Mortal Danger

with Heinz Jager.
    Amy
    But Amelia Jager does not rest in Switzerland. She was able to come home to rest in her own country, and in the hearts and memories of her beloved family.

THIRTY YEARS LATER

 
    Where there is no vision, the people perish.
    But he that keepeth the law—
    Happy is he.
    —Proverbs 29:18
    I cannot count how many times I stepped over this bronze plaque set in concrete just outside the east entrance to the Seattle Public Safety Building (police HQ) as I researched hundreds of homicide cases to write about. Unconsciously, it imprinted its adage on my brain, just like the poem I memorized—and then forgot when it counted—for my third-grade play. I remember that, too.
    Over the thirty-plus years I’ve been writing true crime, I’ve come across a few homicide cases that I never expected to see solved. Most of these were committed by serial killers whose crimes almost always evolve from stranger-to-stranger encounters. Two people who have never met before cross paths, a tragedy occurs, and the one who is left behind can no longer tell what happened. The other disappears, leaving precious few clues.
    Unless a fingerprint is on file with AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) computers, or there is a known suspect, there is no way to link it to anyone. Today DNA evidence can usually be absolutely matched, but before the 1990s, body fluids and hair follicles were only rarely preserved because no one knew everything that DNA could tell us then. But DNA can sometimes be found even on decades-old evidence, a propitious accident.
    The cases I’ve hoped to see successfully closed tend to be those most difficult to unravel. Families are left to mourn but have no answers about why someone they loved very much was killed, and they may never know who the murderer was. It is galling to think of a brutal killer having the last laugh on detectives. But it happens.
    The following cases are true, of course, but they surprised at least two generations of detectives who passed through their assignment to the Crimes Against Persons Unit of the Seattle Police Department. And it certainly surprised me. Many of the detectives retired with a sense of frustration that they hadn’t been able to find out more about the second murder, and, worse, that they had never located the person who killed the first victim.
    Usually, there are patterns of behavior and similarities in victim types that help investigators connect a suspect to different crimes. But not this time.
    I could never have imagined the denouement that came after three decades and made headlines in 2008.

 
    Unless we live in sprawling apartment complexes or thick-walled condos, most of us think we know our neighbors pretty well. But can we ever be sure? If we were truly able to see inside the convoluted pathways of someone else’s brain, to know all there is to know about his or her inner life, his or her real life, we might realize how mistaken our first perceptions were.
    Julie Costello was one of those people who lived a secret life far removed from her origins: the attractive young woman’s very name wasn’t even her own. If a predator hadn’t ended the world she’d built for herself, her carefully constructed masquerade might never have been revealed. She wasn’t a wanted felon or a fugitive. Not really. She’d harmed no one: She did only what she felt she had to, and her life was happy until a tragic encounter on a warm September night.
    Julie Costello had the great misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and, because she was there, she became prey to a killer.
    She wasn’t really Julie Costello at all, but her abductor didn’t know that, nor did the detectives who carried out theinvestigation into her fate know—at least, not for a long time.
    The twenty-three-year-old blond woman’s Seattle acquaintances knew her as Julie Costello. She worked as a clerk at a 7-Eleven on Beacon Hill, one of Seattle’s oldest neighborhoods, where families of myriad ethnic heritages live—usually in harmony.
    Julie worked the graveyard shift, alone, from 11:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m. Clerking in a small neighborhood wasn’t considered very dangerous, but that all changed with the advent of stores that were open around the clock. 7-Elevens and other chains open twenty-four hours soon became tempting targets for armed robbers. Since they are usually the only businesses open in the wee hours of the morning, and they usually have a