Mortal Danger

bullets hit me in my thigh and my buttocks.”
    That had been the absolute last straw. Frankie had done some prison time—for the crimes against Maggie and also for holding two parole officers hostage.
    “I never saw Frankie again,” Maggie Cochran said, “and that was just fine with me!”
    Maybe Lee Lundquist was right about Frankie Aldalotti. He certainly sounded like a dangerous man with an uncontrollable temper. Ciesynski needed something with Aldalotti’s DNA on it to send to the crime lab for comparison. He and Greg Mixsell drove to the latest address listed for the suspect.
    Casually, Mike walked past the house, pretending he was looking for an address. There was a white Chevrolet pickup truck parked in front of the residence. He spotted three cigarette butts lying in the street just next to the driver’s door. Without skipping a beat, he reached down and scooped them up. To an onlooker, he seemed to be tying his shoelace, but he held what might be vital evidence in his hand. After he was back in the detective’s “sneaker” car, he slipped the butts into an envelope and sealed and labeled it.
    If the traces of saliva on the cigarette butts matched the DNA that was being tested on Sara Beth’s clothes and in the medical examiner’s samples, they would have evidence against Aldalotti.
    It seemed to be a shoo-in.
    Months passed, but the Washington State Patrol forensic lab had a long backup of testing to do on more recent cases. It was September 18, 2006, when Mike Ciesynski finally received a phone call from William Stubbs, a forensic scientist employed there.
    “We have a match,” he said.
    Ciesynski held his breath. He expected it to be Frankie Aldalotti.
    But it was no shoo-in. Frankie Aldalotti might have been an undesirable boyfriend, but he was not the man who had ejaculated on Sara Beth’s clothing and on her person.
    It was a major disappointment for the cold case detective. Everything had seemed to fit perfectly. Stubbs said that he had been able to obtain a DNA typing profile from one of the anal swabs at the medical examiner’s office. “We searched it against CODIS [Combined DNA Index System] and it matches the DNA of a Clarence E. Williams. Now we need a reference sample from Williams.”
    At that point, Mike Ciesynski didn’t know who Clarence Williams was, but he located the old case file and read about Laura Baylis’s murder. She had been abducted and killed thirteen weeks after Sara Beth died. He ticked off the similarities between Laura and Sara Beth’s homicides.
    Ciesynski read that a witness in the Baylis case, Mercina Adderly, had told detectives that Clarence Williamshad talked about “wanting to hurt someone” sometime “in the summer” of 1978. Ciesynski wondered if that was before Sara Beth’s murder or before Laura Baylis’s murder.
    According to the Washington State Corrections Department, Clarence Williams was currently housed in a prison in Monroe. Mike Ciesynski made plans to pay Williams a visit, but first he compared the two cases, detail by detail. There were, indeed, similarities:
Both were attractive young females.
They had both been stabbed multiple times, almost equally divided between their breasts and their upper backs. Laura had suffered nineteen stab wounds. Sara Beth had sustained twenty-one. The patterns and number of stabs were almost ritualistic.
Each had been attacked on a weekend.
Both were Caucasian.
Both appeared to have been seized in one place, killed in another, and left in a closet-sized space, with little blood evident.
Initially, there appeared to have been no conclusive signs of sexual attack in either murder.
    There were, of course, other variables that didn’t match. Laura was a world traveler, used to taking care of herself, and Sara Beth a naïve girl in her midteens. The MO of the crimes matched—but the neighborhoods where the young women were abducted were more than twenty miles apart. The distance from Ballard to Beacon Hill was significant. Ballard was in northwest Seattle, while Beacon Hill was in the southeast. One of the most convincing ways to link asingle killer to a pattern is finding that he picks the same type of victim, uses the same MO, and operates within a specific area.
    But not always. Gary Ridgway, the “Green River Killer,” usually stayed near Sea-Tac Airport or the Aurora strip to find his victims, and disposed of them in rugged, wild areas inside a haphazard “circle” around Seattle. But Harvey