Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (30 page)

Pawlyk had been married a couple of times, unions he described to an acquaintance as “disasters,” and he had a son and a daughter. He didn’t have a single black mark on his professional record or any skirmishes with the law. Originally from New York, he was tall and good-looking, urbane, and classy in every way. He had money and prestige, and Debra was attracted to him. It was mutual. In one friend’s words, “For him, along comes Debra with her charismatic, fashionable style and her southern accent, and Pawlyk found her very attractive.”

Debra Sweiger took Bill Pawlyk by storm. She enjoyed dating him and the attention he lavished on her. A woman who was jealous of Debra said, “Debra tended to play games with men’s emotions. I think she liked the drama of it all.”

If Debra was behaving like a high school or college girl who enjoyed being the belle of the ball, sought after by many male suitors at the same time, she was also playing a dangerous game. And it began to backfire on her. Almost before Debra realized it, she was in way too deep with Pawlyk. Some said he had proposed marriage to her; at the very least, everyone who knew them agreed that he was madly in love with her.

Debra drew back; she was definitely not looking for marriage, and his possessiveness had become suffocating. Even though they lived almost two hundred miles apart, he made the trip to Issaquah to see her every weekend, far more often than she wanted. He didn’t want her to date anyone but him, and he questioned her constantly about who she saw and what she did when they were apart. The more he clung to her, the more she fought to slow their romance down until, finally, she attempted to break up with him. He could not believe she was serious.

Bill Pawlyk was distraught. Although Debra had not asked him to do it, he had placed her ahead of everything else in his life, and he’d left himself no escape parachute at all. Without her, nothing mattered to him. He was alternately brokenhearted and enraged. His jealousy was almost pathological. He could not bear the thought that she might be with some other man.

It was more than that. Pawlyk’s pride was shattered; he had spent a lifetime building up his reputation as a confident man, a man in charge in his business world, his navy service, and a man used to being treated with respect. Now he felt deceived and cuckolded, an object of derision, if not actually, at least in his own mind.

Love, passion, and overwhelming jealousy know no age, and Bill Pawlyk, nearing 50, was a runaway train, consumed with jealousy.

By this time, Debra Sweiger had met Larry Sturholm. No one is exactly sure how they met, although it was probably when he contacted Debra for a feature story. He was certainly a celebrity in Seattle, a garrulous, clever man who was a lot of fun to be with. Compared to Bill Pawlyk’s gloomy presence, Sturholm was a breath of fresh air for Debra. They shared an interest in exploring new businesses, they talked about intriguing and innovative ideas, and they shared a lot of laughter.

“In my opinion,” one man who knew them both said, “they were emphatically
not
having an affair, even though it might all have looked terribly bad. They liked to have lunch and talk or party together. He was probably poised for a midlife crisis, and their relationship was definitely headed in the wrong direction, but I don’t think it had progressed to that point.”

But Bill Pawlyk thought it had. He was convinced that Debra was having an affair with Larry Sturholm, and he couldn’t stand the thought of that.

Pawlyk’s breaking point came on July 31, 1989. He didn’t know that Debra Sweiger was going on a trip to the Cayman Islands with Larry Sturholm and his film crew that night, but he was suspicious of everything she did. He wanted to talk out their relationship and somehow convince her to come back to him. But he had slipped over the edge; if she didn’t take him back, he was fully prepared to kill her, a terrible choice that seemed better to him than to let her go to another man.

What happened next was a stunning example of how a whole lifetime—even life itself—can be shattered into minute fragments when someone reacts with rage as violent as a volcanic eruption or a tsunami, unexpected, unheralded, and totally devastating.

When Larry Sturholm arrived at the Sea-Tac airport that Monday night, he didn’t go to the departure gate to await his flight. He carried out one of the few major deceptions of his life. His reason may have been as simple as not wishing to worry his wife. Most wives wouldn’t be thrilled to learn that their husbands were flying off to a romantic spot with a woman as glamorous as Debra Sweiger was. And it’s quite possible that Sturholm had envisioned the trip that lay ahead as more than just a business trip for him and Debra.

