Don’t Look Behind You

at that time. One of her relatives believed that Kerry had lived in an apartment on an upper floor of the building that housed the Crisis Clinic in 1972, but that wasn’t true. There were no apartments in that towering old Victorian house, and the comings and goings of people who weren’t authorized to be there were monitored very carefully.
    As this is written, investigators are backtracking on Kerry May-Hardy’s life, hoping to find information that will lead to
her
killer.
    The search for Joann Hansen continues. This book may prove to be the one avenue that will lead Ty and Nicole Hansen and Cindy Tyler to the truth about what happened to a young woman who literally faced death so that she could be with her children and raise them in a loving home.
    When I look back over the hundreds of disappearance and homicide cases I have been asked to explore over the last forty years, I realize that they all come down to human emotions that have somehow run off the tracks. Synchronicity and chance bring people together, and not all of these connections end happily. I still believe that Ty Hansen willfind his mother, although I wouldn’t wager on how long it may take.
    One thing I do know: Ty, Cindy Tyler, and Nicole will never give up their search for Joann and the truth about the end of her life.
    Anyone with information, no matter how slight, on Joann’s life in August of 1962 should contact the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle or myself at www.annrules.com . I will see that those messages reach Ty Hansen.

THE CASE OF THE DEADLY GIANT

One way to commit the “perfect murder” is for the potential killer to choose a victim who is a complete unknown to him—or her. Detectives cannot follow threads into the past histories of either the slayer or the victim because there
are
no connections. Serial killers invariably pick vulnerable targets that fit their perfect profile. But, beyond that, they search for someone they don’t know at all. There are two reasons for that: (1) Their sadistic fantasies demand that there be no emotional ties to their victims and they look for potential “kills” that are mere objects to them, and (2) they don’t want to get caught by pathways, however narrow, that wend their way back, giving investigators reasons to question them.
    While assailants may stalk victims, those under observation are often as unaware of danger as a rabbit being watched by a coyote.
    When two total strangers met on an Independence Day weekend—Saturday, July 3, and Sunday, July 4, 1971—one of them believed they were unobserved. The other had no inkling of the violence that lay ahead. It was a chancemeeting that might never have been traced, except for the skillful and painstaking legwork by King County police detectives. They reconstructed in the most minute detail the movements of those two lives, movements leading inexorably to a fatal confrontation that would leave one dead and the other to face a jury of his peers.
    The Fourth of July weekend in the Northwest promised three days off to most, but the weather was hardly appropriate for the celebration of a midsummer holiday. The air was as chilly as early April and rain drizzled on and off on Saturday, making the hopes for picnics, swimming, and fireworks dismal. Sunday, the Fourth itself, seemed a bit warmer but storm clouds still lowered, dropping rain on scattered areas of King County.
    Ordinarily, Echo Lake, a small tree-lined body of water improbably set just west of Aurora Avenue’s bustling traffic lanes, would be alive with celebrants on the Fourth of July. On this soggy holiday, only the homeowners whose property bordered the lake were there, and most of
them
were staying inside.
    At 2:30 Sunday afternoon, a young woman who was renting a lakeside home took her dog for a walk close to the water’s edge. She was idly gazing at the wavelets lapping against the dock when her attention was drawn to a patch of crimson bobbing up and down in the lake just below the surface.
    It looked like clothing of some sort and she grabbed a stick and nudged it ashore.
    She was surprised to see that it was a woman’s red leather coat. It seemed to be in new condition, but it was ripped under one arm. When she looked closer, she saw stains of a much deeper red near the ripped area. There was something about the coat that gave her a chill of apprehension. She wondered what to do, and then gingerly carried the soaked coat up to a picnic table near her house.