No Regrets (30 page)

“I remember when she ran away from Fayetteville last June 8,” Littlejohn recalled. “The family asked me to do a ‘locate and determine welfare’ on Teresa because they thought she was headed here. They didn’t have much hope of getting her to go back home. But they wanted to know that she was safe.”

Littlejohn had found Teresa back in Bellevue, and he’d talked to her. Then he called her parents and said that she was all right. He’d tried to keep tabs on her, although she moved around so much that it wasn’t easy. Her parents hadn’t reported her as a runaway; they had just asked for information, and he had no cause to pick her up unless she
broke the law. When Bob Littlejohn responded to the call about the skull in the woods, the picture of Teresa Sterling’s piquant little face hadn’t even crossed his mind.

The physical similarity, the identical blouse, the fact that Teresa Sterling had not been seen by her good friend for months, all pointed to the likelihood that it was her body. Littlejohn was saddened to realize now why there had been no runaway or missing report put out on her. Her parents had simply given up trying to corral her; they had tried everything, and then they had hoped and prayed that tough love might work. Short of locking her up, they hadn’t been able to keep her at home, but hoped finally that maybe she would come home if she got hungry or lonely enough. Littlejohn had spent many off-duty hours trying to help Teresa, too. But no one had been able to convince her to go back to the parents who loved her.

Roy Gleason had the onerous task of notifying Teresa Sterling’s stepmother that he was investigating the homicide of a young girl. “There is a possibility that the victim might be your daughter,” he said gently. “We have to identify her. Would you have the names of dentists who might have cared for Teresa while you lived in the Bellevue area?”

The shocked woman said that Teresa had seen two dentists in Bellevue—one of whom had put in a gold crown. The dentist who had done the crown work gave detectives her dental records, which they carried to the medical examiner’s office. The crown looked to be identical to the tooth in question. To be absolutely sure, the investigators contacted forensic odontologist Dr. Bruce Rothwell of the Mason Clinic in Seattle.

Dr. Rothwell looked at the chart and at the gold crown
work. “There’s no question,” he said. “They are identical. Your victim is Teresa Sterling.”

It was a start. Now, three days after the body’s discovery, they knew the name of their victim, and something of her lifestyle. But they still had vast areas to fill in. Teresa had left Georgia alive and well on June 8, and made it safely to Bellevue. What they had to do now was to attempt to trace Teresa’s movements between June 12 and December 7. Six months.

They knew that she had undoubtedly been alive for a good part of the summer, but they still could not narrow down the time period when she probably was killed. All they had to go on was the fact that she’d failed to meet Nancy Dillon in California—but that could have been simply because she’d changed her mind. She was a capricious girl who went anywhere the wind blew.

Nancy was able to help out more. She looked at her calendar and said she could isolate the few days when she had expected to see Teresa.

“Teresa had a boyfriend named Jeff,* and they promised to call me at my grandmother’s house in California around July 4—just as soon as they were close. But I didn’t hear from them. I even called my mother and asked her if she knew where Teresa was—but no one had seen her. I didn’t get back to Bellevue until the end of August. Teresa was still gone. I thought maybe Teresa and Jeff did make it to California, but they didn’t call me. I figured they might still be still down there.

“Teresa could have stayed at my house,” Nancy continued. “We offered her a place to stay when she showed up on June 12—but she refused. She just planned to stay around with different people. She didn’t like to be tied down to anyone.”

Once the search for Teresa’s friends began, the detectives were deluged with calls from people who wanted to help—both teenagers and their parents. Gossip moved through the teenage community as if it was being passed on by jungle drums. Most of them had kept secrets from their own parents and their friends’ parents, but this was different. Teresa was dead. Murdered. That made them all feel vulnerable. They wondered if her killer was still walking among them.

Teresa had been a party girl, attending every “kegger” and beach party she heard about. During the previous summer, she had worked only one day. She had lived a kind of hand-to-mouth existence, dependent on “the kindness of strangers” and her wits. She borrowed clothes from friends, and ate her meals wherever she was at the moment.

Apparently, Teresa had stayed a very short time with her own eighteen-year-old sister and then with family friends and often with people she had just met, most of them adults. That left scores of people to be questioned. The investigators found a pair of single male adults who had taken her in for a while, but that was early in the summer. The men apparently had had nothing to do with her death.

She had dated many young men, but the name “Jeff” kept surfacing as her steady boyfriend. Sources who had known her well said that “Jeff” was eighteen-year-old Jeff Bigelow,
^*
who lived with his parents, and who rode a motorcycle.

Police in Redmond, a city just northeast of Bellevue, were able to narrow the time of her disappearance more closely. Their department had a report that indicated one of their officers had contacted both Teresa and Jeff
Bigelow around midnight in early August. “One of our patrol officers found them drinking on the beach by Lake Sammamish. We have an FIR (Field Investigation Report) on it. They were both underage,” the Redmond detective said.

And then a hairdresser in Bellevue called the Bellevue detectives and said that he had done Teresa’s hair on August 24. He furnished a copy of his appointment schedule for that Friday that confirmed Teresa had been in his shop. “I recognized the girl’s description,” he told Roy Gleason. “I knew Teresa. On August 24, she came in during the afternoon and she brought along a young guy who carried a motorcycle helmet.”

Valuable tips continued to pile up. Next, the detectives got an assist from Dorcas Resnick,
^*
an elderly woman who lived in the area where Teresa’s body had been found. She called in and asked the detectives to visit her home. Roy Gleason talked to Dorcas and found she had a remarkable memory.

“I walk my dog near the peach orchard every day,” she began. “If you’d like, I’ll walk through the area and show you.”

The woman and Gleason walked through the region, as she pointed out landmarks.

“I began to smell a very strong, foul odor,” she recalled. “I know it was two weeks before the gentleman put up that split-rail fence there. There was a pair of women’s panties lying near the path for about two weeks, and then they were gone. My dog kept wanting to go into the woods where the odor was so bad. I tried to stop her, but a couple of times, she did run in there. Finally, the smell was just so bad that I ended up taking a back way around the woods.”

The site was exactly where Teresa’s skeleton was found months later.

Gleason contacted the fence builder, and learned that the man had put up the fence on September 13. Counting back two weeks, Gleason came up with August 30. That was when Dorcas Resnick had noticed the odor; the decomposition of the body would not have begun to give off a distinctive odor immediately. Gleason conferred with his fellow detectives, and they figured that Teresa had died sometime between the night of August 24 and August 26.

She had had her hair done on the twenty-fourth—probably in preparation for a party. Had anyone seen her after that party? In the days ahead, they found no sightings after that night. It was very likely that Teresa had died on August 24.

The probers had now talked to thirty people who knew Teresa Sterling well. They learned that two of her close friends had run away from home on December 8, just as the news of the body find hit the papers. The two teenagers, Tami Wells
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and Bonnie Cross,
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were traced to Yakima, Washington, in the company of an adult male. They were picked up by Yakima police, and Detectives Gary Trent and Marv Skeen went over the Cascade Mountain passes to bring the girls back.

It turned out that the girls had not run away because of any guilty knowledge about Teresa’s death; they had left on a whim. However, they were able to corroborate much of the information about Teresa’s perambulations during her last summer. Tami verified that Teresa and Jeff had dated quite steadily all summer. “They were together all the time for about two weeks in August, and then I didn’t see either one of them anymore,” Tami said.

“Do you know where Teresa met Jeff?” Gary Trent asked.

“We were walking over by Crossroads and Jeff and some guy went riding past on motorcycles, but then they stopped—and started talking to us.”

“Do you know where Jeff went after you stopped seeing Teresa?”

“All I know is she kept saying they were going to California together. That’s what I thought they’d done,” Tami said. She had considered Teresa her very good friend, and wondered about her. “She used to call me at least once a day, and I was really surprised when she suddenly stopped calling me. She didn’t even say good-bye.”

