Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  The only other boyfriend that Sara had seen regularly in the months prior to her death was Ricco Sanchez. Mike Tando found that Sanchez worked at a Black Angus restaurant when he was dating Sara Beth. He didn’t own a car, so he had picked her up in a taxi for their dates. A check at the Black Angus revealed that Sanchez had quit his job. His last day was either the Wednesday or Thursday after the July Fourth weekend.

  Detectives Duane Homan and Paul Eblin went to Sanchez’s address and talked with his mother. She promised she would have him contact detectives as soon as possible.

  On July 20, Ricco Sanchez appeared at headquarters, ready to talk with homicide detectives. Ricco, sixteen, said he was eager to help in the investigation of Sara Beth’s death.

  “I only knew her for about a month. We went out a couple of times—to the movies and the drive-in. I met her at I. Faces. I used to call her a lot—just to talk.”

  “Where were you on the Saturday night Sara was killed?” Mike Tando asked abruptly.

  “A friend and I went camping in the Cascade foothills on June 29—Thursday—and we didn’t come back until Sunday when we were rained out,” Ricco said. “I didn’t know about what happened to Sara until that night when my friend called and told me to look in the paper. I was shocked. I still am,” he finished, bowing his head.

  “Did you kill Sara?” Tando asked.

  “No, sir. I didn’t.”

  “Why would someone kill Sara Beth?” Paul Eblin asked.

  “The only reason I can think why anyone would kill her would be over jealousy. If somebody who wanted to go out with her—only she wouldn’t—is all I can think of.”

  Asking a suspect for his opinion on how to solve a crime is an old and effective technique; actual murderers tend to enjoy the cat-and-mouse game that puts them in the role of experts on the subject. As they pontificate on what detectives should look for, they often reveal more about themselves than they mean to.

  Was Sanchez telling them that he had been jealous when Sara Beth stopped dating him? They didn’t think so, and he knew that they would check on his camping story. He impressed the detectives as sincere. He seemed to be playing it straight with them.

  And, of course, they checked his alibi about the camping trip and found it to be true.

  In most homicide cases, there aren’t enough suspects. In the case of Sara Beth Lundquist, there were too many. Old boyfriends, new boyfriends, peculiar neighborhood characters, strangers who might have been attracted to the exquisite teenager, and possibly sexual predators who chanced upon her when she was all alone.

  Detective Pat Lamphere of the Sex Crimes Unit talked with Mike Tando about one of her cases. A seventeen-year-old girl had been abducted at knifepoint and raped by a man who drove a van. The victim was walking home after dark on a street not too far away from where Sara Beth was last seen alive.

  “The interesting thing is,” Lamphere said, “our victim goes to I. Faces to dance all the time. Look at her picture; she’s almost a twin of Sara Lundquist.”

  The rapist Pat Lamphere sought had gotten away clean because his victim was too upset to think about checking the license plate as he sped off.

  July 1978 was coming to an end, and the case file on Sara Beth Lundquist was now as thick as an encyclopedia. Mike Tando started another file. Practically everyone who had ever known Sara Beth had been interviewed, as well as occupants of homes for many blocks around the alley where she was thought to have been attacked. Her girlfriends were frightened, too, and reported every call they received from boys or men they didn’t know.

  On July 28, Nouri Habid called from Iran and talked to Lynne Carlson. He was worried because Sara Beth hadn’t written to him as she’d promised. Lynne had to tell him that Sara Beth had been dead since two days after he’d left. Brokenhearted, Nouri said he would fly at once to the United States.

  On August 7, a woman walked into the Public Safety Building and asked to talk to a homicide detective. She seemed distraught and said that something had been bothering her for a long time.

  Detective George Marberg ushered her into an interview room.

  “I live on Fifteenth and Northwest Fiftieth,” she began. “On July first, or very early on the second, I heard my dog barking at something outside, and I couldn’t get him to be quiet. Then I noticed a car in front of my house. I saw two young men and they were either carrying a young woman or helping her into the car. I just thought that she’d had too much to drink at the tavern, but then I got to thinking about the girl they found in the garage.”

