Even so, Long hadn’t really believed that Carrier was serious. However, he testified that after Pam’s body was found, he got scared. “I told Dale, ‘Man I didn’t do that, so don’t go through with the rest of the deal!’ ”
“What did you mean when you said that to Dale?” Votendahl asked.
“I was afraid for my own wife’s safety.”
Then Long said that Dale Carrier had attempted to enlist his help in his continuing plan to make Walla Walla County and vicinity look like the prowling ground of a sexual predator. Once, Long said, the two of them had picked up a young female hitchhiker near Milton-Freewater, Oregon, a town just across the Washington border. Carrier had whispered to him, “Let’s kill her and dump her somewhere to make it look like a sex maniac’s loose.”
Fortunately for the girl, Long said he had quickly vetoed the idea.
But Carrier had still another plan. He tried to convince Long and another friend to pick up a girl named Lindy Copperfield* from a house in Walla Walla where she was babysitting. The plan was for the men to bring Lindy to Carrier where he waited on a lonely road. Then Lindy would be killed, stripped, and left to be discovered as the “perfect” victim of a sexual psychopath.
Burt Long testified that he and the other friend lied and said that they couldn’t find Lindy, so she was saved from Carrier’s scheme.
Lindy Copperfield herself was a witness for the prosecution. She was an attractive enough girl but not really a beauty. She admitted that she had been the hypotenuse of a peculiar triangle in the Carrier home almost until the day of Pam’s murder. She testified that she had met Carrier in Wenatchee, Washington; she had evidently picked up the postman’s signals loud and clear because they’d ended up in bed later.
Carrier wouldn’t have been the first husband to fool around on an out-of-town trip—but he was one of the minority who had the nerve to bring the other woman home to live with his wife and children.
Evidently, the sexual connection between Dale and Lindy continued unabated under his own roof. Just to liven things up, Lindy told the bemused jurors that she’d informed Pam Carrier that she had been intimate with her husband.
Lindy also recalled a fight the Carriers had had in a restaurant on the night of August 6. According to the witness, Pam had told Dale that night that she wanted her freedom. To prove her point, she’d had Lindy give her phone number to a young man in a nearby booth.
That youth joined the motley parade to the witness stand. No, he hadn’t met Pam that night, he testified. He had, however, known her for about a month and had sexual relations with her during that time.
Pam Carrier’s teenage sister took the stand. To the prosecution’s question, “Did the defendant ever make a pass at you?” she answered:
“Yes . . . practically every time I went over to their house.”
She tearfully recounted one instance of alleged intimacy with Dale Carrier in a sleeping bag at his house. She also recalled that Dale had demonstrated to her once how it was possible to achieve a tremendous “high” with chloroform.
The mention of chloroform had interested Chief Criminal Deputy Scotty Ray the very first time the girl had brought it up during his interviews with her. A man adept at using the anesthetic, Dale Carrier could easily have sedated his wife into a helpless state and then press a pillow against her nose and mouth. The chloroform odor itself would have evaporated, and Pam would be left dead without a mark on her—or on her killer.
But it was just a theory. The chloroform, if there was any involved, was never found.
After Pam’s death, the “grieving widower,” according to Long, sought to forget his loss by finding a new bed-mate as soon as possible. Long said he had been temporarily estranged from his wife, when he and “a lady friend” moved into the Carrier home a month after the murder.
Dale had asked Long’s girlfriend if she knew of some woman who “wants to come up and live with me.”
Another female witness testified that Carrier had come to her home in Portland, Oregon, with a gift of his dead wife’s clothes. “He wanted me to leave my husband, come back here to Walla Walla, and live here with Burt and his girl and him.”
Sandwiched in between the defendant’s alleged efforts to simulate a sex-murder wave and to find a new sex partner himself, Long testified, the mailman was getting nervous about the steady pace of Scotty Ray’s investigation. Maybe he’d really believed that his masterpiece of a letter in mid-September declaring his innocence would be enough to throw Ray off his trail. Instead, he had been concerned when it only served to make the detective regard him with an even more jaundiced eye.
So, Burt Long testified, Carrier was ready to eliminate Ray from the picture, if that proved necessary. Enlisting the reluctant Long’s aid again, Carrier had turned his basement into a workshop where practice bombs were made.
Long said that Carrier had it all figured out. Black gunpowder, metal pipes. Simple and deadly.
If he had not been taken by surprise in his arrest on December 10, would he have used the bombs? It is an open question, luckily never to be answered, but one which still gives Ray a chill when he contemplates it.
An Air Force explosives expert testified in the trial that the items from Carrier’s basement could have been used for a very effective bomb. The defense countered by asking if such items and ingredients could not have harmless uses, too, if they were employed separately. The expert witness agreed that they could.
The question of the elusive kittens, whose disappearance had allegedly lured Pam Carrier from her home, came up again and again. Several prosecution witnesses insisted that the Carriers hadn’t had pets in their home for some time before Pam was murdered.
The lone defense witness in the matter of the cats was Burt Long’s wife, who said she’d seen cats around the house shortly before Pam died.
