The Bone Box

the drowning, but about what happened before and after.

Sometimes after was too late.

Another case that had found its way into the cardboard box involved a teenage girl who was the purported victim of a serial killer. Tara Hanson fit the victimology of the three women who had been killed by a sexual sadist rapist and murderer named Percy Bosworth. She had been the right physical type (slender, blond, short hair). And like the other two victims, Tara had been a bit of a party girl, had lived alone, and had been abducted from a mini- mart-as all of Bosworth’s victims had been.

And yet Tara didn’t quite fit in. She was like the jigsaw puzzle piece that is just close enough go in a particular spot, even when the imagery-the hot air balloon, the kitten with the ball of yarn, or whatever-doesn’t mesh accurately. Victims one and two were employed by Kitsap mini-marts-Shellee Casper in Silverdale, LeeAnn Tomm at one in Olalla. While Tara’s car was recovered from a convenience store in Navy Yard City, she didn’t work there. Further, Tara lived in Kingston, far north of the location of her purported abduction. All victims had been strangled and posed after they were dumped, but only Tara had been strangled manually. The others were killed with the application of a two kinds of ligature-the first victim was strangled with a bungee cord and the second victim had been murdered with the tie from a hoodie. While the spread of the fingertip bruising left on Tara’s throat was a close match for Bosworth’s, it was troubling that Tara’s case-as Birdy famously and regrettably told a Kitsap Sun reporter “stood out like a sore thumb.” The headline put up by a copy editor with a decidedly wicked streak took the comment further:

Pathologist Still Coming to Grips With Hanson Case

There were other cases in the box too, more than twenty. The case that she’d first put into that sad little file was the one involving her cousin Tommy and the murder of Anna Jo Bonners on the Makah Indian Reservation, where Birdy had been raised. At first, the Tommy/Anna file had been there just because Birdy’s own personal history was tied up with that particular crime. Later, as she added cases to the box, she’d wondered if it had been unsettling for another reason-a deeper one.

Though she never said it out loud, Birdy Waterman had a name for her little cardboard repository of the unsettling, the unfinished. She called it the Bone Box. Not to anyone else, just herself. That night, she pulled the Bone Box out from the would-be guest room and brought it to her bedside. She lifted the lid and looked down at the neat row of file folders, some thick, some thin. She knew that after doing so she wouldn’t have a decent night’s sleep. There were a lot of reasons why visiting those files was unnerving. But one above the others niggled at her subconscious. Guilt is like a dripping faucet that can never be tightened or turned off. Even when the guilt is undeserved. More so, rightly, when it is.

Birdy just wasn’t sure where she fit in that spectrum.

There were only three clippings in the Port Angeles Daily News about Anna Jo’s murder. The lack of media coverage was a sad but powerful indicator about how easily crime on the reservation was accepted, ignored by the press. It was as if Native Americans were only the subject of some kind of charity profile written in a patronizing manner. Or, Birdy thought, there were the articles that made her people seem as though they’d never been able to make lives for themselves and were mired in social problems like alcohol and drugs. Those were the stories that seemed to find their way onto the pages of the Seattle papers. A murder of one Makah by another, apparently, was not so newsworthy.

The first article announced the arrest.

Indian Arrested for Murder of Girlfriend

It described the basic circumstances surrounding Anna Jo’s murder and the discovery by a “family member” of Tommy soaked in blood.

A second clipping included a photograph of Anna Jo and another of Tommy. Hers was a pretty image taken in the eighth grade. His was a glowering mug shot taken at the county jail.

Makah Murder Case On Trial Next Week

It was on the front page of the paper, a preview of the evidence, including the passage:

Freeland’s 14-year-old maternal cousin is one of the chief witnesses for the prosecution. Because the Makah native girl is a minor, the Daily News is not naming her. She’s expected to testify about seeing the accused flee the scene of the stabbing.

And then, the final clipping.

Freeland Convicted Of Bonner’s Murder

SENTENCED TO LIFE

The article was short, only four inches. After it ran, Tommy Freeland had been sent away to prison and expunged from most conversations around the reservation. His wasn’t the worst crime committed, but as far as Birdy Waterman remembered, it was the one her family never talked about. Only a couple of times had her mother brought it up.

“I know you saw what you saw, Birdy, but you didn’t need to tell anyone about it. Bad things need to stay in the family.”

Lastly, Birdy studied the autopsy report with its voodoo-doll-like outlined drawing of a genderless dead figure, accompanying weights and measures, and the deadpan commentary about a young woman and her horrendous demise. The medical examiner, Stephanie Noritake, had been an idol of Birdy’s. She was one of the first women Birdy had heard of doing the work of speaking for the dead. Birdy had stood in line for two hours to get a signed copy of the doctor’s Among the Stones and Bones: My Life in the Autopsy Suite. She felt like she’d gushed too much when it came her turn to get an autograph, but she couldn’t help it. Dr. Noritake was a forensic science rock star, a woman who mixed care and concern with authority and science. There was no denying that the two shared a bond. Dr. Noritake was one of the first Asian women to hold the position of medical examiner in a major American city when she served in San Jose in the late 1960s. After retirement she moved to the Pacific Northwest, where her family had lived before internment in World War II. Dr. Noritake consulted on cases in Clallam, Jefferson, and Kitsap Counties.

One of those was the Anna Jo Bonner’s case.

She’d testified at trial that the blood found on the victim matched what had been recovered from Tommy’s T-shirt-putting him in the cabin-but her most interesting testimony had been about the stab wounds that killed the girl.

From the autopsy report:

. . there are twenty-seven wounds, indicating overkill. Twenty of the wounds were made after the victim was supine on the floor; nine of those hit the floorboards after piercing the victim’s upper torso …

It was, as Dr. Noritake said in her report, and later at trial, “a classic rage killing.”

And while there could be no doubt that whoever had wielded that knife had overdone it-severing the carotid artery had done the job just fine-as far as Birdy could recall there was no mention as to why Tommy would have wanted to kill his girlfriend. If it had been rage killing, then what was he so angry about?

The next morning, she faced the mirror in the tiny mint-green and black-tiled bathroom. Birdy wasn’t big on makeup, but a hurried glance indicated her sleepless night and the need for a little help. Her brown eyes were puffy, and her skin uneven. She applied a light swipe of powder. Tying back her shoulder-length black hair with a rubber band, she pronounced herself presentable.

It must have been intentional because it happened every time, but Birdy Waterman found herself dressing down for her trips back home to Neah Bay. She commanded a good salary as Kitsap County’s forensic pathologist.