Last Dance, Last Chance

to come next door to the apartment house with her to watch television, but he said he was too nervous. He told her he thought he would take a walk instead. When she returned to their trailer about two and a half hours later, he was there.
    Later on in the week—on Wednesday night—Batten left the trailer after she was asleep. She thought he’d gone to a local tavern. This didn’t strike her as unusual at all. Her husband often went for walks at night after she was asleep.
    A relative of the shake-mill worker said that Batten had commented to him that the newspaper pictures of the victims looked familiar—that he thought they were some girls he’d picked up hitchhiking.
    The missing pieces of the case were rapidly falling into place. Gael and Tina had hitchhiked from the Vashon Island ferry to Olympia, Washington State’s capital city, and then along the old highway west, where they had passed through Satsop and McCleary. They had eaten lunch and then been picked up by a man in a green Ford or Chevy heading north toward the ocean beaches.
    At that rate, they should have arrived on the beach where they set up camp long before sunset, which occurred at 6:26 P.M. on April 14. Harold Sumpter mulled over a possible scenario.
    Suppose Batten had given them a ride, left them at the beach, and bided his time until night cloaked the area with blackness? There would have been no hurry; his quarry was waiting, unaware, in the driftwood lean-to. He could return whenever he chose.
    As they discussed whether they had enough probable cause to ask for an arrest warrant, Harold Sumpter kept full-time stakeouts on the mill worker. Rumors were rife around the close-knit community, and Sumpter particularly feared two things: that William Batten might leave the area before an arrest could be effected, or that angry citizens might decide to carry out their own punishment for the horrendous crime if the suspect was not soon put behind bars.
    Batten continued to report to work at the shake mill and to return home to his trailer each night, but he went for no more walks on the beach.
    Memorial services were held for Tina Jacobsen at the Island Funeral Services Chapel on Vashon Island on Tuesday, April 22. Gaelisa Burton’s services were held the following day at the Vashon Island Episcopal Church. It was a poignant last goodbye for two young women on the brink of life who had expected to find three days of tranquility and meditation on a quiet beach. Instead, their bodies had lain undetected in the windswept shelter as the ocean changed from green to blue to angry black in its ageless ebb and flow while the gentle folk of Moclips went about their regular routines unaware.
    At least, all but one of them were unaware.
    As the week progressed and constant surveillance was kept on Batten, the case investigators continued to question townspeople and county residents about the movements of the dead girls and Batten on that fatal Monday. They finally located a truck driver who corroborated the story told by the witness who had seen the girls get into a green Ford near the Burgess Motel. But their trail ended there. No one who could recall seeing Gaelisa and Tina after that.
     
    On Friday, April 25, William Batten was arrested at his home, and the green Ford was impounded. Two deputies drove him to Olympia, where Washington State Patrol Major John Kendersei, one of the Northwest’s foremost polygraphists, awaited. Kendersei had been apprised of the evidence and facts of the case.
    Batten, 28, was a big man with wildly tousled dark hair, a muscular six feet tall. He seemed a little antsy as he was ushered into Kendersei’s office. He was informed of his rights and asked to take a lie-detector test, but he changed his mind, intimidated by the wires and needles that can winnow truth from lie.
    He muttered, “I’d never pass it.” Instead, the suspect said he would write out a statement in his own hand. He scribbled over six legal-size pages and then did it over. Although he was not satisfied with the first statement, both accounts were similar in detail.
    Even though witnesses had seen Batten pick up two girls matching Gael’s and Tina’s descriptions only 2 miles north of Hoquiam (and about 28 miles from where their bodies were found), he insisted that he had picked them up much closer to the beach—at the Copalis Crossing. He said that he had given them a ride because he knew what it was like to hitchhike himself, and that he’d