  It might have been just the lead that Detective Sergeant Don Cameron’s crew had been waiting for, but they were disappointed when the woman said she suffered from glaucoma, which rendered her eyesight only marginal. She’d been able to see that the men had been about the same height and dressed in dark clothing, but her failing vision had blurred their features.

  It might make sense. At 130 pounds and in good physical shape, Sara Beth could have put up a good fight against one man; she would have had little chance against two.

  But why? Her autopsy hadn’t indicated that a sexual attack had been the motive. She wasn’t robbed. She wasn’t involved in drugs. And she had been perfectly honest in her relationships with the young men she dated. She hadn’t told her mother, her sister, or her friends that she was afraid of anyone. Her killer or killers had to have been consumed by an abnormal mental state, perhaps driven by an obsession kept hidden until that midnight as July 1 turned into July 2.

  The only motive that really made sense was that Sara Beth had been murdered by someone in a mighty rage; the “overkill” from so many stab wounds pointed to an out-of-control killer.

  Enough residents had heard that one “scream” or “shout” close to 12:30 a.m. near the bus stop where Sara Beth got off to convince detectives that she had been seized almost as soon as she left the pseudoprotection of the streetlight. She had then been dragged into the alley, losing her purse and clogs along the way.

  But there was no blood in the alley. There were two pints of blood still unaccounted for. She had probably been grabbed, her mouth covered after she managed to scream only once, and forced into a car. The blood that would have coursed from her wounds was undoubtedly in her killer’s car or truck. If that vehicle could be located, surely traces of her blood would still be present. No amount of cleaning could remove them. Nor was it likely that her murderer had avoided getting blood on himself and his clothing.

  But they had no suspect. They had no vehicle with suspicious stains.

  Don Cameron and Mike Tando clocked the mileage from the alley to the tire garage. It was 3.1 miles and the trip took five and a half minutes at normal driving speeds in average traffic. It was almost a certainty that Sara Beth was unconscious or dead when she was placed in the restroom.

  Detectives believed that someone other than the killer knew about his crime; it didn’t seem something that he could keep to himself. They believed he had probably been violent in the past and would almost certainly be violent again—unless he was stopped.

  And that belief disturbed them mightily.

  I wrote the article about Sara Beth Lundquist’s unsolved murder thirty years ago, and I asked that anyone who might have new information contact Detective Sergeant Don Cameron and Detective Mike Tando in the Public Safety Building in Seattle. There was a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

  Along with many other investigators who worked so hard to solve Sara Beth’s murder, Don Cameron is dead. Mike Tando’s Afro is long since tamed, and he has retired from the Seattle Police Department. None of the men and women who were assigned to some part of the Lundquist case are active police officers now. Even the Public Safety Building is gone, reduced to rubble to make way for a newer building. I have a chunk of marble from the “very modern” structure where I worked as a rookie cop. It has a treasured place in my garden now.

  But over all these years, no one who followed this case has ever forgotten S
ara Beth Lundquist, even though it seemed there would be no answers. Her mother, Lynne, often wondered if she would die herself before she ever learned who had taken away her precious daughter. Her little brother, Lee, has turned forty, and Sara Beth’s friends are well into middle age now as she herself would be—had she been allowed to live.

  When the answer did come, I was astounded. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been. There were remarkable similarities between Sara Beth Lundquist’s murder and another homicide that occurred that summer of 1978. Today, the truth shines through the years like a beacon, but it was obscured back then, a pale light covered by the fog of too many cases, a certain failure to communicate among and between diverse police departments, misleading autopsy results, and the state of forensic science at the time Sara Beth was killed.

  As I said earlier, it’s so much easier to view a homicide puzzle in retrospect. Everything can fall into place perfectly when you’re looking back. When certain facts or information aren’t available, seeing clearly ahead in a baffling case with too many “witnesses” can, indeed, be like trying to negotiate a cleverly designed maze.

