulous measurements to scale of the security photos and photos of Clarence Williams. The measured distance from the two subjects’ ears to the mandible (jaw), the length of the noses, the placement of cheekbones, the width of the foreheads.

  Swindler’s conclusion based on comparing the facial characteristics was that all of the photos were of the same person: Clarence Williams.

  Williams went on trial in mid-January 1979, in Superior Court Judge Nancy Ann Holman’s courtroom. It was to be a trial with one of the most unusual conclusions I’ve ever heard.

  Williams defended himself by telling the jurors that the person in the picture was not him; it couldn’t have been.

  “I was home asleep at the time they say it happened,” he said earnestly. “But once I saw the picture, I was sure they would come and talk to me.”

  He admitted that he had been in the house where the body was found because he was thinking about buying it.

  “But I hadn’t been in that house for a long time before that girl disappeared. I’ve been in the convenience store on Beacon Hill a few times, too, but I never recall seeing any clerk named Laura or Julie or whoever she was. I just didn’t know her at all.”

  The defense was not without ammunition. One of their strongest witnesses was Larry Wilkins, an athletic director for the Seattle Parks Department, and brother of Lenny Wilkins, then coach of the Seattle Sonics, the champion basketball team that was in the midst of its glory days.

  It was Larry Wilkins who had seen two suspicious men in the 19th Hole tavern on the night Laura disappeared. He had identified the second man as the one in the vital camera pictures. But he testified that that man was not Clarence Williams.

  “You saw someone you knew sometime later at the Veterans Hospital, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know his name, but he was the second man in the tavern that Sunday night—the twenty-fourth. He was the man in the security photo.

  “He was much heavier and taller than Williams,” Wilkins added.

  Wilkins testified that he’d known Clarence Williams slightly before the kidnapping incident. He’d played on a local softball team. “If it was Clarence Williams in the tavern that night, I would have recognized him, and he probably would have recognized me.”

  In the end, it didn’t really matter whether or not Clarence had been the man in the tavern. It was much more important that he had been in the 7-Eleven, and he was still connected to the victim in so many ways. The prosecution team wondered if the jurors would see that.

  The jurors deliberated for almost four days. The vital question was identification. Were they to believe the report of Dr. Swindler, their own eyes, and the plethora of circumstantial evidence, along with the criminalist’s testimony on the hair matches?

  Or were they to believe the defense contention that Clarence Williams was merely an unfortunate victim of mistaken identity?

  When they returned to the courtroom, their verdict was that Williams was guilty and they convicted him on all three counts.

  Judge Holman studied the jury’s verdict, and what she did next stunned the gallery and the attorneys present. For the first time in her nine years on the bench, Nancy Holman reversed a verdict!

  She hadn’t been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of Clarence Williams’s guilt, and she wanted to be sure that an innocent man wasn’t convicted.

  She ordered a new trial.<
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  Judge Holman’s reversal of the jury’s verdict was a shock and tremendous disappointment to Lieutenant Bob Holter’s crew of detectives who had worked so hard in the investigation. It also was in total disagreement with the King County Prosecutor’s Office. Judge Holman asked prosecutor Norm Maleng to continue investigating Laura Baylis’s murder, but the prosecution team was absolutely convinced the right man had been convicted. Holman set a new trial date, but it was a moot point; the Court of Appeals affirmed Clarence Williams’s conviction.

  “I feel like I’m being made an example for somebody else’s crime,” he said bitterly as he was sentenced to life in prison on all three charges. At the time, that meant three consecutive sentences of just over thirteen years each. His first parole hearing wouldn’t come until about 2016.

  Most people forgot about Clarence Williams; he’d never been a high-profile felon who garnered tall headlines. And he’d been sentenced to all those life terms. He virtually vanished behind prison walls and was eventually transferred to a Midwestern penitentiary when Washington State’s prisons became overcrowded.

