Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (37 page)

Durall’s original attorneys, John Henry Browne and Tim Dole, asked that he be released on his own recognizance or on “reasonable bail” of $25,000, citing his three years in a supervisory position at the King County Housing Authority. They listed his more prestigious former jobs—Boeing (1987 to 1990), IPC Pension Services (1991 to 1995), and two short-term jobs at IBM, in 1983 and 1985—his loyalty to his mother and sister, and his three small children who were “dependent upon him for emotional and financial support.” They quoted letters from his fellow church members who described him as “gentle, loving spiritual, full of honesty and integrity” and pointed out that if he were planning to flee Seattle, he would surely have done so before he was arrested.

None of their arguments did any good; bail was set at $1 million.

Bob Durall refused to discuss where his wife might be, claiming that he did not know. Her family and the more than a hundred people who had looked for her or her car kept up their search, determined that they would find Carolyn. If she was dead, she deserved to have a funeral or a memorial service and a decent burial. If she was miraculously alive somewhere, she needed to be found.

Bob Durall, the complete expert on computers, should have known that nothing is ever truly deleted from a hard drive. The bytes laid down might not surface in the same pattern that they had been typed in, but they are there, someplace. Perhaps he was confident that no one would have reason to check his computer.

He may not have been aware of it, but his supervisors had noticed that he spent an inordinate amount of time on his computer. Indeed, he had come close to being fired after people walked in on him and noticed that he wasn’t doing agency business on it.

Durall’s coworkers were not close to him, and most of their contact outside the office had been to play on company sports teams or to attend events he had at his house. He was involved in a multilevel marketing firm whose participants moved up the ladder by recruiting new members and also a long-distance phone plan that worked much the same way. For those who worked under him at the King County Housing Authority, it was a kind of command performance to show up for his demonstrations. Sometimes at the beginning of the football season, he would host a party for the guys to select players for their fantasy football teams. Hardly big-time gambling, it was more for fun; they bet small amounts on the players and teams they chose and settled up at the end of the season.

Female employees of the King County Housing Authority had often complained that they felt uncomfortable around Bob Durall. They found him too flirtatious. It wasn’t that he touched them inappropriately, but his manner didn’t mesh with what a husband and father, a church deacon and elder, and a Sunday school teacher should be. All in all, both female and male employees found him a bit of an odd duck.

None of the men were beer-drinking buddies or confidants of Durall’s, but they did feel sorry for him when they learned of the sudden disappearance of his wife. In the weeks after Carolyn vanished, it was understandable that Bob hadn’t been at work much. He called occasionally to question other employees about whether the police had shown up at his office. When she had been gone a week, he called employees into his office and asked them what they had heard from Carolyn’s firm about the situation.

He seemed to be concerned that the police were tracking him, but he had little to say about Carolyn when his coworkers asked if she had been found yet. He usually frowned and said no, curtly. He explained that he had hurt his arm lifting his daughter into a swing and was having surgery on the torn biceps the next day, Friday. But he called again on that day, and it was obvious he hadn’t had the surgery yet. He told police he injured himself lifting his son.

Bob Durall asked one man with whom he’d worked for several years what “bear tracks looked like.” That came out of the blue. He hurried on to explain that he was an avid hunter and fisherman and had been to Tiger Mountain. It wasn’t clear whether he was afraid that he might run into a man-eating bear or was just making conversation.

Durall didn’t have the surgery to reattach his torn biceps on Friday, August 28. Instead, he was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. Now his coworkers were shocked.

Upper management at the Housing Authority asked a few of their sharpest computer experts to see if Bob Durall had left anything on his computer that might reveal his nonoffice activities over the past several months. The experts agreed to do that but didn’t expect to find anything.

“He knew computers,” one man said. “He knew that stuff remained on the hard drive even after it had been deleted. But he also would have known that all he had to do would be to put a new hard drive into his computer. It was a matter of loosening two or three screws. Switching hard drives would give him a clean slate, and anything he didn’t want people to see would be gone when he junked the old hard drive.”

Computer forensic investigations are a sign of the times; even a dozen years ago, it’s unlikely that computer files were considered a fertile Source to see what is truly going on in someone’s life. Today, most of the civilized world understands how to send and receive email and how to use search engines to learn more about any number of things. After a visit to Google or Ask Jeeves, scores of Sources flash across screens. It seems miraculous to anyone who remembers when keyboards were found only on standard typewriters.

In September 1998, one of the prime search engines was www.altavista.com. Bob Durall’s coworkers used it to see if there was anything in his computer that might either help him or help the police investigators. Perhaps they might even find something that would lead them to Carolyn Durall.

The process is too complicated for me to explain or for most readers to follow. The information bubbled up in odd files and stray strings of text, and what surfaced was disconcerting to say the least.

Beginning on May 4, 1998, and continuing until June 23—more than seven weeks before Carolyn vanished—her husband appeared to have been looking for ways to kill her.