  In major cities all over America, police departments have established cold case squads, where detectives search through dusty files and blurry carbon copies written by their predecessors years before. Combining long-unsolved homicides with modern forensic science and fresh eyes, these cold case investigators have been far more successful than anyone could hope. Over the past few years, the Seattle Police Department’s cold case squads have successfully closed several cases dormant for more than three decades. Greg Mixsell, Richard Gagnon, and Mike Ciesynski have used DNA matches and other forensic science near-miracles to take another look at physical evidence carefully preserved in the huge warehouse that replaced the police department’s Property Room of the fifties and sixties.

  And that evidence has given up untold secrets.

  The evidence warehouse became necessary in 2004, having outgrown its former location in the Public Safety Building. It includes everything from specks of blood to entire walls that have been sawed out of crime scenes. A room-sized freezer preserves biological evidence: blood, bloody clothing, saliva, semen.

  Sergeant Cindy Granard, one of the custodians of this massive collection of evidence, is passionately protective of it, and for good reason. “We want to arrest the right person, or be able to exonerate someone. The public needs to know the great care we take to protect these items.”

  Unless detectives agree to have evidence that is no longer needed destroyed, everything in the warehouse must be kept sacrosanct for eighty years!

  Was it even within the realm of possibility that Sara Beth Lundquist’s killer would ever be caught? Might there be something left to examine that couldn’t be tested when she was killed because the expertise wasn’t there then?

  As Greg Mixsell and Richard Gagnon moved on, Detective Mike Ciesynski has become “Mr. Cold Case” in the Seattle department. He wasn’t that much older than Sara Beth Lundquist back in 1978 when he was growing up in Chicago. Mike always wanted to be a cop. He joined the force in Calumet City, Illinois, and then moved west to be a police officer in Casper, Wyoming. Eventually, he and his family moved even farther west. He joined the Seattle Police Department and added more years of law enforcement experience. He now has served twenty-five years as a cop and a detective.

  In 2005, Mike worked cold cases for the Seattle Police Department.

  On March 9, 2005, Ciesynski received a phone call from Lee Lundquist, Sara’s younger brother. Lee was close to forty then, not the kid brother that she had treated so kindly. Ciesynski could tell that Lee Lundquist would never rest until he found out who had killed her.

  Lee believed that Frankie Aldalotti, who was supposed to drive her to his family’s cabin on the July 4th holiday, was her killer.

  “I think there was a limo driver involved, too,” Lee said. “His nickname might be ‘Junior.’”

  Mike Ciesynski pulled Sara Beth’s case out of the archives and reviewed it. It became a priority for him. Twenty-seven years had passed since she was killed. As he pored over the files, he looked at the crime scene photos and memorized the picture of a lovely young girl who never grew older than fifteen.

  Ciesynski saw that there were many, many homicides in 1978, and most of them had been solved years earlier. He tried to connect unsolved cases with other murders in that time frame—to see if there might be similarities that would stand out.

  He then went to the warehouse where 162,000 pieces of evidence waited for a time they might be needed. He was gratified to find that the physical evidence that had been carefully preserved in July 1978 was still there. Sara Beth’s clothing remained intact, sealed against age and loss—her jean jacket and slacks, her silky shirt, her clogs, her undergarments. The chain of evidence had been maintained.

  Ciesynski reached carefully into one pocket of her denim outfit and pulled out the ticket stub for Damien: Omen II.

  Suddenly he was back in 1978.

  As Ciesynski turned the clothing inside out, he spotted a stain and some dark pubic hairs on her leotard. The stains might be semen or saliva. It would be a miracle if something carrying DNA still existed. But if Sara Beth’s killer had prematurely ejaculated before he could carry out rape, that faint stain could be semen.

  He packaged the clothing with delicate caution. To a homicide detective, it might be as precious as diamonds. To be absolutely sure of what he had, Mike Ciesynski needed to find samples of blood and semen preserved from Sara Beth’s body.

