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#Post#: 3296--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:12 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
continued
and blood simply become a four-letter word: Work. And to listen
to Webster talk about his
work and the number of hours he puts in (he works an average of
sixty-five hours per
week), the exhaustion is palpable -- in his scratchy voice and
the way he repeatedly
removes his glasses to rub his tired eyes. Yet he finds
excitement working as Chief
Investigator at the KCMEO. One evening I arrived at his office
around 6:30 p.m. He was
preparing a slide presentation and lecture for a group of
nursing students. His day had
started at 4:00 a.m., and before the presentation was done, it
would approach 9:30 p.m.
Nor don't I envy any new KCMEO investigator because of their
supervisor's character. Quite
the contrary. Webster is an affable, friendly man. He's a
compassionate man who is known
to volunteer time with AIDS victims, in the last stages of the
disease, who contact him
requesting help on how to get their affairs in order before they
pass away. Simply put,
Webster both excels at and loves his job. He could easily live
on his police pension alone,
but he's addicted to the challenges inherent in investigative
work. "My job in many ways,"
Webster comments, "is to serve the living through the dead."
So, why don't I envy any new investigator joining Webster's
team? Simple: Carkeek Park.
"Many new investigator that starts here gets this book," Webster
explains. He pulls a white,
three-ring binder from a nearby bookshelf and places it on his
desk. "This is basically the
kid that lives next door to you. You know he's there, but you
never paid any attention to
him."
The 'kid' Webster is talking about is an unidentified young man
-- approximately 18 to 26
years old -- who was found hanging from a tree in Carkeek Park.
The photographs are
graphic. The young man -- roughly 5' 11" and weighing
approximately 180 pounds -- is
wearing a black leather jacket with a fur collar, a light purple
pullover with red stripes, old
blue jeans, and sneakers. He has black hair and an olive
complexion, and his body hangs at
least ten feet in the air. The angle of the photograph is eerie.
Sunlight creeps through the
tree's leaves, and the thick nylon rope wraps around the young
man's neck like a giant,
calloused fist.
"This is the case that I started on in 1991," Webster comments,
referring to his days as a
rookie investigator working under the direction of then-Chief
Investigator Bill Haglund.
Though the young man's body was found on October 9, 1984, his
identity remains a
mystery. "I always felt, and I still feel, that this case could
be solved. Basically I went back
and I pulled all the records that I could. And then I took all
the investigative files they had
and blood simply become a four-letter word: Work. And to listen
to Webster talk about his
work and the number of hours he puts in (he works an average of
sixty-five hours per
week), the exhaustion is palpable -- in his scratchy voice and
the way he repeatedly
removes his glasses to rub his tired eyes. Yet he finds
excitement working as Chief
Investigator at the KCMEO. One evening I arrived at his office
around 6:30 p.m. He was
preparing a slide presentation and lecture for a group of
nursing students. His day had
started at 4:00 a.m., and before the presentation was done, it
would approach 9:30 p.m.
Nor don't I envy any new KCMEO investigator because of their
supervisor's character. Quite
the contrary. Webster is an affable, friendly man. He's a
compassionate man who is known
to volunteer time with AIDS victims, in the last stages of the
disease, who contact him
requesting help on how to get their affairs in order before they
pass away. Simply put,
Webster both excels at and loves his job. He could easily live
on his police pension alone,
but he's addicted to the challenges inherent in investigative
work. "My job in many ways,"
Webster comments, "is to serve the living through the dead."
So, why don't I envy any new investigator joining Webster's
team? Simple: Carkeek Park.
"Many new investigator that starts here gets this book," Webster
explains. He pulls a white,
three-ring binder from a nearby bookshelf and places it on his
desk. "This is basically the
kid that lives next door to you. You know he's there, but you
never paid any attention to
him."
The 'kid' Webster is talking about is an unidentified young man
-- approximately 18 to 26
years old -- who was found hanging from a tree in Carkeek Park.
