Mortal Danger

“couldn’t remember.”
    She would never go to college, never fall in love and get married, never have children or grandchildren—never have a chance to live out the seventy-plus years that she might have expected. All the Christmases, Easters, birthdays that should have been ahead, washed away like letters carved into a sandy beach.
    Kristin Richardson read the letter that Lynne Carlson had written, while Williams sat without expression or acknowledgment: “‘There will be no language to describe the depths of my grief…no words to describe my pain in seeing my other children suffer. You took the life of a sweet and innocent child, but you can never take her spirit or her laughter, or her precious love, from me.’”
    Clarence Williams declined to make a statement before he was sentenced. To paraphrase him, “What could he say?”
    On December 17, 2007, Clarence Williams was sentenced to 361 months to life in prison, to run consecutively to the eight years he still had to serve for Laura Baylis’s murder. It was, for a sixty-two-year-old man, a life sentence.
    Clarence Williams came to Seattle from Milwaukee and lived there four years. Mike Ciesynski is still looking at other long-dormant homicides that occurred in the Seattle area during that time frame. And he has alerted Milwaukee authorities that if they consider Williams a possible suspect, they may find answers to their unsolved cases in the sixties and seventies.
    For Sara Beth Lundquist and for Laura Baylis, there is, at long last, a bleak justice. The man who abducted and murdered them will never walk free again. And yet he lives and breathes, eats, sleeps, watches television, exercises, may have friends and family.
    And they do not. Although Laura and Sara Beth never met, they share a sisterhood. I suspect that each of them would have fought to save the other if there had been two of them facing a violent sexual predator.
    But neither of them had a chance.

NOT SAFE AT HOME

 
    This is an alarming story because most of us feel safe when we arrive home and bolt the doors to the outside world, and, even if we live alone, home is supposed to be a safe harbor. As we saw in the Mauck case, that isn’t always true.
    My own “security system” begins with three very large Bernese mountain dogs who are devoted to me and are very suspicious of strangers. I have an alarm system, too, but their low growl and angry barking is the earliest warning. Not to mention my “attack cat,” Bunnie, who thinks he is a dog and is tougher than any canine.
    I’ll admit that I want to frighten readers just a little as I tell my most memorable true crimes—but only to make you all wary and prepared with an almost automatic plan of what to do if someone stalks you or attacks you. Those who survive sudden attacks are invariably those who react within seconds. Rapists and killers don’t want to attract attention; their favorite targets are would-be victims who are stunned into passivity and silence until it is too late to save themselves.
    The woman who was watched surreptitiously andstalked in the following case would never have suspected who the phantom in her world was, and that was when she lost her advantage. Without really noticing the date when this investigation occurred, I was a little shocked to realize that I had inadvertently chosen a crime that had taken place on the very same July 4th four-day holiday in 1978 when Sara Beth Lundquist vanished. The victims had no connection at all, save the date that each encountered a different sadistic sociopath.
    Strange. I have no idea why I happened to go back to that weekend thirty years ago. I picked these cases because they fit a pattern—and didn’t look at the date. This case—and Sara Beth’s murder—happened years ago, but similar crimes still occur somewhere in America every day.
    I hope “Not Safe at Home” will make my readers more cautious and enable them to file an instinctual response deep in their thought processes until it’s so solidly implanted that it becomes like a tattoo on the brain.

 
    Traia Carr found herself at a crossroads in her life when she was in her fifties. She’d never expected her marriage to end in divorce. After all, they’d been together for thirty years, and it seemed they would celebrate their golden wedding anniversary together. But life can change suddenly and take sharp turns when we least expect it. Even though the divorce was amicable and she and her ex kept in