Empty Promises

and adopted two children. Jannie was seven years old in June of 1981; her brother, Max,* was six months younger. The Reillys lived in a pleasant white frame house in the Magnolia Bluff section of Seattle. They had a dog and plenty of neighbor children for Jannie and Max to play with. The children’s bedroom was in the basement, close to Lorraine’s sewing room, conveniently near the door that opened into the big backyard. The Reillys slept upstairs.
    Joseph Reilly was educated by the Jesuits, the scholars of the Roman Catholic priesthood, and he made a solid, comfortable living working for a furnace company. Lorraine was involved in the community, devoted to her adopted children and her extended family in Oregon. She had a warm and forgiving heart, but she was, perhaps, naive. She believed in giving people endless second chances and she felt that love and acceptance could cure most of the ills of the mind and spirit.
    Despite the serenity of the Reilly home, something unspeakable happened there during the night of June 18. One of their neighbors awakened sometime that night. She would be the first person outside the Reilly home to sense that something horrible had happened.
    Just before the summer solstice in Seattle, it stays light until 10:00 P.M. and the sun rises again a little after 4:00 A.M. The Reillys’ neighbor was unsure of the time she woke, but she was positive it was full dark when she heard voices outside. She pulled back the curtain next to her bed and saw two figures walking on the street, but she thought little of it; the neighborhood was close to Discovery Park, a sprawling greensward that ended abruptly at a dizzyingly high bluff overlooking Puget Sound. There were people in the park at all hours of the day and night.
    The Reillys’ restless neighbor finally fell back to sleep, but something woke her again near dawn. She looked at her bedside clock, noting that it was 4:00 A.M. She heard a car door slam shut, or perhaps it was a house door. Peering out at the street again, she saw Lorraine Reilly’s brother, who was visiting from Oregon. Lorraine had told her that her brother, Arnold, was twenty-four, but somehow he seemed much younger. Now he was standing anxiously at the curb, apparently waiting for someone. As she watched, she heard the wail of a siren and saw a fire department aid unit pull up next door. It was followed almost immediately by a Medic One rig. The neighbor’s first thought was “heart attack.” The Reillys were barely middle-aged, but such things did sometimes happen.
    She could not have imagined what had occurred inside the protective walls of the house next door. Even the paramedics, who are used to tragedy, were shocked when they saw their patient. A small girl lay on the living room couch, her body covered with a blanket. Her face was suffused with a deep cherry-red flush, something they knew was characteristic in cases of suffocation or carbon monoxide poisoning.
    Jannie Reilly was unresponsive to stimuli, and the paramedics could detect no heartbeat or pulse. Still, they tried to resuscitate her. They lifted her to the carpet and cut away the red, white, and blue shirt she was wearing over a pair of red panties. They attached leads from their Life-Pak to her chest to monitor any sign of heart activity and then began CPR.
    Nothing.
    They started a peripheral I.V. and slid an endotracheal tube down her throat to force oxygen into her lungs.
    Nothing.
    With permission from a supervising M.D. at Harborview Hospital, they attempted to start her heart with an injection directly into the heart itself. It was too late. In truth, they had known it was too late going in, but it was so hard to believe that a child so young was beyond help, even when they saw that her pupils were fixed and dilated. And she had not been dead long; her flesh was still warm.
    While her agonized parents and her uncle stood by, the paramedics stopped their efforts and marked the time of death at 4:14 A.M.
    Seattle Police Patrol Officers Ty Kane, Jon Mattox, Garry McLenaghen, and J. G. Burchfield had been dispatched moments after the call for help came from the Reilly home. Now the paramedics beckoned them over and pointed out the angry scarlet crease on the child’s neck. It was an obvious ligature mark. Jannie Reilly had not died of natural causes.
    Unlike the Ramsey investigation in Boulder, Colorado, this crime scene was immediately sealed to all but the police. The patrol officers cordoned off