The photographs are
graphic. The young man -- roughly 5' 11" and weighing
approximately 180 pounds -- is
wearing a black leather jacket with a fur collar, a light purple
pullover with red stripes, old
blue jeans, and sneakers. He has black hair and an olive
complexion, and his body hangs at
least ten feet in the air. The angle of the photograph is eerie.
Sunlight creeps through the
tree's leaves, and the thick nylon rope wraps around the young
man's neck like a giant,
calloused fist.
"This is the case that I started on in 1991," Webster comments,
referring to his days as a
rookie investigator working under the direction of then-Chief
Investigator Bill Haglund.
Though the young man's body was found on October 9, 1984, his
identity remains a
mystery. "I always felt, and I still feel, that this case could
be solved. Basically I went back
and I pulled all the records that I could. And then I took all
the investigative files they had
#Post#: 3297--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:14 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
continued
In early April 1993, thirty-five-year-old Nicholas Hoerner was
killed by a Burlington Northern
freight train as he walked on tracks north of Carkeek Park. In a
similar incident, a thirtyyear-
old man named Timothy Benson told a friend he was "having
problems" and, a short
time later, committed suicide by stepping in front of a moving
Burlington Northern freight
train on railroad tracks a half-mile north of Carkeek Park.
When investigators began looking into the 1984 hanging of the
young man in Carkeek Park,
they walked away mystified. "I went back," Webster continues,
flipping through the photos
and paperwork on the Carkeek Park case, "and went through the
medical on him. You know,
for instance, you can see some interesting things [in the
photos]. Do you see some
interesting things?"
"Well, I'm not an expert," I reply, studying the autopsy photos.
The young man is laying on
a tray in the autopsy room. His head is turned to the side, his
muscles having stiffened from
being dead for several hours. "Are these bruises around his
ankles?"
"Well, not so much," Webster replies, correcting me. "A lot of
this is darkening color as a
result of him hanging in suspension. There are two things here
-- actually three things here
-- that are very, very obvious that nobody ever saw before that
has significance."
I study the photos a bit longer. I'm stumped.
"Look at the color of the arms," Webster says, pointing at the
young man's tanned arms.
Curiously enough, one arm is darker than the other arm. "Solar
tanning. This is what you'd
expect to see. This arm darker than that arm because the guy
probably drove with his arm
out the window. Don't know what the hell it means. And what's
this?"
"A tan line," I answer. An untanned stripe marks the young man's
left wrist. "He had a
watch on at some point."
"But there was no watch," Webster replies, clearly perplexed.
These are all clues -- new
clues that investigators hadn't noticed in 1984 -- but they do
nothing but convolute what
little is already known about the young man. "But he did wear a
watch. The other thing is
he's clean -- fairly clean-shaven -- he's got less than a
twenty-four-hour beard. And the
rope was brand-new, an over-the-counter type."
The Carkeek Park case is a mystery in the truest sense of the
word. Investigators believed
the young man lived near the Park, because he was fairly well
kempt and hung himself with
a rope that could have been purchased at several stores near the
area.
The similarities between the Hotel Vintage Park case and the
Carkeek Park case are eerie.
The young man hung himself on October 9, 1984 -- exactly twelve
years from the day that
Mary Anderson checked into Room 214 at the Hotel Vintage Park.
Both appeared to be cutand-
dried suicide cases requiring no more than a few minutes of
investigation: run some
fingerprints, check for ID, and contact the families. Case
closed. In the case of Carkeek
Park, a few minutes has turned into thirteen years.
"These kinds of things eat on me," Webster says. He gestures to
the Carkeek Park file.
"Every time I look at this thing, something new shows up on it.
And what I do is, I'll assign
this to some new investigator. I'll give him or her the two
pages of the case report and say,
'Go for it. Find out who this kid is.'"
MARY ANDERSON’S SUICIDE may be one of life's great mysteries,
but when her corpse was
brought to the KCMEO on October 11, 1996, it was business as
usual. King County has a
Medical Examiner's system, which is an unbiased arm of the
County Health Department.