The Housing Authority pros found a search string that read “query?pg=q&stq=8o&what=web&kl
=XXX&q=murder!”

As they clicked more links, they saw that most of Bob Durall’s searches specified websites that had information on “kill + spouse.” Then he narrowed the scope. He had gone to the internet for information on “smother,” “homicide,” “poisons,” “accidental deaths,” and just plain “murder.”

It was a stunning discovery and hard for them to fathom. But Durall had clearly been studying various methods of homicide for months, and he had put the word “spouse” in the search slots. That left little doubt who the intended victim of a cleverly planned homicide was.

And now Bob Durall’s wife was missing, his bedroom and hallways were full of blood, and he had been arrested for murder.

They looked for more clusters that were not work-related, wondering if their longtime boss had a secret life that involved more than they had located so far.

He had visited sites about Monica Lewinsky, prostitution, Venusians, photo sites with titles like “skin,” and, surprisingly, a popular website that was the most up-to-date version of a lonely hearts column or dating service: Match.com.

Match.com is a perfectly legitimate way for singles to hook up with other singles who have similar interests. More active than ever today, Match.com claims that 200,000 people met “that special someone” through their service in 2004. Hundreds of couples go on to marriage. Of course, that doesn’t mean that owners of the website or similar sites can guarantee that everyone who signs up and pays to post there is telling the truth. The website warns that online dating is no more or less safe than any other kind of dating and urges members to read their safety tips and to initially meet strangers in public places. Even so, it is easier when you are on the web to pretend to be something you are not. Even in a bar, women and men can see whom they are talking to. They can check for wedding rings or for the band of pale skin that shows that to appear single the person has recently removed a ring. Unless someone is really good at makeup and wardrobe, singles in a bar know whether they’re communicating with a male or a female.

On Match.com, most of those looking for love or companionship have a handle or screen name, preferring not to have anyone who visits the site know who they really are.

Bob Durall’s computer expert coworkers found emails from women to his computer address. They were written to someone called Freeedom. It wasn’t a typographical error; Durall had deliberately added a third
e
to the word. They were all from correspondents who sounded intelligent and interesting, their grammar and spelling perfect.

One woman in Oregon wrote to Freeedom: “It’s found within me first and foremost, but then if you and I ‘connect’ as we should, it will be found within our shared hearts as well…. I’m looking for (more) true opportunities for learning and personal growth, emotionally, spiritually and professionally…. I love to share strong, deep and true ‘connections’ with others. Good conversation, honest communication and being open to new ideas are all very important in my book. Playing games is not my deal, just want to be true to myself and to you.”

This woman, a professional, wrote that she was beginning to correspond with a few other men. “But I also know full well that I am looking for someone extra special. Could you be him?”

Whatever Freeedom had written to this woman, she was apparently quick to trust him. She said she was “taking a chance” by giving him her real email address, since her subscription to Match.com was going to run out soon.

But did she
totally
trust him? Probably not. Her last email had a cheerful but veiled question in it.

“I look forward to hearing from you, Freeedom. (Does this handle mean you were married before and are feeling quite ‘released’ or what? )”

Clearly, she wanted to know if he was married.

The computer detectives kept going, finding more messages from single women directed to Freeedom, who seemed to have made quite an impression with his profile on Match.com.

Now, they looked for Freeedom himself, typing in anon. Freeedom. And there he was. They were even informed of how close he was to their location in the King County Housing Authority’s offices: “Distance: 7 miles (11 km) from you based on registered location. This member’s last activity on Match.com: August 5, 1998.”

Only one day before Carolyn Durall had disappeared.

Freeedom’s profile would indeed have been tempting to a middle-aged woman:

His ad ended with only one proviso for women who might respond to him. They had to be nonsmokers.

There was no question that Freeedom was Bob Durall. He had not mentioned that he had a wife, only that he sometimes had his young children living with him. Perhaps he didn’t expect to
have
a wife by the time he hooked up with just the right woman on the internet.

The Renton detectives hadn’t asked that Bob Durall’s computer be mined for evidence. The two men who held their breath as they scrolled through the internet sites and found
murder, murder, murder, murder, kill spouse
and all of the possible means of accomplishing that knew they had to tell the investigators what they had found. They printed out copies of all the web searches and Durall’s handle on Match.com and gave them to the men and women who were investigating Carolyn Durall’s disappearance.

When prosecutors Patty Eakes and Jeff Baird heard about Bob Durall’s activities on the internet, particularly his searches for “kill + spouse,” they knew that if Bob had killed Carolyn, it was not through a spontaneous act of rage, unplanned and perpetrated by a man gone suddenly out of control. No, from May 4 to June 23, he had been working on a plan to murder his wife.

On August 28, they amended the charges against him: he was now charged with first-degree murder, and his bail was raised to $5 million.