While the City Slept (2 page)

As Berg descended the hill, the view out his windshield tightened, from a panorama of lights in the industrial valley below to a tunnel of amber-lit arterial with darkness beyond its edges. He braked for a stoplight and cross traffic at the bottom of the hill, pulled around a pickup truck that was in his way, turned on his flashers, then raced across a stretch of flatland and under a highway overpass. He passed lots holding stacked metal drums and lengths of construction cranes lying on their sides. The dump was now on his right in the darkness.

He turned left at an intersection where a city sign for Holden Street
was bolted to the corrugated-metal wall of a warehouse. His cruiser rattled over potholes, past moss-covered Greyhound buses long retired from service, past Fire King of Seattle and its pile of old extinguishers rusting in an adjacent lot, past Custom Crating and Wood Box Company.

The road Berg was on would soon dead-end at the Duwamish, but before this happened, he pulled right onto Fifth Avenue South. Past Swift Tool Company, past Rogers Machinery, and then, six blocks from the scene, Berg stopped his patrol car and waited, headlights shining on an overgrown lot. He’d often trained new officers, so he knew protocol dictated he arrive at South Rose Street with backup.

The fire truck, too, was stopped and waiting, now parked near Israel’s house, several hundred yards from where the shouts were coming from, a standard procedure designed to protect unarmed firemen and medics. Still the truck’s lights flashed, and its headlights beamed down the block toward the red house, as if in promise to the women and in warning to their attacker.

—

Berg knew the guy who was coming to watch his back while he focused on the victims, Officer Ernest DeBella. As soon as the radio told him DeBella was close, Berg headed for South Rose Street, alternately gunning and slowing his engine to try to synchronize his arrival with his fellow officer’s. He passed a stack of wood pallets on a sidewalk, turned onto Eighth Avenue South, accelerated, turned his flashers back on. He passed under a canopy of maples, including the one that had buckled the sidewalk in front of Israel’s house.

At the intersection with South Rose, he drove up on the curb to get around the fire truck and then stopped at a collapsible basketball hoop set up for playing in the street. It had been five and a half minutes since the call came in.

What Berg now saw stood out from “hundreds, maybe a thousand” violent crime scenes he’d walked into during his twenty-five years as a
police officer. He saw Teresa Butz lying in the street, her head no longer in Sara’s lap. He saw Jennifer Hopper standing above her, partly shrouded in a white towel Diana had given her. He saw blood.

—

The waiting medics came in behind Berg and DeBella, and then additional police cars behind them. Officer Melissa Wengard was driving one. She’d just checked in for first watch—3:00 a.m. to noon—and during roll call, she later testified, she was told to get to South Park “as quickly as possible.” With Officer Nilo Dela Cruz, who likewise was sent directly from roll call to South Rose, she proceeded to “clear” the red house.

“It was a very brief clearing,” Wengard said. “It’s a fairly small house.”

They shouted “Seattle Police!” as they entered the front door, noted blood on the floor and in the main bedroom. They looked in closets, under the bed, accidentally knocked over an ironing board, saw a large knife on the floor, checked the low-ceilinged basement. They stayed on the perimeter of the rooms as they did this so as not to disturb evidence. “We actually walk the walls,” Dela Cruz explained later, on the stand. “That’s what we call it, walking the walls.” They found no one.

Officer Brian Downing, part of the canine unit, arrived with his German shepherd, Jack. They found a scent of interest outside the red house, just under its bathroom window, which was open, and Jack followed the scent across an alley behind the home. He pulled Officer Downing along hard—“I call it dog skiing,” he said—onto the community center ball field, toward an edge of the field where a scrim of trees bumps up against the stretch of freeway bisecting the neighborhood. There, Jack lost the scent.

Someone called over the radio for the police helicopter. It wasn’t available. Someone else called over the radio for a blood run. Officer Curtis Daniel Woo offered himself. He’d come to the scene without being told. “Wasn’t so much dispatched,” he said, “as I volunteered for the call. This is probably one of the most serious calls a police officer will go to. When
something like this comes out, everybody that’s working goes. You drop what you’re doing and you just go, because you know the other people there are going to need help.”

