At 7:30 A.M., the body was removed for autopsy by the chief medical examiner, Dr. Gale Wilson. While detectives Cuthill, Miller, and Fonis returned to headquarters to confer with the director of the crime lab, criminalist George Ishii, Sergeant Wittman directed five investigators to the scene—Sergeants Ed Golder, Henry Ebbeson, and Detectives Roy Moran, Billy Baughman, and Mike Germann—to conduct an inch-by-inch search of the wooded park area. It didn’t matter that it was a Saturday. The usual weekend crew in the Homicide Unit was made up of one sergeant and four detectives, but this murder was so savage that nobody complained about being called in for overtime.
They were dealing with what was potentially a huge crime scene. Detecting evidence—some of it minute—would not be easy in the rugged park landscape. However, Mike Germann and Ray Moran, working beneath the bridge overpass some 225 feet from the body, noted suspicious dark red stains on bushes growing there. They rushed the branches to the crime lab for tests. The stains proved to be human blood.
Just as they had feared, the crime scene perimeters encompassed a very large area, far larger than the usual scene. But the tedious search for physical evidence was the backbone of any strong homicide case, and every detective going through that woods on his hands and knees knew it. The most minute clue is often the one that clinches a case. Circumstantial evidence is all well and good and makes TV detectives and lawyers shine, but it is the kind of doggedly painstaking search carried out by Seattle detectives on that sunny morning in July that constructs a case that will hold up in court.
At eight A.M. on that bright summer morning, Detective Don Strunk had the hardest task a homicide detective ever faces—informing the family of the victim. He could tell when they opened the door that they hadn’t slept all night; they’d clearly been waiting up for their daughter to come home.
As gently as possible, he talked with Victoria Legg’s parents and sister. Fighting to retain some degree of composure, the Legg family said that Victoria had left at about eight the previous evening for a date with a man they knew only as Cal Lansing.* At least, they assumed that she had gone out with Lansing; they could not be sure, because no one was home at the time he was supposed to pick her up and none of them had ever seen him.
They said that Victoria had never dated him before. All they knew was that she had met him about a month previously at a TacoTime Mexican restaurant in South Seattle.
Her mother wept as she said she had warned Victoria over and over again about dating someone she had met so casually. If only she had been home to meet her daughter’s date of the night before, she wondered if she might have been able to save Victoria.
“She just said that she would be fine, that he seemed like a nice guy. I told her she couldn’t know that so soon, but she thought I was silly to be worried.”
It was a last-minute date, her family recalled, because Victoria had been planning to go shopping with two girlfriends the night before. But she had suddenly changed her mind and accepted Lansing’s invitation to go to The Warehouse. Strunk knew that was the popular tavern at the moment for those in their twenties. It was on Eastlake, about two miles south of Cowan Park.
“You remember anything else Victoria might have said about Lansing?” he asked.
“She said he told her that he had just been released from a hospital where he was treated for a football injury. I think he was on the University of Washington team, and they just started summer practice.”
As Strunk left, he could see the family was in deep shock, still trying to deal with the terrible news he’d given them. Sadly, the victim’s mother had been right in her advice, but the end result was much worse than even she had worried about. Don Strunk assured them that the detectives were doing everything they could to find Lansing. He left his card and asked Victoria’s family to call if they remembered anything more that she might have said about him.
Don Strunk talked next to a neighbor of the Legg family who said he had seen Victoria leaving with a date the night before. The neighbor said he’d even made small talk with the man. “He was a young fellow—husky—maybe five feet ten and up around two hundred,” the witness said. “He was wearing a yellow sweater, and he had dark brown hair. Cut short and neat. He was a real clean-cut guy. We talked a little and he seemed like a happy-go-lucky type.”
“Did you notice the car he was driving?” Strunk asked.
“Yes. It was a ’62 or ’63 Olds. Ivory color—four door sedan. I know my cars. It had Washington plates.”
Strunk thanked the witness for his help and thanked providence for the man’s precise memory. He’d come up with everything but the car’s license number.
Checking the Traffic Violations Bureau for a record on a Cal Lansing, Strunk fared even better. There was an arrest noted for a Calvin Archer Lansing Jr., white male, 21, six feet tall, 210 pounds, with brown hair and a stocky build. He had been arrested two months earlier for drunk driving. Even more interesting, this Cal Lansing was listed as owning a 1963 Oldsmobile four-door white sedan, license number ABB-957.
Strunk obtained mug shots of Lansing, combined them with five similar-looking photos of men in a “lay-down,” and returned to show them to the observant neighbor of the victim. The man studied them for a while, but he wavered between two of the photos and said he didn’t think he could definitely pick one photo. However, his son and a friend had also seen Victoria Legg’s date and both of them picked Cal Lansing’s photo without hesitation.
• • •
While Don Strunk was trying to identify Victoria Legg’s Friday-night date, Ted Fonis and H. D. Aitken were detailed to Dr. Gale Wilson’s office to witness the autopsy of the dead girl. They told Dr. Wilson about the surroundings where she had been found and showed him the photographs detectives had taken at the park scene.
