Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (36 page)

“Jody was over last night,” Patti Pearce said. “They’d all gone down to Oregon for the Fourth of July. While she was down there, she had her hair bleached really blond, and she wanted to show us. Besides that, their phone was out of order, and she wanted to report it and call for the exact time because Arne said that all the clocks in the house had stopped.”

It seemed that the Kaarstens’ first day back from the long weekend had been marked by several unusual circumstances. The Pearces recalled Jody saying that Arne had told her he’d seen a man peering through their glass patio door earlier in the day. Arne Kaarsten evidently had not seen the man’s face—only his legs. Then the peeper had run to the fence around their backyard and disappeared.

Patti Pearce said that Jody had arrived at their home about 10:00
P.M.
Tuesday night and stayed until midnight.

Detective Ted Forrester was assigned the task of getting a statement from the widower. He offered to drive Kaarsten downtown to King County Police headquarters in the courthouse where he could give a formal statement about the events of the night and early morning. The Pearces volunteered to care for Terry, and Kaarsten rode into Seattle with Forrester.

Forrester is a kind, low-key man, and he was sympathetic to the young husband who had awakened to inexplicable horror. During the forty-five-minute drive to Seattle, Kaarsten spoke over and over about his loss. He explained that he and Jody had had a wonderful marriage. “We were the perfect family,” he said. “I can’t understand why she’s been taken from me—in such a terrible way.”

At headquarters, Chief of Detectives T. T. Nault talked with the grief-stricken young husband. Handsome, almost boyish-looking Arne Kaarsten had thick brown hair combed in a smooth pompadour. He told Chief Nault that he and Jody had been high school sweethearts. He had been nineteen and she a year younger when they married in November 1962. The teenage couple became parents the next year, when Terry was born.

“When was Peri Lynn born?” Nault asked.

Kaarsten looked down and bit his lip. “She was born on December 16, 1965. Last year.”

Kaarsten said he was employed as a draftsman for a concrete conduit company. His avocation and his main interest, however, was race-car driving. Although he could not afford to own one of the expensive cars he raced, he said he drove for the president of a manufacturing firm who owned several cars.

Nault asked Kaarsten to recall the events leading up to the murder of half his family. Kaarsten sighed and began.

He recalled that the weekend just past had been particularly pleasant for his family. They had rented a car so they could drive to southern Oregon to spend the Fourth of July with Jody’s relatives. The trip had been relaxing and fun, and he said he had been pleased when one of Jody’s relatives bleached her hair for her. He said he loved the way she looked as a strawberry blonde.

They had driven home on Monday because Kaarsten had to work Tuesday. That afternoon—July 5—Jody had phoned her husband at work and asked him to pick up some supplies at the drugstore and bring them home on his lunch hour. He had gone to pick up Terry first, made the pharmacy trip in fifteen minutes, and come home to find that the door was locked.

“Locked?” Nault said.

Kaarsten nodded. “This was strange. Jody never locks the door in the daytime.” He went on to say that she was very frightened. While he was gone, she had seen a man “in his twenties” and wearing work clothes prowling around outside their home.

Kaarsten said he went at once to the sliding patio doors to the backyard. He caught just a glimpse of a man’s legs outside the patio doors, but the man disappeared before Arne could get outside and give chase. Pressed for more details, he shook his head. The glare of the sun on the glass doors had kept him from seeing more than the prowler’s legs.

“Did you go back to work yesterday afternoon?”

“No, Jody was frightened, and both she and the babies were sick,” Arne Kaarsten said. “I decided to take a half sick day from work so I could stay home and take care of them.”

Later in the afternoon his wife and daughters apparently felt better. Kaarsten said they visited relatives, ate supper at a restaurant, and did some shopping at a discount store before returning home around 10:00
P.M.

It was only then, he said, that Jody had picked up the phone to call her family in Oregon and discovered the line was dead. She decided to run next door to the Pearces’ and report it.

Kaarsten was struggling to recall the evening before in sequence. “I began to feel sick myself at that point,” he said. He and Jody had agreed they would get a better night’s sleep if he slept alone in the bedroom and she slept on the fold-down couch in the living room. They thought they had probably picked up some kind of twenty-four-hour flu while they were in Oregon.

He said one of his relatives was a nurse and had given him some sleeping pills. They had worked so well that he fell asleep almost immediately. He didn’t know what time Jody had come back from the Pearces’, and since she planned to sleep in the living room, she didn’t disturb him when she got home.

“You hear anything last night?”

Kaarsten shook his head. “Nothing. I even slept past my usual wake-up time of six forty-five. I didn’t wake up until a quarter to eight. Usually Peri Lynn wakes us at six forty-five.”

But of course Peri Lynn did not wake up. Kaarsten said he had been half asleep when he wandered down the hall toward the living room. He had seen the pile of blankets on the floor, but he didn’t immediately register what he was seeing. Only when he saw the blond hair poking out of the bedclothes did he realize that Jody was underneath.

He said he pulled the blankets back, then panicked at what he saw. “I grabbed Terry and ran next door to get help.”

Nault wondered why Kaarsten had not grabbed Peri Lynn, too. Maybe he’d been afraid that Terry would wander out of her bedroom and find her mother dead. Maybe he just hadn’t been thinking straight.

Arne Kaarsten told Nault that he was quite sure burglary had been the motive; Jody had had $100 in cash in her purse, and it was missing.

Nault wondered aloud why burglars had neglected to take Jody’s diamond ring and her expensive watch. She was still wearing both when detectives arrived.

