Worth More Dead

a kind of command performance to show up for his demonstrations. Sometimes at the beginning of the football season, he would host a party for the guys to select players for their fantasy football teams. Hardly big-time gambling, it was more for fun; they bet small amounts on the players and teams they chose and settled up at the end of the season.
    Female employees of the King County Housing Authority had often complained that they felt uncomfortable around Bob Durall. They found him too flirtatious. It wasn’t that he touched them inappropriately, but his manner didn’t mesh with what a husband and father, a church deacon and elder, and a Sunday school teacher should be. All in all, both female and male employees found him a bit of an odd duck.
    None of the men were beer-drinking buddies or confidants of Durall’s, but they did feel sorry for him when they learned of the sudden disappearance of his wife. In the weeks after Carolyn vanished, it was understandable that Bob hadn’t been at work much. He called occasionally to question other employees about whether the police had shown up at his office. When she had been gone a week, he called employees into his office and asked them what they had heard from Carolyn’s firm about the situation.
    He seemed to be concerned that the police were tracking him, but he had little to say about Carolyn when his coworkers asked if she had been found yet. He usually frowned and said no, curtly. He explained that he had hurt his arm lifting his daughter into a swing and was having surgery on the torn biceps the next day, Friday. But he called again on that day, and it was obvious he hadn’t had the surgery yet. He told police he injured himself lifting his son.
    Bob Durall asked one man with whom he’d worked for several years what “bear tracks looked like.” That came out of the blue. He hurried on to explain that he was an avid hunter and fisherman and had been to Tiger Mountain. It wasn’t clear whether he was afraid that he might run into a man-eating bear or was just making conversation.
    Durall didn’t have the surgery to reattach his torn biceps on Friday, August 28. Instead, he was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. Now his coworkers were shocked.
    Upper management at the Housing Authority asked a few of their sharpest computer experts to see if Bob Durall had left anything on his computer that might reveal his nonoffice activities over the past several months. The experts agreed to do that but didn’t expect to find anything.
    “He knew computers,” one man said. “He knew that stuff remained on the hard drive even after it had been deleted. But he also would have known that all he had to do would be to put a new hard drive into his computer. It was a matter of loosening two or three screws. Switching hard drives would give him a clean slate, and anything he didn’t want people to see would be gone when he junked the old hard drive.”
    Computer forensic investigations are a sign of the times; even a dozen years ago, it’s unlikely that computer files were considered a fertile Source to see what is truly going on in someone’s life. Today, most of the civilized world understands how to send and receive email and how to use search engines to learn more about any number of things. After a visit to Google or Ask Jeeves, scores of Sources flash across screens. It seems miraculous to anyone who remembers when keyboards were found only on standard typewriters.
    In September 1998, one of the prime search engines was www.altavista.com. Bob Durall’s coworkers used it to see if there was anything in his computer that might either help him or help the police investigators. Perhaps they might even find something that would lead them to Carolyn Durall.
    The process is too complicated for me to explain or for most readers to follow. The information bubbled up in odd files and stray strings of text, and what surfaced was disconcerting to say the least.
    Beginning on May 4, 1998, and continuing until June 23—more than seven weeks before Carolyn vanished—her husband appeared to have been looking for ways to kill her.
     
    The Housing Authority pros found a search string that read “query?pg=q&stq=8o&what=web&kl
=XXX&q=murder!”
    As they clicked more links, they saw that most of Bob Durall’s searches specified websites that had information on “kill + spouse.” Then he narrowed the scope. He had gone to the internet for information on