No Regrets

calls from people who wanted to help—both teenagers and their parents. Gossip moved through the teenage community as if it was being passed on by jungle drums. Most of them had kept secrets from their own parents and their friends’ parents, but this was different. Teresa was dead. Murdered. That made them all feel vulnerable. They wondered if her killer was still walking among them.
    Teresa had been a party girl, attending every “kegger” and beach party she heard about. During the previous summer, she had worked only one day. She had lived a kind of hand-to-mouth existence, dependent on “the kindness of strangers” and her wits. She borrowed clothes from friends, and ate her meals wherever she was at the moment.
    Apparently, Teresa had stayed a very short time with her own eighteen-year-old sister and then with family friends and often with people she had just met, most of them adults. That left scores of people to be questioned. The investigators found a pair of single male adults who had taken her in for a while, but that was early in the summer. The men apparently had had nothing to do with her death.
    She had dated many young men, but the name “Jeff” kept surfacing as her steady boyfriend. Sources who had known her well said that “Jeff” was eighteen-year-old Jeff Bigelow, * who lived with his parents, and who rode a motorcycle.
    Police in Redmond, a city just northeast of Bellevue, were able to narrow the time of her disappearance more closely. Their department had a report that indicated one of their officers had contacted both Teresa and JeffBigelow around midnight in early August. “One of our patrol officers found them drinking on the beach by Lake Sammamish. We have an FIR (Field Investigation Report) on it. They were both underage,” the Redmond detective said.
    And then a hairdresser in Bellevue called the Bellevue detectives and said that he had done Teresa’s hair on August 24. He furnished a copy of his appointment schedule for that Friday that confirmed Teresa had been in his shop. “I recognized the girl’s description,” he told Roy Gleason. “I knew Teresa. On August 24, she came in during the afternoon and she brought along a young guy who carried a motorcycle helmet.”
    Valuable tips continued to pile up. Next, the detectives got an assist from Dorcas Resnick, * an elderly woman who lived in the area where Teresa’s body had been found. She called in and asked the detectives to visit her home. Roy Gleason talked to Dorcas and found she had a remarkable memory.
    “I walk my dog near the peach orchard every day,” she began. “If you’d like, I’ll walk through the area and show you.”
    The woman and Gleason walked through the region, as she pointed out landmarks.
    “I began to smell a very strong, foul odor,” she recalled. “I know it was two weeks before the gentleman put up that split-rail fence there. There was a pair of women’s panties lying near the path for about two weeks, and then they were gone. My dog kept wanting to go into the woods where the odor was so bad. I tried to stop her, but a couple of times, she did run in there. Finally, the smell was just so bad that I ended up taking a back way around the woods.”
    The site was exactly where Teresa’s skeleton was found months later.
    Gleason contacted the fence builder, and learned that the man had put up the fence on September 13. Counting back two weeks, Gleason came up with August 30. That was when Dorcas Resnick had noticed the odor; the decomposition of the body would not have begun to give off a distinctive odor immediately. Gleason conferred with his fellow detectives, and they figured that Teresa had died sometime between the night of August 24 and August 26.
    She had had her hair done on the twenty-fourth—probably in preparation for a party. Had anyone seen her after that party? In the days ahead, they found no sightings after that night. It was very likely that Teresa had died on August 24.
    The probers had now talked to thirty people who knew Teresa Sterling well. They learned that two of her close friends had run away from home on December 8, just as the news of the body find hit the papers. The two teenagers, Tami Wells * and Bonnie Cross, * were traced to Yakima, Washington, in the company of an adult male. They were picked up by Yakima police, and Detectives Gary Trent and Marv Skeen went over the Cascade Mountain passes to bring the girls back.
    It turned out that the girls had