Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  The three investigators didn’t believe that she was still alive, but they didn’t comment on it; Scott was upset enough as it was.

  “Try to think,” Bruce Whitman urged. “Think of anything unusual that may have happened in the past few months—anything, even if it didn’t seem important at the time, that might have caused Ms. Carr to be afraid or nervous.”

  But Tom Scott said the only thing he could think of was actually a crime where he was the victim.

  “I was over at Traia’s house for the evening, and somebody ripped off stuff from my truck—they took some tools, fishing gear, and some blank checks. I was mad. I figured it was probably somebody from the house next door. There’s a bunch of teenage kids over there, and it seemed like it was the kind of thing kids would pull. I wanted to go over there and confront them, but Traia begged me not to. She said she had a good relationship with the family, and the kids had never bothered her. She thought I might stir up trouble if I accused them. So I didn’t.”

  Gunderson nodded. “We’ve been working on that,” he said. Later, he told Whitman and Taylor that he felt Scott’s suspicions were probably true.

  “Those missing checks are popping up around town, and the makers have been traced to the Berrios house next door. Luis Jr.’s name is on some of them, but there are also some from other kids his mother lets live there.”

  The Marysville Police Department was very close, Gunderson said, to filling charges against the forgers when Traia Carr disappeared. Still, he doubted that there was a connection.

  They tended to agree. Why would anyone from the Berrios house hurt Traia? She hadn’t approached them about the theft from Tom Scott’s truck, and she’d convinced him not to accuse them, either. She had bent over backwards to keep a peaceful relationship with her next-door neighbors. And the forgers had no idea yet that they were about to be arrested.

  No. Abducting the pretty divorcée made no sense at all. Surely, even as attractive as Traia was, she was much too old to tantalize teenage boys—and much too circumspect even to consider doing so.

  Five days passed, and there were no calls or letters from Traia. Her relatives and her lover were desperate for news of her as the hottest weather of the year burned grass brown, and Traia’s trees dropped pears, peaches, and early apples on the ground, where they rotted. Ordinarily, she would have been canning and freezing the produce for the winter ahead.

  The Marysville and Snohomish County detectives were convinced now that they were probably working on a murder case. They had eliminated almost everyone in Traia’s world as suspects. Tom Scott had a solid alibi for the vital time period when his sweetheart vanished, and he was doing everything he could to help them.

  He had loved Traia—that was clear—and he was deeply saddened as day after day passed and there was no word from her or about her.

  The amorous suitor who made unwanted sexual advances to Traia when he was drunk had been far away from Marysville on July 4. The detectives verified that.

  If Traia had received obscene phone calls, she hadn’t mentioned it to her friends or to Tom Scott. She had been afraid at night—but of whom?

  They had worked their way through Traia’s world. Except for someone unknown who had frightened her, there was no one else who would conceivably have wanted to hurt her.

  If a stranger had come to her door, she would never have let him in.

  “Traia’s feisty,” one of her relatives told the investigative team. “She could handle troublemakers in the tavern; she’d eighty-six them if they didn’t shape up. But she valued her life, and she wouldn’t have taken any chances with it. Once she saw a stranger in the peephole of her door, she wouldn’t let him in. I know that.”

  At 4:30 in the afternoon on Wednesday, July 12, Traia Carr had been missing for a full week. A logger was finishing work for the day off an isolated dirt road on the Tulalip Indian Reservation, which is very close to Marysville. Working alone, he was cutting and yarding—pulling fallen fir trees out of the woods.

  He’d been in the area for a few days, and he’d caught occasional whiffs of a nauseating odor. He recognized it as decaying flesh. That wasn’t unusual in the deep woods, and he figured some animal had died close by and was decomposing rapidly.

  He hooked a turn (two logs together) and dragged them down along the road. Glancing back, the logger caught a glimpse of “something light.” He hopped off his rig and walked back to see what it was.

  Traia Carr had been found.

  Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor processed the body site. Without the logger choosing just this area to work in, the missing woman might never have been discovered. The undergrowth was as thick as if they were in a jungle.

  The female body before them was completely nude and lying facedown. Despite the decomposition caused by a week’s intense heat, and the fact that the huge fir trees had actually passed over her body—crushing it—the detectives could still see many puncture wounds in her back. And, when they gently turned her over, more knife wounds marred her breasts. Someone had stabbed her again and again in an almost classic example of a rage killing.

  Traia’s purple robe and slippers were gone, although tracking dogs would later turn up a torn piece of purple cloth in the brush not far away.

  Dr. E. Bitar, a forensic pathologist, performed the postmortem exam on Traia Carr. The knife thrusts had entered her heart and lungs, causing several fatal wounds. Some were shallow, but the deepest wounds measured five inches. She had been stabbed at least fourteen times—five in her back and nine in her upper front torso.

  “See this bruising impression here,” Dr. Bitar pointed out to the detectives. “The weapon used had a guard at the end of the handle. The guard made the bruises. The murder weapon was a knife with a wide curving blade, tapered at the point.”

  Because Traia was nude when her body was found, her robe ripped to pieces, Jarl Gunderson, Bruce Whitman, and Dick Taylor agreed that the motive behind her murder could very well be sexual. And Dr. Bitar confirmed that theory. Acid phosphotase turns bright reddish-purple when it comes in contact with semen, and this test on Traia was positive for semen and for sperm (now dead).

  The most bizarre and shocking discovery at autopsy, however, was that her killer had packed her vagina with leaves. There was no other way for leaves to have entered her vaginal vault so deeply unless someone had deliberately shoved them there.

  But why? Was it a kind of symbolic rape? That wasn’t likely because the killer hadn’t been impotent—he had left semen behind. It could only have been a gesture of contempt.

  The three investigators looked harder at the occupants of the house Gabrielle Berrios rented next door to Traia. They were closing in on an arrest for the theft of Tom Scott’s belongings and checks, and Jarl Gunderson needed to obtain a search warrant to find possible evidence in that case.

  They didn’t believe that a teenager would have kidnapped Traia Carr and killed her in this grotesque fashion. They would find the answers to check theft first—if they could—and bide their time on the homicide probe. The very proximity of the two houses was a factor that couldn’t be discounted. Nor could the juvenile records of many of the residents in the sprawling Berrios home.

  They got their search warrant, and the items it listed were Tom Scott’s tools, fishing gear, and blank checks. They entered the Berrios residence and found it cluttered and messy, not unusual for a place where numerous teenagers lived.

  Bruce Whitman searched upstairs. He observed a number of knives in the small bedroom of one of the boarders, but none of them matched the description of the murder weapon.

  Jarl Gunderson’s search area was a washhouse located on the back of the property. He was looking for the blank checks that hadn’t yet turned up. When he reached into a cardboard box, he came up with a small jewelry chest. He showed it to Taylor, who pulled a list out of his pocket; it was an itemized tally of Traia’s missing jewelry that her daughter had given him that morning.

  “Gold ladder
used to hold earrings,” he read.

  “It’s here.”

  “Ring made of birthstones—”

  “That’s here, too,” Gunderson said. “And there’s a payroll stub from the bakery, from a check made out to Traia Carr.”

  Both investigators were stunned.

  “Until that moment,” Rick Taylor recalled, “we weren’t sure at all that anyone in that house was connected to Traia Carr’s murder. We were leaning the other way—we really felt it was probably someone else entirely, probably an older man who was fixated on her.”

  They wanted very much to continue their search, but search warrants are strictly defined to protect the rights of citizens. Their current warrant didn’t list any of Traia’s belongings. If they continued to search now, any evidence discovered that was linked to her murder might well be deemed “fruit of the poisoned tree”—evidence found without a search warrant—and be thrown out of court.