In the back of an ambulance, paramedic Les Davis tended to the woman with the towel draped around her and, as he worked, noticed the look on her face. It was unique to him in thirty-five years as a paramedic. “Absolute terror,” he said. “I’ve never seen that. I’ve seen a lot of people.”

This was Jennifer Hopper, Teresa’s fiancée. Before being taken to the ambulance, she’d been heard to say, “He told us if we did what he asked us to do, he wouldn’t hurt us. He lied.”

—

Jennifer kept asking about Teresa. A second paramedic, Carlos Valdivia, told her, “Other people are taking care of your partner right now. We’re here to take care of you.” She screamed out for Teresa from the back of the ambulance, telling her she loved her.

Valdivia and Davis then drew a small vial of Jennifer’s blood and handed it to Woo, who raced “lights and sirens” to the Puget Sound Blood Center as the ambulance itself headed for Harborview, the region’s Level 1 trauma center, perched on a downtown hill distant from the Duwamish River valley.

—

Later, when the doctors were done, Woo walked in and asked Jennifer the required questions as gently as he could. “Name, date of birth, address,” he recalled on the stand. “Asked her for the name of her partner.”

Jennifer still wanted someone to tell her about Teresa.

“I lied to her,” Woo said. “I told her I didn’t know if her partner was alive or not.”

Jennifer didn’t believe him.

She held a thought she’d had standing there on South Rose Street: “I have to be able to tell people what happened.”

—

Somewhere in the night was the man who’d done this. In the grip of what, no witness to his violence knew, though a small number of people, on hearing what occurred on South Rose Street, would get an uneasy feeling and think to themselves: Isaiah. They knew him to be a young man reeling, raging. They had feared him, and it was fear of a certain kind. Not the primal, salable fear of violence, not fright of the unexpected arriving with sudden brutality from an unknowable beyond. Theirs was fear of a known man and an outcome not yet known but likely to be grim. Fear of a person who, regrettably, had lived and delivered pain already, a man intelligent enough to impress yet with seemingly no handle on where his disjointed thoughts, speech, and actions might be headed. Or, if he did have some premonition, no firm brake, internal or external.

—

To the police, the most easily deduced thing was that the man who’d done this was brazen. He’d left bloody footprints and fingerprints at the red house, as if he lacked any thought of capture or consequence, and this now added to fears about his next thoughts, to the urgency of the gathering manhunt. In a basement apartment near the center of the city, a cell phone rang.

Detective Dana Duffy was asleep on a mattress on the floor, her service weapon, a .40-caliber Glock, stuffed under her pillow. She didn’t feel safe in this place. It kept getting robbed, which was strange because Detective Duffy didn’t have much of interest. When she left her husband of twenty-three years and found this cheap one-bedroom, she’d brought with her just the mattress, a used couch, an old TV, and a $40 microwave, the sparseness of the furnishings in direct proportion to the urgency of her need to get away.

He hadn’t wanted her to be a cop, thought she should keep working as an emergency room nurse. Her father wouldn’t have liked her career change,
either. He was a drunk and a bank robber and, for a time, an out-of-state fugitive. Detective Dana Duffy is not one to appreciate being told what to do. Six years as a cop, first on night patrol, then in the gang unit. After that, homicide, a perch it usually takes officers twenty years to climb into. Seven years as the only female detective in homicide, left her husband along the way, and when her cell phone rang in her basement apartment that night in the summer of 2009, Detective Duffy picked it up, forty-five years old, fit and compact, adrenaline rising, ready to work. “A lot of people get up, and they’ll shower,” she said. “For me, I like to get there.” She listened to the brief synopsis of what first responders were seeing. She put her light brown hair in a ponytail. She threw on some clothes. She grabbed a Diet Coke out of the fridge, to throw some caffeine behind the adrenaline. She got into her take-home car, an Impala, a car that, being speed oriented, she was happy to have, because the other choice for Seattle detectives was a hybrid Toyota.

