Mortal Danger

of the man in the photo.
    In a lineup held on October 23, Clarence Williams was identified by the man who had gone there to purchase cigarettes.
    “Number three is the person I saw in the 7-Eleven store on the morning of September twenty-fifth,” he said.
    The bartender at the nearby 19th Hole tavern picked Williams as the man she had poured wine for around midnight on the 24th. A patron who was in the tavern that night picked Williams out of the lineup, too.
    They obtained a search warrant for Mercina Adderly’s car. The woman who had driven him to work most days had lent Williams her car on several occasions during the vital time period when his own car was inoperable. She couldn’t remember exactly which days he had asked to borrow it but said she would try to think back.
    As they processed her car, they found some long, blondish-brown Caucasian hairs in the trunk. Mercina was black, and so were Clarence Williams and his wife. Criminalists, using a scanning electron microscope, found that these hairs were alike in class and characteristics to Laura Baylis’s hair. This made them a probable match—but not a positive one.
    Again, in 1978, DNA was still a brave new world in forensic science.
    Mercina Adderly told detectives that Clarence had been suffering great emotional upheaval after his wife left.
    “He said things that worried me,” Mercina said. “Justbefore that girl disappeared, he was very distraught and he told me he wanted to ‘hurt someone.’ I didn’t think he meant it literally, and I finally put it down to his state of mind.”
    “How long before?” Hank Gruber asked.
    “It was summertime—I remember that—but I couldn’t say if it was August, or even July.”
    It was fitting perhaps that it was Halloween when formal charges of first-degree robbery, first-degree kidnapping, and first-degree murder were filed against Clarence Williams in the Laura Anne Baylis homicide.
    The man who’d once wanted to buy a seemingly haunted house didn’t see the irony in his being charged on the spookiest holiday of the year.
     
    The first problems the prosecution would face at trial were the blurry security camera photos. The State had to convince a jury that they were of Clarence Williams, and they were sure the defense would quibble over that.
    Professor Daris Swindler of the University of Washington’s Anthropology Department studied pictures taken of Clarence Williams and compared them to the photographs of the man caught by the camera. Swindler often helped police identify victims or suspects, sometimes working with only a skull denuded of all flesh and tissue.
    Now he took meticulous measurements to scale of the security photos and photos of Clarence Williams. The measured distance from the two subjects’ ears to the mandible (jaw), the length of the noses, the placement of cheekbones, the width of the foreheads.
    Swindler’s conclusion based on comparing the facial characteristics was that all of the photos were of the same person: Clarence Williams.
    Williams went on trial in mid-January 1979, in Superior Court Judge Nancy Ann Holman’s courtroom. It was to be a trial with one of the most unusual conclusions I’ve ever heard.
    Williams defended himself by telling the jurors that the person in the picture was not him; it couldn’t have been.
    “I was home asleep at the time they say it happened,” he said earnestly. “But once I saw the picture, I was sure they would come and talk to me.”
    He admitted that he had been in the house where the body was found because he was thinking about buying it.
    “But I hadn’t been in that house for a long time before that girl disappeared. I’ve been in the convenience store on Beacon Hill a few times, too, but I never recall seeing any clerk named Laura or Julie or whoever she was. I just didn’t know her at all.”
    The defense was not without ammunition. One of their strongest witnesses was Larry Wilkins, an athletic director for the Seattle Parks Department, and brother of Lenny Wilkins, then coach of the Seattle Sonics, the champion basketball team that was in the midst of its glory days.
    It was Larry Wilkins who had seen two suspicious men in the 19th Hole tavern on the night Laura disappeared. He had identified the second man as the one in the vital camera pictures. But he testified that that man was not Clarence Williams.
    “You saw someone you knew sometime later at the Veterans Hospital, didn’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Who was