Worth More Dead

morning.

    While Bob Durall continued to suggest that Carolyn had simply chosen to leave him and their children, no one who knew her well could accept that. She was much too loving a mother to do that. She just wasn’t the kind of woman who would walk away from her responsibilities no matter how unhappy she was at being trapped in a cage-like marriage.
    Carolyn’s friends could not wait around for some word of her. They made hundreds of phone calls and continued to pass out fliers with her picture on them asking for information.
    They organized search parties. Drawing a grid map with the Duralls’house in the center of a circle, they began a methodical search for Carolyn and her van. Sea-Tac Airport is a fifteen-minute drive southwest, and Bellevue approximately the same distance to the north. Within twenty miles they would come to the foothills of Snoqualmie Pass, where thousands of acres of national forest land, thick with fir trees, crept up to the I-90 freeway.
    The volunteer search party began by driving slowly through the scores of parking lots outside hotels and motels, restaurants, and the airport. Carolyn’s van was big and blocky, and its wine color would make it stand out even if it was hidden in the woods.
    They looked in back of buildings and in private driveways. They found some similar Ford vans, but none was Carolyn Durall’s.
    On Wednesday, August 19, almost two weeks after Carolyn Durall was last seen, a party of volunteers searching for her turned into the parking lot of the Radisson Hotel at the corner of Pacific Highway, and South 170th. The hotel had parking on all four sides of the sprawling grounds. As they drove slowly around the hotel, they checked the scores of vehicles parked there, not really expecting their search to be any more successful than the previous sweeps of parking area. But this time, they spotted Carolyn’s van.
    It was parked next to the laundry area in the back of the hotel, just east of the north runways of the airport and the frontage road. The wine-colored van had plates whose number they had long since memorized: 166 CWI. It had obviously been there a long time: its windshield and roof were covered with leaves and twigs.
    Their hearts in their throats, they peered into the van through its dusty windows. It looked normal enough, and there were no signs that anything violent had taken place there. They hoped fervently that Carolyn had taken the hotel van to the airport a quarter mile down the road and flown off to some tropical paradise but they knew that she probably hadn’t. The only thing unusual they could see in her van were some bags of clothes marked for the Salvation Army.
    They showed Carolyn’s photo to the desk clerks, but no one recognized her. They notified the Renton police investigators, who had the van placed on a flatbed and taken to their headquarters to be processed. Later, detectives asked to check the registration log from August 6 to the present. Unless she registered under an alias, Carolyn had not stayed there.
    Denise Jannusch wasn’t surprised when she heard where Carolyn’s van had been found. “The Radisson lot is where she and Bob used to park when they flew somewhere. It was cheaper than parking in the airport garage.”
    Carolyn hadn’t used a credit card, made or received calls on her cell phone, accessed her bank account, bought a plane ticket on an airline flying out of Seattle, or contacted anyone who knew her.
    She was simply gone.
    That her husband didn’t want them to look through the family home for any clues to her disappearance made the police look upon Bob Durall with unusual suspicion.
    The consensus, as hard as it was to accept, was that Carolyn Durall was dead. On August 21, 1998, Gary Kittleson prepared an affidavit citing probable cause to obtain a search warrant for the green house on Hoquiam Court. Renton detectives, accompanied by criminalists from the Washington State Patrol crime lab, served the warrant and entered the last place Carolyn was seen alive.
     
    John and Linda Gunderson stared at the CSI van from the Washington State Patrol as it turned into the Duralls’ driveway. Linda had been distraught ever since Carolyn’s disappearance, but as John admitted later, “Until I saw that CSI van, I didn’t really believe that anything bad had happened to Carolyn; at that point, I had to wonder if Bob might really have done something to her.”
    With neighbors peering nervously through their blinds, the