The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule Page B

other Betas heard the door slam and stuck Ms head out his window, recognizing Georgeann.
    "Hey George!" he called loudly. "What's happening?" The pretty, deeply tanned, girl wearing blue slacks, a white backless teeshirt, and a sheer red. white, and blue top. craned her neck and looked back. She smiled and waved, talked for a moment or two about the Spanish exam, and then, laughing, called "Adios." She turned and headed south toward her residence. He watched her for about thirty feet. Two other male students who knew her recall that they saw her traverse the next twenty feet.
    She had forty feet to go-forty feet in the alley brightly lit. Certainly, there were some murky areas between the big houses, filled with laurel hedges, bloomins rhododendrons, but Georgeann would have stayed in the middle of the alley.
    Her roommate, Dee Nichols, waited for the familiar sound of pebbles hitting their window: Georgeann had lost her key to the back door, and the sorority sister would have to run down the stairs and let her in. There was no rattling of pebbles. There was no sound, no outcry, nothing. An hour passed. Two hours. Worried, Dee called the Beta House and learned Georgeeann had left for home a little after
    1:00 A.M. She awoke the housemother, and said softly, "Georgeann's gone. She didn't come home."
    They waited through the night, trying to find some reasonable explanation for why Georgeann might be gone, not wanting to alarm her parents at three A.M.
    In the morning, they called the Seattle Police.
    Detective "Bud" Jelberg of the Missing Persons Unit took the report, and rechecked with the fraternity house where she'd been seen last, then called her parents. Usually, any police department will wait twenty-four hours before beginning a search for a missing adult but, in view of the events of the

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
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    first half of 1974, the disappearance of Georgeann Hawkins was treated very, very seriously immediately.
    At 8:45 A.M. Detective Sergeant Ivan Beeson, and Detectives Ted Fonis and George Cuthill of the Homicide Unit arrived at the Theta House, 4521 17th N.B. They were accompanied by George Ishii, one of the most renowned criminalists in the Northwest. Ishii, who heads the Western Washington State Crime Lab, is a brilliant man, a man who probably knows more about the detection, preservation, and testing of physical evidence than any other criminalist in the western half of the United States. He was my first teacher of crime scene investigation. In two quarters, I learned more about physical evidence than I ever had before. Ishii believes implicitly in the theories of Dr. E. Locarde, a pioneer French criminalist who states, "Every criminal leaves something of himself at the scene of a crime-something, no matter how minute-and always takes something of the scene away with him." Every good detective knows this; this is why they search so intensely at a crime scene for that small part of the perpetrator that he has left behind: a hair, a drop of blood, a thread, a button, a finger or palm print, a footprint, traces of semen, tool marks, shell casings. And, in most instances, they find it.
    The criminalist and the three homicide detectives covered that alleyway behind 45th and 47th N.B.-that ninety feet on their hands and knees. And found nothing at all.
    Leaving the alley cordoned off, and guarded by patrolmen, they went into the Theta House to talk with Georgeann's sorority sisters and her housemother.
    Georgeann lived in Number Eight in the house, a room she shared with Dee Nichols. All of her possessions were there, everything but the clothes she'd been wearing and her leather purse, a tan "sack" bag with reddish stains on it. In that purse she had carried her I.D., a few dollars, a bottle of "Heaven Sentfc perfume with angels on the label, and a small hair brush.
    "Georgeann never went anyplace without leaving me the phone number where she'd be," Dee said. "I know she intended to come back here last night.