Last Dance, Last Chance

looked like a 1952 gray or light tan Plymouth. They couldn’t see who was driving, but they were positive that there was only one person in the car.
    Nancy Winslow never made it home that night. Her worried husband went to the Bellingham Police Department to file a missing persons report the next afternoon. He was insistent that she would never have left her children willingly. He’d come home from work late the night before to find a worried baby-sitter, who hadn’t heard from Nancy since she had sent hamburgers home for them to eat. She had promised she would be there by 10:45 at the latest.
    Although the Bellingham police checked with hospitals and surrounding law enforcement departments, they found out nothing about Nancy Winslow. She had simply walked out of the Beaver Tavern into the darkness and driven off with someone. They didn’t even know whether the driver was a man or a woman.
    It was two weeks to the day on August 9 when a couple, enjoying an outing in the forested tranquility of the Bridge Camp Ground some 40 miles east of Bellingham, noticed that their dog was behaving strangely. He kept dashing to the edge of the Nooksack River, barking and growling. The camping area near the foot of Mount Baker is a virtual wilderness, and they assumed that their dog had caught the scent of a bear or a cougar. But he seemed to be barking at something that lay on a rocky bar that jutted out of the river below. They walked over to see what it was.
    As they moved closer they saw the naked body of a woman sprawled on the rocks. They corralled their dog and hurried to the closest ranger station. An urgent call went into the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office, and Sergeant Ward Crutcher and Detective F. Scott Notar were dispatched to the body site on the Nooksack River.
    The detectives and the ranger waded through the swift current to the gravel and rock bar. The body of the woman was badly decomposed by the ravages of summer heat. Most of the head and neck were nearly skeletonized. It would be impossible to identify her visually.
    She was completely naked except for a nylon stocking that had been used as a garotte around her neck. They would learn it was a type sold by J. C. Penney, called “Clingalon,” with lacy elastic at the top.
    “She was probably thrown into the river upstream,” Crutcher surmised. “With the heat of the last two weeks, the river’s gone down a lot, and it exposed this bar. Otherwise, the body would have ended up much farther downstream.”
    The body in the river was taken to Whatcom County Coroner Dr. Robert Rood’s office for a postmortem examination.
    The corpse appeared to be that of a young woman, well under thirty. With the high temperatures and the body’s long immersion in the river, it was no longer possible to tell the extent of the injuries the victim might have suffered, or whether she had been raped. Nor could Dr. Rood give a time or even a day of death. The murder weapon was the stocking; she had died of strangulation by ligature.
    Nancy Winslow, the 22-year-old waitress, was the only woman missing in Whatcom County who fit the general description of the body in the Nooksack. A comparison of her dental records and those of the river victim verified that she had been found.
    She had disappeared from the city of Bellingham, but her body was found in Whatcom County, so it became essentially a county case, although the sheriff’s detectives would work closely with the city investigators.
    An outdoor crime scene is very difficult to work; wind, water, changing weather, and wild animals all combine to move or destroy any evidence that might have been left behind by the killer. Detectives Pete Kuehnel from the county and Telmer Kvevin from the city drove the 40 miles to the lonely river campsite. They knew that they had little chance of finding Nancy’s clothing; it had probably all washed away in the river—but they hoped they might find something.
    With the help of forest rangers, Kuehnel and Kvevin searched the campgrounds. They dug through garbage piles and even probed portable “Honey Buckets” placed there for campers to use. It was an onerous task. They were looking for the bright orange and white daisy-printed shift Nancy had worn, her black patent-leather pumps, the white sweater she’d borrowed, and her big straw basket of a purse. But, after frustrating hours under a burning sun, they found nothing they could connect to the murdered woman.
    Nor did they discover