  There he was stymied. There were no samples from her in the evidence warehouse, nor were there any medical records that might lead to Sara Beth’s genetic profile.

  But he’d heard that sometimes the King County Medical Examiner’s Office preserved swabs and slides after postmortem examinations. To Ciesynski’s great relief, the ME had saved just such items for almost thirty years.

  On March 25, Ciesynski picked up three anal, oral, and vaginal slides that had been retained from Sara Beth’s autopsy. He sent them to the Washington State Patrol crime lab. Even the tiniest speck of DNA can now be replicated infinitely, so small samples are no longer in danger of being destroyed by the tests for a genetic profile.

  While he waited for the results from the lab, Ciesynski looked for phone, address, or Internet listings for a woman named Penny Martin,* who was an ex-girlfriend of Frankie Aldalotti. He found a listing in that name, but the woman who answered the phone said she didn’t know anyone named Aldalotti.

  “I’ve heard of another Penny Martin, though,” she said. “I think she works for the Kent School District.”

  The second Penny wasn’t the right woman, either.

  The cold case detective was disappointed but not ready to give up. He was elated, and a little surprised, when he heard from a Washington State parole officer in late May. Frankie Aldalotti hadn’t exactly lived a crime-free life in the years since Sara Beth was murdered.

  “We know him,” the parole officer said. “My partner and I went to arrest him after he abducted and raped his girlfriend back in the seventies. We picked him up at his parents’ house and transported him to the King County Jail. When we got there, he pulled out a six-inch .357 revolver and held us hostage for several hours.”

  The parole officers had emerged unscathed, but it was a very dicey period for them.

  Ciesynski located another former girlfriend of Frankie Aldalotti. He spoke with Maggie Cochran* in August 2005. She vaguely remembered being interviewed by detectives about Sara Beth back in 1978, although she had tried to put Frankie out of her mind after a terrifying relationship.

  “I remember Frankie,” she said. “Since he shot me, I guess it’s to be expected I’d remember him very well.”

  Maggie and Frankie’s romance was mercifully short and soon disintegrated into violence, although she found it hard to get away from him. She said that Frankie had abducted her twice and taken her to his father’s cabin, where he raped her.
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br />   “One time he beat me up,” Maggie said. “He threw me against a wall and fired a dart gun at me. The next time he forced me up there, he put a gun in my mouth and raped me. He also threatened me with a long screwdriver.”

  The only way she had gotten away after the second rape was to convince him that she’d go back to dating him if he would just drive her back from the cabin to her home.

  “I didn’t report the first two rapes,” Maggie said, “but Frankie was getting progressively worse. I broke up with him and was relieved to be done with it. But then he smashed my bedroom window and fired at me with a twenty-two.”

  “Were you injured?” Ciesynski asked.

  “The bullets hit me in my thigh and my buttocks.”

  That had been the absolute last straw. Frankie had done some prison time—for the crimes against Maggie and also for holding two parole officers hostage.

  “I never saw Frankie again,” Maggie Cochran said, “and that was just fine with me!”

  Maybe Lee Lundquist was right about Frankie Aldalotti. He certainly sounded like a dangerous man with an uncontrollable temper. Ciesynski needed something with Aldalotti’s DNA on it to send to the crime lab for comparison. He and Greg Mixsell drove to the latest address listed for the suspect.

  Casually, Mike walked past the house, pretending he was looking for an address. There was a white Chevrolet pickup truck parked in front of the residence. He spotted three cigarette butts lying in the street just next to the driver’s door. Without skipping a beat, he reached down and scooped them up. To an onlooker, he seemed to be tying his shoelace, but he held what might be vital evidence in his hand. After he was back in the detective’s “sneaker” car, he slipped the butts into an envelope and sealed and labeled it.

  If the traces of saliva on the cigarette butts matched the DNA that was being tested on Sara Beth’s clothes and in the medical examiner’s samples, they would have evidence against Aldalotti.