Worth More Dead

stop the flow of blood from her severed arteries. As a registered nurse, she would have known full well that she had to stop the bleeding and that she needed emergency care immediately. She had indicated to the man who’d come to help her that he must keep driving.
    He drove as fast as he could, but even if the paramedics or the emergency room doctors had been right there fighting to save her, she was so terribly wounded that it would have taken a miracle.
    The word was that she died in her friend’s husband’s arms before they could get medical help.
    Deputies back at her house opened the front door and began a search of the downstairs rooms. From the saturation of blood, they knew that something disastrous had occurred there. During a sweep of the downstairs, they discovered a man wedged between the tub and toilet of the bathroom. There were indications of an immense struggle in the bathroom, and there was no question that he, too, was dead. He had probably attempted to lock himself in the bathroom, then barricaded the door against his attacker. He had been stabbed an estimated 180 times, too many times for a pathologist to get an accurate count. Even for trained and experienced police officers, the interior of this lovely home, the sight of the dead man, and the pools and sprays of blood throughout the house were almost too much to take in. This was shocking, senseless overkill.
    They immediately called for backup and also requested that detectives from the Major Crimes Unit respond. Then they set about stringing yellow “Crime Scene: Do Not Cross” tape to guard the scene from contamination.
    At the same time, other deputies walked cautiously through the strangely silent house. They had located the deceased man there. A few miles away, paramedics confirmed that they had declared a woman dead. According to the male friend who tried futilely to save her, she had lived in that house and her name was Debra Sweiger. The officers had no idea what her relationship to the dead man was. First word was that this house belonged to her. They didn’t know yet who had done what to whom—or, more ominously—who might still be inside the house.
    They searched the downstairs area and determined that there was no one hiding there. They headed up the stairs, their guns in their hands, expecting some madman to leap out at them at any moment. Then, as they opened the bathroom door, they found another man. He was in the tub, submerged in bloodied water. Dead.
    This appeared to be a triple homicide or perhaps a double homicide and a suicide. The deputies and their supervisors knew that radio and television reporters monitored police calls, but it was difficult to call in over their police radios without giving details. Inevitably, by the early morning hours of Tuesday, August 1, the rumor that there had been three violent deaths in Issaquah had leaked to the media.
    Media cars, their station’s call letters visible on the sides, crept up as close as they could to the crime scene, only to be prevented from getting near enough to find out much before they were turned back by deputies stationed to guard the perimeter of the scene.
    The Seattle stations KOMO-TV, KING-TV, and KIRO-TV (ABC, NBC, and CBS, respectively) all had their newsrooms on alert, standing by to get the first news of the rumored murders in Issaquah. Phil Sturholm was the news editor for KIRO, and he waited at the television station near the Space Needle in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. From the rumors, the Issaquah situation sounded as though it would be a top-of-the-hour story for the noon news. Bombarded by bad news and tragedies, radio and television newsmen and women learn quickly to grow a thick hide so that they won’t take it all home at the end of a shift, but most of them do feel the pain. Field reporters have to knock on the doors of people still in shock from hearing that they have lost someone they love to violence. Reporters come to learn that life is ephemeral. They also lose some of their own to helicopter crashes and vehicular accidents as they race to where news is happening.
    More than those in most occupations, media personnel are well aware that it can happen to them or to someone they love, too. But there was nothing about the first reports emanating from police radio transmissions to make anyone think that this incident was anything more than a huge crime story.
     
    At the perfectly appointed home on the east side of Lake