Part 3: County solves case after Kent dodges it

KENT -- It's like a game of "dodge ball," King County Detective Tom Jensen says.

Like any game, there are rules. They can vary from police department to police department, but most generally base their dodge on where a person lives or where he or she disappears. As long as one or the other puts the person outside your police jurisdiction, you win.

"There are double standards," Jensen says. "Where someone lives or where they disappear, police will use that to their advantage in dodging a report."

In this game, odds generally favor police who do nothing. Most missing persons simply reappear, unharmed, on their own. It happens every day.

But when a missing person is a crime victim, everyone loses -- the family, friends and especially the victim.

Fortunately for the family and friends of Elizabeth Lamphere, the King County Sheriff's Office stepped in when Kent police took a pass on a missing-person report.

The "dodge" technique is just one of several ways that law enforcement fails to adequately investigate or accept missing-person reports, a yearlong investigation by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has found. Through lack of knowledge, indifference, poor training and unreliable computer systems, law enforcement can allow the dead to remain unnamed and killers to get away with murder.

In Lamphere's case, it began around 11 p.m. on Sept. 23, 1996, when the 27-year-old mother left Sappho's bar in downtown Kent. She was a regular at the nightspot managed by her friend, Mary Benton.

Lamphere had been forlorn that night: Her mother was hospitalized, near death. Elizabeth had decided to unplug the machines rather than watch her slowly die.

She arrived at the bar in the afternoon and left hours later with a truck driver who said his name was Paul. She was immediately missed.

Lamphere's sister, Charlene Schonberger, got a worried call from her 11-year-old nephew, Charles, sometime after 11:30 p.m. Schonberger was worried, too. This wasn't like Lamphere, who would call even if she was just running late.

The next day, with still no word from Lamphere, Benton and Schonberger called Kent police.

"They gave us every excuse," Benton said. "'Well, she probably just took a break, she's an adult and can take care of herself.' But to disappear -- that wasn't Elizabeth's nature."

The Kent department has a policy: Unless there are clear signs of foul play, no report will be taken until the adult is gone longer than 24 hours.

Benton and Schonberger were left on their own, calling hospitals, jails, and morgues, learning nothing.

That night, employees at Sappho's again called Kent police. An officer came to the bar and took down some information, but she didn't take a report. Sheriff's records show that Kent classified the call as a "citizen assist."

Kent police spokesman Paul Petersen recently researched the case at the request of the P-I. He said the officer who went to the bar "got no indication of abduction, so wrote no report."

And, Petersen added, Lamphere lived in Covington, just outside the city. Her disappearance "was not within the Kent Police Department's jurisdiction" even though she was last seen there.

Deciding which agency should take a report when a person lives in one place and disappears from another "is a conversation I've heard debated between police agencies quite frequently over the years," Petersen said. "There is a reluctance to put a report into the system for another agency."

Serious enough to launch a murder investigation before Lamphere's body was found.

"For any investigation, the faster you get into it, the better off you are," Jensen said.

As the most senior member of King County's Green River serial killer task force, Jensen is all too familiar with the "dodge" technique involving police jurisdictional disputes over missing-persons cases.

The same thing happened several times during the height of the Green River killings 20 years ago, such as with the disappearance of 19-year-old Shirley Sherill, one of 49 presumed victims of the Green River Killer.

Sherill's mother repeatedly tried to report her daughter missing to Seattle police in 1982, but was told that "since her daughter was an adult, she could not do so," according to a later sheriff's report.

More than a year after Sherill went missing, a Seattle officer finally took a report -- which was quickly purged when city police learned Sherill may have gone missing from the South City Motel in unincorporated King County.

"Detectives will look for ways to dump a missing-persons case," Jensen said. "That's still pretty typical."

A similar dodge occurred when John Cronk, 66, fell overboard and presumably drowned while rafting on the Nisqually River in July 2000.

