Rage To Kill And Other True Cases The Thanksgiving holiday, 1998, was no different from any other holiday, although Thursday, the day itself, was fairly quiet. Most residents of the western half of Washington State were grateful that the week''s tumultuous weather had tempered just a little, and that there was power to roast their turkeys, since a storm packing 70-mile-an-hour winds had swept in on Monday and knocked power out in 200,000 homes. Ten inches of snow fell in the Cascade Mountains and the first gully-washing rains of what would prove to be a winter of record rainfall had begun. Thanksgiving Day itself was mostly cloudy, a little rainy, but the gale-force winds had diminished to only breezes. Friday was the same. That was fortunate for anyone living along Puget Sound or Elliott Bay; high tides of over twelve feet were expected and 70-mile-an-hour winds would have taken out a lot of docks and bulkheads and carried away boats and buoys. That had happened often enough over the Thanksgiving holidays of the past. There are no holidays in a homicide unit; there are only detectives who have the day off, detectives who are on call, and detectives who are on duty.
When something catastrophic happens, the whole police force is, of course, available. Those in the first category in the Seattle Police Department''s Homicide Unit can breathe easy on a holiday, but the next two are either listening for their pagers to beep or working on open cases. Holidays tend to breed homicides; people who manage to avoid each other--and are wise to do so--the rest of the year are thrown together, with sometimes fatal results. They drink too much, get too little sleep, are worn out by travel, and generally tend to behave badly if they have a propensity for badness in the first place. Detectives Steve O''Leary, John Nordlund, and Gene Ramirez were only on call on November 27, and thankful for that. They figured they were through the worst of the weekend by Friday. Steve O''Leary and his wife were having a delayed holiday dinner with her grandmother at a restaurant called Claire''s Pantry in the north end of Seattle that afternoon. Between his turkey and his pumpkin pie, O''Leary happened to glance up at the television set placed there in deference to football fanatics.
"When I saw what I saw," he recalled, "I wondered why they hadn''t called me. A moment later, my pager sounded. And that was the beginning of it." * * * Traditionally, in every city in America, the day after Thanksgiving is the kick-off of the Christmas shopping season. Die-hard shoppers have barely digested their turkey dinners before they are up and headed to the malls and downtown. That was true in Seattle on November 27, too; most of the shoppers drove private cars, but hundreds of them took advantage of the Metro Transit park-and-ride lots located on the borders of the city. They rode the bus--no parking hassles that way. Forty-four-year-old Mark McLaughlin was well into his twentieth year as a bus driver for the Metro King County bus system, and he was a familiar and cheerful presence on the Number 359 daytime route from Shoreline in the far north end of Seattle to the downtown area.
Mark was a big man with broad shoulders, a deep chest and a comfortable belly. He was six feet, two inches tall, and weighed over 250 pounds, and his partially white beard made him look a little older than he really was. Many of his regular passengers felt that he was a good friend and they looked forward to his kidding, just as his fellow drivers and the mechanics at the bus barn did. He could wrestle the huge articulated buses with an ease a smaller man might envy. McLaughlin loved his job, and he was a complete professional in a career that required a driver to be not only skilled behind the wheel, but adept at dealing with the problems, complaints and eccentricities of the passengers who hopped on board and took a seat behind him. Driving a transit bus has never been an easy job in Seattle. Three decades or more ago, the buses got their power from overhead electric wires. They were half trolley/half bus, and their connecting rods were forever detaching and swinging free.
Drivers had to stop, get out, risk getting a shock as they struggled to get their rig back on track. Later, Metro went to regular buses, but when the transit company purchased sixty-feet-long, forty-thousand-pound, articulated buses, everyone eyed them with suspicion. These buses had an accordion-like midsection that connected one ordinary-size bus to another. Articulated buses could carry twice as many passengers, and slide around corners like a Slinky toy. At first the concept didn''t seem natural--or even safe. But some of the drivers, including Mark McLaughlin, were willing to give them a try. Before long, the behemoth buses were taken for granted. * * * Mark McLaughlin lived away from the city in Lynnwood, halfway between Seattle and Everett.
