Empty Promises

back.
    Death would have been virtually instantaneous. There was no evidence that Scott had been sexually molested. Like Brad, he had been dead since shortly after noon on Tuesday.
    With the massive media coverage that followed the discovery of the two six-year-olds, tips flooded in. Doctors in the ER at Valley General Hospital in Renton reported that a rather bizarre forty-year-old man with a long beard had presented himself to the emergency room on the afternoon of April 20 and asked for help with mental problems. He feared that he “might harm children” and told a rambling story where he compared his emotional problems to Charles Manson’s.
    ER personnel said the man had numerous scratches on his arms, lower legs, and forehead. He explained that he had scratched himself while running through the brush. Still, at the time, he seemed harmless enough. He was released from the hospital and he vanished. Was he the killer or was he just another compulsive confessor?
    After yet another request for help from the public, Renton detectives learned that the bearded suspect had asked for a drink of water at a home and at a business some three to five miles from the body site around 4:30 P.M. on April 20. Then he had checked into the ER at 5:22 P.M.
    He seemed the perfect suspect in a pedophiliac homicide. Detectives located him in Tacoma. His name was Antoine Bertrand,* and he was forty years old. Bertrand was interrogated about the murders of Brad and Scott, but either he truly knew nothing about them or he had experienced a complete memory block. He looked baffled and said he had no idea what they were talking about. He hadn’t seen any little boys.
    The King County prosecutor’s office charged Antoine Bertrand with two counts of murder, based on a mass of circumstantial evidence, his proximity to the crime scene at the time Scott and Brad died, and his own feeling that he might hurt children. However, any prudent prosecutor wants physical evidence, and there was nothing concrete linking Antoine Bertrand to the young victims.
    The search for the knife that had caused Scott’s death continued. On April 28, an Explorer search-and-rescue scout, Emmett Husa, age seventeen, combed the ravine on his hands and knees some 150 feet from the spot where Scott and Bradley were found. And there it was—a bowie knife with a heavy curved blade—nestled beneath the salal and vine maple leaves. The handle of the knife was wrapped with black friction tape.
    Renton detectives examined the handle. They could barely make out a id scratched lightly into the surface. They contacted the young man whose name was on the knife.
    “Yeah, I used to own that knife,” he said. “I bought it for a dollar fifty and kept it until August of 1970. Then I sold it to a friend of mine.”
    Officers Wally Hume and Jim Phelan talked to the friend. He said he owned the knife for only a couple of months. “I traded it to this guy.”
    “Who?”
    “Some guy. He gave me a pea coat for it.”
    Wondering how long this trail was going to be, Hume and Phelan located yet a third teenager.
    “Yeah, I had a bowie knife,” he said. “But I only had it for about two weeks. Around Christmas of 1970 I left it in my friend’s truck.”
    “What’s his name?” Hume asked wearily.
    “Gary Grant. He gave me a ride and I absentmindedly left it on the seat of his truck. When I asked him about it, he said his father had found it in the truck and put it in his room and that he couldn’t get it back right away. I never did get it back.”
    On April 30, Hume and Phelan drove to the trailer park where nineteen-year-old Gary Grant lived with his parents. Gary wasn’t there. His mother said he was getting a haircut.
    “We want to talk to him about a knife he owns.”
    “He’ll be home pretty soon. You can wait for him if you want to.”
    It wasn’t long before a pickup truck pulled in front of the mobile home. A tall, skinny teenager stepped out and walked toward the detectives.
    “You’re Gary?” Jim Phelan asked.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “We understand a friend of yours left a bowie knife in your truck not too long ago,” Phelan said.
    Grant nodded a little nervously. “I had it, but I guess I left it out in the woods—out back of the park here.”
    He was neither cooperative nor antagonistic, but the pimply-faced teenager wasn’t sure if he would be able to find the knife in the woods. He did, however, agree to go to Renton Police headquarters to talk with the