  Laura Baylis, who had lived her short life as she pleased, who wandered happily throughout the country she chose to embrace as her own, lay buried in her native England. I wrote the story of her life—and her death—for one of the fact-detective magazines for which I was a regular stringer covering Northwest crimes.

  There were an inordinately large number of murders in Seattle in 1978, far more than the city would see after the millennium, and I wrote about almost all of them. Overworked homicide detectives worked on their unsolved cases whenever they had a break. There were no cold case squads in the seventies or eighties, possibly because it was rare for new physical evidence to show up, and there would be no DNA to match until well into the nineties.

  I, too, put this case on a back shelf in my mind, but I always felt that none of us had heard the whole story of Clarence Williams or of Laura Baylis. Someday, sometime, I believed the whole story would surface.

  Maybe then I could update it.

  Was Laura a chance victim of a man who “wanted to hurt somebody” because his marriage had shattered?

  Or did Clarence have more secrets to unveil?

  Was Clarence as innocent as his judge believed?

  Was Laura taken away by someone else, someone who never surfaced?

  Another case has tormented me, staying with me throughout the decades, popping into my mind unbidden. People sometimes ask me if I get sad and depressed writing in the true-crime genre. With some of the cases, the answer is yes. That’s particularly true when homicide victims are young, many of them as young as my own five children at the time I covered the cases. It was almost impossible for me to research and write about them without becoming emotionally involved. I never said to their parents, “I know how you feel,” because I didn’t; I could hardly imagine. How could I dare to presume to know how they felt?

  Many of the national and worldwide headlines in 1978 sounded very much like today’s news—only the celebrity names and songs were different. Thirty years flying by like dry leaves in the wind. Animal House drew large audiences. The Bee Gees were hugely popular with “Stayin’ Alive” and other hit songs from the smash movies Saturday Night Fever and Grease. It seemed that disco dancing would go on forever. John Travolta’s hair was thick and shiny black then and his body was chiseled.

  The first test-tube baby was delivered alive and well in England, and Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert were at the top of their games.

  That same year was also a year of infamy and horror in many ways. The “Reverend” Jim Jones convinced nine hundred of his devout followers to commit suicide in Guyana by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, and his guards killed a California congressman and network reporters and photographers who had come, too late, to investigate what was going on; Hustler publisher Larry Flynt was shot and left a paraplegic; police found the bodies of twenty-one young men under John Wayne Gacy’s house in Chicago; David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam,” was sentenced to 365 years in prison; and Ted Bundy was recaptured in Pensacola, Florida, after his escape from a Colorado jail.

  America was saturated with serial killers, it seemed—but that term had yet to be coined. That would take another five years. After I’d met with detectives from all over America to try to catch this “new” kind of killer, I suggested to my then-editor that I write a book about serial murder. He said, “Don’t bother. It’s a fad like the hulahoop or trampolines. By the time you finish a book, nobody will be interested in serial killers.”

  He was, of course, wrong.

  As always, 1978 had its share of unrest and insurrection in far-off nations. None of the foreign news had much impact on a young girl who had her whole life ahead of her. But she worried about those people in her world who were unhappy and she tried to help them.

  Her name was Sara Beth Lundquist, and she was the kind of teenager that any parents would be proud of: innocent, a little naïve, concerned for other people, a lover of animals, and as freshly beautiful as an apple blossom that had just unfolded.

  Sara Beth was at the center of one of the more baffling unsolved cases in Seattle’s criminal history. I’ve kept her photographs at the top of my “unsolved” file, hoping that one day there would be an end to her story, and that end would have to be the arrest of someone yet unknown.

  Sometime in the summer of 2007, I was signing books at a huge Costco store, and a man stopped by to say he hoped for the same thing I did, for a long-dormant case to be solved.

  “Which case is that?” I asked.

  He began to say the name of his niece, but he didn’t even have to finish his sentence. It was Sara Beth. She had been on my mind too, and I always remembered her in the summer. Her family had waited so long with no answers. I told her uncle that I hoped one day to write the end of her story.

