No Regrets

young woman. Detectives Marv Skeen and Gary Trent attended the postmortem, and listened intently as Eisele outlined many of the facts that can be elicited from forensic pathology.
    “She was very young,” Eisele said. “Probably about thirteen to fourteen—possibly as young as eleven—or as old as sixteen. Caucasian. She was between five feet one and five feet, five inches tall—slender—and she had medium length light brown hair.”
    “Cause of death?” Trent asked.
    Eisele shook his head. “There’s no way to tell. I can only tell you that there’s been no fracturing of her bones. No trauma to any bone, not even the skull. The internal organs have decomposed. If she was shot or stabbed, it penetrated the soft tissue—and that’s gone. If she was strangled—same problem.”
    The dead girl could have succumbed to a bullet, a stabbing, a strangling, or suffocation, but there was no way left to say absolutely what had happened.
    The motive for the killing was obvious, grotesquely apparent. Her skeleton had been found in the “classic” rape position, on its back with legs spread wide. Dr. Eisele found that a branch had been savagely shoved into thevaginal vault, effecting both a symbolic and a legal act of rape.
    It’s not unusual to find all manner of foreign objects in the vaginas of women who have been killed by someone in a sexual rage: bottles, umbrellas, sticks, and branches are “signatures” of impotent killers or of rapists so full of anger that they are not satisfied just to violate the bodies of their victims. They are also compelled to leave something behind to demonstrate to the person who discovers a body or to the police how powerful they are. It is an act hard for the normal mind to comprehend. In this case, any residual semen that might have been deposited during forced intercourse was, of course, gone, lost to the rain, wind, and processes of decomposition.
    Following the autopsy, Roy Gleason gave information to local newspapers describing the clothing found with the victim, and her very general description. They were looking for a missing girl whose dental records might be compared with the teeth of their victim. Without the help of the public, there would be no place else to go with the case. The scant information that the detective team had managed to put together about the victim was broadcast to the thirteen western states—and then more widely—through NCIC (National Crime Information Center) computers. Bellevue police were soon inundated with responses. As there always are, there were hundreds of teenage girls missing in the United States. They received queries from as far away as New York State, as well as from California, Oregon, and other counties in Washington State.
    Frantic parents whose teenage daughters had run away, or been taken away, had filed missing reports on girls who, at least on the surface, resembled the unknown victim. None of them matched Bellevue’s unknown victim.
    On the morning of December 10, a call came in from the mother of a teenage daughter named Nancy Dillon.* The family lived in the Bellevue area.
    “I’ve read the article in the paper,” she began, “and I think you should talk to my daughter. Nancy has a friend, a girl named Teresa Sterling. Teresa was a runaway from Georgia. We haven’t seen her for a couple of months.”
    The Bellevue detectives were about to get a tremendous boost from some rebellious teenagers, a group who often resent the police. Roy Gleason assured Nancy that she and any of her friends who were willing to talk to him could be assured that his main—and only—concern was a homicide investigation. For the time he worked to find the answers about why a teenager had ended up dead in the woods, he would not ask witnesses about their drug or alcohol use, shoplifting, truancy, running away, or any other offenses. He had to gain the trust of his informants, or he might as well quit. And he was not about to do that. He had a feeling that the dead girl was Teresa Sterling, but he couldn’t prove it by himself.
    Nancy Dillon was most cooperative. She said she had been worried about Teresa Sterling after she seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth without telling anyone she was leaving.
    “Tell me a little about Teresa,” Gleason began. “Try to go back and fill me in on her lifestyle, her friends.”
    The story that came out was tragic, but not unfamiliar. Teresa Caroline Sterling had been born on December