Seattle Justice by Christopher T. Bayley

Author:Christopher T. Bayley [Bayley, Christopher T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63217-030-9
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2015-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

One More Thing

Another enduring mystery of this era stems from an event that took place on May 31, 1969. That morning, around eleven or eleven thirty, Ben Cichy walked across his lawn to work on his yacht, which was moored at the dock of his expensive home on Yarrow Point. His wife then took a nap, woke up, and could not find Cichy. She started calling those he was supposed to see that day, including the attorney for the Far West Novelty Company, Joel Rindal, who Carroll was then touting for US attorney. A rookie deputy sheriff arrived around seven that night to find already present Rindal and a King County deputy prosecutor, Fred Yeatts, with whom Cichy had been supposed to meet at two that afternoon. The rookie deputy called divers, who quickly found Cichy’s body in five feet of water near the dock. As per the officer’s later report, Cichy had his glasses and slippers on, and was floating in a sitting position, as if he were in a chair, with a smile on his face. The officer thought he did not look like somebody who had fallen off a dock into the lake; if he had, the glasses would have been knocked off.

An autopsy of Cichy was to be performed the next day, on the weekend, in the presence of the police as called for by the law. But the chief medical examiner, then on vacation on Whidbey Island, told the coroner’s office to stop the autopsy and wait for him to come back. The examiner, Gayle Wilson, was also Chuck Carroll’s brother-in-law. Wilson arrived Monday morning, did the autopsy himself, without witnesses, and declared the cause of death to be drowning following a heart attack.

And that, to this day, is what is known for sure about the death of Ben Cichy. There were rumors. Chambliss, who spent a lot of time talking to figures in Seattle’s underworld, reported that it was common knowledge Ben Cichy was on the verge of revealing all to investigators when he was killed to shut him up. Drowning, according to Chambliss, was a favorite method of disposing of people in Seattle. Chambliss claimed Cichy’s offices at his home were later ransacked, a claim also made by Tony Gustin. But Joel Rindal has dismissed all the innuendo as simply unsubstantiated conspiracy mongering. Yeatts remembers nothing of that day. There were stories that Cichy had a heart condition.

Today, Cichy’s death remains what it has been for forty-five years—a mystery. Undeniably, though, many of those who heard about the death at the time assumed Cichy had been murdered. Jessup, for one, testified later that the news immediately left him apprehensive. If there are people alive today who know more about what happened that sunny day on the Yarrow Point dock, they are not saying.

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