Though he was last seen in Thurston County, he had lived in Pierce County. And that sparked a debate between two sheriff's departments over who had to do the paperwork, said Doug Patterson of the state Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit.

Fortunately, Cronk's case generated enough attention that the Pierce County Medical Examiner obtained his dental records for the state, which may need them to someday identify a body.

No police agency has ever filed a missing person report for John Cronk, Patterson said.

"In this particular case, we got the information just because we got lucky," he said.

In Lamphere's case, King County saw the need for a thorough investigation from the start. Days after Lamphere disappeared, Jensen interviewed bar employees and patrons and discovered that "Paul" had started coming to the bar about a month before. He had an East Coast accent, a white semi-truck and a penchant for bragging that he often drove moving vans for famous athletes.

The Sheriff's Office had an artist make a composite sketch of Paul, which was released to the media. In early October, a woman reported meeting the man in another Kent bar three nights before Lamphere disappeared.

She said the man had bragged that he once played for the Boston Red Sox, and he gave her a business card from the team equipment manager as proof. Jensen soon learned that a mover who hauled team equipment had stolen some business cards, and the moving company confirmed that driver Paul Goyette had been in the Seattle area.

Detectives later interviewed the Massachusetts resident, who acknowledged hanging out at Sappho's, but denied leaving with Lamphere. Then he changed his story, saying he showed Lamphere his new truck but she returned to the bar and he left alone.

A search of Goyette's truck in Waltham, Mass., turned up few clues. But Goyette failed one lie detector test; a second was inconclusive.

Then, on Nov. 29, two employees smoking behind Chipman's Moving and Storage in Kent -- a local agent of Goyette's company -- found the remains of a partially clothed woman. She had been shot in the head and dumped in a ditch.

Goyette later confessed, claiming he shot Lamphere when she tried to rob him. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and is serving 15 years in prison.

"If we hadn't pursued the missing-persons case from the beginning, I don't think we'd ever have gotten the arrest," Jensen said.

For Benton, who raised Charles Lamphere, the case inspired her to become a paralegal. Jensen, she said, is "a hero to me."

"The difference in the way King County police saw this case from the way Kent did is like night and day," she said.

"Had we investigated this more thoroughly . . . we probably would've found suspicious circumstances," Petersen said.

"Perhaps raising these issues will help us get a policy in place so that we will at least be willing to take a missing-persons report and transfer it to another agency. That's something I think the department's policymakers need to look at."

INSIDE SEATTLEPI.COM

Day in Pictures
Bears on trial and more

David Horsey
Speaking of appeasement...

The week's best photos
Great shots from the P-I staff

PHOTO GALLERY
Pictures from this series

RESOURCES
Missing persons database List of unidentified remains Links to resources and additional information

THE SERIES
Part 1: Overview People go missing, killers go free Part 2: Investigation Missing-person cases are routinely ignored Part 3: Cops don't care County solves case after Kent dodges it Ex-deputy angry with police Part 4: Predators Serial killers prey on 'the less dead' Suspected or convicted serial killers in Washington Part 5: Predators II Serial killers: They're not always who we think Part 6: Predators III In their own words: The twisted art of murder Part 7: Nameless in death Records often are as hard to find as a body Key to dead man's identity in a file all along Part 8: Baby Jane Doe Whatever happened to Baby Jane Doe? Woman clings to faint hope of finding her missing sister Part 9: A flawed database After 21 years, the bones get a name Flawed national dental database leaves dead nameless Part 10: Fixing the system Experts list ways to improve system Lack of a DNA database hampers police Project index

FOLLOW-UPS
P-I series helps find names for unidentified dead Lawmakers, police seek better handling of missing-person cases Mattawa police chief vows changes vowed in wake of girl's murder

CONTACT INFO
Lewis Kamb 206-448-8336 e-mail Lise Olsen 206-448-8390 e-mail Mike Barber 206-448-8018 e-mail Missing People If you have information about anyone in our missing person database, e-mail us