The victim’s body was extremely dirty and countless pieces of twigs, grit, dust, and weeds from the park area adhered to it. There were a number of small abrasions on her legs and feet, both knees were skinned, her left elbow was skinned, and there were numerous small bruises and abrasions on her shoulders. There was a large bruise on the right side of her neck extending from the collarbone to the underpart of her chin.
The postmortem exam also revealed that the victim had suffered terrible injuries from a beating, either with fists or a thick branch. Both of her eyes were blackened—although the left eye had been injured much more severely.
One tooth had been knocked completely out, one loosened, and one broken off. Perhaps more shocking, vegetable matter had been forced down her throat—the Oregon grape and fern fronds that grew in the park location, some of them seven inches in length. If the stocking around her neck hadn’t succeeded in strangling her, the native vegetation would probably have suffocated her.
Her dress was still zipped up the back, but remnants of her panties were found around her waist. Her bra straps had been torn apart and the bra, too, dangled around her waist. Vaginal examination indicated that intercourse had taken place shortly before, during, or just after death.
Victoria had eaten a heavy meal within two hours of her death—a meal that consisted of Chinese food.
Dr. Wilson concluded that Victoria Legg had succumbed from asphyxia by strangulation and the “vegetable matter that an unknown person forced down her throat with an unknown instrument.”
Her death had been unusually violent, the work of someone enraged, perhaps, by her refusal to have sex with him.
• • •
Victoria’s family had provided the names and phone numbers of her closest girlfriends. The investigators started by talking with the girl that she had planned to go shopping with on Friday night.
“We had a tentative date,” the girl said. “Victoria told me that she’d go shopping with me if Cal Lansing didn’t call her back. I guess he called before she got home from work and her little sister answered, and he said he’d call Victoria later. Then she called me about a quarter to seven on Friday and said she did have a date with Cal. Th
ey were going to The Warehouse.”
“Had she been out with him before?” Wayne Dorman asked.
“No—I’m sure she hadn’t. I don’t really know anything about him,” Victoria’s friend said, “except his name and that Victoria met him at the TacoTime drive-in about a month ago. She told me she was attracted to him because he reminded her of an old boyfriend. She never did go out with him before Friday that I knew of, but I know she talked to him on the phone several times.”
The fact that Lansing did indeed resemble Victoria’s old boyfriend was most evident to investigators when they looked at an enlargement of a snapshot they’d found in the victim’s wallet. The photo was of Victoria Legg and her former boyfriend; the boyfriend, now in the service, bore a decided resemblance to Cal Lansing.
Detectives questioned all employees of The Warehouse and found one bartender who remembered that Cal Lansing had been in the vast, uniquely decorated nightspot from around 9:30 to 10:30 on Friday night. However, he couldn’t remember if Lansing had a date with him.
Looking at the many-tiered levels of the immense tavern and the packed crowd of “under-30s” dancing to the constant throb of hard rock music from the combo suspended above the dance floor, the investigators could well imagine that it would be hard to remember who might or might not have been there on any given night.
Working on the information that Cal Lansing had been a football player, Ted Fonis called popular University of Washington football coach Jim Owens, who had taken his winning teams to the Rose Bowl. Fonis asked Owens if he had a student named Cal Lansing in his Husky football spring or summer turnout. Owens replied that he had not—nor had he ever had a Cal Lansing on his squad.
That told them one thing for sure: Cal Lansing was, at the very least, a liar.
A work friend of Victoria’s had more information. He was an employee of The Boeing Company, a security guard at the huge plant’s gates. When he read the article in The Seattle Times about Victoria’s murder, he called Don Strunk and Ted Fonis to tell them that he had known the victim for some time and might have things that would help them find her killer. They drove at once to the Boeing plant and listened to his story.
The security guard was a middle-aged man who explained that he had known the pretty young clerk since she began working for Boeing. “She kind of confided in me like a daughter might to a father,” he said. “Victoria was an old-fashioned, naive girl, the kind you don’t see much anymore. She blushed a lot. Well, the last couple of weeks before Vicki died, this fellow had been coming to the parking lot and waiting by her car—it’s a 1968 Buick—when she came out to lunch. I’d see them talking by her car. It was all kind of joking, you understand, but Victoria told me that he bothered her.”
“How?” Strunk asked.
“I guess because she didn’t know him very well, and he was real insistent about dating her.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was about her age, I’d say—maybe 22, 23. I’d say six feet tall, over two hundred pounds. Kind of heavyset, with brown hair.”
Ted Fonis showed him the lay-down of mug shots, and the guard identified Cal Lansing immediately as the man who had hung around the dead girl’s automobile.
“I didn’t like the look of him,” he commented sadly. “He was almost stalking her, just creeping around her car, waiting for her like that. I would have told him to leave her alone, but she never asked me to do that—and it wasn’t my business.”
• • •
Armed with the address listed for Calvin Archer Lansing at the time of his traffic violation arrest in May, detectives drove to an area just west of the University District. They found the name Lansing on one of the mailboxes of the run-down five-plex and cautiously approached the apartment just up the stairs where the number on the door matched the mailbox.
