Last Dance, Last Chance

beach, plush resorts, and modest cabin camps. It is a county with place names that sound strange to a visitor: towns named Humptulips and Satsop ring oddly to the ear. The hamlet of McCleary has the biggest summer festival, and the cuisine is bear stew.
    In spots, the timberland of Grays Harbor County gives way to acres of bog, which is almost like quicksand. One oceanfront section was called—quite realistically—Washaway Beach. It did indeed give up more and more shoreline as the hungry ocean gnawed at it year after year.
    The Quinault Indian Reservation is the northwest corner of the county and has its own tribal police force.
    Grays Harbor has had both its stunning failures and its roaring successes. For those who truly love the wildness of the ocean as it has been for eons, Grays Harbor is a much desired destination, and that will never change. The Satsop Project, designed to convert atomic energy to civilian use, collapsed into a financial fiasco that left nothing but looming silos. A singular success was Kurt Cobain; perhaps the most brilliant—if troubled—musician ever to come out of the Northwest was born and raised in Grays Harbor County.
    But Kurt Cobain was only a tow-headed, blue-eyed little boy on Monday, April 14, 1975. On that day, Grays Harbor County Sheriff Harold Sumpter and a friend who was a Superior Court judge were driving to a weekly lunch meeting. It had become something of a ritual for them over their years of association. They had just left the county seat of Montesano and were nearing Satsop on old Highway 12 when they noticed two young girls with backpacks walking along the side of the blacktop.
    They shook their heads at the danger inherent in the situation, but they had no reason to stop the girls. Hitchhiking wasn’t against the law at the time. The judge commented that it was “too bad” that their usual lunch companion, who was a juvenile court worker, wasn’t with them. “He probably knows them.”
    If he had been with them that day, they might have found a reason to give the girls a ride home.
    In mid-1975, young women in Washington and Oregon were still afraid of running into the mysterious “Ted,” the faceless wraith who was wanted for the murders and disappearances of almost a dozen girls, some of whom had been last seen hitchhiking. These two young women had tucked their thumbs in when they saw the sheriff’s car, but Sumpter knew they were hoping to catch a ride.
    Law enforcement officers file away information almost unconsciously, and Sumpter remembered later that one girl was of medium height and the other much shorter and very petite; both carried orangy-red backpacks. Still, he was never absolutely sure that the young women he saw near Satsop were the same girls he would see later in horrifying circumstances.
    Most homicides in Grays Harbor County erupted out of family beefs and domestic violence situations. But there was no way to predict how many predators—not animal but human—prowled the highways and beaches looking for the vulnerable and the trusting. No, hitchhiking wasn’t against the law, although the “Ted” case had spurred activists and police alike to circulate petitions to send to the Washington State Legislature to ask for a law that would ban it. No one knew yet that the real Ted—Ted Bundy—had moved on to Utah.
     
    Harold Sumpter was a man born to the badge: his grandfather was a judge, and his father was the sheriff and then a marshal in Mason County, Missouri. The lawmen in his family warned him that if he ever expected to have any money, he’d better avoid police work. He knew they were right, but the urge was too strong. He signed on at Grays Harbor County in 1963 as a special deputy, rose through the ranks to resident deputy in the eastern sector of the county, and then became Chief Criminal Deputy. When he was off duty, Sumpter painted houses to add to his income.
    Sumpter knew his citizens and the back roads of his county as well as most men know the block they live on. He had 27 working deputies (he included himself in this count), but he recalled only too well a time when he was the only officer on night patrol in the entire county. The idea of having a backup unit if he ran into a potentially dangerous situation was unheard of “unless you could wake up somebody at home, and then it was usually too late,” Sumpter said with a grin.
    He had just settled into his new post as Sheriff when he and his department were faced