Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen
No Regrets

No Regrets

Titel: No Regrets Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Ann Rule
Vom Netzwerk:
problems with Teresa.
    The Sterlings had been afraid that Teresa was smoking marijuana, and possibly using LSD. They had been at their wits’ end trying to stop her from running away. Littlejohn had talked with Teresa—to no avail—before her family moved back to Georgia.
    “I remember when she ran away from Fayetteville last June 8,” Littlejohn recalled. “The family asked me to do a ‘locate and determine welfare’ on Teresa because they thought she was headed here. They didn’t have much hope of getting her to go back home. But they wanted to know that she was safe.”
    Littlejohn had found Teresa back in Bellevue, and he’d talked to her. Then he called her parents and said that she was all right. He’d tried to keep tabs on her, although she moved around so much that it wasn’t easy. Her parents hadn’t reported her as a runaway; they had just asked for information, and he had no cause to pick her up unless shebroke the law. When Bob Littlejohn responded to the call about the skull in the woods, the picture of Teresa Sterling’s piquant little face hadn’t even crossed his mind.
    The physical similarity, the identical blouse, the fact that Teresa Sterling had not been seen by her good friend for months, all pointed to the likelihood that it was her body. Littlejohn was saddened to realize now why there had been no runaway or missing report put out on her. Her parents had simply given up trying to corral her; they had tried everything, and then they had hoped and prayed that tough love might work. Short of locking her up, they hadn’t been able to keep her at home, but hoped finally that maybe she would come home if she got hungry or lonely enough. Littlejohn had spent many off-duty hours trying to help Teresa, too. But no one had been able to convince her to go back to the parents who loved her.
    Roy Gleason had the onerous task of notifying Teresa Sterling’s stepmother that he was investigating the homicide of a young girl. “There is a possibility that the victim might be your daughter,” he said gently. “We have to identify her. Would you have the names of dentists who might have cared for Teresa while you lived in the Bellevue area?”
    The shocked woman said that Teresa had seen two dentists in Bellevue—one of whom had put in a gold crown. The dentist who had done the crown work gave detectives her dental records, which they carried to the medical examiner’s office. The crown looked to be identical to the tooth in question. To be absolutely sure, the investigators contacted forensic odontologist Dr. Bruce Rothwell of the Mason Clinic in Seattle.
    Dr. Rothwell looked at the chart and at the gold crownwork. “There’s no question,” he said. “They are identical. Your victim is Teresa Sterling.”
    It was a start. Now, three days after the body’s discovery, they knew the name of their victim, and something of her lifestyle. But they still had vast areas to fill in. Teresa had left Georgia alive and well on June 8, and made it safely to Bellevue. What they had to do now was to attempt to trace Teresa’s movements between June 12 and December 7. Six months.
    They knew that she had undoubtedly been alive for a good part of the summer, but they still could not narrow down the time period when she probably was killed. All they had to go on was the fact that she’d failed to meet Nancy Dillon in California—but that could have been simply because she’d changed her mind. She was a capricious girl who went anywhere the wind blew.
    Nancy was able to help out more. She looked at her calendar and said she could isolate the few days when she had expected to see Teresa.
    “Teresa had a boyfriend named Jeff,* and they promised to call me at my grandmother’s house in California around July 4—just as soon as they were close. But I didn’t hear from them. I even called my mother and asked her if she knew where Teresa was—but no one had seen her. I didn’t get back to Bellevue until the end of August. Teresa was still gone. I thought maybe Teresa and Jeff did make it to California, but they didn’t call me. I figured they might still be still down there.
    “Teresa could have stayed at my house,” Nancy continued. “We offered her a place to stay when she showed up on June 12—but she refused. She just planned to stay around with different people. She didn’t like to be tied down to anyone.”
    Once the search for Teresa’s friends began, the detectives were deluged with

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher