down to Decatur, bringing with her a portfolio of photographs of the dead man. Joseph Watson returned with McCann to Evanston, where he viewed the body in the morgue and positively identified it as that of his son.
Hopes of a swift breakthrough in the case rapidly faded, however. Bank, medical, telephone, utility, DMV, voter’s registration, IRS, consumer credit and Social Security agency records were all checked, without effect. Dale Watson’s name did not feature on the National Crime Investigation Computer, and there was no record that he had ever been charged with a crime.
By interviewing the parents and following up leads provided by them, the police gradually built up a profile of Dale Watson’s life. He had been born in Shelby County and raised in Decatur, where the family moved in the mid- seventies. He had achieved average grades at school. People remembered him, if at all, as a pleasant, unexceptional young man. The caption to his high school yearbook photograph read: “Noted for his ready smile, Dale participated in Frosh football and Varsity baseball … he belonged to the Baptist Youth group outside of school… he will remember shop class because of Mr. Booker’s inspirational teaching … his secret ambition is to travel throughout the world … Dale plans to attend college next year.”
But he hadn’t. Instead he’d gone to Chicago, where he’d worked at a variety of low-paid jobs from pumping gas to delivering pizzas. If his parents were worried by his lack of ambition, they didn’t make a big deal of it. Joseph and Olive Watson were plain folks-he ran a garage, she took care of the house-and made a clear distinction between “doing well for yourself” and “getting above yourself.” Going to college wasn’t needful for the former, the way they saw it, and could all too easily lead to the latter, if not to worse things. As long as Dale continued to fear the Lord, it wouldn’t do him any harm to have a taste of big city life, get it out of his system. Then he could come home to Decatur, find some nice girl and settle down to a steady job.
The first sign that this modest scenario might not work out was when the Watsons received a letter postmarked Omaha, Nebraska:
Dear Mom and Dad,
Well, as you see I’ve moved out West for a while, I guess I just got the travel bug. I got work at a garage, nothing fancy, but I can do lube jobs and replace shocks like you showed me, Dad. Once I get a few bucks together I might head on a little farther, try and see something of this great country of ours. Hope you’re well. Say hi to Trish and Howie. Did Ronda have her baby yet? I guess she must.
Love, Dale
For the next eighteen months, similar letters arrived irregularly from towns and cities all over the western states. On special occasions-Christmas, his parents’ birthdays-Dale would telephone, but his calls were as brief and vague as his letters. He never left a forwarding address or phone number where his parents could contact him, explaining that he would soon be moving on.
One of the letters had been sent from Portland, Oregon, and for a moment Eileen McCann thought she might be on to something. But it was dated six months before the burglary at Willard Sumner’s house, by which time Dale Watson had once again “moved on,” and she reluctantly conceded that this was a mere coincidence.
Mr. and Mrs. Watson had not been too happy about Dale’s continuing and indefinite absence, and still less with his nomadic way of life, but they had other problems to contend with, notably Olive’s health-a kidney infection-and the marriage of Dale’s sister Patricia, which was well on its way to becoming Topic A in the community.
Just over a year earlier, they had received yet another of Dale’s letters, this one from Los Angeles. It mentioned that he intended to “head south for a while, maybe go to Mexico.” There was nothing else remarkable about it, certainly nothing to suggest that this was the last contact they would ever have with their son. But there the series ended. When two months went by without any more letters or phone calls, the Watsons-alarmed more than anything else by that word “Mexico”-notified the police.
About a million Americans are reported missing each year, and the numerous city, county, state and federal agencies whose job it is to locate them are understaffed and underfunded. As the months went by without any news, the Watsons reluctantly decided to employ a private investigator. Lou Gelen did not find their son, but he discovered a tragic and possibly significant secret which Dale Watson had been keeping from his parents.
As one of his routine search procedures, Gelen contacted the Illinois Drivers Services Section in Springfield, hoping that Dale might have registered a change of address which would give him a starting point to work from. He drew a blank there, but Dale’s accident history showed that he had been involved in a traffic-related fatality in Idaho the previous year. Gelen applied to the Motor Vehicle Division of the Idaho Department of Law Enforcement, enclosing the search fee of five dollars, and ten days later received a copy of the accident report.
One summer night, just before two in the morning, Dale Watson had been driving a car which was struck by an eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer rig which had crossed the median on Interstate 84 near Nampa. Watson was taken to the hospital suffering from shock and minor injuries. His passenger-Starr Costello, seventeen, of Boise, whose parents were the registered owners of the car-was killed. The trucker was charged with reckless driving. No charges were brought against Dale Watson.
Using the Haines Tele-A-Key locator service, Lou Gelen obtained the phone number corresponding to the street address in Boise where Dale Watson had told police he was living at the time. The person who answered his call said he’d only been there a couple of months and had never heard of any Dale Watson. The Watsons weren’t prepared to pay Gelen’s expenses to go out there in person, so there the matter rested until the police got involved.
After a flurry of faxes and phone calls from Eileen McCann and the Idaho State Patrol, the Boise Police dug out their files on the accident. According to Dale Watson’s statement, he had been at a party given by some people he’d met in a bar. He’d got a ride to the party, which was in a town called Caldwell, but the people he’d come with had left early and he’d had no way of getting back to Boise. Then a girl called Starr Costello offered him and another couple a ride in her parents’ car, which she’d borrowed. At the last moment the couple had got a ride with someone else, and Dale and Starr had set off together. She’d asked him to drive because she was feeling “unwell.” Watson had agreed to take a breath test, which showed a level of alcohol slightly over the legal limit, but since the accident was clearly not his fault, and he was “severely traumatized” by what had happened, the police decided not to press charges.
At Eileen McCann’s request, the Boise Police interviewed a number of people who had attended the party in Caldwell, and eventually traced three who had known Dale Watson. One of them had since moved out of the area, but she was able to contact the other two by phone.
The first, Kathy Lawson, twenty-two, sounded like a female equivalent of Dale himself, a rootless migrant moving from state to state according to whim or weather. She was from South Dakota originally, but had moved around quite a lot since then, and had a record of convictions for drug possession. Despite this, she was perfectly prepared to talk to Detective McCann all day-or even longer, Eileen suspected, given half a chance.
“Dale was like a nice guy, you know? Someone you could trust? Like I know he kinda had a thing for me, but he never hit on me or anything. You get guys hitting on you the whole time, but Dale was different. He was like
“That thing that happened, with the truck? It just… I don’t know what to tell you. It was like it destroyed him. I was there that night, and we kinda had a little thing going for a while there. He like started to come on to me, you know, and then this other guy, a real asshole name of Arnold, he came over and got me to dance and Dale kinda drifted away. He wasn’t like real flexible, you know?
“It’s like with the accident. I mean it wasn’t his fault, the other guy was going too fast and just lost control. And the girl who died wasn’t even a friend. It was just some mall rat who offered him a ride home, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like it was someone he really knew and cared about. But he took it really hard. I went to see him in the hospital, they thought he had maybe a cracked rib or something? And he was going on about how it was all like just a total chance, what happened. And I thought, right, so what’s your problem? But Dale, well, you know he had a kinda strict religious upbringing, that Bible Belt stuff, and I guess that makes it tougher to go with the flow. Like if you grow up thinking there’s like a reason for everything, and then something like that happens, and there’s no reason …
“Last I heard of, he was talking about moving to Seattle. He said he wanted to go all the way to the edge and
