Worth More Dead

was Monday, August 10, and Carolyn hadn’t been seen since the previous Thursday at three PM . She hadn’t talked to anyone since six hours after that. Back in the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter offices, her coworkers did what she had asked of them. They weren’t intruding on her privacy; they were carrying out her wishes. She had told them what they should do if she disappeared, “If I don’t come back…my whole life is in my desk.”
    Still, they felt uneasy about looking through the drawers of her desk. Taking a deep breath, they went ahead, hoping there might be an address or a phone number—something—that would help them find her. They discovered that Carolyn’s whole life was indeed in her desk, including her private financial records and her poignant writings about her failed marriage. They found a copy of a letter she had either sent to Bob or planned to send or give to him, perhaps on Thursday night.
    “Our marriage was a mistake from the beginning,” Carolyn had written. “I love you too little, and you love me too much.”
    Carolyn said that for years she had been “unhappy, guilt-ridden and humiliated. I am dying inside. There is so little left of who I used to be. My spirit is crushed. I feel that you are too controlling and obsessive and jealous.”
    There were numerous notes and a journal that told the same story, written by a woman who was being emotionally suffocated.
    Carolyn had left the PIN for her private bank account in her desk, too. The balance was something over nine hundred dollars. A call to her bank showed that nothing had been withdrawn recently. If Carolyn had left of her own accord, surely she would have needed money to live on. She had noted that she had no independent access to the couple’s credit cards or to Bob’s bank account.
    Carolyn’s friends called the Renton police again to beg for an all-out search for her. Now she was officially a missing person but not classified as a possible homicide victim, something her friends feared she might be.
    Only if her disappearance were reclassified as an urgent matter could the police call out Explorer Search and Rescue Scouts and their reserve officers.
    On Monday night Bob Durall called Gary Jannusch and asked to meet with him at a local pizza parlor. Gary agreed, and the two men drove to Gene Coulon Park, where they sat and talked. Gary noticed that Bob’s conversation wasn’t about how worried he was about Carolyn; instead, his remarks were more derogatory toward her. At one point, Bob said, “Do you know that she smokes?” in a tone that suggested she was a scarlet woman. He stressed that Carolyn “yelled at the kids, too.” It was as if he was building a case for himself as the injured party in their marriage.
    Bob asked if he could move in with the Jannusches “temporarily,” but Gary said they really weren’t set up to have a guest. If Bob Durall had done anything Monday, it was all about himself. He went to work for a while. He mentioned that he had seen a doctor earlier because he had injured himself lifting one of his sons into a swing. “I’ve got a torn biceps,” he said, “and I’ll need surgery.”
    A torn biceps muscle is a severe injury, one that would require delicate surgery to reattach the ends of the muscle so the arm wouldn’t atrophy. It seemed unlikely that lifting one small boy into a swing would do so much damage, especially to a man who took pride in keeping in shape.
    Bob also dropped into Morgan Stanley and spoke with a few of Carolyn’s coworkers, women who weren’t as close to her as Denise, Maria Benson and Tari Scheffer. Again, he spoke negatively about his missing wife. The women were both surprised and distressed.
     
    It was Tuesday, August 11, when Detective Gary Kittleson met Bob Durall for the first time. Kittleson now knew about the information Carolyn had left in her desk and that she had planned to ask for a divorce the night she disappeared.
    As he faced Durall, he found a man who was remarkably calm considering that his wife and the mother of his three children had been missing for five days. In fact, he wanted to tell Kittleson how disappointed he had become in his wife’s behavior. He said he had “confronted” her about his suspicions that she was unfaithful in 1997. In his version, she confessed that she met men in a chat room on America Online and rendezvoused with many of them. Bob Durall was convinced she had had at least one affair with some man she met