Worth More Dead

had been missing for four weeks and five days. John Henry Browne talked with his client and impressed on Bob Durall that he should reveal where his wife’s body was. It would be a kindness to her family and her friends, who needed to know where she was and to give her a decent burial. If Durall should agree to lead detectives to where he had left Carolyn, Browne, his associate, Tim Dole, and the prosecutors, Patty Eakes and Jeff Baird, had agreed to certain stipulations, if not an outright plea bargain: (1) he would receive some sentencing “consideration” after he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder; (2) the State would not reveal at trial that Durall had led investigators to Carolyn’s body; (3) the State would not, however, reduce the charges to second-degree murder; and (4) if Bob Durall should take the stand in his own defense and deny that he had killed his wife, he would be impeached by the prosecution and the agreement not to mention that he had led the investigators to her body would be null and void.
    He accepted that plea agreement. On that Monday in September, a caravan of cars followed the police unit in which Bob Durall rode with detectives and his lawyers. They took the I-90 freeway on its climb east through the foothills until they came to Forest Service Road 9031, ten miles west of the Snoqualmie Pass summit. There they turned down the heavily forested road, drove slowly for two miles, passing several turnouts (where people had illegally left bags of refuse). Finally, Durall told them to stop.
    Carolyn was there, buried in a shallow grave beneath a pile of rocks. Using a litter connected to ropes, the search party carefully lifted her remains from the sylvan burial place.
    Her body had been doubled over, cinched tight with several belts, and encased in a number of plastic garbage sacks.
    The postmortem examination of Carolyn Durall’s body by the King County Medical Examiner’s office verified that she had died of homicidal violence, blunt-force damage. Her skull had been shattered in several places by a heavy, dense object dropped on, or swung at, her head. It had to have been made of metal or hard wood. A fist or arm could not have done so much damage. More likely, the weapon was something like a baseball bat.
    She was almost certainly unconscious immediately after the first blow. She might have continued to breathe for a short time. She had not suffered, very small comfort to those who loved Carolyn.
    For all of Bob Durall’s precise planning and internet searches on how to commit a perfect murder, it appeared that he had in fact flown into a violent rage, probably when Carolyn asked him for a divorce, and used the closest weapon at hand.
    It was too late to determine whether Carolyn Durall had been drugged before she was attacked; there was little blood left in her body and she had lain in the woods for so many weeks. No poisons were identified in toxicology screens. The medical examiner was not surprised at those results because blood breaks down during decomposition.
     
    There was no more searching. On September 16, a week later, a memorial service for Carolyn was held at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church in Medina, Washington, a church not far from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter where she had worked and where she had told friends of her dream to be free to live her life in peace. The theme of her services was a butterfly; she had always loved butterflies, and a picture of a beautiful Monarch was on the cover of the program. The minister reminded the mourners that Carolyn was no longer caged, but “as free now as a butterfly.”
    After the services, Morgan Stanley hosted a reception in honor of Carolyn. Her neighbors and friends held a final get-together in the Renton Highlands where she had once loved her home and doted on her children. They planted a flowering pink cherry tree in the park where the neighborhood kids played, they had a potluck dinner with dishes made from Carolyn’s recipes, and, as the sun set, held a candlelit ceremony. They released white balloons, tying chocolates to the ribbons, Carolyn’s favorite.
    Her children’s cat went to live with them at their grandparents house. Daisy, her parakeet, was adopted by the Jannusches. (Daisy lived until 2004.) Her friends cleaned her house and packed up her things. In a way it was over, but it was a long way from being truly over.
    Robert Durall went through a succession of attorneys, most of them the very top criminal defense