Onto the empty freeway, into the Duwamish valley, onto South Rose Street, out of the Impala, into the warm morning, past the yellow tape and the top brass. “It was summer,” she said. “It was a beautiful day.”

—

At her desk at police headquarters in downtown Seattle, Detective Duffy keeps pictures of all the people whose deaths she’s investigated, tacks them to the walls of her cubicle. She’s lost track of how many yellow-taped murder scenes she’s arrived at, all told. This one stood out. “I remember seeing the house, and seeing the curtain flying from the bedroom window, drifting through the air, with blood all down the bottom,” she said. “And looking across at the neighbor’s house, and seeing blood all over the neighbor’s door, thinking, ‘What in the hell happened?’” Teresa’s body was still in the street, now covered by a yellow emergency blanket. Detective Duffy took this in and was still knocking the cobwebs out of her head when she walked through the red house. “A dynamic scene,” she said. “This wasn’t just a shooting where somebody’s dead, and that’s it. Something happened. There was a story.”

The interior was a grotesque hieroglyph hinting at strong emotion and violent struggle. Investigators began bagging evidence, and Detective Duffy’s mind turned to another unusual aspect. “I’ve never had a murder case where there’s two victims,” she said, “and one survives.”

—

She got back in the Impala. She drove to the hospital. She walked into Jennifer’s room, put her hand on Jennifer’s wrist. She said, “Hey, Jen. I’m Detective Duffy. I’m Dana, and I’m gonna be one of the detectives working on your case.”

“And I remember,” Jennifer said, “the first thing I asked her was, ‘Did she make it?’ And without hesitation—and I was so grateful for this—she just said, ‘No, she didn’t.’”

—

Jennifer screamed.

Some time passed.

Detective Duffy pulled out an audio recorder. She turned it on.

“Okay,” she said to Jennifer. “Let’s start at the very beginning.”

B
ack in South Park, the Duwamish moving through another warm day. In the city beyond, people awakening to work. On television, the launch of a familiar narrative: a neighborhood in shock, a manhunt, vows to make an arrest.

But the story of a crime like the one that occurred on South Rose Street does not begin with the news. Look down into any stretch of the Duwamish, on any day, and offer a variation on Detective Duffy’s request: Where is the very beginning?

The tributaries that feed a moment are vast. At the riverside, countless water molecules in motion and the din of the surrounding city. It could be concluded, standing there, that a very beginning for what occurred on South Rose Street will never be located. That one might as well ask how three drops of rain, each cast from different skies, came to float in one fouled bend in the Duwamish at the height of summer.

Even so, some stories are worth assembling. Some crimes cry out for an accounting. Some offenses indict so much, and reflect so much, that they demand attention—to what was taken, to the taker, to the trials that preceded and followed.

There were two women in that red house who, searching for love, had found each other. There was one man who, needing a halt to his psychological descent, had found nothing but an open window. All of them human with human limits, their routes winding backward through St. Louis, where Teresa grew up stubborn and tough in a large family; through the
mountains north of Santa Fe, where the newborn Jennifer was cradled by two adventurous spirits; through Uganda, the country Isaiah’s father fled for Seattle; and through the neighborhoods of the father’s new city, where he met Isaiah’s mother, where their son was raised amid difficult circumstances, and where, nearly twenty-four years later, Isaiah’s disintegrating life collided with the life Teresa and Jennifer had made.

That collision, and the histories that precede it, have something to offer the present. All three lives have something to teach. Upstream then, eyes wide, against the current.

A
brick house on Holly Hills Boulevard in St. Louis, and a large sweet gum tree towering above it. Towering above the stone porch, above the green Spanish-style tiles that cover the home’s roof. The limbs of this tree bustle about during the high winds that signal tornado season, and on still days in summer a boy and his younger sister play inside a ring of bushes surrounding the tree’s base. This is their spaceship. The ring of bushes is their cockpit, and secured inside this cockpit, they fly their craft, using some branches as switches and other branches as control sticks by which to navigate. He is Tim. She is Teresa. But on these voyages into outer space, they travel under assumed names. He is Bob. She is Pete.