  Sara Beth’s story began shortly after midnight on Sunday, July 2, 1978, and no one could have foreseen how long it would take justice to arrive for her.

  In 1978, the Fourth of July came on a Tuesday, and a lot of people were taking a four-day weekend, finding excuses not to come to work on Monday. As often happens in the Northwest on Independence Day, the weather looked as though it would fail to cooperate and the weekend before the big day was marked by gray clouds and drizzle. Those who had planned picnics started to look for alternative locations and kids who had a stash of illegal fireworks worried that they would get too soggy to light.

  Sara Beth lived in the Ballard neighborhood in the northwest part of Seattle, a proud and venerable community where there are more Scandinavians per square block than anyplace else in Washington. Many of its residents make their livings commercial fishing, heading up to the dangerous waters of Alaska. Boating is probably the main avocation in Ballard. During rush hour, the Ballard Locks are jammed with motorboats and sailboats traveling between landlocked Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west. On days when the wind is right, the brightly hued spinnaker sails of private boats dance like butterflies on the waters of Elliott Bay.

  Ballard has always been a family community, with homey-looking bungalows, a local theater that features serials and second-run movies, parades and festivals on both American and Norse holidays—a good place to raise youngsters and a part of the city with a relatively low crime rate.

  Sara Beth Lundquist grew up there. At fifteen, she wasn’t very different from her peers. She got good grades at Ingraham High School where she was a sophomore—when she studied—but she could be distracted by so many more fun things to do. She worked part-time as an aide in a convalescent home, and her soft heart hurt to see so many elderly people whose families had left them there, alone, and never came to visit. She tried to spend extra time with them.

  Sara Beth lived with her mother, Lynne, and her sister, Melissa, in a home divided by divorce. Her ten-year-old brother, Lee, lived much of the time with their father, Robert. The children were close to one another, and Sara Bet
h saw her father often. She actually liked her little brother and often let him tag along when she was with her friends, even though five years was a big age gap.

  Sara Beth liked to cook, especially experimental dishes. She made her own Christmas gifts, and was sewing some pretty aprons. She loved her mother and told her so often. Sometimes, Lynne would find notes on her pillow that Sara Beth had left for her, saying, “I love you.”

  She was as natural an ice-skater as if she’d been born and raised in Sweden or Norway. She played the piano and taught Sunday school.

  And she loved to laugh and to make her family laugh. Sara Beth was at that crystalline point between being a child and a woman; she was past the early pubescent years when mothers and daughters sometimes lock horns, and she hadn’t yet reached the pseudosophistication of an older teen.

  And yet Sara Beth was different from a lot of teenagers. She was extraordinarily beautiful. She had even features, very large blue eyes fringed with incredibly thick, dark lashes, and a perfect rosebud complexion. She was slender and exquisitely proportioned.

  She seemed unaware of how pretty she was. When she wore makeup, she looked older than fifteen and could have passed for eighteen or twenty.

  Tragically, she would never grow any older than fifteen. Someone stalked Sara Beth Lundquist in the shadows of a rainy July night. Maybe he had been stalking her for a long time and waiting for his chance to take her away from where she was safe. Perhaps he’d just spotted her and become obsessed with the idea of hurting her or taking sexual advantage of her.

  Sara Beth’s best friend was Minda Craig,* also fifteen. They’d known each other since kindergarten, and they’d been best friends for a year. They had plans for Saturday night, July 1. They were going to see Damien: Omen II, about a thirteen-year-old devil child purported to be the Antichrist, and they looked forward to being a little frightened.

  Sara Beth was excited about getting out. Three weeks earlier, she’d been diagnosed with mononucleosis, a common teenage illness. At first, she felt quite sick, and later she’d been prevented from working at her job at the convalescent center where she’d been a therapy aide for nine months. Finally her doctor had declared her “no longer contagious.” She looked forward to returning to work. Her elderly friends there had missed her as much as she’d missed them.