Worth More Dead

waffles, and pancakes, the latter items part of a ritual at the lodge where waiters pour syrup from several feet in the air until it curls over the pancakes.
    The investigators even located the waiter who had served Bill Pawlyk and learned that he ate his meal with gusto. The server had detected no overt signs of disorientation or despair in the man he waited on. Rather, he found him quite cheerful.
    Then Pawlyk drove back to Issaquah to lie in wait for Debra’s return home.
    The defendant had an extensive lineup of impressive character witnesses, including the mayor of Richland, who extolled Pawlyk’s service to the community in the Tri-Cities area. According to his friends and coworker, Pawlyk must surely have been out of his mind when he carried out the two murders. Yet the man sitting at the defense table looked eminently sane. Bill Pawlyk was relying on the not guilty by reason of insanity defense, but his actions before the stabbings seemed much too deliberate for a man who had lost touch with reality.
    As it was, Bill Pawlyk had already escaped the most severe penalty for aggravated first-degree murder; the death penalty had been taken off the table. By mutual agreement between the State and the Defense, if he were found guilty, he would face life in prison with no early parole or commutation of the sentence. Once the death penalty was dropped, a life sentence would have no teeth if it could be softened and adjusted as the years went by.
    But first, the jurors had to decide whether Bill Pawlyk was guilty of the over-kill of two human beings who were taken completely by surprise after he carefully planned the details of the murder of Debra Sweiger.
    Lee Yates and Jeff Baird summed up the shocking case in their final remarks and rebuttal. Of all the murder cases they had prosecuted, this was one where they expected a quick verdict, although they had long since learned that no one, not even experienced judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys can truly read a jury by studying their faces and body language during a trial.
    Juries who come back in a short time do, however, tend to vote for conviction. As their deliberation stretches into days, the likelihood of an acquittal grows.
    There was no quick verdict. Indeed, the jurors in the Pawlyk trial deliberated for five days. But in the end, Yates and Baird and the evidence unearthed by the King County sheriff’s detectives convinced them that Pawlyk was indeed guilty of a carefully choreographed plan to commit the murder of Debra Sweiger.
    They believed that when he found Larry Sturholm in her house, Larry became expendable to Pawlyk. Did they actually have an initially friendly conversation? Pawlyk insists they did, but experts doubt that.
    When William Pawlyk was found guilty of two counts of aggravated first-degree murder, he was sentenced to life in prison. No one—not even the prosecutors—knew of his frank confession to Cindy Versdahl. But the brutality of the murders could not be denied, nor could Dr. Christian Harris’s opinion that Pawlyk was neither currently insane nor had he been insane under the law or medically on the night of July 31, 1989.
    Pawlyk was sent first to the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla. There he proved to be an ideal prisoner; there was no question that he was a brilliant man. He tutored prisoners who attended community college classes in basic math, calculus, science, and physics but worked mostly with those who were either trying to earn their GEDs or high school diplomas. He oversaw a small reference library and worked in preproduction for an in-prison television station.
    He was president of the prison military service veterans’ group; he had always been active in navy reserve activities. Pawlyk had many supporters, so many that he had to decide whom to trim from his visitors’ list, as he was allowed to have only ten people cleared to visit him. He received many letters and cards. To keep up with his correspondence, he often had to write a single letter and make duplicate copies. He sent Christmas cards to scores of friends.
    Several television stations requested interviews. He weighed the advisability of doing them. He was reluctant to grant those that emanated from Seattle. The third anniversary of the murders in Issaquah brought a number of requests in mid-1992. “I’m more reluctant to do those,” he wrote to Cindy Versdahl, “because of the personal emotional drain and the stirring up of memories and