The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule

never made the Student Union Building. Like the others, all of her possessions were left behind: her bike, clothing, cosmetics. This time, no one had seen anyone suspicious. No man with his arm in a sling. No Volkswagen bugs. Kathy had never talked of being afraid or of receiving obscene phone calls. She had been a girl so subject to wide mood swings that the question of suicide arose. Had she felt so guilty about fighting with her father, perhaps believing that she had caused his heart attack? Guilty enough to have taken her own life?

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    The Willamette River, which wends its way near Corvallis, was dragged, and nothing was found. Had she chosen another means of self destruction, her body would surely be located soon, but it was not. Lieutenant Bill Harris, of the Oregon State Police Criminal Investigation Unit, was stationed on the O.S.U. campus and he headed the probe in Oregon. He had had a tragic homicide in Sackett Hall a few years before, where a coed was found stabbed to death in her room, but his successful investigation had resulted in the arrest of a male student who lived on an upper floor. That youth was still in the Oregon State Penitentiary.
    After a week-long search, Harris was convinced that Kathy Parks had been abducted, probably seized as she walked between the great masses of lilac bushes blooming along the path between Sackett Hall and the Student Union Building. Gone, like all the others, without a single cry for help.
    Police bulletins with pictures of the four missing girls were tacked up side by side on the office walls of every law enforcement agency in the Northwest, smiling faces that looked enough alike to be sisters. Yet only Herb Swindler was absolutely convinced that Kathy Parks was part of the pattern; other detectives felt Corvallis was too far away for her to be a victim of the same man who prowled Washington campuses. There was to be only a short respite. Twenty-six days later, a casual acquaintance of my elder daughter, Brenda Carol Ball, twenty-two, who lived with two roommates in the south King County suburb of Burien, disappeared. Brenda had been a Highline Community College student, until two weeks before. She was five feet three, 112 pounds, and her brown eyes sparkled with her zest for life.
    On the night of May 31-June 1, Brenda went alone to the Flame Tavern at 128th South and Ambaum Road South. Her roommates had seen her last at 2 P.M. that Friday afternoon and she told them that she planned to go to the tavern, and mentioned that she might catch a ride afterward to Sun Lakes State Park in eastern Washington and meet them there. She did go to the Flame and was seen there by several people who knew her. No one remembers exactly what she was wearing, but her usual garb was faded blue jeans and long-sleeved turtleneck tops. She seemed to be having a good time, and stayed until closing at 2 A.M. 66

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
    Brenda asked one of the musicians in the band for a ride home, but he explained he was heading in another direction. The last time anyone remembers seeing Brenda Ball, she was talking in the parking lot with a handsome, brown-haired man who had one arm in a sling. . .. Because Brenda-like Donna Manson-was a free spirit, given to impulsive trips, there was a long delay before she was officially reported missing. Nineteen days passed before her roommates became convinced that something had happened to her. They'd checked with her bank and become alarmed when they learned that her savings account hadn't been touched. All of her clothing was still in their apartment. Her parents, who lived nearby, hadn't heard from her either.
    At twenty-two, Brenda was the oldest of all the missing women, an adult, who had proved herself capable and cautious in the past. But not now. It seemed that Brenda too had met someone she should not have trusted. Brenda was gone.
    But the stalking was far from over. Even before Brenda Ball was reported as a missing person