Don’t Look Behind You

wore on.
    “I staggered—the way I see it—up to the Frontier Tavern. I don’t remember if Bethany Stokesberry was there or not when I got there. I had never seen her before. I don’t remember talking to her although I might have.”
    “Do you remember leaving with her?”
    “Yes. I remember going in a car and getting out at the Elephant Car Wash. She wanted to go for a walk so we ranacross Aurora Avenue. I remember that she had some kind of accent. We went down toward the water and along the gravel path to the dirt path.”
    “Did she say anything to you then?”
    “When I put my arm around her, she was foulmouthed. She said my dad was a bastard and my mother must have been a terrible person to have a son like me. She made fun of my height. She asked if my brothers were tall, too, and I said we were all over six foot six. Then she said when I was born I must have been dropped on my head and then pulled out and stretched like a string to get to be so tall.
    “She kept on and on when I told her to shut up. I felt angry inside. I started swinging on her with my fists. Everything went blank. I felt like I was fighting to stay alive. I didn’t see her while I was hitting her—it was dark out. She fell and got up. I hit her again. Then I threw her against the tree headfirst. Then I kicked her—with the heel of my right boot. I ripped off her clothes with my hands. I just grabbed them at the throat and tore.”
    Vinetti vehemently denied throwing Bethany Stokesberry into Echo Lake. “I remember seeing something white on the ground. I picked it up and split. She was lying right by the tree when I left. My foot was next to her when I was reaching for the money. She wasn’t in the lake.”
    Vinetti explained that his reaching for the money had been involuntary—a reflex action from the times as a child when he had had to survive any way he could.
    Perhaps the most damaging testimony Vinetti gave was his reply to prosecutor Roy Howson’s question about howhe could be so sure he had not thrown the victim into the lake.
    “I hit her. I threw her against the tree. I used my boots. That’s three different ways—and that’s all I did.”
    As in all murder trials, there is one side of the story that is never heard: the victim’s side. Was Bethany Stokesberry a malicious termagant who consciously or unconsciously sought out a man’s weakest side and finally went too far with the wrong man with her caustic comments?
    Or were the remarks attributed to her by the defendant the product of his own imagination, which was fueled with beer, marijuana, and possibly other illegal substances?
    Whatever the provocation had been, the jury didn’t believe that anything the petite woman might have said excused Vinetti’s brutal attack.
    We will never know why she went with him, or if she willingly got out of her acquaintances’ car and walked to a deserted lake at midnight. She may have simply wanted to go home, or Paul Vinetti may have physically pulled her from the car before she could protest.
    Nor will we know what she said to her killer at the lakeshore. Why would she have courted disaster by taunting a man twice her size? The words Paul Vinetti recalled might have been from someone else he’d met that day, and, very much under the influence of alcohol and drugs, he could have confabulated the day’s events in his mind.
    Bethany Stokesberry never had an opportunity to tell her side of the story. So we have to give her credit for what she could not say. She was a bored housewife who probably dressed too provocatively when she went to theFrontier Tavern that night in July. But I tend to believe her silent voice rather than Vinetti’s drunken recall of what really happened.
    We do know that
she
was not intoxicated at all. She had no alcohol in her blood.
    The jurors in Paul Vinetti’s trial seemed to hear her silent plea for justice, too. Paul Anthony Vinetti was found guilty of second-degree murder and grand larceny.
    Perhaps he had no choice in life either. When his mother picked a pair of roller skates over her baby son and abandoned him, she may have sealed his fate.
    And the fate of Bethany Stokesberry.

THE MOST FRIGHTENING CRIME OF ALL

PART ONE
THE DAYLIGHT RAPIST
    In many ways , the crime of rape is always the same—the forcing of one individual’s sexual desires upon a helpless victim.
    In other ways, it is always different.
    When I worked in the Sex Crimes Unit of the Seattle Police Department, I came to