her one night along Carroll Creek Drive for a broken taillight. And after she returned home to her husband, she discovered nothing wrong with the light. Rachel was convinced that if a motorcyclist hadn’t passed by and waved at her and the deputy during their brief exchange, she would have ended up like Wendy Matusik.
Investigators combed through Corey’s ranch house, located in a residential area near the center of town. The place was a mess, with plates of moldy, half-eaten food everywhere. The Ikea furnishings were tattered and dirty, and dust covered the two mounted deer heads on his wall. But he had a state-of-the-art computer and sound system.
In his basement was an entertainment room with a big-screen TV. In front of the black leather sofa, an old locked trunk doubled as a coffee table. They found more than 200 pornographic DVDs in the trunk, most of them advertising S & M and bondage on the cases. The detectives also discovered sexual paraphernalia such as handcuffs, leather masks, and mouth gags.
Next door, in Corey’s exercise room, they uncovered what they were looking for in another locked trunk: a scrapbook full of clippings about the Mama’s Boy murders. Beside the grisly headlines, Corey had pasted gold and blue stars.
In the same trunk were Corey’s journals—with photos of Wendy Matusik, of Bellingham, and Monica Fitch, of Vancouver. In some shots, they were still alive—half-dressed, looking scared and disoriented in a darkened little cell. They were curled up on that same moldy, stained mattress on which Moira Dancey would later find herself. The other pictures were taken after he’d finished with them. His journals described in detail abducting both women. Wendy with her flat tire, and Monica, trapped in a narrow pit, had been so happy to be rescued at first. For Wendy, he’d even been in uniform, driving in his squad car. Corey buried both of them within ten feet of each other, very close to the spot where the police had found the eighth known Mama’s Boy victim, Stella Syms.
For the families and friends of Corey’s victims, the waiting, wondering, and dreading were over. The bodies were excavated, autopsied, and transferred to their loved ones. Monica and Wendy, who had planned on merely passing through Cullen months and months before, finally returned home.
Allen Meeker’s various residences were tracked through his tax records. He had indeed been living in Chicago when the first-known Mama’s Boy victim, Patricia Nagel, was abducted in front of her toddler son in their apartment—not far from the El station where Allen had first spotted them. He’d been in Oakland, California, and in Annandale, Virginia, when the Mama’s Boy murders occurred in those areas as well. But it was at his residence on Camden Mills Road in North Seattle where he’d done most of his killing. The remote, two-bedroom, dark red cedar- shingle rambler was slightly run-down. It had a small, hidden room he’d created in the basement—behind a built-in bookcase in the storage closet. The current owner of the house, a sixty-seven-year-old retired art teacher, Eileen Miller-Johnson, had no idea the room existed. In the seemingly empty little cell, investigators found blood and hair samples matching nine of the eleven murdered women from the Seattle area.
The vacated house on Camden Mills Road was still a boarded-up crime scene when Eileen Miller-Johnson contacted a real estate agent about eventually selling the property. The house remained unoccupied for weeks and weeks after that. Several times a day, people drove by to gawk at Allen Meeker’s former home. Many of the license plates were from out of state. Some of those people took photos with their cell phones, or they got out and walked up to the windows of the empty house. A few of them even broke off pieces from the cedar shingles for souvenirs.
Apparently, Corey Shaffer wasn’t the only fan of Mama’s Boy.
There was a three-year gap, from the 2004 murder of Samantha Gilbert in Alexandria, Virginia, to the disappearance of Rebecca Lyden from a rest stop near Wilsonville, Oregon, in 2007. Meeker’s tax records showed he lived in Jacksonville, Florida, in the interim.
Two months after Meeker’s death, FBI and local police were still trying to connect him with the disappearances of three Florida women, all young mothers, between 2004 and 2007.
The morbid tourists who made pilgrimages to the house on Camden Mills Road weren’t very interested in Allen Meeker’s residence for the last two years—a one-bedroom unit in a modern condominium in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood. From what investigators could discern, Meeker hadn’t committed any murders while living there—and while he knew Susan.
