Empty Promises

it dangerous because the path was hidden from view by dense underbrush. They had, in fact, asked the city to clear the brush away. The detectives already knew that; with grim synchronicity, a work crew had arrived that morning to chop down the underbrush, only to find detectives already there, processing the murder scene. If they had cut down the thicket a day earlier, the young woman might still have been alive.
    It was almost impossible for the investigators to cast plaster moulages of tire marks on the path because of the gravel surface. But they did note that a car—probably a foreign model with very small tires—had been near the body site. They cast those tracks the best they could, hoping they might one day have a suspect’s car to compare them with.
    At eleven o’clock that morning, Dr. Gale Wilson, medical examiner for King County, performed an autopsy on Carole Erickson’s body. Carole was 5 feet 6 and weighed 126 pounds. Oddly, she had suffered only one severe injury. Someone had plunged a knife into the middle of her back, causing a deep, thrusting wound that had severed her seventh rib and pushed the rib into her chest cavity. The knife then penetrated the lower lobe of her right lung and entered the right atrium of her heart. According to Dr. Wilson, such a wound would have caused her to collapse at once and die within five minutes.
    There were two constriction marks caused by the leather shoelaces tied around her neck. They were deep enough to cut into the flesh, but the larynx beneath had not been fractured. Save for a small abrasion on her upper lip, there were no other wounds on the victim’s body and no defense wounds to indicate that she had fought her attacker.
    The vaginal examination indicated evidence of rape and the presence of viable sperm. “It could have been deposited there just before—or just after—death,” Wilson said.
    Dr. Wilson set the approximate time of death at 9:00 P.M. on December 15, fourteen hours before the postmortem examination. It looked as if someone had dealt Carole Erickson a fatal blow as he came up behind her on the path. If he had approached her from the front, surely she would have fought him, but there was no evidence that she had. She was slender, but she wasn’t a small girl; she could have put up a fight. Sexual intercourse had taken place—but it had not been consensual intercourse.
    Women reading about Carole’s murder were afraid. How terrible to be walking along a dark path where no one could help you, where the sound of the river would drown out screams. Even after the brush was cut down, the shortcut to the library no longer attracted walkers; they now preferred to take the longer—safer—route.
    The Renton detectives launched a massive manhunt, following up on leads they obtained from Carole’s school and work associates. A picture of Carole was printed in local papers along with a request for information from anyone who might have seen her on the day she died. There were many responses, but most of them were from people who meant well but who had little useful information.
    Some of the people who worked at the restaurant with her recalled that Carole had argued with her current boyfriend on the very day she died. She told her co-workers that they had had words when he drove her to work that afternoon. Dashnea and Huebner were very much interested to learn that Carole’s current boyfriend drove a small foreign car. They questioned him about his activities on December 15. Regretful now that his last moments with Carole had been angry, he explained that their quarrel was brief and over something silly. He said he’d been with several friends throughout the evening. When the detectives checked, they found that he was telling the truth.
    Even more interesting was a fellow student of Carole’s at Renton Vocational Tech. Her friends described him as “very shy, afraid of girls.” He apparently had a crush on Carole. “He got up his nerve once,” one girl told Dashnea, “and he wrote her a really corny note, like ‘Meet me tonight. I’ll be wearing a white carnation.’ That kind of thing. She didn’t go, but he still acted like he was spaced out about her.”
    Investigators found the lovesick student. He was certainly nervous and very unhappy about Carole’s death, but he assured them that he had nothing at all to do with her murder. He was appalled that they would think he would ever hurt her. He agreed to take a polygraph