She prefers her brown hair short and a little ragged, demands scissors from her parents so she can do it herself. Later, she keeps the style but adds a few blond highlights, an effect that echoes her eyes, which are hazel with brown flecks. People will mention a sense of sparkle, and it may trace to the flecks or to the smile, contagious, confident, a smile consonant with the air of invincibility carried on her short, solid frame, a smile that easily, and often, cracks into a body-shaking laugh.

It is a laugh to be imitated, and many of her closest people try. The women on her softball team who come to call her T-Buzz. The friends who come to call her T. The family members who, out of love and exasperation, come up with all manner of name shortenings, dropping letters and syllables to more easily race back into the thick of conversation with her,
saying, “Hey, Reese . . . ,” “But, Treese . . . ,” “Come on, Reesy . . .” The laugh begins as a kind of chipmunk giggle, and then her head starts nodding up and down, and then the clapping, loud cracks that can be identified from way off as hers. If the laughter becomes more intense, a sort of convulsion follows, head thrown back, shoulders thrown back, everything quaking. “Like she’s trying to exorcise the giggle,” a friend will say. Then she reaches out, grabs the booth if there’s a booth—and with Teresa there is often a booth—or she starts pummeling the people next to her, hard. Everyone gets a turn. Longtime friends, wise to what’s coming, place newbies next to her for buffer. Toward the end of the laughing fits, tears. Then more clapping.

—

Her full name, Teresa Ann Butz, is given to her October 19, 1969, when she arrives the ninth of eleven children in a loud Irish-German-Catholic family in south St. Louis. Her mother, Elaine “Dolly” Butz, traces roots back many generations in “Missoura,” which is how Dolly learned to say it from her grandparents, who were farmers. Dolly grew up down near the St. Louis rail yard, not far from the Mississippi River, close to the Anheuser-Busch brewery and a burlap bag factory, and hers was a musical household, with Dolly’s mother playing the upright piano, her father playing banjo, guitar, and piano, too, everyone singing all the time. The family of the man she married, Dolly will say frankly, “is not musical at all.”

Dolly’s husband, Norbert Butz Sr., would agree. He grew up a few blocks from Dolly, the two of them first dating when he was sixteen and she was fourteen, Norbert senior drawn to the songs pouring out of the living room in Dolly’s house on South Tenth Street. The opposite of songs pouring out of a living room—that was his home. Norbert senior’s father was an immigrant baker with only one good eye, the other damaged by a branch while he was climbing a pine tree in his youth. He’d left Germany as a teenager fleeing his own father, who refused to get him medical care for the scratched eye, who once horsewhipped one of his daughters for talking to a boy in the middle of town in the middle of the afternoon.

Having fled home, Norbert senior’s father, in America, fled fatherhood. As a consequence, Norbert senior’s mother raised him and his older sister on $15-a-week child support, which it was Norbert senior’s job to collect at the bar his father frequented, plus earnings from her work in sweatshops along Washington Avenue, plus a little money from newspapers the whole family sold on weekends.

—

In college in St. Louis, Norbert senior walks up to a military recruiter and says, “You get me out of this town in two weeks and I’m yours for life.” The marines take him to postwar Korea, then onward to jobs guarding military brigs in Japan and San Diego. In 1957, he returns home and asks Dolly to marry him. “I was in my dress blues looking good,” Norbert senior says, “so she could hardly say no.” He comes to run a small insurance company in south St. Louis. Dolly runs the household.

Every Sunday, no negotiation allowed, the Butz children and their parents, along with just about all the other families in their neighborhood, head for the nearby St. Stephen Protomartyr Catholic Church. Norbert and Dolly are adherents to the church’s ban on contraception, and have had nine of their eleven children between the years of 1959 and 1969. “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang” is how Tim Butz, their eighth, describes it. Teresa comes right after Tim, and she surprises and pleases Dolly, who’s just had six boys in a row.

After Teresa, a seven-year hiatus in Butz offspring. It means she’s the baby of the family for some time, and it proves retrospectively mystifying to Tim, who never hears a reason for the hiatus.