That didn’t keep Susan from feeling hurt—and violated and incredibly stupid for letting herself be taken in by him.
She and Mattie became reluctant celebrities. The tabloids, TV, newspapers, and Internet always identified her as
Though Allen was dead, Susan still couldn’t completely expunge him from her and Mattie’s lives. She went through her photo collection and tossed all the pictures that had Allen in them; even if just his hand or half his face was in the shot, out it went. She donated to the Salvation Army every gift he’d given her and Mattie. Though she’d been living in the same duplex on Prospect Avenue since her first son, Michael, was born, Allen had spent so much time there, Susan felt compelled to move.
In December, the two-year lawsuit over the deck collapse was finally settled out of court, and Susan put some of that money down on a small two-bedroom house in West Seattle. News about the lawsuit settlement made Internet headlines on AOL: SERIAL KILLER’S FIANCEE AWARDED $1.5 MILLION. Even though the article pointed out that Susan had won the money in a lawsuit in a negligence case involving the deaths of her husband and older son, the “user comments” below the story showed that 90 percent of the readers hated her:
KayeM2 says at 2:52 PM 12/4/09: I can’t believe this woman would take money after sleeping and having sex with a serial killer. They should take her kid away from her. She’s trash.
MarcusvXXX says at 2:58 PM 12/4/09: I agree with the last person! Ive seen her on TV, & she’s a HAG & stupid sounding. My wife & I call her Susan Bullshit. She acts like she was never engage to Mamas Boy & had no idea he was a killeer but I don’t believe her for one minute. She’s a BIG phoney. I feel sorry for her son. Now their giving her money! She should give it to all the people Mamas Boy killed.
MelissaS says at 3:04 PM 12/4/09: I think people are forgetting that Susan Blanchette was given that money after she was injured in an accident that also resulted in the deaths of her husband and child. It has nothing to do with the Mama’s Boy murders. From what I’ve read, Allen Meeker had intended on killing her, but changed his mind in hopes of eventually getting her lawsuit money. I don’t understand how people can’t have more compassion for this woman who was duped by a charming psychopath. In the end, she’s one of the people who stopped him. I’d say she’s a hero.
MarcusvXXX says at 3:09 12/4/09: That last comment was SO STUPID!!!! If you consider that EVIL bitch a hero, you don’t know WHAT THE F—K your talking about!!!! She should give that money to the family of people her boyfriend killed. Its too bad he didn’t strangel her like he did the others…
“I can’t believe you actually read that crap, Susan,” Tom Collins told her on the telephone. He’d called her on a Saturday night in early December, two days after that story with all the comments had been featured online. He’d caught her cleaning out kitchen drawers in preparation for the move.
Two months before, it had been Tom’s call to the Skagit County police—followed minutes later by two radio transmissions from Deputy Shaffer’s squad car about a shooting—that prompted the police and medical response to Cedar Crest Way. Tom’s red MINI Cooper had arrived on the scene right after the police and ambulances. He’d parked on Carroll Creek Road, just far enough away from all the chaos and carnage so that one of his passengers couldn’t see what was going on. Rosie had ridden shotgun with Mattie in her lap. One of the cops on the scene had written him a $124 ticket for violating the state’s child-restraint laws. But Tom still claimed that it had been well worth it to see the ecstatic look on Susan’s face when she’d spotted Rosie at the end of the driveway with Mattie in her arms.
She and Tom hadn’t seen each other since. But that hadn’t been Tom’s fault. He’d called several times, asking to get together, but Susan kept putting him off. It just wasn’t the right time to start seeing him—or any man for that matter. Still, she looked forward to his calls.
“Listen, you have to scroll down to read those user comments, right?” he said on the other end of the line. “Do yourself a favor and don’t scroll down. I feel sorry for the intelligent people who get on there and try to talk some sense into the idiots making those comments. I mean, that one guy who really hated your guts, he was borderline illiterate. Do you really give a crap what he thinks of you?”