"We are not elected officials," Webster says. "The coroner is an
elected official that may be
subjected to pressure, whereas our office is totally
independent. We don't represent law
enforcement. We don't represent the prosecutors. We don't
represent the families or the
attorneys. We represent the dead person lying on the floor." A
Chief Medical Examiner who
is also a Board Certified Forensic Pathologist administers the
KCMEO. Dr. Donald Reay, the
Chief Medical Examiner at the KCMEO, is one of the top Forensic
Pathologists in the United
States. Dr. Reay is internationally renowned for several
specialties: asphyxial death
(hangings) and positional asphyxia (police restraint). As a
result, Dr. Reay often testifies in
death penalty cases that involve hanging. When Wesley Allen Dodd
and Charles Campbell
were sentenced to a hanging death at Walla Walla State
Penitentiary, Dr. Reay was
consulted because of his expertise. Dr. Reay was also the Chief
Medical Examiner when the
autopsies were performed on the thirteen victims of the 1983 Wah
Mee Massacre in
Seattle's Chinatown. Moreover, Dr. Reay has consulted on several
high-profile cases.
#Post#: 3298--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:16 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
continued
Another valuable asset to the KCMEO team is Forensic
Anthropologist Kathy Taylor. "I love
my job," Taylor explains. "Forensic anthropology is my passion.
That's what I went to school
for all those many years to do. I could spend hours and hours
and hours at a table with
bones, trying to figure out the mystery." Taylor earned her
master's degree in forensics at
the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where she worked at the
Human Identification Lab,
helping to investigate more than 100 cases per year. She started
working at the KCMEO in
August 1996. Studying bones is the crux of Taylor's work, so
much so that she has given
herself the nickname "Bones Person." She measures, sifts, sorts,
and creates inventories of
bones discovered by Webster's investigators.
The KCMEO's two functions are to determine both the cause and
manner of death -- these
may include accident, homicide, suicide, natural disease
process, or "undetermined." King
County is the largest county in the state, and Webster has
eleven investigators working
around the clock. An average working day sees approximately
seventeen deaths reported to
the KCMEO. Of these, four will actually come into Webster's
office; the others will be
classified as "No Jurisdiction Assumed," which include people
who die in nursing homes and
health care facilities with extensive medical histories and a
private physician willing to sign
the death certificate -- essentially, natural deaths.
"It's a pretty difficult place here, for the most part," Webster
comments, describing the
nature of the work. "We don't ever go out at three o'clock in
the morning and knock on
somebody's door to bring them good news. We don't go around
telling them they won the
lottery. We give them some of the most crushing and most
disturbing news they're probably
ever going to get in their life. That's hard on the families,
obviously, but it's hard on us,
too."
Investigating deaths. conducting autopsies, informing people
that their loved one has been
killed -- none of this seems glamorous, and one would think that
Webster would be hardpressed
to put together a team of investigators. Yet, Webster has to
turn applicants away.
Indeed, one evening I attended a lecture and slide-show Webster
presented to a group of
nursing students, many of whom afterward queried him about what
they should study to
work for him. "I am fortunate," Webster told the students,
"because we live in a fairly
populated county. We have a lot of well-educated people with
good backgrounds. Right now
I have a Ph.D. candidate as one of my investigators, and he has
a degree in Forensic
Anthropology. That's a pretty upscale investigator. I require
that my investigators have four
years of college in a health-related field, and have at least a
year in some sort of
investigative background. I have the cream of the crop right
now."
Indeed, the KCMEO's investigators and doctors comprise a sharp
team. Their teamwork,
indeed familial closeness, results from the unique nature of
their work and the long hours
they spend working each day.
"One of the ways we get through this is there's a lot of humor
here," Webster admits. "We
get along well. We scream and yell and fight and do crazy things
in here -- but never, ever
do we direct any comments or criticisms to the people who come
through our office through
the back door. The reason being is that there's not a one of us
here that may not be up in
the cooler in an hour. It could be you or your family or your
children. We never lose sight of
that. One of the things I try to get through to these
investigators here is that we are the
last people on the face of the earth who can speak for these
dead people, so we better
damned well listen to what they have to tell us."
Webster and his team of investigators do a lot of "listening."
