Worth More Dead

online.
    In early 1998, Durall said, he found that Carolyn continued to communicate with men in chat rooms, and he became even more suspicious about her fidelity. He found women’s underwear that he didn’t recognize in their clothes hamper. He thought he detected semen on the garment.
    “I thought she was having another affair,” he said, “but I didn’t confront her about it.”
    That didn’t appear to upset him very much, either. Apparently he had dealt with it, and the marriage was intact.
    When he was asked about the previous Thursday night, Durall said that he had taken Carolyn out to dinner and that nothing untoward had happened. “It was just a normal night.”
    He certainly had no hint that she planned to leave him or was about to run off with someone else.
    “Which vehicle did you take to the restaurant?” Kittleson asked.
    “Her van, the Aerostar.”
    “And you got home at what time?”
    “About 8:40.”
     
    Carolyn’s van had been spotted being driven erratically between Renton and Burien at about six on Monday morning. As Kittleson interviewed Bob Durall the next day, it was still missing. Noting that Durall was quite slender and had dark hair, he wondered if he was the one driving his missing wife’s van.
    Linda Gunderson, watching the Durall house, had seen Bob drive up in his Nissan Pathfinder about 7:30 on Monday morning.
    Witnesses living in the Licorice Fern neighborhood said that they first noticed Carolyn’s van there sometime Thursday evening and that it remained there through Sunday. Who left it there and who moved it was anyone’s guess. Perhaps Bob had left it there. He was an experienced jogger and could easily have run the two miles to his house. Or he could have run from his house to the van on Monday morning and driven it toward Burien, then gotten back to his Nissan Pathfinder, possibly by taxi.
    Or if Carolyn herself had left her van two miles from home, maybe someone had picked her up and driven her away.
    It was very confusing, particularly when a clerk at a minimart and gas station in Bellevue was sure that she had seen Carolyn alive and well there on Saturday, August 8. After she saw Carolyn’s photograph on one of the hundreds of fliers her friends distributed, the clerk said she remembered her as the pretty blonde who had smiled at her.
    Had she seen Carolyn Durall or another blonde woman? If she had indeed seen Carolyn, was it on August 8—or on August 1, the Saturday before?
    Memory is not infallible, and it can be influenced by many factors.
    When Gary Kittleson talked with Bob Durall on August 11, Bob never mentioned that he had been notified that Carolyn’s van was found two miles from their home—or anywhere. Kittleson didn’t say anything about that, but he did ask Bob where he thought it might be. He speculated that it could be parked somewhere near Sea-Tac airport.
    Two days later, on August 13, Kittleson called Bob Durall and asked him if the two of them could check his residence to determine if Carolyn had taken any extra clothing with her when she left. Durall said he would call back later in the day.
    Then Bob Durall, aware that he might be placed in the category of suspect because he was the closest person to his missing wife, decided to hire an attorney to represent him. When detectives asked to do a “walk-through” of his house, his antennae went up. He didn’t like the idea of strangers swarming all over his home. He hired one of the most successful criminal defense attorneys in Seattle, John Henry Browne. The flamboyant, six-foot four-inch Browne had long flowing brown hair and a luxuriant mustache, and he rode motorcycles. Looking more like a renegade biker than an officer of the Court, he was in great demand. He often seemed to be the patron saint of lost causes, taking on the most difficult defense cases. More than twenty years earlier, it was Browne, then a public defender, who counseled Ted Bundy after his first arrest in Utah and during Bundy’s trial in Miami.
    Now Browne told the media that subjecting a worried husband to a search of his house would only add to his stress. There was no indication that Carolyn had met with foul play. In fact, Browne said, his client had reliable witnesses who reported seeing her alive and well on Saturday, August 8, and again on August 10, after she had supposedly vanished. He was speaking of the convenience-store clerk and the woman who saw the swerving van in the wee hours of Monday