Kaarsten said he had no idea. None of this made much sense. But he was sure it had to do with the prowler who had been watching Jody though the patio doors. “I saw him,” he said again. “I saw his legs. If only I’d managed to catch him…”

Arne Kaarsten thought the voyeur must have been the one who cut the phone line—so no one could call the police if he was caught inside the house. But the grieving widower was at a loss to understand why a burglar had picked his modest home.

Nault was puzzled, too—more than puzzled. There were elements here that made the skin prickle at the back of his neck. Burglars didn’t break into little ranch houses when people were sleeping inside. It wasn’t worth the risk. Also, burglars rarely killed when they were discovered; they ran. And burglars would have had no reason to kill a little baby. Furthermore, why would Kaarsten have bothered to check his wife’s purse to see if the cash was missing? Wouldn’t the motive for her murder have been the last thing on his mind when he was so filled with shock and grief?

Tactfully Nault questioned Kaarsten further about his marriage. He wondered if it was really the perfect union that Kaarsten had described. And slowly the picture of unblemished wedded bliss began to crumble. Kaarsten admitted that it had not been as idyllic as he had first described it.

Perhaps they had married too young; perhaps Jody had needed to know she was still attractive to other men. He said she had been unfaithful to him—something that he was embarrassed to admit but felt he had to explain, since her adultery might have had something to do with her murder.

Kaarsten said that Jody took a vacation—alone—to Oregon in April of 1965. While she was there she met another man. She spent a weekend with him. Her physical attraction to him was so consuming that she changed from the faithful wife she had always been. It was not like Jody to be unfaithful, but it happened. A week later, Kaarsten said, she flew back to Oregon to meet the man again. Her lover, Jack Kane,* seemed to have an almost hypnotic hold over his wife. In July, Jody actually left Arne and moved in with Kane in Oregon.

But Jody didn’t stay long with Kane. She discovered she was pregnant. The baby would have been conceived in March—before she met Jack Kane; it was clearly Arne’s baby. When Jody told her husband she wanted to come home and try again, he said he welcomed her with open arms. They reconciled, and according to the distraught man in front of Nault, their renewed marriage had been perfect ever since. Peri Lynn had been born six months later.

Nault had to ask an obvious question: “Did you ever think that Peri Lynn might not be your child?”

Kaarsten said the thought had crossed his mind several times. But he had decided it was destructive to worry, so he’d put it out of his mind. Born in mid-December, Peri Lynn was a full-term baby; that meant she had been conceived in March. As far as Kaarsten was concerned, Peri Lynn was his, and he accepted her just as he’d accepted Terry. Once he did so, the marriage had seemed to get better and better.

When he was asked to take a lie-detector test, Arne Kaarsten agreed readily. However, when the polygrapher, Norm Matzke, started to attach the leads of the machine that would register blood pressure, respiration, galvanic skin response, and heart rate, he could see that Arne Kaarsten was much too nervous and emotionally upset for his responses to be registered and evaluated accurately. It was just too soon. They would have to try again at a later date.

Kaarsten told the detectives that the necktie used to strangle Jody had been one of his own. It had to have been a weapon of opportunity. He remembered that he had taken it off, along with his sweater and jacket, when they came home the night before. He had draped the tie and his other clothing on the railing of Peri Lynn’s playpen, which sat next to the couch.

Nault noted that Kaarsten had a Band-Aid on the back of his right hand. “You hurt your hand?” he asked casually.

“Yeah, I was roughhousing with Terry last night, and she scratched me accidentally.”

“Can I take a look at it?”

When Kaarsten took the bandage off, Tom Nault could see that Kaarsten had two deep fresh scratches along the tendons between his middle and ring fingers. He jotted the information down but said nothing more.

It was noon—four hours after the bodies were found—when King County Medical Examiner Dr. Gale Wilson began the autopsies on Jody and Peri Lynn Kaarsten.

Jody was very slender at five feet six inches and 100 pounds. As Wilson had suspected, she had died of asphyxia by ligature. There were cruel bruises and indentations on the flesh of her neck where the necktie had cut in, and she had the characteristic pinpoints of petechial hemorrhages on her face and in her eyes, which were common to strangulation victims. The only other marks on her body were a bruise on the lower left side of her chin and vertical splits in the two middle fingernails of her left hand. It looked as if she had tried to fight off a hand that held the garrote that squeezed out her life. By measuring the degree of rigor mortis, lividity, and loss of body heat, Dr. Wilson determined that Jody Kaarsten had died between midnight and 2:00
A.M.
the previous night.

Peri Lynn had died of the same cause, but she had no broken fingernails. She had probably been sound asleep when the ribbon from her teddy bear was placed around her neck and tightened.

The Kaarsten investigation was to become one of the strangest marathons King County Police detectives had ever participated in. They never fell victim to the tunnel vision that affects some departments. They eliminated all possible suspects, winnowing their theories down until there was only one possibility left.

They compiled a thick case file on every aspect in the double murder. They located Jack Kane, Jody’s ex-lover, and Detectives George Helland and Len Randall brought him to Seattle for a secret preliminary hearing. The results of that hearing were announced through local news media, leaving the public even more bewildered than before.

It was a perfectly legal finding, though it was rarely used: “The deceased were killed by person or persons
known.”
People were accustomed to hearing that victims of unsolved murder cases were “killed by person or persons
unknown.”
That phrase was often used on television mysteries. If the police and the prosecuting attorney
knew
who the killer was, why hadn’t they arrested someone?