Worth More Dead

of the D’Autremont brothers and to the elderly who recalled the headlines.
    In 1979, I had yet to publish a book myself, and I was grateful to be hired to edit the rough draft of All for Nothing. Working on Larry Sturholm’s book bought my family a lot of groceries. I was impressed with his ability as a writer and the way he could create suspense and bring back the scenes and personalities after more than fifty years. He didn’t need any editing in storytelling, so I confined myself to checking his grammar and spelling. His words caught the futility and the tragedy of the desperate men whose foolish crime ended their hopes and dreams and also the lives of their innocent victims. His title, All for Nothing, was right on target.
    One day, that title proved to be grimly ironic.
    Sturholm wrote another book, this time on the bravery of law-enforcement officers: In the Line of Duty: The Story of Two Brave Men. It detailed the struggle of a Portland, Oregon, police officer who fought brain damage and paralysis after a devastating car crash. Once more, it was a gripping read, and Sturholm told it with sensitivity.
    Neither of Larry Sturholm’s books were national best sellers, although they did sell very well in the Northwest, and are still available by order through bookstores. His fans looked forward to more books.
    His television viewers hoped to be able to enjoy his sense of humor and genius with new ideas for years to come. He was a natural; he had already won a number of Emmy Awards, and he was only 46.
    Larry and Judy Sturholm stayed together in a marriage that other people envied. They were happy, although they never had children. As they both turned 40, they realized that they probably never would. But their lives were full; Larry always had his hand in new projects, producing short subjects, documentaries, and even commercials. And of course he had his KIRO features.
    In midsummer, 1989, Larry Sturholm’s fans were disappointed when he announced that he was taking a sabbatical from “Larry at Large” and Seattle and was going to head “into the sunset” on a new adventure, a project in the Cayman Islands. Disappointed, but not surprised. He was a man who constantly tested his limits, looking for new ways to create and entertain and educate.
    On the night of July 31, 1989, the end of the five o’clock news ran pretaped footage that Sturholm had prepared for his good-bye to viewers. It showed him on water skis, close up at first, waving good-bye, then his image growing smaller and smaller as he disappeared into a beautiful sunset.
    Sturholm and his crew were scheduled to fly that evening to the Cayman Islands. Judy drove her husband to Sea-Tac airport and kissed him good-bye. She didn’t expect to hear from him until his flight and connecting flights touched down. They had been married for twenty-two years. She had never had any reason to doubt his faithfulness.
     
    A few hours later the King County Police got their first disjointed call for help from paramedics dispatched from a hospital in Bellevue on the east side of Lake Washington. At the same time, a citizen was reporting a stabbing, with wounded people and possibly even a murder at a house near Issaquah. Issaquah was once a very small town near the foothills of Snoqualmie Pass that burgeoned in the eighties.
    A female victim, who had suffered a massive loss of blood, had apparently been declared dead on arrival at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue. Other reporting callers said that there had been some kind of fight or assault at the home in an upscale neighborhood outside of Issaquah.
    Deputies were dispatched to meet with the paramedics, and other units were sent to the address given in Issaquah. As they began to sort things out, they realized that the woman, who had died of exsanguination (blood loss incompatible with life), had apparently called her friend and business partner for help, gasping that there was trouble at her house. Unaware that anything more than one of her partner’s increasingly common verbal confrontations with an ex-boyfriend was taking place, the friend sent her husband to the victim’s house, the same house in Issaquah, where deputies were sent.
    The woman, a nurse, was alive when her friend’s husband reached her home. But she had been savagely stabbed, and her throat was sliced open deeply from one side to the other. As they headed for the hospital, she somehow managed to grip the edges of her slashed neck, trying to