The Lost and the Found

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

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,

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,

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