He was divorced and had custody of his two sons, who were sixteen and thirteen. His seventy-eight-year-old mother, Rose, lived nearby, and he had brothers and a sister close by, too. After Mark graduated from Ingraham High School in 1972, he married his first wife, a local girl. He enlisted in the Army and trained to be a medic. When his Army stint was over in 1979, he went to work for Metro. His first, young marriage ended and so did his second marriage, but he didn''t give up on the possibility of finding someone who would be right for him. He raised his boys, drove the big buses, and hoped for a happier future. He found it in what had become his world--on the bus.
Sometime in 1990, Mark was driving through the suburb of Bothell when he met a young woman who was a regular passenger. She was pretty and petite with long blond hair and she always got on with two small children, a baby carrier and a jumble of bags that held diapers, bottles and other baby paraphernalia. Mark always got out of the driver''s seat and helped the young mother get settled. The sight of her struggling with her babies and their gear touched his big heart. Her name was Elise Crawford. When the bus was nearly empty during off-peak hours, Elise and Mark talked. He learned that she was alone and he told her his second marriage had ended. After months, he asked her out and she said yes.
Inevitably, perhaps, they fell in love. They became engaged and joined their families, moving into a modest three-bedroom house in Lynnwood. Mark welcomed Elise''s children; he was such a natural father that he had been awarded custody of his second wife''s son by her earlier marriage. Now, Mark and Elise had four children--his two, her two. Mark and Elise had wedding plans for the spring of 1999. They were going to marry at his mother Rose''s home, and his sister Debra was helping Elise with the plans. It wouldn''t cost a ton of money, but they would have spring flowers, bridesmaids in pastel dresses, and a great buffet. Mark and Elise had each known lonely days, and this marriage was going to be forever.
When he wasn''t driving a bus, Mark McLaughlin was an avid fan of the Seattle Sonics and Seahawks. He loved the outdoor opportunities in the Northwest, and he was a hiker and an amateur photographer. Elise worked as a nurse at Virginia Mason Hospital, and she took a second job clerking at a J.C. Penney store on the weekends. Mark was driving extra shifts, and it seemed only fair that she help, too. With four kids and a wedding coming up, they needed extra money. Their big dream was to buy their own home together, someplace with bedrooms enough for everyone.
There was no reason to think they wouldn''t be able to realize that dream. Where they lived didn''t really matter to Elise. After being alone with her small children, often being afraid of sounds in the night, she felt so safe with Mark. He was a big bear of a man who looked after everybody. "He was a wonderful man," Elise recalled of their happiest days. "We had just started to make it. I was never afraid of anything with him here." As a nurse, Elise worried sometimes about Mark''s weight and urged him to cut back on his appetite.
But he seemed healthy, and he had boundless endurance. Mark and Elise had a perfect day on Thanksgiving; they went to his mother''s house for a turkey dinner along with the rest of their relatives. One of Mark''s favorite cousins drove down from Vancouver, B.C., for the weekend. He and Mark planned to take the kids on a hike on Saturday, but first Mark had a shift to drive for Metro. He started at 11:30 on Friday morning, driving Number 359. He would be home in plenty of time to eat leftovers and watch a few of the games during the football marathon that weekend.
Mark worked out of Metro''s North Base located at Interstate 5 and 165th; he''d been there since it opened in 1990. It was close to his home, and daytime runs were usually pretty easy when it came to trouble from passengers, even though his route was one of three in the Metro system with the most incidents involving violence. You could never guarantee that there wouldn''t be a drunk or some druggies on the bus, but there were certainly fewer than during late night runs. Drivers all over the city had had their problems with "gang bangers" and other riders who seemed to have more potential for trouble than the average passenger. On some routes, it seemed that the transit drivers had to spend more energy maintaining order on the bus than they did driving. County-wide, Metro was averaging about ten incidents a day. Some were only minor altercations among or between passengers, some were over fare disputes, and, in rare instances, the drivers themselves were assaulted. But, considering that 217,000 people rode the bus every day, the average wasn''t bad.