Karen Sparks is eighteen years old. She is asleep in her basement bedroom in a house on the University of Washington campus. It is January 4, 1974. Sometime before dawn, somebody comes in through a side door that wasn’t locked, pulls a metal rod off the frame of her own bed, and beats her with it while she sleeps. By the time her roommate finds her, she is unconscious, and she is going to stay that way for ten days. When she wakes up, she has lost most of who she used to be. Brain damage she will live with for the rest of her life. Memories that don’t come back. The independence she had as an eighteen-year-old college student, gone in a single night, by the hand of a man whose face she will never see.
Karen Sparks survives. She is the first one we know about.
Her case goes into a stack on a Seattle desk. There is no suspect. There is no pattern yet. There is a girl who almost died in her own bed and a city that has not yet learned to be afraid.
Four weeks later, the same city does it again.
A girl doesn’t come down for breakfast.
Her name is Lynda Healy. She is twenty-one years old, a University of Washington senior, a psychology major, and she reads the morning ski report for a local radio station — the kind of voice that wakes you up. She lives in a green house in the University District with four other women. The night of January 31, 1974, she eats dinner with her roommates, runs to the grocery store, has a beer at a nearby tavern, comes back, talks for a few minutes with the roommate in the kitchen, and goes downstairs to her room. The next morning, when she doesn’t show up for her shift, her boss calls the house. Her roommates go down to the basement.
Her bed is neatly made. Lynda never made her bed. The pink satin pillowcase is gone. There is a small spot of blood on the pillow under the cover and another small spot on the wall. Her nightgown is hanging in the closet, neatly, with blood at the neck of it. Her bike is still there. Her purse is still there. Her clothes are still there.
She is the thing missing.
This is the whole tone of what Seattle is about to walk into. Not gore. Not a scream in the night. Something quieter. Somebody bothered to make the bed.
(Continued In Video 👆)
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