—

Sometimes, out front of the brick house, when they are under the sweet gum tree and playing spaceship, dangerous aliens threaten in the minds of Teresa and Tim. If this happens, they gather up red berries from the bushes and toss them outside the circle, bombs for blowing up the bogeymen. Or
they pick up a racquetball and move around to the side of the corner lot, where four cement steps lead to the backyard. Pitch the racquetball at the steps, and depending on how it bounces, it’s a single or maybe a grounder. Hit the steps in the right spot, and the ball arcs high overhead, across the street, beyond the fence surrounding a neighbor’s yard. Teresa tends to win and prefers to play in the character of Keith Hernandez, her favorite St. Louis Cardinal.

She is naturally athletic. “Built like a bulldog,” Tim says. Which means, built like her father. She’s tenacious on the baseball diamonds and soccer fields at Carondelet Park, a few blocks away from their house, and she can beat boys her age in a sprint. It’s her body that gets her there but also her will, and this is another way she’s like her father. Determined, to a degree that determines outcomes.

—

The Mississippi River is a ten-minute drive away, and Teresa’s parents take her and other Butz children down there to watch the water, or look at the arch, or eat at the floating McDonald’s. They shoot a homemade movie to remember it all, catch the river-cruising paddleboats moored at the water’s edge and the old Busch Stadium, its rim lined with rows of arches reflecting the larger waterfront arch. A few hours’ drive away is “the Farm,” a neglected property that Norbert senior purchased at a cut rate. Teresa loves it out there. “The sky could just thrill her,” Dolly says. It’s a place for the wider Butz clan to gather for playing touch football in the fields, or catching minnows and crawdads along the banks of the Meramec River, or jumping off a railroad bridge thirty feet above the river’s surface and then, at the end of the day, walking back to the red farmhouse with its wraparound front porch to eat barbecue cooked on grills laid over huge metal drums cut in half, and corn on the cob, and watermelon. These meals have to be huge. Dolly has two sisters, and between these three Catholic women there are twenty-seven offspring.

At home in St. Louis, on summer evenings when it’s too hot to do
much else, the Butz kids pile into the bedroom Teresa shares with her older sister, Kathy. It has air-conditioning, and in the cool they sing along to records by John Denver and Amy Grant, music cleared in their parents’ vetting process. Other times, they go to the living room, where Dolly, like her parents, keeps a piano, a baby grand. With Steve, the first Butz child, on guitar, and Mike, the third Butz child, on accordion, and Norbert junior, the seventh child, on piano, they do the Billy Joel songbook, or gospel tunes, or pieces they’re practicing for choir. Below, a basement room where Steve and Mike keep a private, un-vetted record collection: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
. “This very hip, clandestine, smelly lair,” says Norbert junior.

Teresa, at a certain point, gets her hands on Michael Jackson’s
Thriller,
listens to it incessantly, puts posters of him up all over her room. Never the best singer in the family, she dances to everything she hears. “From a very young age,” Dolly says.

—

At Christmas, when the eight boys in the Butz family receive boy things and the three girls in the Butz family receive girl things, Teresa is noticed to prefer the boy things. There is not much time to reflect on this in a family with eleven children, and in any case Teresa doesn’t run entirely against expectations for a young Catholic girl growing up in the middle of the country in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. She thrills at wearing pretty dresses for Communions and weddings, puts on a blue dress with a butterfly embroidered on its neckline for a family photograph, and beneath this dress wears a yellow collared shirt with yellow ribbons trailing from each collar point. Directly behind Teresa in the photograph is Norbert junior, wearing a gray suit and a similar smile, both of them looking markedly more mischievous than the rest of their siblings.

As she grows, Teresa amasses a large trove of Precious Moments figurines, small religious-themed, cherubic-faced ceramic statues that are taking off in the Midwest. Her friends never quite square this side of her
with the rest of her, but that’s Teresa. “As tough as she was on the exterior,” says Rachel Ebeling, her lifelong friend, “inside she was the mushiest person you would ever know.” Teresa and Rachel meet in kindergarten at St. Stephen Protomartyr elementary school, a small tan-brick building attached to the large tan-brick church they both attend on Sundays. Jean Fox, another lifelong friend of Teresa’s, is also in this kindergarten, where the girls all wear uniforms of red plaid jumpers and white blouses and where the classrooms are tiny, up on the second floor and tucked beneath the eaves of a slanting roof, the floor covered in old carpet samples, the teacher in various psychedelic print dresses, and throughout the room the smell of old crayons and warm radiators.