In 1997 approximately 13,000
people died in King County; forty-nine percent of those deaths
were investigated by the
KCMEO. Firearms are the "weapon of choice" in King County. They
account for most of the
county's homicides and suicides. King County is unique, too, in
that its 2,130 square-miles
feature an unusually diverse range of rural, urban, ethnic,
social, and religious groups. In
addition, the area features an unusually diverse topography:
saltwater lakes, freshwater
lakes, mountains, rivers, ponds, and puddles. All of this makes
for a real "gift sampler" of
deaths that Webster and his team have investigated. In one
breath, Webster tells the story
of a man who drowned in the shower; in the next breath, he
relates a story about a small
religious group that only permitted the deceased's eldest
brother to touch the corpse; this
eldest brother ultimately acted as Webster's hands. Webster also
relates a fascinating story
about a small Southeast Asian tribe called the Hmong; every few
years, a Hmong young
man, typically between nineteen and twenty-three years of age,
is found dead in bed with
no anatomical or pathological cause of death. "This is only
specific to the Hmong," Webster
comments. "What a study has shown is that these young men may
have nightmares that
are so terrifying that they are scaring themselves to death in
their sleep. Those are some of
the type of cases that come in here. Every morning when I come
into the office, I say, 'I
think I've seen it all.' And then I see the four or five that
came in the night before and I say,
#Post#: 3299--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:18 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
continued
'Well, I've seen it all except for these four or five.' I see
some of the most fascinating things
that people will ever see in their entire lives."
Webster and his team have also had some personal close calls.
Like the time one of his
investigators was kidnapped at gunpoint while trying to serve a
death notice. Or the time
someone pulled a gun on Webster while he was trying to load a
body into a van. "I was
working graveyard one New Year's Eve," he explains. "First call
I get is one at Yesler and
Boren. A dead Cuban male -- his name was Jose -- lying on the
middle of the floor. He had
been dead for about twelve hours. All of his buddies are sitting
around the room -- all drunk
and raising hell. They think Jose is sound asleep. Well, Jose is
not sound asleep -- he's stone
cold dead. The cops leave and I start to pick Jose up and put
him on a stretcher, and one of
the guys says, 'You're not taking Jose!' He reaches under a
mattress and pulls out an old,
hefty .38. Fortunately, the guy was so drunk that I was able to
grab it from him."
While King County's population has steadily increased since 1983
(now reaching 1.6
million), the KCMEO's caseload has deviated little. "People are
living longer," Webster
explains. "The numbers of different types of deaths have
changed. In 1996 we had 216
suicides; last year we had 238. In 1996 we had 110 homicides;
last year we only had 88.
So we have a shift there, and that shift is kind of interesting.
It balanced them out again, so
that we basically come out with the same number of deaths."
Another interesting note is
that ten years ago, there were approximately 450-500 traffic
fatalities in King County; last
year there were barely 200. "Everybody collapses and says, 'God,
this is just wonderful,'"
Webster observes. "'We've got seatbelt laws, we've got
three-point restraint, we've got
airbags, we've got stiffer vehicles, we've got better-designed
vehicles, we've got lower
speed limits, and we've got helmet laws.' The problem is, it is
saving people's lives but the
people with devastating irreversible injuries are now in what we
call persistive vegetative
states. They've got these devastating head injuries. They
haven't had a thought. They've
been straightlined into an EEG. So that's kind of an interesting
twist."
After awhile, Webster asks, "Do you want to look around
upstairs?" The autopsy room and
coolers are located upstairs.
"Sure," I reply. We head upstairs. I follow him down narrow
hallways and small flights of
stairs that weave and twist and turn deep within the basement of
the Harborview Medical
Center. Webster used to give tours of the KCMEO facility to
medical students, but too many
bodies came through his office with infectious diseases posing a
health hazard.
The KCMEO's doctors and investigators don't start working when
the bodies arrive at their
office. Rather, their investigation begins at the scene of the
incident, and their investigation
is intense. All bases are covered, and measures are taken to
ensure that the cause and
manner of death are precisely determined. Webster runs a tight
ship, and he needs to. "Our
doctors and investigators take the case from the scene to the
trial," Webster comments.