Another seventeen-year-old girl volunteered an opinion. Jill Reid* told Gleason that she had known Teresa and Jeff Bigelow, although she hadn’t been a close friend of either. “When we heard that Teresa had been killed, a bunch of us started talking. We kept asking each other, ‘Could Jeff Bigelow have done it?’”

“Why would you feel that way?” Gleason probed.

“Well, they were together and people saw them all over, and then three months ago, they both just disappeared. Suddenly, we heard that Jeff had gone into the army, and nobody had seen Teresa at all.”

No matter which angle the Bellevue detectives studied, the most rational approach kept bringing them back to eighteen-year-old Jeff Bigelow—Teresa Sterling’s last boyfriend.

One of the most dissonant factors jarring the detectives was that everyone but Jeff Bigelow had called them to offer help or to ask questions. If he had been so close to Teresa, surely he would have heard by now that her body had been found. Surely he would have come forward to
help in the investigation. Unless he had something to hide.

Gleason contacted military authorities and learned that Jeff Bigelow had enlisted in the army during the last few days of August, and been sent to Fort Lewis, Washington, the sprawling army base forty-five miles away. It had not been an impromptu enlistment, however; Bigelow had signed up earlier in the summer.

On December 14, Gleason and Gary Trent went to CID offices at Fort Lewis—only to learn that Bigelow had taken a four-day pass and would not be back until Tuesday, December 18. Two days later, however, Bigelow called the Bellevue Police Department. When he was told that the detectives who were looking for him were not on duty, he left his name and hung up.

On December 18, Gleason and Trent went back to Fort Lewis and met with Jeff Bigelow in the CID offices. The interview began on a casual note. He was told that they were merely seeking more information about Teresa Sterling, and Bigelow was perfectly agreeable to having the interview recorded.

Even at this point, the young soldier was not a prime suspect, but he was the one man who had evolved as being the closest to the dead girl. Trent asked him to describe their meeting, their relationship, and how often he had seen her.

The detectives were surprised by his next words. He seemed to be holding back. He was very calm as he said he had known Teresa only casually—he guessed that he might have dated her once or twice. “The last time I saw her was some time in the middle of August. It was in downtown Bellevue. I said ‘Hi’ and told her I was going in the army.”

Trent stopped the tape. He said they knew that Bigelow’s story was full of discrepancies, and that, at this point, he would be advised of his rights under Miranda. “We think you’re the guy who was with Teresa at the beauty shop on August 24. All your friends have told us over and over you and Teresa went to a lot of parties together.”

Bigelow turned ashen and sagged a little in his chair. And he then admitted that he
was
the man with the motorcycle helmet who had been with Teresa that afternoon. “I guess I thought that was sometime earlier in August.”

“We don’t believe that you were only casual acquaintances,” Trent said quietly. “We think you two had hooked up last summer.”

“I didn’t consider her my girlfriend,” Bigelow argued. “I guess we did go out together, but it was only to parties and stuff.”

Gleason and Trent could see that the previously calm soldier was becoming agitated. They pointed out that all their investigations indicated that Bigelow was probably the last person to see Teresa alive. Gradually, they suggested that he might have been involved in her death.

Their conversation continued for another twenty minutes or so, and then Jeff Bigelow could stand it no longer. He had a lot on his conscience, and he wanted to tell someone.

“I lost control of myself... and I accidentally killed her,” he sighed.

Bigelow described a party the two had attended on August 24 or 25. They had both been drinking, and he guessed that they were probably pretty drunk.

“Teresa made me jealous—she was paying attention to
all the other guys there, and deliberately ignoring me. It got to me.”

He said he had watched her flirting and had started to seethe with envy. Just after midnight, they had left the party, riding double on his motorcycle. At that point, he said they weren’t very far from where Teresa’s body had been found.

“A ways down the street, I stopped,” Bigelow recalled. “She kept telling me how good-looking all those dudes at the party were, and how she wanted me to take her back there. We got into an argument about it.”

Bigelow said he’d heard enough of that kind of talk. He was tired of it. But Teresa kept on taunting him about how much more attractive the other guys at the party were.