Their knocks, however, went unanswered. When they peered through the window, they could see that the apartment had probably been vacant for some time. Cardboard boxes, dust, empty cupboards, and just a few junky pieces of furniture left behind told the story. They contacted a neighboring tenant and learned that Lansing had lived there, but he had moved out about a month before.
Even with this information, the detectives double-checked with the landlord and arranged to have patrol units check the address several more times.
They located an elderly relative of Lansing’s, but the man they wanted wasn’t there, nor was Lansing’s car parked nearby. He had several family members living in the south end of Seattle, and the investigators drove “sneaker cars” around their homes, first checking alleyways and surrounding streets to see if the ’63 Oldsmobile was parked there.
When they did contact Cal Lansing’s relatives, they all said they hadn’t seen him for months. One uncle finally admitted that Cal had called only the day before, but he didn’t know where he was at the moment.
Elmer Wittman and Mike Germann went back once again to the five-plex. They had a hunch that he wasn’t really gone from there for good. This time, they talked with the tenant who lived immediately beneath Lansing’s former apartment. She said Cal Lansing had lived there for eight or nine months and had moved out only two weeks before. She’d known him well because he used her phone often.
“In fact,” she offered, to the detectives’ surprise, “he was here yesterday—in the morning—to pick up his mail.”
“How was he? Did he seem nervous—or different than he usually acted?” Germann asked.
“No,” she said. “He was like he always was: in a good mood.”
“Have any bruises or scratches on him?”
She shook her head. “None. I wasn’t looking for any, though, but there was nothing obvious.”
Lansing’s neighbor told them that she believed Lansing had been receiving unemployment checks from the state and thought he was probably looking for his check.
“What’s he like? You know him well?”
“Not really. But he had a violent temper when something set it off,” she said. “He drank a lot of wine, and he was always talking about speed and narcotics. I don’t know if he was really using, or if he was trying to sound cool.”
Victoria Legg had only been dead for two days, but the investigators from the Seattle Police Homicide Unit had been working around the clock, one team taking over from another. They were fighting time and the chance that Lansing might take another victim. They disregarded the fact that it was a summer Sunday. An all-points bulletin in the eleven western states was issued for Calvin Archer Lansing.
By Monday morning, July 20, they had yet to find Lansing, even though he’d been seen briefly at most of his old haunts. They suspected he was still in the area.
Sergeant Elmer Wittman received a phone call from a female relative of Cal Lansing. She said she was extremely concerned because Lansing always came to her home for Sunday-night dinner, but he hadn’t shown up the night before. “I just saw him on Friday night,” she said.
“What time was that?” Wittman asked.
“He left my house about 7:30 P.M.,” she said. “He was all dressed up, I remember. He had on a gold-colored sweater, a white sport shirt, and plaid slacks.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No—but he called me Saturday morning about eleven A.M. and asked about his mail. He sounded normal and cheerful, like always. He was waiting for letters from several colleges where he’s sent applications. Now I’m worried because Cal said he was coming over to see me in a couple of hours, and I haven’t heard a word from him since.”
So far, the investigators were getting two diametrically opposed descriptions of Cal Lansing. Some witnesses had said he was a weird stalker, a man with out-of-control temper tantrums, and a drug and alcohol user. His relatives—and Victoria’s own neighbor—said that he was a pleasant, well-groomed man who was looking forward to college in the fall.
Lansing’s father told detectives that Cal had applied for a loan—a federally insured student loan—from a no
rth end bank so he would have tuition money.
“I think he’ll be checking with the bank this week to see what progress they’ve made on that loan. He applied for $1,000.”
When he was asked if his son might have flipped out of control and killed Victoria Legg, Lansing’s father looked doubtful.
“I don’t think he had anything to do with the murder of that girl,” he said firmly. “If he is avoiding you police, it’s because he’s worried about some traffic violations he has on his record.”
“Yeah,” Ted Fonis said. “We know about those. No big deal with that. We just want to talk to him and he can probably clear himself.”
Fonis and Don Strunk contacted the bank officials and spoke with the officer who had processed Cal Lansing’s application. She said she had mailed correspondence to him on the previous Friday, July 17, and had received his reply by return mail.
“In fact,” she said, “it was in this morning’s mail. I expect I’ll hear from him again soon. His loan was okayed and he’ll need to get in touch with me in order to get his check.”
The number of places Lansing was likely to show up—and soon—was multiplying. Fonis and Strunk asked the bank staff to call them at once if he called them or came in to pick up his check. They made a similar agreement with the Washington State unemployment office where they had learned Lansing was due to report at 9:45 on Wednesday morning. If he wanted any more checks, he was required to check in and give them a list of places where he had sought work.
Every patrol officer in Seattle and all the sheriff’s deputies in King County had Lansing’s photo on their dashboards and the description of his white Oldsmobile. Surely, one of them would spot him at any moment.
But the hours passed without even a sighting. Strunk and Fonis worked on another lead that could place Lansing with Victoria Legg on Friday evening. No one had actually seen them together—not even her neighbor. He had seen Lansing, as had the bartender at The Warehouse. Was there even a slight chance that Vicki had stood Lansing up? Had she gone out with someone else?