"They know it's going to have an impact on them." At the scene
of the death, extensive
photographs are taken -- of the body and various points of
concern. The hands are bagged,
the ankle tagged, and the contents of the pockets emptied and
collected. The body is then
wrapped in a nylon bag and brought into the KCMEO office.
The floor of the receiving area is unpainted concrete, and the
area has the look and feel of a
grocery store backroom. It was here, at this area, that Mary
Anderson's corpse was first
marked and weighed when brought to the KCMEO.
"When the bodies are brought in," Webster says, pointing to a
security monitor in the corner
of the room, "they are moved into the elevator and brought up
here." The security monitor
depicts a circular driveway where the KCMEO vans unload bodies.
It is in this area that the
body is weighed and identified. The corpse is numbered with a
black felt marker,
fingerprinted, and logged. After the body is weighed and tagged,
it is moved onto a "tray"
with wheels and moved into the autopsy room.
The autopsy room is sprawling and immaculate. On the afternoon
of my visit, no autopsies
are being performed and the room feels vacant and spare.
Positioned around the autopsy
room are workstations complete with stainless steel sinks,
surgical instruments, and
miscellaneous tools. The autopsy room is heavily shadowed -- the
lights have been turned
down. And the room is incredibly clean -- no weird stains or
blood-soaked sheets. I can't
help but think that the autopsy room -- with all its stainless
steel sinks and shiny surgical
tools -- looks not unlike the kitchen at Tim Burton's home. "The
bodies are brought here,"
Webster says, standing a few feet from the center of the room.
The corpses are
photographed just as they are brought in -- in most cases, fully
clothed. Then the bodies
are stripped, cleaned, and photographed nude.
#Post#: 3300--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:19 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
continued
Afterward, the autopsy is performed. "When we do an autopsy, the
first thing we do is open
the chest and the abdomen with a big wide incision. We remove
the breastplate, which
exposes the lungs, heart, intestines, liver, kidneys, and so
forth. The organs come out and
the doctor does the dissections. After each organ is dissected,
they go into a bucket lined
with a plastic bag. While the organs are being removed and
dissected, another autopsy
technician opens the head and removes the brain, which is also
examined, dissected, and
placed in the bucket. When all of that is finished, the body is
thoroughly washed -- inside
and out. The plastic bag in the bucket, containing the organs,
is closed and returned to the
abdominal area. The body is sewn shut and the skull is
replaced."
If x-rays are needed, the corpses are wheeled into a room with
state-of-the-art equipment.
"We do our own laundry, for obvious reasons," Webster says,
chuckling slightly. He points to
a set of washers-and-dryers located in a hallway adjoining the
autopsy room to the x-ray
room. "Do dead bodies bother you?" Webster asks.
I have absolutely no idea. I've never seen a dead body. "Um,
no," I lie. "Not at all."
There are two coolers at the King County morgue. Both are
heavily secured. Webster
punches a numeric code and unlocks a large steel door not unlike
those found in the
security vaults at banks. We look inside the first cooler and,
as far as the eye can see, the
room is filled with bodies. The bodies are covered -- most
zipped up in white nylon body
bags and lying on trays. The cooler is extremely noisy --
overhead fans hum and whir. The
first cooler is reserved for bodies whose autopsies have yet to
be fully completed. Some are
waiting for identification or dental records. More than a dozen
bodies crowd this cooler and,
though most are covered, one body is not -- that of an elderly
man weighing close to four
hundred pounds. He is wearing blue jeans, red suspenders, socks,
and no shirt. His gut is
massive, more akin to a medicine ball than a human belly. The
man's head is wrapped in a
white towel.
"Did the man drown?" I ask, studying the corpse's gray cheeks,
seemingly waxy skin, and
water-filled belly.
"No," Webster replies, explaining that the man had cirrhosis of
the liver.
Directly across from the fat man's corpse is a tray covered with
a white sheet, yet there is
no body. Webster lifts the sheet and reveals a cluster of bones
and dirt. He explains that
this is a homicide victim that was buried by her killer in a
shallow grave. When the killer was
caught, his victim's body was exhumed -- some nine months after
being buried -- and
brought into the KCMEO. These are the victim's remains.
