Empty Promises

striking blonde told detectives: “I was at Kathi’s about four months ago, and someone threw a rock through Kris’s window. About fifteen minutes later, some guy named Pat called, and he was very irate. Later that night somebody vandalized her car, and she said there was $4,000 damage done to it.”

    Kathi Jones didn’t want to be tied down to any man until she found one who would treat Kris as his own. She never talked about Kris’s biological father, and friends knew he was out of her life and Kris’s. Until she found someone who would be a good father, she wanted to date casually, but ever since she’d met Patrick Lehn the previous autumn, she had found herself boxed in by his possessive jealousy. No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape. She was a strong woman, however, and for a long time she was unaware of Pat Lehn’s jealous tenacity. At first, she was more annoyed with him than afraid; she thought she could handle him, play along with him until she got her things back. She had told friends that she planned to break up with him for good, but she hadn’t been able to do it yet. She had no idea what a dangerous game she was playing.
    Lehn himself admitted to running into Kathi and Kris on the dark side of Bitter Place North late that night, but he said that when he left them, they were “outside the car.” There were witnesses who had seen the couple during their screaming argument and who had seen the bloody bodies of the victims afterward, lying on the grassy slope as a large man bent over them, still beating them. They saw a tall man who “looked like Bill Walton” driving away in the little red sports car that Kathi Jones had prized so much.
    Why did Lehn think he could get away with murder? Maybe because he had barely gotten his hands slapped after destroying his last girlfriend’s car. Maybe because his constant harassment of any woman who dared to break up with him had caused the woman far more trouble than it had ever caused him. Perhaps he thought he could walk away from a double murder too. But the ring on his hand matched the mark on his smallest victim’s forehead perfectly, a brutal piece of physical evidence that inexorably tied Pat Lehn to the scene of the crimes.
    On April 4, 1980, Patrick David Lehn was charged with two counts of murder in the first degree, and his bail was set at half a million dollars. On September 24, he was sentenced to serve a minimum of fifty-four years and two months for the murder of Kris Haugen and a minimum of ten years for the murder of Kathi Jones. Lehn is now housed in the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. His earliest possible release date is November 19, 2016.

Young Love
    Unrequited love can be as painful as an abscessed tooth. The pain is throbbing, searing, and anyone who has suffered from it remembers the wakeful nights when sleep would not come. But there is nothing more agonizing than the loss of first love. Those of us who survive that initial heartbreak learn that love can—and will—come again, but try to tell that to a teenager who has lost that first, flawless love. Young people believe that there will be no tomorrow, and all you will get is an incredulous look if you try to tell them otherwise. When you are eighteen, you can visualize only endless years of aching loss. Most of us do get over it, and live to enjoy mature relationships. Some of us do not.
    A lifetime relationship was never going to happen for eighteen-year-old John Stickney and Leigh Hayden,* but John refused to accept reality. He stubbornly believed that he and Leigh belonged together forever, and he was determined to do whatever he had to do to see that they would never part.

M ercer Island , Washington, is to Seattle what Grosse Point is to Detroit, what River Oaks is to Houston, and what Beverly Hills is to Los Angeles. Located near the south end of Lake Washington, Mercer Island is among the more expensive and desirable suburbs for those who can afford the good life. The lushly vegetated island was once almost inaccessible, but the construction of the first floating bridge across Lake Washington sixty years ago made Mercer Island ripe for a building boom. The first homes, naturally, were built along the waterfront and have their own docks to moor sleek cabin cruisers or high-masted sailboats. Many of the homes here have swimming pools and tennis courts. Even as construction moved farther inland, a sense of forest remains. Row houses have no place on