  Frustrated, but knowing it was the only legal way, they immediately stopped their search of the Berrios property and set about getting a search warrant seeking evidence in Traia Carr’s homicide. They certainly had probable cause now to believe that someone living in Gabrielle Berrios’s house might be the killer.

  While they awaited word that a new search warrant had been granted, the three investigators talked to possible witnesses in the house about the theft of Tom Scott’s property.

  As the detectives were pulling scorched and partially burned checks out of a burn barrel, Luis Berrios Jr. came strolling up the alley behind his home. He had a wary expression on his face as Dick Taylor looked up and said, “Hi.”

  Luis didn’t say anything.

  “You’re under arrest for possession of stolen property,” Taylor said and advised him of his Miranda rights.

  He didn’t mention Traia Carr’s murder, and Luis visibly relaxed, taking a deep breath. The detectives had seen that same relieved look on the afternoon of July 5—after they’d told Luis they were investigating the juvenile fight at the party in Everett. When they came out to question him the day after Traia vanished, Bruce Whitman and Dick Taylor had been completely unaware of Traia’s disappearance.

  Several young men in their late teens had been living next door to Traia Carr, and Luis Jr. was known to Jarl Gunderson as, at most, a penny-ante crook. He wasn’t very big at five foot eight, but he weighed 165 pounds, and that made him considerably taller and heavier than Traia. Still, she’d been forty years older than he was, old enough to be his grandmother. He was hardly a likely candidate as her rapist-murderer, but he might know something that he was afraid to tell.

  Luis didn’t seem concerned about the theft charges. He answered questions about Tom Scott’s missing property, but his responses were vague. They took him into the house and sat down at the dining room table.

  “We don’t want any conversation,” Taylor said, and Luis looked confused. But as the minutes passed, he grew anxious again. If they’d come to talk to him about a burglary, why weren’t they asking him more questions?

  Once they were informed that a second search warrant had been signed by a judge, Taylor, Whitman, and Gunderson led Gabrielle Berrios out to the washhouse in the backyard. She was stunned when they showed the search warrant that now allowed them to look around her property for items of Traia Carr’s that were still missing.

  “We have reason to believe that someone living in your house is aware of what happened to Mrs. Carr—”

  “We all know what happened to the poor lady,” Gabrielle interrupted, crossing herself. “She was murdered.”

  “No,” Jarl Gunderson said. “We think someone who lives in your house may have guilty knowledge about her abduction and her death. We need to talk with Luis Jr.”

  She stared back at him, uncomprehending. And then a shadow crossed her face as she understood. “That’s all right,” Gabrielle said. “I can see why you might want to. He knows just about everything that goes on here—but he doesn’t always tell me.”

  A uniformed officer led Luis Jr. out to the washhouse, and he was interviewed in the presence of his mother, after he was once more advised of his rights—this time in the case of Traia’s murder.

  Luis Jr. finally admitted that he had some of his neighbor’s things. “But I only had them because some Arab gave them to me at a party the night of July Fourth.”

  It seemed to be a contrived story, but there were a large number of Middle Eastern students attending Everett Community College at the time.

  Gunderson left the interview to speak with people Luis said were at that party. He learned that Luis had been there, all right, but witnesses said he arrived after midnight—not earlier in the evening, as he said.

  Jarl Gunderson outlined all the evidence—both physical and circumstantial—that indicated Traia Carr’s killer probably lived in his house. He stared hard at Luis. “Luis, I’ve known you for a long time,” he said. “And I know when you’re lying.”

  Luis looked at the floor.

  “You’re lying now, aren’t you?”

  Faced with the information that Gunderson had uncovered, all the bravado went out of Luis Berrios Jr. He heaved a great sigh. “All right,” he said softly. “I did it.”

  “What did you do?” Gunderson pressed.

  “What you think I did. I killed her.”

  The investigators were surprised. They had expected him to tell them about someone else who was Traia’s killer.