At any rate, Larry had not told Judith about his friendship with Debra Sweiger nor that she was going along on the trip to the Cayman Islands. After he said good-bye to his wife, Sturholm rented a car and drove away from the airport, headed for the Issaquah area. He planned to pick Debra up when she got home and take her back to the airport with him.

He didn’t know that the house wasn’t empty. Debra had given him a key to her house so he could come in and wait for her, but he didn’t need it: he found the door unlocked. As he stepped in, he was confronted by Bill Pawlyk. But it wasn’t the same Pawlyk that his family and friends had known for decades; instead, he was a man on a deadly mission.

On Sunday, the day before, Pawlyk had purchased two razor-sharp hunting knives. He’d taped them to his socks where they would be hidden by his trousers. He knew exactly what he was going to do as he made the long drive west from the Tri-Cities area.

He didn’t know that Debra was almost home free or that Larry Sturholm was planning to wait for her in her house. Had Pawlyk delayed only one more day or even a few more hours, they would have been on a plane headed toward an island paradise and their lives would have played out in entirely different ways.

According to Pawlyk, Sturholm was as surprised to see him standing there in the foyer of Debra’s house as he was to see Sturholm.

There is no way to validate what happened next because only one eyewitness remains, and he had reason to fabricate. Bill Pawlyk said later that the two of them had a friendly enough conversation at first. But Sturholm had soon realized to his horror why Pawlyk was there. He tried to reason with a man possessed who had no intention of letting Debra go.

It was like reasoning with a mad dog. The thin veneer of civility and polite conversation fell away, and it all went sour. Larry Sturholm was a great talker, a man whose decades of interviewing people had taught him to understand the frailties and bitter disappointments of other men, but he was not a fighter. He had no reason to be armed, and he must have been totally shocked when Bill Pawlyk reached to his ankles and produced the knives he’d bought to kill Debra.

In a blind rage, Pawlyk struck out at Sturholm. Victims who have survived stabbings say that they never felt the cuts; instead, they recall only the sensation of someone hitting them with what felt like a closed fist. Hopefully, that is true. Trapped and unprepared, Larry Sturholm died rapidly from more than a hundred fatal thrusts and the exsanguination that followed.

Pawlyk left Sturholm’s body where it could not easily be seen by someone entering through the front door. Then he took time to shower and shave while he waited for Debra.

When she arrived home, she found to her surprise that Bill Pawlyk was there to meet her. He was committed now and perhaps angrier than he had been before. He had proof that Sturholm had a key to Debra’s house. In his mind, that was also proof of her infidelity.

According to Pawlyk, Debra also tried to reason with him. Since he had cleaned himself up, his clothing wasn’t blood-stained. She probably didn’t know that Larry Sturholm had been attacked and was dead and that her ex-lover had waited for hours in her quiet house for her return.

Again, no one can know for sure what happened next. Pawlyk said he allowed Debra to make a phone call to her partner, knowing that no one could possibly arrive in time to stop him from what he planned to do. Joyce quickly picked up on Debra’s coded words, realized that she was in trouble, and sent her husband, Mark, racing to Debra’s nearby house.

Already wounded but still conscious, Debra asked Pawlyk if she could write a good-bye note to her daughter. He permitted her to do that. It was a short note, stained with her blood: “Jenny, I love you. Mom.”

And then Bill Pawlyk carried out his original plan. No matter how many years have passed since that terrible night, writing about it is very difficult. It always will be. Pawlyk cut Debra Sweiger’s throat in a final cruel act of revenge and jealousy after he had already stabbed her dozens of times. Believing that she was dead or fatally wounded, he left her in a welter of her blood. He planned that they would die together soon enough. He recalled later that he went upstairs to the bathroom. His lack of sleep and the overdose of sedatives he’d taken had made him “tired.” He described how he tried to cut his throat on the right side as he gazed into the mirror over the sink, but he couldn’t bring himself to use as much pressure as he had on his victims. Instead, he sliced his wrists until blood welled up.