The second cooler is actually an attachment of the first cooler,
and is located at the rear.
Webster unlocks another security door; the eggy, somewhat ripe
smell of dead bodies
overwhelms me. The second cooler is where bodies are stored
after autopsies are
completed. They are simply waiting to be claimed, identified, or
shipped out to a funeral
home. "Some of these bodies are here for several weeks," Webster
comments, "which would
explain the smell."
When Mary Anderson was brought to the morgue, her corpse was
fingerprinted, tagged, and
an autopsy was performed. A rib bone determined her approximate
age. An IUD was
removed and its part number explored. Since investigators were
unable to determine her
identity, the corpse remained in the morgue's coolers for more
than eight months.
We head downstairs, back to Webster's office. He sits down at
his computer and scans
several e-mail messages. I ask a few more questions about the
case. How are other
indigent cases handled? What happens if the KCMEO can never
determine the cause of
death or identify the body?
"We don't issue a death certificate until we actually know who
it is, or determine a cause of
death," Webster explains. "We identify them as a category -- a
category of unidentified. We
still have some of the Green River girls here. Some of Bundy's
victims are still here. They
still have evidentiary value. During the Bundy and Green River
days, DNA testing was
unheard of. Now we have DNA testing, which may be helpful. So
now what we're trying to
do is think five or ten years down the line, 'What might be out
there that we should be
trying to capture today?' Even though we have no use for it, or
need for it, or understanding
of it, maybe there's something we should have today that might
be of value ten or fifteen
years down the line."
While writing this article, I familiarized various acquaintances
with Mary Anderson's story.
Some felt she was a woman scorned. Heartbroken and distraught
after a failed marriage,
#Post#: 3301--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:21 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
continued
Mary Anderson returns to the room where she honeymooned. As a
sort of 'religious
cleansing' and plea for forgiveness, she opens the Bible and
takes her own life. Others
suggested that Mary Anderson didn't commit suicide but, rather,
was murdered. During one
of my visits to the KCMEO, Webster and I discussed Mary
Anderson's case with a staff
physician. A visiting attorney had mentioned Mary Anderson's
suicide to him and posed a
rather Tom-Clancy-esque theory that Mary Anderson was a
Ukrainian spy; when the Kremlin
didn't need her anymore, they disposed of her identification and
poisoned her.
Whatever the case, one simple fact remains: Mary Anderson was
very deliberate and
detailed in her suicide. Dr. Maples, when discussing suicide in
his book, comments, "Most
suicides are far better thought out than most pregnancies. A
tremendous deliberation, a
dreadful persistence mark some of the self-inflicted deaths I
have seen. In such cases the
will to die can be as strong -- even far stronger -- than the
will to live."
I explained to Webster that I believed Mary Anderson was an
attention-monger -- a 'drama
queen,' if you will. She checks into a posh hotel, dolls herself
up, opens the Bible, and goes
out in a grand exit. I told Webster I thought Mary Anderson was
bitter. She had been
wronged. I asked, "Do you think, maybe, she kind of wanted to
challenge some people?
Maybe she was thinking, 'Try to find me.'"
Webster disagreed. "I think what she wanted to do was she wanted
to take her own life.
She wanted to appear good and decent, and that was about it," he
explained. "I think she
just basically wanted to appear well to whoever found her body.
She's got lipstick on. She
was clean. Her hair was combed. She just wanted to look nice
when she was found and she
didn't want to cause anybody any trouble."
"But she caused you a lot of trouble," I countered. "I mean, you
spent a lot of time trying to
solve this thing, right?"
"If she was trying to challenge people," Webster reasoned, "she
wouldn't have left a note.
Only twenty-percent of the people who commit suicide leave a
note."
I asked Webster what kind of a person he thinks Mary Anderson
was.
"She just appears to be a very nice lady," Webster commented.
"The lady who lived next
door to you; you knew she was there, but you didn't know
anything about her. I think she's
from out-of-town. I think she's got family. She may have
brothers and sisters. I don't have
a feeling one way or the other if she was married or divorced.