  Luis Jr. was now ready to fill in the blank spots in their reconstruction of the victim’s last hours. The three detectives listened avidly as he told them he had felt sexually turned on by his fifty-seven-year-old neighbor. He’d kept track of her comings and goings and come to know her habits. Often, he’d peered into her bedroom window as she undressed for bed.

  “She never knew I was there,” he said.

  “Maybe she did,” Whitman said flatly. “But I doubt she knew it was you.”

  Luis continued with his story of what happened the night of July Fourth. His mother and younger brothers and sisters had gone to see the fireworks display, and his friends had all gone out, too.

  “I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone about twenty minutes after eight,” he recalled. “We had a fight and I hung up on her.”

  Luis said he’d been angry and bored. “I was the only one in our house,” he said. “I saw Traia come home from her picnic and go into her house. I watched while the lights went on. I knew she was probably alone.”

  “You kept that close track of her?”

  “Yeah. I could tell if she was alone or if her boyfriend or her daughter was over there.”

  Luis said that he’d looked around his house for some money “to do something with.” He’d searched through a number of rooms in the big old house.

  “That’s when I stumbled across the knife. And I began to think about the neighbor next door—Traia—and about raping her. I went over and circled the house and I peeked into her windows. I could see that she was alone.”

  Then Luis had gone around to the front door and knocked. Traia had looked out the peephole and recognized him, and she’d opened her door with a smile.

  “I asked her if she’d like to watch the fireworks from my house, and she was happy. She asked me, ‘Yes, that would be nice. Where are they—out in back?’”

  For some reason, Traia had begun to shut her door—maybe to remove the chain from its slot, maybe because she wanted to change clothes.

  “But I pushed it open,” Luis said. “And I pulled out the knife and slipped inside. She was shocked and asked me what I was doing and if I wanted money.”

  Traia would have been shocked: This was the kid next door, from the family she’d done so much for—from bringing day-old doughnuts home from the bakery for the kids to giving them odd jobs when they needed money. She had tried so hard to welcome them to the neighborhood and avoided arguments at all costs. She’d felt kind of sorry for the recent widow with so many kids and so little money.

&n
bsp; “So she asked me did I want money,” Luis said. “And I told her I wanted sex.”

  She saw that he meant it, but it was, of course, unthinkable. Traia had tried to talk Luis out of having sex with her, and she’d offered him money if he would just leave.

  “I told her I meant it when I said we were going to have sex. I held the knife close to her and told her to take her clothes off.”

  Trembling, Traia had taken her clothes off and placed them on the couch in the living room.

  “I told her to go into the bedroom. She was really scared and she started to cry, but that didn’t change my mind. Then she said her boyfriend was coming over at eleven thirty.”

  At that point, Traia Carr may have sealed her doom. She had feared something like this, as she’d sensed someone watching her—always—but she had never been able to explain, even to herself, what it was that terrified her. And she had no idea who it was who watched her. She just knew that someone was.

  “That changes things,” Luis recalled saying to her. “If your friend is coming over, we’ll have to get out of this house and go somewhere else.”

  “No…no,” she said, weeping. “He’s not coming over. I was just saying that, hoping you would go home and forget this.”

  “But now I can’t believe you,” Luis had told her, playing sadistic mind games. “I can’t believe anything you’re saying, so you’ll have to come with me.”

  Traia had pleaded with him to be allowed to dress first, and Luis had finally agreed to let Traia wear her robe. “She threw that on, and some pink slippers, and she grabbed her purse.”

  Her phone line was cut, there was no one next door, and it seemed as though the whole town was someplace else, watching the fireworks that lit up the sky and boomed in the dark night. As Luis led Traia out to her car, she must have looked around frantically for someplace to run, for someone to call out to.

  But there’d been no help around.

  “I drove out behind the Thunderbird Drive-In to the Indian reservation,” Luis said. “Then I parked and told her to get in the backseat.”