Rachel doesn’t have any sisters. Teresa has too many brothers. Jean has only brothers. So the girls become each other’s sisters, the ones who tell the truth to each other, laugh at each other, protect each other as they rise through the grade levels at St. Stephen and beyond. There are some tougher students at St. Stephen, girls Rachel is afraid of, and she marvels at how Teresa simultaneously resists and disarms them, how she manages to locate their good side. This despite, or maybe because of, the way that Teresa, with her aggressive sturdiness, with her jeans and flannels in the cold seasons, sticks right out as a tomboy. If there is any instinct to marginalize Teresa over this difference, Rachel and Jean—Ray and Ween, if it’s Teresa talking—never see it.

—

At school, Teresa becomes a protector for her older brother Tim, who’s shy and timid. She plays this role at home, too, where their father’s punishment philosophy is, as Tim describes it, “kick ass first, ask questions later.” Norbert senior’s work is draining, and he sometimes returns to Dolly’s crying from the stress of managing the huge brood all day long. Seeking to bring order to mayhem, “I’d walk in like a drill instructor,” Norbert senior says. “I’d take my belt off. And I never had to once hit ’em. But I tell you, they’d scurry like roaches, and within fifteen minutes,
twenty minutes, they had all their jobs done.” In Tim’s memory, there is, in fact, some hitting, for not keeping books off the stairs or failing to keep hair out of the sink, and when the hitting happens, Teresa comforts him and makes her displeasure known.

—

On the soccer field, her preferred position is defender. She inhabits this role with full intensity, too. Once, during a play-off game at Carondelet Park, Norbert senior watches Teresa tackle three girls on the opposing team with such force they leave the field in pain. He thinks it’s overkill. So at halftime, when her team is huddled around the coach, he steps onto the field. “Just walked right into the middle of the group,” Norbert senior says, “and I said to the coach, ‘I want my daughter.’ I said, ‘Get over here, Teresa.’ And I talked to her. I asked her what the hell she was doing. She’s hurting people. Now, there was some bad blood between these two girls’ teams, I guess with verbiage or whatever, and I remember she cleared her throat, and she spit on the ground right in front of me, and she said, ‘They got everything they got coming.’ You know, so.”

Her strident side comes out at school as well, along with a serious altruism. With Jean and Rachel, she joins the Bellarmine Speech League, and at its meetings the three friends practice elocution while reading famous speeches and dramatic monologues. Teresa always picks from the “serious” category. “Tear-jerking, heart-wrenching stories filled with human empathy,” Jean says. “People in nursing homes. People dying. Stories set in the Holocaust. A guy who volunteers to be shot so a father doesn’t have to be shot in front of his family.”

—

One year, for an all-school talent show, Teresa and Rachel sign up to perform a song from the 1972 Marlo Thomas album
Free to Be . . . You and Me,
which has been on heavy rotation in the Butz household ever since Dolly spotted the album while out shopping and remembered liking Marlo
Thomas on the television series
That Girl
. “There were little secular influences that kind of made their way through in subversive ways,” Norbert junior says. “And that record is the perfect example.” It plays in the opening shots of the Butz family home movie, its earnest lyrics cheering self-discovery as the camera pans across views of the downtown St. Louis waterfront, the old stadium, the Mississippi. In another home movie clip, Teresa, intent but far from on key, practices the song from the album that she and Rachel are going to sing in the talent show. It’s “When We Grow Up,” a duet for a male and a female—Michael Jackson and Roberta Flack in one popular instance. In the living room of her family’s brick home on Holly Hills Boulevard, Teresa sings the song wearing a white dress with a lacy collar, which is not what she wears to the talent show.