Last Dance, Last Chance

with one of the most brutal crimes in county history.
    April 14 was a little early for the true tourist season to begin in Grays Harbor County; the weather was too mercurial, changing from sunshine and blue skies to bitterly cold, windswept storms in minutes. But Tina Jacobsen and Gaelisa (Gael) Burton loved the ocean beaches, and they were prepared to deal with the vicissitudes of Mother Nature. Sadly, they knew a lot more about camping than they did about human aberration, and they headed for the ocean without fear.
    They had graduated together from Vashon Island High School in 1974. Vashon Island is a small community between Seattle and Tacoma, set in the middle of Puget Sound. The only way to get there is by ferry. Most of its graduates find jobs off the island in Seattle.
    Gael had worked a while as an X-ray librarian at Virginia Mason Hospital; Tina still worked there as a dietary aide. At 19, Gael had given up hospital work and the big city. She lived alone on an old 20-acre homestead on Vashon. She was an apprentice in a moccasin and leather shirt business on the island, and she was so talented and hard-working that she had just been asked to become a full partner. It was a very small business, but orders were increasing all the time.
    Gael had some unfinished moccasins in her backpack and intended to sew on them while they were camped out on the beach.
    Gael Burton was only five feet, one inch tall and weighed about 95 pounds. She was a vegetarian, a young woman who deplored violence in either thought or deed. She had long straight dark hair and wore “granny” glasses.
    Tina Jacobsen was five feet, five inches tall and weighed 125 pounds. Her face was as open as a flower, with a smooth high forehead and dark eyes, framed by masses of curly light brown hair that cascaded below her shoulder blades.
    Tina often visited on Gael’s farm, and she knew the Grays Harbor area well, too. She had visited the ocean beach towns several times before and had suggested to Gael that it was the perfect place for an early spring campout. There wouldn’t be a lot of tourists yet, and the weather was warming up.
    The two girls were well prepared for their trip to the coast as they rode the Vashon Island ferry to Tacoma on that Monday in April. From there, they hitched rides. They wore warm clothes and sturdy hiking boots, and they carried backpacks filled with carefully chosen food and equipment. Both of them had maroon sleeping bags, but they had more than enough money for emergencies and a few meals inside, out of the weather, if they needed to.
    As always, their friends and Gael’s mother had cautioned them about strangers, but they felt safe because there were two of them. They promised that they wouldn’t have anything to do with strangers on the beach—they knew better than that. They just wanted to hike and camp.
    They were due home on Thursday, April 17, but they didn’t get back then. Nobody was really worried about them that night, thinking that they had just decided to camp one more day.
     
    It was close to 5 P.M. on Friday, April 18, when a couple from Seattle walked slowly along the shoreline just inside the border of the Quinault Indian Reservation. They were only a few hundred yards from the small town of Moclips, Washington. They separated as each scanned the sands for interesting driftwood to take home.
    The wife’s attention was drawn to a shelter that looked as though kids had built it by stacking driftwood logs around a center pole. The whole thing was about five by six feet and barely five feet high. At high tide, it would be no more than fifty feet from the pounding surf. But the woman who looked at it didn’t think anyone would actually use it for shelter. The spaces between the driftwood walls wouldn’t afford much protection from wind and waves. It would make an ideal “fort” for kids with active imaginations, though.
    Moving closer, she peered inside—and stepped back hastily in embarrassment. Through a crack in the gnarled logs, she’d seen what could only be someone’s bare buttocks. She thought she’d stumbled across lovers who had taken advantage of the shelter. Somewhat red-faced, she walked back to where her husband stood.
    They discussed what she had seen, and the more they talked, the more unlikely it seemed that anyone would be making love in the nude in such chilly weather. They walked closer to the shelter, called out, received no reply, and finally peered inside