Worth More Dead

blood. He planned that they would die together soon enough. He recalled later that he went upstairs to the bathroom. His lack of sleep and the overdose of sedatives he’d taken had made him “tired.” He described how he tried to cut his throat on the right side as he gazed into the mirror over the sink, but he couldn’t bring himself to use as much pressure as he had on his victims. Instead, he sliced his wrists until blood welled up.
    As his life fluid seeped out, Pawlyk ran a bath and stepped into the tub. There he finally passed out.
     
    When Mark Breakey arrived, probably thinking he had come to calm down only an argument, he found Debra in a room drenched and sprayed with her blood. It was a scene that would never leave him for the rest of his days. She was still alive, fighting desperately to survive. She held her throat, putting pressure on the severed arteries just as she had done to save other lives when she worked in the emergency room. She managed to gasp, “That son of a bitch, Pawlyk, did this to me…”
    Mark picked her up, carried her to his car, and headed toward Overlake Hospital. But he knew in his heart they wouldn’t get there in time, and he couldn’t drive and help Debra at the same time. He pulled into the driveway of a home along the way and pounded frantically on their door. The family who lived there opened their front door, and Breakey begged them to call paramedics. They did so immediately.
    But it was too late. Debra died in his arms.
     
    When the King County detectives saw that the “dead man” in the tub was still alive, they called an ambulance to rush him to the closest hospital. The first ER physicians who examined him determined that he wasn’t in critical condition. (Pawlyk later complained bitterly that they made him stay in the hospital corridor on a gurney while they took care of patients who needed more urgent care.)
    No one knew for sure yet who the other victim in Debra Sweiger’s house was. Detectives learned from Mark Breakey that Debra had made a dying statement that someone named Pawlyk had stabbed her. There were three vehicles at the Sweiger house. One was registered to Debra and one to William Pawlyk; the third was a rental car. There was a rental agreement in the glove box that had Larry Sturholm’s name on it. The investigators had Breakey’s identification of Debra, and they thought they knew who the two men were, but the official determination would have to be made by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.
    News crews continued to stand by, waiting for more information. It was just before ten when Channel 7’s Bryan Thielke took the M.E.’s call on Tuesday morning and listened with horror. The dead man was KIRO’s own Larry Sturholm. Larry’s brother, Phil, Thielke’s editor, sat a few feet away from him. It was Thielke who had to break the news to Phil that his brother had been murdered.
    “We’d had no idea one victim was a friend, colleague, and relative,” Thielke wrote later in an article on journalistic ethics. “It’s something every reporter wonders about and even fears, being on the other side of the mic [microphone] or notebook. What’s it like that we were about to be a principal Source in a news story at the same time you’re covering it?”
    Some of the KIRO staff wondered about the relationships among Pawlyk, Sturholm, and Debra Sweiger. A few of Larry’s closest friends knew about his possible romantic involvement with a woman who lived in Issaquah and were even aware that she had been dealing with a jealous ex-lover. This was in a way the most difficult aspect of the tragedy for the news staff. They knew Judith Sturholm, and they didn’t want to cause her any more pain than she already faced. “We were torn between doing the best job possible and protecting our friends.”
    In the end, KIRO didn’t have to make the decision; another network affiliate came out with the love triangle rumor as a possible motive. Phil Sturholm, a truly decent man who had lost his younger brother, didn’t flinch. “Phil urged us to vigorously pursue the story of his brother’s death, not to hold back,” Thielke wrote. “Phil’s urging helped all of us do what we knew, as journalists, had to be done.”
    All of the KIRO reporters were impacted emotionally by the loss of Larry Sturholm, and they would never again approach a crime or accident story with as thick a wall between the news and their own feelings. They decided to