Throughout the prosecution’s case, the man who had come to be known around Walla Walla as the “Passionate Postman” sat quietly at the defense table, betraying little emotion. In his composure, he was the antithesis of the spectators who lined up early each morning to crowd into the courtroom. They were so deliciously shocked by the testimony that they often had to be hushed as they exclaimed, gasped, and commented in the presence of the tightly sequestered jury.
Dale Carrier’s defense took only fifty minutes. In a rather unusual touch, one of his defense lawyers took the witness stand so that he could be questioned by his cocounsel about Pam and Dale Carrier’s visit to his office on July 29, only nine days before Pam’s murder.
He testified that Pam Carrier had first told him she wanted Dale to adopt the older of her two boys, the child conceived before the marriage. But when he’d explained that procedure to her, she had countered with the statement that she wanted a divorce.
“That threw me a little bit, and I asked her what’s it all about,” he told his cocounsel.
Apparently, Pamela had told him she’d married too young and “wanted time to play.”
It had been agreed that Dale Carrier would sue for divorce because he had all the grounds, and she had none. Later, Carrier had told the attorney that he was not going to fight the divorce because he didn’t want to antagonize his wife. He stated that he hoped his wife would reconsider and realize his home wasn’t so bad after all.
The question of divorce, of course, soon became moot; Pamela Carrier was found naked and dead in a ditch.
After a weeklong trial, the five-woman, seven-man jury was handed the Carrier case. Judge Albert Bradford informed them they had three choices: acquittal, guilty of first-degree murder, or guilty of second-degree murder. If they should rule for murder in the first degree, they would then have to decide for or against the death penalty.
After seven hours, the jury filed back in. In the first ballot, they had decided unanimously that Dale Carrier was guilty of murder in the first degree. They voted against the death penalty. That would soon have been overturned if they had voted for it. The Washington State Supreme C
ourt soon voted against capital punishment, only to reinstate it some years later.
On December 19, Dale Carrier stood before Judge Bradford. He had a statement to make: “You may send me to prison but it does not alter the fact I am innocent. I would gladly volunteer to go to prison if it would guarantee this would not happen to someone else like it did to my wife, because whoever killed my wife is out there right now and may do this again. I am guilty of one thing and that is believing in my country.”
The statement was a strange non sequitur. Immediately after Carrier finished, Judge Bradford sentenced him to life in prison. For what little comfort it gave him, Dale Carrier would not have to leave his hometown: the Washington State Penitentiary was right down the road in Walla Walla.
Carrier made news a week after his conviction when he and two fellow prisoners were caught attempting to tunnel their way out of the Walla Walla County Jail.
He tried a more socially acceptable escape route a few years later. His appeal to the Eastern District Appellate Court of Washington met with resounding failure. All three judges voted against granting the ex-postman a new trial based on his claims of irregularities in the original courtroom procedure.
What’s Love
Got to Do with It?
This case was right out of the film noir movies of the fifties where B-list actors moved through smoky, dark sets in pale imitations of Veronica Lake and Robert Mitchum or Joan Blondell and Dick Powell. The blondes were always brittle on the outside and sentimental beneath their thick makeup, and the men they loved had wavy hair, glistening with Brylcreem. Nobody’s love affair ever turned out well, and usually somebody died violently. Many of those screenplays are being revisited now, starring young actors who haven’t the slightest idea what it takes to make an impossibly bad script into a pretty good movie.
The characters in this case were attractive enough to have been B-list stars and maybe even A-list, but their lives veered off course and they ended up far away from bright lights, big money, and public adulation.
Any veteran detective will tell you that there is really no such thing as an easy murder case. Even the homicides that look as if they will be a breeze to solve can take on unexpected twists. Solving a homicide is never simple; sometimes it seems impossible. On a humid Saturday afternoon in August 1969, King County, Washington, sheriff’s detectives faced one of the toughest challenges they had ever come up against: an unidentified—and virtually unidentifiable—body.
When investigators have no idea who the victim is, they can’t begin looking for his family, closest associates, or enemies. Where do you start?
Two 11-year-old girls found the body, a traumatic experience they would not forget even when they were middle-aged women. The girls had rented horses that day from the Gold Creek Riding Stable, which was located between the small towns of Redmond and Woodinville. In 1969, the towns were considered much too far out in the boonies to even be considered suburbs of Seattle. Today zealous builders have constructed subdivision after subdivision in that area and farther north and east as the new neighborhoods creep up toward Snoqualmie and Stevens passes. The forested acres and fields bristle with houses on small lots, and five-bedroom, three-bathroom homes sell for upwards of half a million dollars apiece. Displaced bears, deer, and even cougars sometimes prowl the newly poured streets, disoriented and looking for food in garbage cans.
But back then, this place was wide-open country, and there were many isolated trails near the stable. The preteens took turns leading the way, laughing and enjoying the last days of their summer vacation. Everything smelled like sunshine, pine and fir sap, and dried grasses bending in the wind.