I'm guessing she was married
and later divorced. I don't think she was a vagabond, simply
because of the quality of her
clothing, the type of clothing, the way she traveled, and so
forth. I don't think a street
person would plop down $450 in cash in a high-class hotel. I
think if they were going to
[commit suicide], they would have probably gone to a park to do
it, or gone someplace out
of public view. In all probability she was a Christian. You
know, she may have taken that
path at the time she decided to take her life. She made a choice
to take her life -- which I
don't find any objection to. I think that's her right. She
didn't want to cause any problems.
She didn't want to be spectacular." Webster paused. "You know,
you can just speculate hour
after hour after hour."
Seattle University psychology Professor Steven Halling has his
own take on Mary Anderson.
"The one thing that is most profoundly associated with suicide
is hopelessness," Halling
explains. "The ritual of her death is probably not too different
from how she lived her life.
She is very careful, methodical. She goes to great lengths to
hide how she dies, but none of
us, no matter what we do, can disappear without a trace."
But Mary Anderson did virtually that. When Webster sent press
releases to the local
newspapers, requesting the public's help in identifying Mary
Anderson, he forgot to include
one important detail. Mary Anderson's elusiveness is as much a
characteristic as, say, her
height, weight, hair color, and other physical features.
After Mary Anderson's corpse was discovered at the Hotel Vintage
Park, her body was kept
in a cooler at the county morgue. Investigators spent nearly a
year trying to determine her
identity. Mary Anderson's body was finally sent to Wiggins &
Sons Funeral Home and she
was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in mid-June 1997.
One morning I drove out to Crown Hill Cemetery, in the north
section of Ballard. I had called
the previous day for directions, and spoke with the cemetery's
director. "She's the one who
was found in that downtown hotel, right?" he asked, searching
through records.
"Yes," I replied.
#Post#: 3302--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:22 pm
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continued
The director paused a moment. I could hear him flipping through
pages. "Here it is. She was
buried as Jane Doe." I asked where exactly she was buried at the
cemetery. "She's at the
east section of the property. Look for the dirt pile along the
fence line. You're going to have
a hard time finding where she's buried because there isn't a
marker for her."
The following morning, I drove north on Interstate 5, and took
the 85th Street exit. I
headed west -- crossing Greenwood Avenue -- and passed a
collection of small liquor stores,
dilapidated taverns, and petite beauty parlors. I turned on 12th
Avenue NW and weaved
through several side streets lined with small houses and broken
vehicles sitting dead on
front lawns. The ten-acre cemetery was tucked amid old houses
and gravel side-streets. It
was drizzling slightly, and the morning's gray glow enveloped my
car as I entered a narrow
gravel driveway. Off to the right was a small building -- the
cemetery's office; a tiny wooden
sign, shaped like the open pages of a Bible, was off to the
left. I thought it ironic that this
Bible-shaped sign -- with the words Crown Hill Cemetery painted
on it in black letters --
designated the property, especially as Mary Anderson's body had
been discovered at the
Hotel Vintage Park, a Bible opened across her chest to the
Twenty-Third Psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie
down in green pastures. He
leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He
leadeth me in the paths of
righteousness for His name's sake. Yea, though I walk through
the valley of the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me; Thy rod and
Thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine
enemies. Thou anointest my head
with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall
follow me all the days of my
life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Ballard civic leaders founded Crown Hill Cemetery in 1903. In
1916 "Old Man Sharpnack"
was buried upright, according to directions he left after
committing suicide, sitting in his
wheelchair, in the mausoleum he built for himself at the
cemetery. Legend has it that, when
things get real quiet at the cemetery, one can hear the cracking
of Old Man Sharpnack's
wheelchair.
I drove slowly down the gravel road, small stones popping and
shifting beneath the car's
tires. The cemetery felt more like a park than anything spooky.
The property was dotted
with rhododendron shrubs, huge cedars and firs, big-leaf maples,
and hedges. I headed
toward the east end of the property and saw a massive,
building-sized pile of dirt. I parked
the car and got out. To the left were three cement, coffin-sized
blocks used to bore out the
holes in the earth for burial sites.
