Empty Promises

twenty-four hours.
    King County Police Deputy Les Moffett talked with her family and was convinced that this was more than a typical runaway-teenager case. He talked to his patrol sergeant, George Helland, who agreed that the sheriff’s office should get involved. Search-and-Rescue Explorer Scouts arrived in teams, along with search dogs whose handlers would work them in grid patterns throughout the ravine area.
    “It was like a maze,” one of the searchers said. “The dogs would run again and again to a dead end. Once my dog began to howl and sniff up in the air. I even looked up in the treetops, but there was nothing.”
    He was relieved that there was nothing there. Experienced search dog handlers know that sometimes dead things on the ground send odors into the trees. When dogs look up, it is usually bad news.
    Thirty hours after Joann began her walk in Hidden Valley down to Honey Creek, the search ended. Clyde Reed, a member of the Washington search-and-rescue group, followed his bloodhound’s throaty whoops, his mind full of dread because he knew what the sound meant.
    Joann Zulauf lay sprawled in a depressed wash area next to the path she had taken on Sunday afternoon. She was naked, but oddly someone had piled her neatly folded clothing on top of her.
    The sheriff’s deputies and detectives were summoned from where they were combing other areas of the ravine. Les Moffett arrived first. Knowing that it was useless, he nevertheless checked for signs of life and found Joann’s body “very, very, cold.” He backed away and summoned Homicide Detectives Ron Sensenbach and Robert Schmitz.
    It was full dark now, and the detectives had to use their flashlights to see the dead girl. The sweep of the lights gave them enough illumination to see that her face was grotesquely swollen and purple. In all likelihood, she had been strangled. They could see bruises on her forehead and dried blood in her hair on the right side of her head.
    It was after midnight in the tangled woods and there was little they could do in the pitch-black ravine but guard the scene and wait for the first rays of daylight.
    Deputy Michael Temcof stood by the body all night in the chill rain. It was a bleak and lonely vigil. The roped-off area had to be kept sacrosanct; they didn’t dare risk missing some vital bit of evidence that even the high-powered auxiliary lighting might have missed.
    At dawn, the King County detectives processed the scene thoroughly, searching it literally inch by inch. But they found no leads to the slayer’s identity. They cut blaze marks into the surrounding trees for the triangulation measurements that would allow them to pinpoint the precise site of the body long after it was removed.
    The postmortem examination of Joann Zulauf’s body seemed to substantiate the detectives’ first impression. The autopsy indicated that she had succumbed to asphyxiation, probably manual. Like Carole Erickson, Joann had sustained an injury from some force behind her. Dr. Gale Wilson discovered a V-shaped laceration on the back of her head just below her right ear.
    Although Joann had been a virgin with an intact hymen, the pathologist noted bruising at the vaginal entrance where rape was attempted. She had apparently been dragged for some distance, probably by the arms, just as Carole had. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to drag Joann: she was only 5 feet 2 and weighed 113 pounds.

    Now, eight months after the investigation into Carole Erickson’s murder, another urgent plea went out to the public; the police needed information—anything, even if it seemed unimportant. And again there were precious few useful responses. Some tips verged on the bizarre. A woman called Renton detective Wally Hume to say that she had talked to a mystic on a Puget Sound ferryboat on the afternoon of the Sunday Joann disappeared. The man had suddenly become very agitated. “Then he told me that there had been another murder in Renton!” she reported.
    The man might have been clairvoyant, or he might have been putting on an act to impress the woman. Or he might have been a 220, as Seattle area detectives call mental cases. At any rate, the man was many miles away from Renton when Joann Zulauf was killed. There was no way he could have committed the murder himself, and the woman on the phone didn’t even know his name or how to find him.
    Homicide detectives grow weary of psychic reports that come in after the details of sensational crimes