Mortal Danger

United States.
    On August 7, a woman walked into the Public Safety Building and asked to talk to a homicide detective. She seemed distraught and said that something had been bothering her for a long time.
    Detective George Marberg ushered her into an interview room.
    “I live on Fifteenth and Northwest Fiftieth,” she began. “On July first, or very early on the second, I heard my dog barking at something outside, and I couldn’t get him to be quiet. Then I noticed a car in front of my house. I saw twoyoung men and they were either carrying a young woman or helping her into the car. I just thought that she’d had too much to drink at the tavern, but then I got to thinking about the girl they found in the garage.”
    It might have been just the lead that Detective Sergeant Don Cameron’s crew had been waiting for, but they were disappointed when the woman said she suffered from glaucoma, which rendered her eyesight only marginal. She’d been able to see that the men had been about the same height and dressed in dark clothing, but her failing vision had blurred their features.
    It might make sense. At 130 pounds and in good physical shape, Sara Beth could have put up a good fight against one man; she would have had little chance against two.
    But why? Her autopsy hadn’t indicated that a sexual attack had been the motive. She wasn’t robbed. She wasn’t involved in drugs. And she had been perfectly honest in her relationships with the young men she dated. She hadn’t told her mother, her sister, or her friends that she was afraid of anyone. Her killer or killers had to have been consumed by an abnormal mental state, perhaps driven by an obsession kept hidden until that midnight as July 1 turned into July 2.
    The only motive that really made sense was that Sara Beth had been murdered by someone in a mighty rage; the “overkill” from so many stab wounds pointed to an out-of-control killer.
    Enough residents had heard that one “scream” or “shout” close to 12:30 a.m. near the bus stop where Sara Beth got off to convince detectives that she had been seized almost as soon as she left the pseudoprotection of thestreetlight. She had then been dragged into the alley, losing her purse and clogs along the way.
    But there was no blood in the alley. There were two pints of blood still unaccounted for. She had probably been grabbed, her mouth covered after she managed to scream only once, and forced into a car. The blood that would have coursed from her wounds was undoubtedly in her killer’s car or truck. If that vehicle could be located, surely traces of her blood would still be present. No amount of cleaning could remove them. Nor was it likely that her murderer had avoided getting blood on himself and his clothing.
    But they had no suspect. They had no vehicle with suspicious stains.
    Don Cameron and Mike Tando clocked the mileage from the alley to the tire garage. It was 3.1 miles and the trip took five and a half minutes at normal driving speeds in average traffic. It was almost a certainty that Sara Beth was unconscious or dead when she was placed in the restroom.
    Detectives believed that someone other than the killer knew about his crime; it didn’t seem something that he could keep to himself. They believed he had probably been violent in the past and would almost certainly be violent again—unless he was stopped.
    And that belief disturbed them mightily.
     
    I wrote the article about Sara Beth Lundquist’s unsolved murder thirty years ago, and I asked that anyone who might have new information contact Detective Sergeant Don Cameron and Detective Mike Tando in the Public SafetyBuilding in Seattle. There was a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
    Along with many other investigators who worked so hard to solve Sara Beth’s murder, Don Cameron is dead. Mike Tando’s Afro is long since tamed, and he has retired from the Seattle Police Department. None of the men and women who were assigned to some part of the Lundquist case are active police officers now. Even the Public Safety Building is gone, reduced to rubble to make way for a newer building. I have a chunk of marble from the “very modern” structure where I worked as a rookie cop. It has a treasured place in my garden now.
    But over all these years, no one who followed this case has ever forgotten Sara Beth Lundquist, even though it seemed there would be no answers. Her mother, Lynne, often wondered if she