No Regrets

a small child lay facedown on the beach near the river as it lapped against the beach. As they drew closer, they realized with sinking hearts that it was a little girl. She was fully clothed, and it looked as if she had drowned, as unlikely as it was that she could have wandered so far out on this lonely shore. And she certainly wasn’t dressed suitably to be on a boat’s deck, but she must have somehow fallen overboard.
    The tugboat men radioed the St. Helens office of the Oregon State Police to tell troopers there about their sad discovery. Corporal H. D. Watson and Lieutenant Benninghoff were dispatched at once to the scene. The child still rested where the witnesses had found her, her face in the shallow water. Drowned. But when the state police investigators rolled her over, they saw a large jagged cut in the middle of her forehead. There was blood in the sand where her head had rested. Eighty-one feet south of the child, Watson and Benninghoff observed a large, pink, oblong bundle near the water’s edge. The condition of the child and the shape of the bundle were ominous enough for them to put in an immediate call to the State Police Crime Lab for assistance before they proceeded further. Evidence that might be there could easily wash away in the river water if they weren’t extremely careful to preserve it.
    At 4:38 P.M. , Lieutenant Robert Pinnick and his crew of criminalists arrived at the desolate spot. The sun was a pale shadow in the western sky as it set, and they carried auxiliary lights to help them explore the windswept beach.
    Bob Pinnick unwrapped the large bundle on the sandonly enough to see what was inside. And it was what all the men there suspected. The blankets were a shroud hiding the nude body of an adult female. As unlikely as it might seem, the child might have drowned accidentally, but the discovery of the woman’s body meant they were now working a homicide.
    Oregon State Medical Examiner Dr. William Brady joined the first investigators on the beach, and knelt to pull the blanket further apart to view the woman. Then he looked up at the circle of investigators and said rather quietly, “She’s been decapitated.”
    Within a matter of minutes, it was completely dark. Only two days had elapsed since the shortest day of the whole year, and the murky shoreline was probably one of the more difficult crime scenes the officers would ever be called upon to process. However, they set to work, using their powerful floodlights to illuminate the grim job before them.
    They found no identification papers at all near the two bodies, but they felt confident that they would eventually be able to identify them. The child’s clothing was apparently intact, and her garments bore some manufacturers’ labels. Although the woman was naked, her body was wrapped in sheets and blankets with distinctive patterns that could probably be traced. In addition, they found a white towel near the woman’s body and a pink plastic necklace on the sand near the little girl.
    After they had spent many hours in the frigid December air gleaning every bit of physical evidence they could, the investigators released the bodies to be taken to the Multnomah County Morgue in Portland to await autopsy.
    It was now early in the morning of Christmas Eve. The gruesome task before the detectives was completely incongruouswith the spirit of the season. Who could have taken the lives of the young woman and the little girl and then tossed their bodies away so heedlessly? Whoever it was, he (or they—or perhaps even her) had left precious little behind of himself. There seemed to be no question about the criminal intent on the part of the person who had disposed of the bodies. While it was possible that the child had drowned accidentally and that her head wounds had come from the rocks along the shore, there was no plausible explanation for the woman’s body being in the state it was—other than homicide.
    At the Medical Examiner’s Office, forensic pathologists estimated that the woman had been between seventeen and thirty years old. She was probably in her twenties. She had been between five feet two, and five feet, four inches tall and had weighed about 125 pounds. Clearly, her killer had wanted to delay any identification of her body—which seemed to suggest that she had some connection to him. The severing of her head from her body had been accomplished neatly, so neatly that it was possible that the killer had had some