Mortal Danger

Beth had dated other youths, including Ricco Sanchez*—whom she’d also met at the disco—and two brothers, sons of a wealthy family that had a business in the north end: Benny and Frankie Aldalotti.*
    According to Minda, Sara Beth was drawn to foreign-looking youths with black hair, dark eyes, and tan complexions.
    But Nouri Habid,* the Iranian boy, was the only one she was serious about. She dated the American teenagers on a casual basis, and Minda couldn’t remember any of them being jealous.
    Sara Beth wasn’t perfect, and Minda admitted that she smoked a cigarette once in a while and occasionally sipped a drink, although she never finished the whole thing.
    “She wouldn’t touch drugs, though,” Minda said. “Not even marijuana. She said it made her sleepy when she tried it once, but she mostly just didn’t believe in it.”
    Lynne Carlson said that Sara Beth was very careful tofollow curfew rules set up in their home. “She always called me if she would be even a half an hour late.”
    Don Cameron’s team checked juvenile records, but there were no hits on either Sara Beth or Minda. They were good, normal, “straight” kids.
     
    At 8:15 on Monday morning, July 3, Don Cameron, Mike Tando, and ID tech Marsha Jackson attended Sara Beth’s autopsy. Jackson took Sara Beth’s fingerprints so that she could differentiate them from the many latents she had lifted in the tire garage.
    Sara Beth was five foot four and a half and weighed 130 pounds. Dr. Eisele found that she had been stabbed through her clothing twenty-one times. Her killer had plunged his knife into her upper back, the midline of the chest, and the top of her head. She had numerous defense wounds: palm cuts and bruised knuckles, as if she had fought her killer. There was one through-and-through wound in the soft tissue of her right forearm.
    The cause of her death was exsanguination: bleeding to death. The knife had perforated her aorta, her lungs, her liver, and the pericardial sac surrounding her heart. Her skull had been fractured by the head wounds with resultant bone chipping, and another thrust had sliced bone off the spinal column.
    Whoever had done this to her had been full of rage.
    Eisele commented that it would have taken a killer with tremendous strength to inflict wounds of such force and depth. He was unable to tell if the murderer had been right-or left-handed, as he had reversed the blade in successive thrusts.
    “One thing I’m sure of,” the ME said. “She wasn’t killed in the restroom. We can account for less than a pint of blood on the floor, less than a pint in her clothing, and another pint in the body cavity. She lost two pints more than that; it’s probably in the killer’s car or at the site of the actual murder.”
    “Did she die instantly?” Tando asked.
    “Almost. She could have lived for a very short time, but five of her wounds were potentially fatal if she didn’t have immediate medical attention.”
    And no one had come to help her as she lay mortally wounded. It was likely that she was already dead when her killer hid her in the dark cubicle.
    It was Dr. Eisele’s opinion that Sara Beth had not been raped, or, rather, that her killer had not finished an act of rape. There was no evidence of spermatozoa or semen in her vaginal vault. There was no damage whatsoever to her pelvic area and no bruises on the inside of her thighs.
    That was some small comfort to her family.
    The investigators wondered if Sara Beth’s attacker had hated her for some obscure reason and killed her in an act of perverted revenge.
    But who could have been that angry at a sweet fifteen-year-old girl? It was far more likely that her path had crossed that of a sadist on the prowl.
    Detective Mike Tando was given principal responsibility for the case; it was one of the rash of homicides that hit the Seattle Police Department in early July 1978, and they didn’t have enough detectives to put two of them on thecase full-time. The young detective with the wild Afro found himself working twenty-hour days for almost a week, running down the deluge of leads that came in once the story hit the evening TV news and the front pages of Seattle papers.
    Tando asked the investigators in the Sex Crimes Unit to go through their files and look for any cases of assault that seemed to mimic the MO of the baffling murder. They did, but they didn’t find many with similarities to the murder of Sara Beth Lundquist.
    While Tando fielded the