Worth More Dead

lawyers in Seattle. One of them declared him “the most difficult client I’ve ever had.”
    Durall wanted to run his own defense and to ignore any agreements previously made between his lawyers and the prosecutors. He intended to take the stand at his trial. He would not plead guilty to having anything whatsoever to do with Carolyn’s murder. The public did not know yet that he was the person who led police to her body.
    In jail he grew a beard, perhaps to make up for his jail-forbidden hairpiece. He had quite a few visitors, and his mother was often there to comfort and support him. She refused to believe that the son she cherished could have committed a crime like murder. At her urging, some of the men who had been neighbors or coworkers visited him out of friendship and the possibility that he had not been himself when he killed Carolyn. Some, however, frankly admitted that they went to the jail hoping he would say something that would help convict him.
    He mentioned to one former associate that he had checked on his pension fund shortly after Carolyn vanished; he didn’t want it to be claimed by anyone else if he was incarcerated. He expected to be acquitted or to receive a short sentence for something he “did not do,” and he wanted to keep his investments and his pension fund protected.
    When the news media publicized Bob Durall’s arrest, a few women came forward to talk to detectives about their correspondence with him on Match.com. One said that she had begun writing to him in December 1997, some eight months before Carolyn’s murder. They had met for lunch at a small restaurant a few blocks from the University of Washington. Theirs was not a romantic liaison, but Bob had been somewhat open with her about his feelings. He wasn’t completely honest with her but did discuss the possibility of his “upcoming” divorce. He sounded very bitter about his wife and clearly had no love for her, but she noted tears in his eyes when he said he couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing his children every day. As for his wife? “She would be better off dead,” he had said bluntly.
    On August 18, Bob’s lunch date said, he wrote to her about his situation. “I don’t know how to say this,” he wrote, “but Carolyn has vanished. I assume she’s run off somewhere but no trace [so far]. I am worried and confused. Our family could use some prayers.”
    There were probably a number of women who did not come forward, women who held their collective breaths that they wouldn’t be linked with Bob Durall in any way and that their correspondence and meetings with him would remain secret.
    Durall and whichever attorney was representing him at any given time delayed his trial with a number of pretrial motions. Washington statutes grant defendants the right to a speedy trial, assuring them that their cases will be heard in court within sixty days. The accused, however, have the right to ask for more time. Durall exercised that right at least five times. And he would have five different attorneys who had to start from scratch in reviewing his case.
    The defense team attempted to have the evidence seized at the Durall home excluded from his trial, claiming that the investigators had done a sloppy job of drawing up their search warrant.
    Denied.
    Bob Durall had other objections. He didn’t want a corrections officer from the Regional Justice Center jail to testify about something he overheard Durall saying to himself: “Forgive me for what I have done.”
    He held that he had a right to pray without being overheard.
    With his bail set high, Bob Durall remained incarcerated awaiting trial because of his own demands. It seemed further and further in the future. He made a close friend behind bars, a man in his cell block who seemed to have little in common with him, indeed nothing beyond their being close in age and in proximity. Clarence Burns* was a 39-year-old transient serving jail time for a third-degree assault and for taking a car without permission. He had no family that cared about him and he’d never had the kind of home that Bob Durall once owned or children he could dote on.
    Burns and Durall passed the time by playing pinochle. The two men often appeared to be in intense conversation, with Durall doing most of the talking and Burns nodding in response.
    The tragic summer was over, and the rains came to Seattle along with the holiday season. Thanksgiving and Christmas in jail are very pale imitations of