Mortal Danger

impossible for me to research and write about them without becoming emotionally involved. I never said to their parents, “I know how you feel,” because I didn’t; I could hardly imagine. How could I dare to presume to know how they felt?
    Many of the national and worldwide headlines in 1978 sounded very much like today’s news—only the celebrity names and songs were different. Thirty years flying by like dry leaves in the wind. Animal House drew large audiences. The Bee Gees were hugely popular with “Stayin’ Alive” and other hit songs from the smash movies Saturday Night Fever and Grease. It seemed that disco dancing would go on forever. John Travolta’s hair was thick and shiny black then and his body was chiseled.
    The first test-tube baby was delivered alive and well in England, and Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert were at the top of their games.
    That same year was also a year of infamy and horror in many ways. The “Reverend” Jim Jones convinced nine hundred of his devout followers to commit suicide in Guyana by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide, and his guards killed a California congressman and network reporters and photographers who had come, too late, to investigate what was going on; Hustler publisher Larry Flynt was shot and left a paraplegic; police found the bodies of twenty-one young men under John Wayne Gacy’s house in Chicago; David Berkowitz, “Son of Sam,” was sentenced to 365 years in prison; and Ted Bundy was recaptured in Pensacola, Florida, after his escape from a Colorado jail.
    America was saturated with serial killers, it seemed—but that term had yet to be coined. That would take another five years. After I’d met with detectives from all over America to try to catch this “new” kind of killer, I suggested to my then-editor that I write a book about serial murder. He said, “Don’t bother. It’s a fad like the hulahoop or trampolines. By the time you finish a book, nobody will be interested in serial killers.”
    He was, of course, wrong.
    As always, 1978 had its share of unrest and insurrection in far-off nations. None of the foreign news had much impact on a young girl who had her whole life ahead of her. But she worried about those people in her world who were unhappy and she tried to help them.
    Her name was Sara Beth Lundquist, and she was the kind of teenager that any parents would be proud of: innocent, a little naïve, concerned for other people, a lover of animals, and as freshly beautiful as an apple blossom that had just unfolded.
    Sara Beth was at the center of one of the more baffling unsolved cases in Seattle’s criminal history. I’ve kept her photographs at the top of my “unsolved” file, hoping that one day there would be an end to her story, and that end would have to be the arrest of someone yet unknown.
    Sometime in the summer of 2007, I was signing books at a huge Costco store, and a man stopped by to say he hoped for the same thing I did, for a long-dormant case to be solved.
    “Which case is that?” I asked.
    He began to say the name of his niece, but he didn’t even have to finish his sentence. It was Sara Beth. She hadbeen on my mind too, and I always remembered her in the summer. Her family had waited so long with no answers. I told her uncle that I hoped one day to write the end of her story.
     
    Sara Beth’s story began shortly after midnight on Sunday, July 2, 1978, and no one could have foreseen how long it would take justice to arrive for her.
    In 1978, the Fourth of July came on a Tuesday, and a lot of people were taking a four-day weekend, finding excuses not to come to work on Monday. As often happens in the Northwest on Independence Day, the weather looked as though it would fail to cooperate and the weekend before the big day was marked by gray clouds and drizzle. Those who had planned picnics started to look for alternative locations and kids who had a stash of illegal fireworks worried that they would get too soggy to light.
    Sara Beth lived in the Ballard neighborhood in the northwest part of Seattle, a proud and venerable community where there are more Scandinavians per square block than anyplace else in Washington. Many of its residents make their livings commercial fishing, heading up to the dangerous waters of Alaska. Boating is probably the main avocation in Ballard. During rush hour, the Ballard Locks are jammed with motorboats and sailboats traveling between landlocked Lake Washington to the east and