I walked toward the dirt pile. A landscaper was driving a
lawnmower several yards away,
making circles and leaving fresh clippings in his wake. The
cemetery was filled with the
sounds of the lawnmower's buzzing, and a few small birds chirped
and shuffled in trees that
dotted the property. I snooped around the dirt pile and
inspected the three cement blocks. I
wasn't sure exactly what I was looking for, but I felt like I
was at least near the spot where
Mary Anderson was buried.
"Can I help you?" The man on the lawnmower drove over to where I
was standing, the
engine idling.
"I spoke to someone on the phone yesterday," I said, gesturing
toward the office. "A woman
named Mary Anderson was buried here last summer. At least Mary
Anderson was her
pseudonym. I'm looking for where she was buried."
The man turned off the lawnmower. He walked toward me, directing
me to only a few feet
from where I had been standing. "She was buried right about
here," he said, pointing at the
ground. He remembered the burial, he told me, and knew that the
body was of someone
who had died in a downtown hotel.
I stared at the spot where Mary Anderson was buried. The lawn
was damp, and fresh
clippings stuck to my boots. It struck me as sad that Mary
Anderson was buried at the far
end of the cemetery, away from the other graves, near a dirt
pile, with no headstone.
Wiggins & Sons Funeral Home designated the cemetery, the staff
at Crown Hill had carried
out the burial, and the county picked up the tab. The whole
thing was nothing more than a
series of business transactions. I snapped several photographs
-- the cemetery, the dirt pile,
the patch of lawn where Mary Anderson was buried. There were
very few people at the
cemetery. A woman was standing fifty yards away -- clutching
flowers, staring at the
ground, and perhaps praying. Mary Anderson was clearly an
outcast. No one would ever
visit her grave -- no one, of course, except nosy journalists
like myself, enamored of the
mystery of her anonymous death. It were as though Mary Anderson
was being punished for
#Post#: 3303--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:23 pm
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continued
what she had done -- buried near a dirt pile as far away from
the cemetery's entrance as
possible.
I snapped a few more photographs and walked back to the car.
I climbed inside, started the engine, and took one last look at
Mary Anderson's "non-grave."
Then I put the car in DRIVE and pulled away, leaving Crown Hill
Cemetery.
In a strange way, Mary Anderson's absence is very much her
presence. I unabashedly admit
that the mystery surrounding Mary Anderson is the reason why I'm
even interested in her at
all. I am almost certain that, were I to discover Mary
Anderson's real identity, I would be
rather disappointed. Take the mystery away and give this woman a
childhood and siblings
and a career and life experiences, and she threatens to become
terribly boring. But keep
her in Room 214 with a phony address and a pseudonym and no
records of fingerprints, and
the woman is fascinating. It is indeed this sense of mystery
that makes Mary Anderson
someone to think about; take away that mystery and she seems
uninteresting.
No matter how many times I grilled Jerry Webster on the case, or
debated burglarizing
Room 214, or visited Mary Anderson's grave, this inherent sense
of unresolvedness and
mystery seemed proof I knew this woman better than anyone else
-- a woman I'd never
met.
#Post#: 3304--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:24 pm
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Crown Hill Cemetery
8712 12th Ave NW, Seattle, WA
HTML https://i.imgur.com/4nWf9nh.jpg
HTML https://i.imgur.com/VeC5B4B.jpg
HTML https://i.imgur.com/MIMk4f5.jpg
#Post#: 3305--------------------------------------------------
Re: ''MARY ANDERSON'' WF, 30-50, suicide at Hotel Vintage Park i
n Seattle, WA - 9 Oct 1996 *GRAPHIC*
By: Akoya Date: March 7, 2020, 2:26 pm
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Vintage Park Hotel, Seattle
HTML https://i.imgur.com/DJgnwR0.jpg
HTML https://i.imgur.com/uIfVBPM.jpg
HTML https://i.imgur.com/YEB0DhJ.jpg
One of the rooms
HTML https://i.imgur.com/FMzX7X4.jpg
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