Sex. Murder. Mystery. by Gregg Olsen

Author:Gregg Olsen [Olsen, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Best 2013 Nonfiction, Nonfiction, Retail, True Crime
Amazon: B00EZ4LFO2
Publisher: Crime Rant Classics
Published: 2013-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

SOUTH OF SEATTLE and not far from the airport, Kent, Washington, had been in a growth spurt for much of the 1980s. The suburban city was a bland mix of old and new. Ticky-tacky apartments along I-5 and view homes overlooking the Kent Valley and Mount Rainier were at the extremes. It was by far middle and working class.

Traffic had been increasing steadily. Making a left turn down into the valley was becoming more difficult for the folks who lived in the condominium complex called Carriage Row and worked in the basin that had become a sprawl of nondescript aerospace offices where truck farms once flourished. In 1985 Steve, Mary Kay, and their toddler son, Steven, moved into unit 109 of the town-house-style complex done up in theme more akin to Boston than Seattle. The family moved down from Anchorage; Steve had been transferred to the SeaTac hub of Alaska Airlines where he worked handling baggage. Mary Kay was gearing up for classes at Seattle University where she would complete what she had started at Arizona State. She was going to be a teacher.

One sunny afternoon when Joe Bendix was pruning some shrubbery in front of his condominium, he was interrupted by Mary Letourneau. A very casual Mary.

“Have you seen my son, Steven?” she asked.

Joe said he hadn't. He put down his tools.

“I haven't seen him in a while,” she said. “Wonder where he is… ”

Her tone was flat. She was so casual about it.

Hadn't seen him in a while.

Joe Bendix knew the drill. There were plenty of times when Mary would get busy doing something, lose track of the time and her barely-out-of-diapers son. More than once Joe would call over to another neighbor and the pair would canvas the parking lot, the greenbelt, and the edge of the property abutting the apartment construction site in search of little Steven.

Mary's lack of urgency mystified the man.

She's a sweet lady, but only by the grace of God has that little boy made it as far as he has, Joe thought.

Years later he still wondered about it. Oddly enough, he never doubted that Mary loved Steven or her other children. She was a good mother, except for losing track of her progeny.

“This kid was three or so and running around this complex,” Joe recalled. “My next-door neighbor and I would freak out. There was a busy street and they were building some apartments. We'd find him watching the heavy equipment on the edge of the construction site. They could have squashed him like a bug. It really shocked me.”

If ever someone needed a new beginning, it was Teri Simmons. The daughter of Fran Bendix, who lived across the Carriage Row complex from the Letourneaus, was fighting a secret disease that in time would nearly take her life. Bulimia had been her secret hell since her parents split up when she was just twelve. Fran went off to flight attendant school and eventually married Joe Bendix, also a flight attendant. The two worked at Alaska Airlines with Steve Letourneau.

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