Empty Promises

over not to go near creeks and ponds, the searchers checked virtually every deep puddle, with negative results.
    Two days after the boys were last seen and two miles away, weary searchers came upon a child’s clothing: shirt, jeans, undershorts, and socks, but their frantic parents could not identify the clothing as belonging to either Bradley or Scott. Next, someone spotted small footprints leading to an abandoned gravel pit a mile away. And yet, when the flooded pit was dragged, they found nothing at all.
    Much of the search area was choked with wild evergreen ground cover: salal, sword ferns, vine maple saplings, huckleberry bushes, and deadfall logs encircled with bindweed and blackberry vines. Just beyond the recently constructed homes the woods were almost as impenetrable as they had been when the pioneers first came to the Northwest. It was tough going for volunteers but none of them quit as the days dragged by at an agonizing pace.
    It was early evening on Thursday, April 22, when a volunteer fireman spotted something that made him catch his breath; it was what they had all feared. A small boy clothed in a striped T-shirt lay as if asleep in a shallow dip in the woods. The firefighter called his team leader, who signaled the group to stay back as he walked carefully around the depressed area. Both of the missing boys lay in front of him, partially covered with ferns and soil. He felt the youngsters’ chests for any signs of life. There were none.
    The firefighters secured the area and put out a radio call to both the King County Police and the Renton Police Department. Sheriff’s Deputy Richard A. Nicholiason arrived first, followed shortly by Sergeant Helland. The gully where the boys lay was determined to be within Renton city limits and the Renton detectives who had investigated Carole Erickson’s death responded. Don Dashnea, Arnold Huebner, Harold Caldwell, and I.D. expert Joe Henry hurried to the tragic scene in the woods.
    Both bodies were partially nude. Bradley Lyons lay on his back, the striped T-shirt pulled up under his chin, his trousers lying across his chest. A venetian-blind cord, used as a ligature, was knotted tightly around his neck.
    Scott Andrews was lying facedown, his Jockey shorts twisted around his ankles. A bloodstained T-shirt had been knotted around his neck. What looked like knife wounds marked his chest and neck. It was apparent the boys had been dead for some time.
    As daylight faded, floodlights were brought in. Dashnea and Caldwell removed the items of clothing found at the scene and placed them in sealed plastic bags. Joe Henry took a series of photographs leading from the entrance to the trail down to the body site.
    Assured that searchers had not approached the bodies closely except for the team leader’s one cautious check for signs of life, the detectives were intrigued by a set of large footprints left in a distinctive circular pattern around the bodies. They immediately made moulages of the prints.
    They began an intensive search for a knife or other weapon that might have been used on Scott Andrews, but neither their eyes nor metal detectors located one.
    Early the next morning, the detectives from Renton attended the postmortem examinations on the small victims. The investigation of the murder of a child is always the hardest assignment any homicide detective can have. The cops braced themselves and tried to think clinically, fighting back the normal emotions that any father would have felt in the same situation.
    Six-year-old Bradley Lyons had died of asphyxia secondary to ligature from the venetian blind cord. He also had bruises on his lips. Based on the contents of his stomach and the progression of rigor mortis in the body, Dr. Wilson estimated that Bradley had died between 12:30 and 1:30 P.M. on April 20, the last day he was seen. Although there were no overt injuries to his genitals, Dr. Wilson found a twig and a hair in the rectum.
    Scott Andrews had contusions on his forehead, left cheek, and lips. There were fabric imprints on his neck from the knotted T-shirt, but the underlying tissue had neither hemorrhaging nor constriction enough to cause suffocation. He had sustained three knife wounds. One, just beneath the left collarbone, had penetrated only 1.5 centimeters. The other two wounds, however, were fatal wounds where the knife had slashed through the lung and heart to a depth of 4½ inches, ending at the vertebrae just below the skin of the boy’s