Don’t Look Behind You

family lived there at some time and they had a nephew who had sex with dead bodies—so you might want to check that out …”
    Was this an urban myth that had begun long ago? Deserted old houses often are the subjects of totally specious “ghost stories.”
    Or could it possibly be true? Benson was inclined to think it was probably the former, but he would follow it back to its beginning, as good detectives always follow every clue—as unlikely as they might seem.
    In the end, he found no confirmation that the family of former renters had harbored a necrophile.
    But even in the bright warmth of June days, there was something about the property that gave many of those who investigated the mystery shivers up and down their spines.
    A rabbit running over their graves? Or just the knowledge that someone’s violent death had been hidden here for so long?
    Owen Carlson talked with his sister Marilyn Miller shortly after she came back from Kansas, and he immediately typed up a report for Ben Benson that contained everything either or both of them remembered. Carlson’s narrative was of great help in giving the Pierce County investigators someplace to begin.
    When she learned of the bones’ discovery, Marilyn had consulted some loose notes in the file she’d kept on tenants since the house had become a rental in 1973. She found some information there about the family who leased it in 1978. Those notes triggered her brother Owen’s memory.
    “I recall now,” he wrote. “They [this family] moved in in June 1978. It was about nine months after that when the three women who said they were from some southwest state—maybe Arizona or New Mexico—came into my hardware store at Summit. Actually, there may have been two young women—sisters. And their mother was with them. They were inquiring about their father. He had formerly worked in Alaska.
    “The last time they had heard from their dad was when he lived in our family’s house at 10309 Canyon Road East,” Carlson continued. “They felt that he had met with foul play from his girlfriend or wife. They didn’t feel comfortable with that lady, and, as I told the first deputy, one daughter thought this woman was capable of murder. Those women actually walked the property to see if they could discover anything. Meeting and talking with them under such circumstances made an impression on me at the time. The daughters told me they would file a missing person report.”
    According to their conversation and Marilyn’s notes, the worried young women had come looking for their father on April 9, 1979.
    Marilyn Miller still had a copy of the rental agreement signed in June 1978. It was signed by “Mrs. A. M. Hesse,” who had given her first name as Geraldine, although she said she went by Geri. The rent would be $350 a month. At that time Geri Hesse had probably been in her middle to late forties.
    It was a stroke of luck in a very difficult case for the investigators to discover how meticulous Mrs. Miller had been about details. “Mrs. Hesse drove a 1977 Thunderbird—with an Alaskan license: AJH828,” she said. “She gave me a phone number for a man who worked for Century 21 real estate in Bellevue. I think he might have been a reference for her.”
    But all of that had been current
twenty-nine years
earlier. In 2007, would Ben Benson be able to trace “Mrs. Hesse” that far back?
    Marilyn Miller said that Geri Hesse’s daughters lived with her; one was a very pretty young woman, probably somewhere in her midtwenties. The other was much younger, a child about eight years old. Geri Hesse had given the impression that she also planned to live with a man named Ray Isaak, and he’d given a former address in Puyallup. In 1978, there had also been a yellow Chevrolet S-10 truck, license #8497AR, parked on the property, but which state had issued that license was lost in time.
    Still, very few law enforcement agencies are lucky enough to find witnesses with both great memories
and
documentation. The Carlsons offered both. Owen and his sister promised to bring the lease that Geraldine Hesse signed in 1978 to the Pierce County sheriff’s headquarters.
    Owen Carlson had even come up with the names of the young women who feared their father had met with some sort of homicidal violence. They were Gina and Jacqueline Tarricone. Jacqueline had told Carlson that she usually went by the name she’d chosen for herself: Gypsy. She had given Owen a phone number in New Mexico.