Now, in 1983, his favorite trolling areas were along the Pac HiWay, with emphasis on the cross streets of S. 144th, S. 188th, and S. 216th.
CONSTANCE ELIZABETH NAON, twenty, drove a fifteen-year-old Chevrolet Camaro that she often parked at the Red Lion at 188th when she was working the street. She was a lovely young woman with perfectly symmetrical features, and she did pretty well financially, but she had a drug problem that ate away at her money. She also had a straight job at a sausage factory, and on June 8, she planned to pick up her paycheck there. She called her boyfriend to say she was on her way to visit him and would be there in twenty minutes. She never arrived.
Police found her Camaro in the Red Lion lot late in June. It was dusty and cluttered with Connie’s possessions, but there was nothing in it that could tell them where she was or what might have happened to her.
FOR A LONG TIME, it was difficult for her family and friends to know just when Carrie Ann Rois, sixteen, dropped out of sight. Carrie, who looked like the prettiest cheerleader in any high school, probably vanished in mid-July 1983. Originally, a close friend thought she’d gone missing in March, but, later, task force detective Mike Hatch talked to enough people to realize that Carrie had been seen on Memorial Day weekend, and for perhaps a month after that.
How could a family lose track of a daughter who was so young? It was hard for her mother, Judy DeLeone, to keep up with Carrie, even though she tried her best to rein in her emotionally fragile and headstrong daughter. They seemed to have everything working against them. Judy married twice after she was divorced from Carrie’s father and their family seemed always to be in a state of flux.
Carrie was in the ninth grade in Nelson Middle School in Renton in November 1981 when Judy married for the third time. A few months later, in the spring of 1982, Carrie told social workers that her stepfather had molested her. She remained in the home until the second time she reported he was sexually abusing her. Carrie went to live with her natural father, but they didn’t get along either. Carrie claimed that he’d hit her and left bumps on her head. She ran away and ended up at the Youth Service Center. When her father was notified, he said, “Send her home,” but Carrie wouldn’t go. She ran away again, walking out the front door of the detention center.
Carrie always had a lot of friends, and she usually had a girlfriend buddy who ran away with her, and other friends who gave them a room to live in for a while. At one point, Carrie and her fellow runaway lived in the laundry room of somebody’s house.
Judy DeLeone would never live with Carrie again, but she worried about her constantly. She left the husband Carrie had reported for abuse, but her daughter still refused to come home. And then, on Christmas Eve, 1982, Carrie called her mother from a pay phone to tell her she missed her. Judy picked her up and they shared a wonderful Christmas Eve together, talking and catching up. Still, Carrie didn’t want to move back home. Carrie had a court-appointed guardian and Judy couldn’t force her to come home. Trying to keep their tenuous connection alive, Judy agreed to drive her to the house where she was staying with a girlfriend.
From time to time, Carrie was placed in group homes and she always got along well. One social worker recalled that Carrie idolized Brooke Shields, whom she felt she resembled, and wanted to be a model herself one day. But she was a jackrabbit, a runner who was always game for a walk on the wild side. And she was also a paradox. While she was attending Garfield High School in Seattle in the spring of 1983, she played the flute and wore her uniform proudly in the marching band. Her grandfather, Ken Rois, bought her the flute, hoping her interest in music would settle her down.
It did, for a while, but then somebody stole the flute from her school locker. Carrie loved parties and had experimented with marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol. Her best friend, and runaway buddy, Margaret, was placed in the Echo Glen juvenile facility, and when she was released, she found that Carrie was hanging out at a lot of places that could be dangerous, including “My Place,” a topless tavern on the Strip. She had new friends, many of whom Margaret didn’t know.
Margaret was convinced that Carrie had disappeared on March 24, 1983. “The last time I saw her,” she told Mike Hatch, “Carrie was standing near the Safeway store on Rainier and Genessee Street. She was wearing blue jeans and a tan coat with high brown boots. She had on pink or purple nail polish.”
But Carrie was still going to high school at that point, and records show she skipped school only a couple of times a week. She was a striking girl, five feet eight, with green eyes, and such exquisite features that anyone who saw her remembered her.
Neither her mother nor her father knew where she was, but there was every reason to believe she was alive in March, April, May, June, and at least some part of July in 1983. But she was working the streets, using the unlikely pseudonym of “Silver Champagne.” She usually wore “a ton of makeup,” according to a university student she dated for a while. “I told her she was so beautiful that she didn’t need makeup,” he said, “but she just laughed.”
Task force detectives learned that Carrie and her new friend Lisa had been frequenting the Strip along the two block area of S. 142nd to S. 144th in the late spring of 1983. She had had many friends who kept track of her. Several of them recalled hearing her talk about a peculiar experience with a “trick.” Although she didn’t mention the man by name, she said he had taken her far away from the Strip, driving her up almost to the summit of Snoqualmie Pass, an area that was fifty miles from the airport, to “see the snow.” Spring blizzards are not at all unusual in the high elevations of the pass, as drivers who head up to ski or to drive to eastern Washington know.
Carrie had come back from her unusual jaunt. Her friends had seen her get out of a pickup truck safely, albeit a little intoxicated. All they remembered about the driver was that he was a white male who wore a baseball cap. Carrie said that he was “kind of weird,” but she didn’t elaborate. They thought it was very strange for her to have agreed to go on such a long trip with a john.
What they recalled about the truck was that it was brown and tan, or brown and white, with a camper on it. It wasn’t a new truck, but no one who saw Carrie get out of it could give the make or the year accurately.
And then, sometime in June or July of 1983, Carrie Rois simply vanished. Her grandfather moved back from Honolulu to help look for her. Judy DeLeone was plunged into guilt and remorse and terrible worry. She had always believed that one day Carrie was going to come home, older and wiser, and not so anxious to run away. But the months ground on and there was no word at all from her daughter.
Christmas Eve, 1983, came and Judy sat by the phone, hoping against hope that Carrie would come out of hiding and call as she had the year before. But the phone was silent.
At least one other teenager had disappeared from the airport strip in midsummer 1983, although her ties to home had stretched so thin that no one reported her missing. Her name was Tammy Liles and she was sixteen years old in June 1983.
I HAD LIVED in Des Moines since 1963, and the corner of Pac HiWay and S. 216th was as familiar to me as our main street was. There were many reasons to patronize the shopping area at the highway intersection. The Safeway was up on the southwest corner of the highway, along with Bartell’s drugstore, a popular Seattle family’s chain. There was a hot-tub store run by a family with kids in my kids’ classes, and I bought one for the backyard of the first house I’d ever purchased on my own. I’d almost signed an earnest money agreement on a house a block away from the 216th intersection until I found out the whole area was about to be taken over by the Port Authority and the houses torn down. Most people in Des Moines went to Furney’s nursery with its acres of roses, trees, rhododendrons, and bedding plants, and so did I, pulling one of their red wagons around to fill with plants. That was close to the northwest corner.