As they neared a blacktopped road, however, the girls wrinkled their noses in distaste at a pervasive, nauseating odor that assailed their nostrils. Reining in their nervous horses, they looked toward what seemed to be the source of the smell, a pile of fir boughs and brush. They caught just a glimpse of white and assumed that a calf probably had become entangled in barbed wire or thick, vined foliage and died there. They were aware that many local farmers gave rewards for information on livestock that had strayed, and the girls galloped back to the stable and told the owner they had found a dead animal, urging him to come and look for himself.
Worn down by their insistent pleadings, he finally agreed to ride back to the woods with them. Dismounting, he edged closer to the pile of boughs, and then gasped involuntarily as he saw not a calf, but a human arm beneath the branches.
He waved the girls away, telling them he would take care of it. “Don’t look,” he warned. “Go on back and turn in your horses. Just don’t look.”
He returned to his stables and phoned the King County Department of Public Safety, the official title for the sheriff’s office at the time.
Deputy E. Cunnington responded immediately, followed shortly by Chief of Detectives Tom Nault, Sergeant Gordon Hartshorn, and Detectives Eugene Steinauer and Marley Anderson. They asked Dr. Charles Fontan, head of the King County Crime Lab, to accompany them.
Anderson photographed the site before any attempt was made to extricate the body. Then his camera shutter clicked again and again as the investigators began the grisly task of removing the tree limbs and brush that covered whoever was beneath them. When they finally got down to it, they could see that the body, lying prone and completely nude, was in advanced stages of decomposition.
“Frankly, at that point, we didn’t even know if the victim was a man or a woman,” Tom Nault recalled. “The hair was long, making us think that if it was a male, he might have been one of the hippies who attended the big rock festival held in Woodinville during the last week of July.”
Hippies. The term sounds almost quaint now, but 1969 was the height of hippiedom, those “shocking” longhaired, drifting flower children with their peace signs and smelling of patchouli incense and probably marijuana too. Compared to the habitués of meth labs and the heroin smugglers of today, hippies seem benign.
The cause of death for the corpse was a long way from being determined, but the fact that someone had apparently taken pains to hide the body made the King County detectives lean toward foul play of some kind. It had to be either murder or illegal disposal of a dead body.
They searched for something that might help them identify the corpse, but there didn’t seem to be anything at all. There was no clothing and no jewelry. After the body was removed to the King County medical examiner’s office to await an autopsy, the detectives combed the area in a grid pattern, hoping to find some clue to who the victim might have been. They concluded that he—or she—had died somewhere else and that all links for identification had been scrupulously removed.
“The medical examiner’s office may be able to tell us if this was a drug overdose, if the body hasn’t been there too long,” Sergeant Hartshorn speculated. “With all the hundreds of kids gathered for that rock thing, it’s not a surprise that something like this could happen.”
“Yeah,” Nault agreed, “but I’m guessing that this body has been here for some time, maybe as long as three weeks. With the summer heat, decomposition was accelerated, of course.”
Pathologist Paul Foster, deputy King County Medical Examiner, did the postmortem examination. He determined that the deceased was a male, about five feet eleven inches tall, and had weighed 185 to 190 pounds. He had been young, probably between 20 and 25, and muscular.
He hadn’t died of a drug overdose; he had died because someone fired three bullets into the left side of his head. Foster recovered two .38-caliber slugs from the head. The entry wounds were in the eye, the temple, and the cheek. Decomposition made it impossible to tell if the neck or chest had suffered trauma. (Later, a question would come up: Could the deceased also have been stabbed or bludgeoned? But there was no way to tell, even during a very thorough autopsy.)
Foster attempted to take fingerprints, but the fingertips had degenerated to a state that made normal printing impossible. In the hope that the dead man’s prints we
re on file in the FBI’s national headquarters, Foster carefully peeled a layer of skin from each finger. They had at least a partial print left in the layer of skin below. It isn’t easy to erase fingerprints completely, not without the deep plastic surgery some organized-crime figures resort to, because the ridges, loops, and whorls are etched deep down. Foster mounted the fragmented skin on slides with special chemical preservatives, and sent the tissue to the FBI.
There was little officers could do while they waited for the FBI response, except go over the body site painstakingly again on the off chance that they had missed some particle of evidence. The area was isolated, so there were no nearby residents to question about the sounds of a shot or shots. The case had all the earmarks of a “loser,” but Chief Nault and his men weren’t ready to give up yet.
Gordon Hartshorn, a fifteen-year-veteran with the sheriff’s office, assigned Detective Steinauer to the case. They both knew that if the victim was one of the thousands of young people who had attended the frenetic rock concert, he could have come from anywhere in the United States. Also, it was quite possible that he had never had his fingerprints recorded. At the time, the FBI had to have all ten prints to make a comparison; they maintained single-print files only on America’s Ten Most Wanted criminals.
But the Washington State investigators got a lucky break: the FBI lab reported they had been able to make a match. It was the first faint ray of light in a very difficult case. The victim was foreign born and he’d been required to have his prints taken when he immigrated to the United States.
The dead man was Karsten Knutsen, 24, who was a citizen of Norway. The Norwegian national had been in the United States for seven years, and he had a listed address in the Ballard area of Seattle.
Hartshorn and Steinauer studied the information. “That probably blows the hippie theory,” Hartshorn mused. “But how on earth did Knutsen end up over east of Lake Washington?”