As his life fluid seeped out, Pawlyk ran a bath and stepped into the tub. There he finally passed out.

When Mark Breakey arrived, probably thinking he had come to calm down only an argument, he found Debra in a room drenched and sprayed with her blood. It was a scene that would never leave him for the rest of his days. She was still alive, fighting desperately to survive. She held her throat, putting pressure on the severed arteries just as she had done to save other lives when she worked in the emergency room. She managed to gasp, “That son of a bitch, Pawlyk, did this to me…”

Mark picked her up, carried her to his car, and headed toward Overlake Hospital. But he knew in his heart they wouldn’t get there in time, and he couldn’t drive and help Debra at the same time. He pulled into the driveway of a home along the way and pounded frantically on their door. The family who lived there opened their front door, and Breakey begged them to call paramedics. They did so immediately.

But it was too late. Debra died in his arms.

When the King County detectives saw that the “dead man” in the tub was still alive, they called an ambulance to rush him to the closest hospital. The first ER physicians who examined him determined that he wasn’t in critical condition. (Pawlyk later complained bitterly that they made him stay in the hospital corridor on a gurney while they took care of patients who needed more urgent care.)

No one knew for sure yet who the other victim in Debra Sweiger’s house was. Detectives learned from Mark Breakey that Debra had made a dying statement that someone named Pawlyk had stabbed her. There were three vehicles at the Sweiger house. One was registered to Debra and one to William Pawlyk; the third was a rental car. There was a rental agreement in the glove box that had Larry Sturholm’s name on it. The investigators had Breakey’s identification of Debra, and they thought they knew who the two men were, but the official determination would have to be made by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.

News crews continued to stand by, waiting for more information. It was just before ten when Channel 7’s Bryan Thielke took the M.E.’s call on Tuesday morning and listened with horror. The dead man was KIRO’s own Larry Sturholm. Larry’s brother, Phil, Thielke’s editor, sat a few feet away from him. It was Thielke who had to break the news to Phil that his brother had been murdered.

“We’d had no idea one victim was a friend, colleague, and relative,” Thielke wrote later in an article on journalistic ethics. “It’s something every reporter wonders about and even fears, being on the other side of the mic [microphone] or notebook. What’s it like that we were about to be a principal Source in a news story at the same time you’re covering it?”

Some of the KIRO staff wondered about the relationships among Pawlyk, Sturholm, and Debra Sweiger. A few of Larry’s closest friends knew about his possible romantic involvement with a woman who lived in Issaquah and were even aware that she had been dealing with a jealous ex-lover. This was in a way the most difficult aspect of the tragedy for the news staff. They knew Judith Sturholm, and they didn’t want to cause her any more pain than she already faced. “We were torn between doing the best job possible and protecting our friends.”

In the end, KIRO didn’t have to make the decision; another network affiliate came out with the love triangle rumor as a possible motive. Phil Sturholm, a truly decent man who had lost his younger brother, didn’t flinch. “Phil urged us to vigorously pursue the story of his brother’s death, not to hold back,” Thielke wrote. “Phil’s urging helped all of us do what we knew, as journalists, had to be done.”

All of the KIRO reporters were impacted emotionally by the loss of Larry Sturholm, and they would never again approach a crime or accident story with as thick a wall between the news and their own feelings. They decided to release some of the
Larry at Large
film, and his last time on the screen, heading into the sunset, was ubiquitous on the news over the next week. They would not, however, give permission to use it on the tabloid television shows whose producers seemed likely to pounce on the most salacious versions of the double murders.

I wasn’t eager to write the story, either. Judy Sturholm came to my house a few months after she became a widow, and we talked for hours. She told me that she had had no idea that Debra Sweiger had a place in her husband’s life until they were killed. When the couple’s credit card bill came in the month after Larry was murdered, there was a charge from a florist for flowers that were delivered to an address Judy didn’t recognize. Still trying to understand what had happened, Judith called the florist and asked who the recipient had been. It was Debra Sweiger.