Mortal Danger

that?”
    “I don’t know his name, but he was the second man in the tavern that Sunday night—the twenty-fourth. He was the man in the security photo.
    “He was much heavier and taller than Williams,” Wilkins added.
    Wilkins testified that he’d known Clarence Williams slightly before the kidnapping incident. He’d played on a local softball team. “If it was Clarence Williams in the tavern that night, I would have recognized him, and he probably would have recognized me.”
    In the end, it didn’t really matter whether or not Clarence had been the man in the tavern. It was much more important that he had been in the 7-Eleven, and he was still connected to the victim in so many ways. The prosecution team wondered if the jurors would see that.
     
    The jurors deliberated for almost four days. The vital question was identification. Were they to believe the report of Dr. Swindler, their own eyes, and the plethora of circumstantial evidence, along with the criminalist’s testimony on the hair matches?
    Or were they to believe the defense contention that Clarence Williams was merely an unfortunate victim of mistaken identity?
    When they returned to the courtroom, their verdict was that Williams was guilty and they convicted him on all three counts.
    Judge Holman studied the jury’s verdict, and what shedid next stunned the gallery and the attorneys present. For the first time in her nine years on the bench, Nancy Holman reversed a verdict!
    She hadn’t been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of Clarence Williams’s guilt, and she wanted to be sure that an innocent man wasn’t convicted.
    She ordered a new trial.
    Judge Holman’s reversal of the jury’s verdict was a shock and tremendous disappointment to Lieutenant Bob Holter’s crew of detectives who had worked so hard in the investigation. It also was in total disagreement with the King County Prosecutor’s Office. Judge Holman asked prosecutor Norm Maleng to continue investigating Laura Baylis’s murder, but the prosecution team was absolutely convinced the right man had been convicted. Holman set a new trial date, but it was a moot point; the Court of Appeals affirmed Clarence Williams’s conviction.
    “I feel like I’m being made an example for somebody else’s crime,” he said bitterly as he was sentenced to life in prison on all three charges. At the time, that meant three consecutive sentences of just over thirteen years each. His first parole hearing wouldn’t come until about 2016.
    Most people forgot about Clarence Williams; he’d never been a high-profile felon who garnered tall headlines. And he’d been sentenced to all those life terms. He virtually vanished behind prison walls and was eventually transferred to a Midwestern penitentiary when Washington State’s prisons became overcrowded.
    Laura Baylis, who had lived her short life as she pleased, who wandered happily throughout the country she chose toembrace as her own, lay buried in her native England. I wrote the story of her life—and her death—for one of the fact-detective magazines for which I was a regular stringer covering Northwest crimes.
     
    There were an inordinately large number of murders in Seattle in 1978, far more than the city would see after the millennium, and I wrote about almost all of them. Overworked homicide detectives worked on their unsolved cases whenever they had a break. There were no cold case squads in the seventies or eighties, possibly because it was rare for new physical evidence to show up, and there would be no DNA to match until well into the nineties.
    I, too, put this case on a back shelf in my mind, but I always felt that none of us had heard the whole story of Clarence Williams or of Laura Baylis. Someday, sometime, I believed the whole story would surface.
    Maybe then I could update it.
    Was Laura a chance victim of a man who “wanted to hurt somebody” because his marriage had shattered?
    Or did Clarence have more secrets to unveil?
    Was Clarence as innocent as his judge believed?
    Was Laura taken away by someone else, someone who never surfaced?
     
    Another case has tormented me, staying with me throughout the decades, popping into my mind unbidden. People sometimes ask me if I get sad and depressed writing in the true-crime genre. With some of the cases, the answer isyes. That’s particularly true when homicide victims are young, many of them as young as my own five children at the time I covered the cases. It was almost