Worth More Dead

his professional record or any skirmishes with the law. Originally from New York, he was tall and good-looking, urbane, and classy in every way. He had money and prestige, and Debra was attracted to him. It was mutual. In one friend’s words, “For him, along comes Debra with her charismatic, fashionable style and her southern accent, and Pawlyk found her very attractive.”
    Debra Sweiger took Bill Pawlyk by storm. She enjoyed dating him and the attention he lavished on her. A woman who was jealous of Debra said, “Debra tended to play games with men’s emotions. I think she liked the drama of it all.”
    If Debra was behaving like a high school or college girl who enjoyed being the belle of the ball, sought after by many male suitors at the same time, she was also playing a dangerous game. And it began to backfire on her. Almost before Debra realized it, she was in way too deep with Pawlyk. Some said he had proposed marriage to her; at the very least, everyone who knew them agreed that he was madly in love with her.
    Debra drew back; she was definitely not looking for marriage, and his possessiveness had become suffocating. Even though they lived almost two hundred miles apart, he made the trip to Issaquah to see her every weekend, far more often than she wanted. He didn’t want her to date anyone but him, and he questioned her constantly about who she saw and what she did when they were apart. The more he clung to her, the more she fought to slow their romance down until, finally, she attempted to break up with him. He could not believe she was serious.
    Bill Pawlyk was distraught. Although Debra had not asked him to do it, he had placed her ahead of everything else in his life, and he’d left himself no escape parachute at all. Without her, nothing mattered to him. He was alternately brokenhearted and enraged. His jealousy was almost pathological. He could not bear the thought that she might be with some other man.
    It was more than that. Pawlyk’s pride was shattered; he had spent a lifetime building up his reputation as a confident man, a man in charge in his business world, his navy service, and a man used to being treated with respect. Now he felt deceived and cuckolded, an object of derision, if not actually, at least in his own mind.
    Love, passion, and overwhelming jealousy know no age, and Bill Pawlyk, nearing 50, was a runaway train, consumed with jealousy.
    By this time, Debra Sweiger had met Larry Sturholm. No one is exactly sure how they met, although it was probably when he contacted Debra for a feature story. He was certainly a celebrity in Seattle, a garrulous, clever man who was a lot of fun to be with. Compared to Bill Pawlyk’s gloomy presence, Sturholm was a breath of fresh air for Debra. They shared an interest in exploring new businesses, they talked about intriguing and innovative ideas, and they shared a lot of laughter.
    “In my opinion,” one man who knew them both said, “they were emphatically not having an affair, even though it might all have looked terribly bad. They liked to have lunch and talk or party together. He was probably poised for a midlife crisis, and their relationship was definitely headed in the wrong direction, but I don’t think it had progressed to that point.”
    But Bill Pawlyk thought it had. He was convinced that Debra was having an affair with Larry Sturholm, and he couldn’t stand the thought of that.
    Pawlyk’s breaking point came on July 31, 1989. He didn’t know that Debra Sweiger was going on a trip to the Cayman Islands with Larry Sturholm and his film crew that night, but he was suspicious of everything she did. He wanted to talk out their relationship and somehow convince her to come back to him. But he had slipped over the edge; if she didn’t take him back, he was fully prepared to kill her, a terrible choice that seemed better to him than to let her go to another man.
    What happened next was a stunning example of how a whole lifetime—even life itself—can be shattered into minute fragments when someone reacts with rage as violent as a volcanic eruption or a tsunami, unexpected, unheralded, and totally devastating.
    When Larry Sturholm arrived at the Sea-Tac airport that Monday night, he didn’t go to the departure gate to await his flight. He carried out one of the few major deceptions of his life. His reason may have been as simple as not wishing to worry his wife. Most wives wouldn’t be thrilled to learn that their husbands